So, there's a debate, in the middle of the
play, in the sheep-shearing scene, about whether
human beings have the right to change nature.
And on the one side, you hear the idea that,
in the case of flowers, nature makes white
flowers, it makes purple flowers, but it doesn't
put those flowers together, like a gardener
might do and create a striped flower.
In the play, it's called a striped gillyvor.
You can think of today's carnations, where
sometimes you get a carnation that has these
funny little borders around it.
Very clearly, someone has gotten involved
and altered the way that that plant grew.
What's the bigger issue?
The bigger issue is whether human beings have
a right to change nature.
We deal with that issue all the time.
Today, we think about genetic engineering
and other ways in which human beings alter
the biological landscape around us.
But, at the heart of those debates is the
question of whether human beings exercising
their art, their will, and their cunning are
doing something unnatural.
One of the answers that this play gives, it's
a very clever way to solve this problem.
Do you just take what nature gives you or
do you change it?
Well, if you're an artist, you're changing
things all the time, and "The Winter's Tale"
is a piece of art.
It doesn't grow in the fields, it's part of
a garden, and you have to cultivate a story
like that.
The answer is that art, the art of putting
together flowers, the art of playwriting,
the art of making something new, those are
arts that nature makes, and that's the phrase:
"an art that nature makes."
It's a very powerful idea because it suggests
that there's really, in the end, no boundary
between the human creative capacity to make
things and nature's ability to manufacture
new species, or to create one generation out
of the other.
I think we still struggle with that question,
but Shakespeare found a poetic way to do it.
He put it in a story.
He found a drama to do it, where he could
stage that debate, and then he came up with
this phrase that resonates through the 17th
century and the 18th century.
What are the limits of art?
And "The Winter's Tale" is an answer to that
question, "What are the limits of art?"
