[HPforGrownups] Hermione's Name

[Erika Lachapelle]

No: HPFGUIDX 55052

Greicy wrote:
BTW, has anyone read The Winter's Tale by Shakespeare? JKR got Hermione's name from there and I wanted to know if there maybe a clue about Hermione.  I have it, but I just can't get into it.

Me:
    I read "A Winter's Tale" in my full-year Shakespeare course a few years back.  In the play, Hermione is the wife of Leontes the of King Sicilia. She has a son by the name of Mamillius and is pregnant as well. Leontes, for no real reason, (at least as far as I remember) becomes insanely jealous and  believes she may be having an affair with his friend Polixenes the King of Bohemia (which she is not). Eventually, he goes into a rage and Polixenes flees for his life while Hermione is thrown into prison. Shortly thereafter, she gives birth to a daughter and,  according to her attendant Paulina, dies in the process. She is not seen again until the final scene of the play.

    At the end on the play, some fifteen or sixteen years later, Leontes has come to regret his unwarranted jealousy and finally made up with Polixenes and finally accepted his daughter Perdita (who had been left for dead in Bohemia, coincidentally enough). In any case, after all this has happened Paulina leads Leontes to a room in which she has what seems to be a statue made in the image of Hermione- but a Hermione who has aged some fifteen years. She ask Leontes if he will accept her and, when he does, Paulina speaks to the "statue" and Hermione returns to life. Leontes is thus reconciled with his wife, his friend Polixenes, and his daughter who is to marry Polixenes' heir and thus bring the two kingdoms together and achieve comic resolution.

    I've left out a great deal for the sake of brevity, but that's the limit of Hermione's involvement in the play IIRC. I don't know if that really sheds any light on Rowling's Hermione, though. I thought I read an interview somewhere in which Rowling said that her Hermione wasn't meant to have much in common with Shakespeare's. The idea was to choose a name that a pair of dentists might choose in order to show off, but also one that was unusual enough so that a real little girl wouldn't get teased for having a name similar to Rowling's creation. Has anyone seen an interview that said something to that effect?

    The only parallel that I can see off the top is the whole idea of Hermione being turned into a statue- reminds one of the petrification incident in CoS a little, doesn't it?

Hope that helped
Erika (Wolfraven) -who enjoyed dusting off her huge volume of Shakespeare's collected works

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