Bodging a theatrical script is the practice of stitching verbal and visual patches into one's text in unexpected ways to produce a dramatic hybrid for the stage. In “verbal,” I include words, phrases, sentences, and patterns of speech that can be traced to written or spoken language outside the play. These would encompass such locutions as those that passed from Il pastor fido into All's Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure. By “visual,” I refer specifically to those vivid patches of dialogue that “lead objects before our eyes”—whether natural or artificial—by means of ekphrases, though visible actions—what we now call “stage business” or “theatergrams”—are also among the materials available for recycling. Bodging involves insight into the rightness of often improbable conjunctions of materials that function so well together that their union commands assent, despite—or perhaps because of—its unpredictability. It is born of ingenuity, which, we are told by the humanist Juan Luis Vives, is a God-given power to enable unaccommodated man to construct his world through “the lively keenness of an ingenium full of spontaneous play.” Its success lies in the eyes and ears of the bodger and his or her perceivers, who discover a “breakthrough into a new reality,” according to philosopher Ernesto Grassi, where “the metamorphosis of man takes place.” We have seen that Shakespeare was an inveterate bodger, using many kinds of materials to stitch together his plays—as, truth to tell, were most of his contemporaries, all trained in the arts of literary imitation, ekphrasis, ethical representation, topical dialectic, and the myriad other devices taught by classical and contemporary rhetoricians. The question that the foregoing account of The Winter's Tale inevitably raises, however, is whether one can bodge up faith.

The peculiarity of Paulina's injunction to Leontes, “It is required / You do awake your faith,” is that it seems to demand he arouse a dormant religious faith in the possibility of Hermione's resurrection and to direct the theater audience to do so as well, although they are involved only vicariously in the crisis confronting Hermione's family and friends onstage.