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Sir, my gracious lord,
To chide at your extremes it not becomes me;
O, pardon that I name them! Your high self,
The gracious mark o’ th’ land, you have obscured
With a swain’s wearing, and me, poor lowly maid,
Most goddesslike pranked up. But that our feasts
In every mess have folly, and the feeders
Digest it with a custom, I should blush
To see you so attired, swoon, I think,
To show myself a glass. (4.4.6–15)
These are Perdita’s first words in the play. Now sixteen, she has grown into a young woman whose refined language and evident intelligence belies her status as a “lowly maid.” It is precisely her refinement that has attracted Prince Florizell, the man to whom Perdita addresses these lines. The subject of her speech is her concern that Florizell’s father, King Polixenes, will find out that he’s courting a shepherd’s daughter. The very idea makes her feel embarrassed for putting on airs, the shame of which she expresses in the phrase “most goddesslike pranked up.” The irony, of course, is that her air of nobility is no “prank”: she’s the true daughter of the Sicilian king.
O Proserpina,
For the flowers now that, frighted, thou let’st fall
From Dis’s wagon! Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses,
That die unmarried ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength—a malady
Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and
The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The flower-de-luce being one—O, these I lack
To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend,
To strew him o’er and o’er. (4.4.139–52)
Perdita has been charged with the task of presiding over the annual spring sheep-shearing, for which she employs her deep well of horticultural knowledge. Here, as she accounts for the flowers that have been gathered for the festivities, she links the botanicals to goddesses from classical mythology. Once again, Perdita demonstrates a natural intelligence that symbolically marks her as noble by birth. But what’s most significant about this passage is the way it begins with Proserpina, the Roman goddess of spring. As mistress of the spring ceremonies to come, Perdita herself is the symbolic heir of this goddess of seasonal renewal.
This is the prettiest lowborn lass that ever
Ran on the greensward. Nothing she does or seems
But smacks of something greater than herself,
Too noble for this place. (4.4.185–88)
During the sheep-shearing scene, Polixenes and Camillo arrive in disguise as part of a plan to discover what Florizell has been up to in the country. They soon find the answer when they see the prince romancing Perdita. Though we might expect the king to be upset with his son for courting someone so far below his status, this turns out not to be an issue. As Polixenes notes with these words, Perdita, though apparently “lowborn,” nonetheless carries herself in a way that transcends her birth: she “smacks of something greater than herself, / Too noble for this place.” In making this comment, Polixenes acknowledges her natural-born grace. Later in the play, an anonymous Lord will make a similar comment to Paulina and Leontes: “Women will love her that she is a woman / More worth than any man; men that she is / The rarest of all women” (5.1.139–41).
