ABSTRACT
In the middle of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (1611), the doomed courtier Antigonus stands on the seacoast of Bohemia under grim skies. He tells the exiled infant in his hands about his dream, in which the Sicilian queen Hermione, thought dead, appeared to him. He opens his description with the words, “To me comes a creature” (III.iii.19), 1 naming the apparition with a word that has special resonance in this play, so concerned with artistic illusion and the interplay of art and nature. In the early seventeenth century, creature carried a much broader meaning than the animalistic connotations that cluster around it today. Derived from creatura, the future-active participle of the Latin verb creare, “to create,” creature denoted anything intentionally made; “a created being, animate or inanimate; a product of creative action” (OED, “creature, n.”). 2 Creature straddled the line between the creations of God and man, foregrounding the centrality of poesis and design to early modern ideas of nature and artifice. Standing on the Blackfriars stage holding the doll representing the infant Perdita, a letter, and cask of jewels, recalling a ghost who may have been a figment of his guilty imagination, and about to be reduced to a few scraps of physical evidence himself, Antigonus recounts his dream at an important crux in The Winter's Tale’s exploration of the vitality and creative power of the made things onstage.
