Act 4.1
An old man with a scythe and hourglass, named Time, steps forward. In rhyming pentameter couplets he informs us that sixteen years have passed. This temporal chasm, utterly at odds with the classical dramatic unity of time, enforces a switch in the audience's perception of the play away from its being a tragedy. Matters have changed in ways it would be impossible for them to alter in the space of a day. Perdita is now a young woman, Prince Florizel in love with her. Time's appearance as a choric figure on the stage, (like Rumour, prologue to Henry IV part 2), gives him a greater claim to control over both the events of the play ("which follows after / Is th' argument of time") and makes him the vital medium of the audience's experience, the means of focus that sets the stage ("imagine me... In fair Bohemia" 4.1.19- 21) and the means of forgetting that turns stage into mere story:
"so shall I do
To th' freshest things now reigning, and make stale
The glistering of this present, as my tale
Now seems to it" (4.1.12-15)
Act 4.2
Our first glimpse of Bohemia is not of Perdita but of two old men: Polixenes refuses Camillo's request to return home (as Leontes had done to him), and draws parallels between Leontes' loss of children and his own virtual but no less painful loss of Florizel, who prefers to spend his time at a shepherds hut. Polixenes takes Camillo with him to investigate, in disguise.
Act 4.3
Autolycus enters singing a summer song, an antidote to the manoeuvres of the old grey men. Once a servant of Florizel, his traffic now is sheets, meaning both bed sheets and ballad sheets. His is named after the son of Mercury, who is classical mythology was messenger to the gods and himself god of thieves and dishonesty, renowned for cunning. Autolycus lives up to his name, fleecing the Clown by pretending to have been beaten and robbed of everything including his clothes by a rascal named Autolycus, who left behind his old rags. The Clown, sent by Perdita to buy sugar, spices, nosegays and fruit for the sheep-shearing, bends down to help and has his pocket picked. Full of sympathy, he even offers to give him some money, but Autolycus could not possibly accept. The situation recalls two well-known incidents of fleecing: Odysseus' escape from Polyphemus in The Odyssey, and Jacob pretending to be Esau in Genesis.
"if I make not this cheat bring out another, and the shearers prove sheep, let me be unrolled, and my name put in the book of virtue!" (4.3.115-18)
Act 4.4
i) Finally we do see Perdita, the queen of the festivities bedecked with flowers and accompanied by Florizel. Florizel's first lines lay their stress on the present occasion: "These... this... you", and on the way it has transcended itself: the sheep-shearing is now a meeting of the petty gods. Perdita on the other hand is disturbed by the "unusual weeds", and worried about Florizel's father beholding her, dressed in "borrowed flaunts" above her station, with Florizel, dressed below his. The threat of Polixenes' anger at his son's unsuitable match, irrespective of how the couple is dressed, seems to disturb her less than the kind of spectacle they are making of themselves. Perdita's idea of nature is of an honesty untainted by any deceit, even that of dressing up. Perhaps for that reason she has to be coaxed into playing her part in the festivities and reassured that there is nothing wrong with this kind of playing. In this long scene full of group performances - Perdita's flower-giving, two dances, a three-part song, and - almost - a betrothal, at each point before the perfomance begins there is a hesitation on the threshold.
When the guests arrive the Shepherd urges Perdita to behave like the hostess, painting a word picture of how his late wife used to play the hostess. Although his wife is dead and the description in the past tense, it is as if she were here and now: "This day ... now here ... now i'th'middle; / On his shoulder, and his...".
Perdita and Polixene's disagreement about flowers has been much discussed by people looking for a clue to the aesthetic of this scene and of the play as a whole. Any such attempt has to cope with a major obstacle to a simple reading: the irony that Perdita argues against grafting whilst being herself "grafted", while Polixenes argues for marrying "a gentler scion to the wildest stock" only to violently oppose his son marrying below his social station. The flowers that are given are autumn flowers because it is harvest time, to middle-aged men. Camillo and Polixenes get rosemary and rue, perennial herbs, while the girls and Florizel get a beautiful speech about the flowers that Perdita doesn't have for them, because it is not spring. Overall, the fitting of flowers to ages seems the most important aspect of this part of the scene, not the philosophising about art and nature which Perdita diverts, onto herself:
"I'll not put
The dibble in earth to set one slip of them;
No more than, were I painted, I would wish
This youth to say 'twere well, and only therefore
Desire to breed by me" (4.4.99-102)
Perdita has no time for "painting" because it is unchaste and because she has no need for it. Nevertheless, she is not artless, since her poetry from line 110 onward is highly rhetorical: she talks evocatively about what she does not have - creating a powerful presence on the stage from the description of what is absent. She notices something is happening:
"Come, take your flowers:
Methinks I play as I have seen them do
In Whitsun pastorals: sure this robe of mine
Does change my disposition" (4.4.132-5)
While Perdita attributes her changing nature to her new attire, Florizel's next speech, a lyric moment unparalleled in Shakespeare's dramatic work, attributes it to her, creating a timeless picture of her "present deeds" that exemplifies the entire scene's insistence on immediacy and performance. In particular, the word "still" combines a sense of continuity with one of stasis that anticipates its use in T.S. Eliot's Burnt Norton. For all her arguments in favour of constancy, Perdita has a vivacious, mercurial grace: playfully she transforms Florizel's faux pas - "what, like a corpse?" into "a bank, for love to lie and play on", literally resuscitating a linguistic dead-end. This ability to play with words and transform meanings is shared most obviously by Autolycus and Hermione and is by no means unconditionally admired, since it can be deceitful or false. Perdita's reaction to Florizel's praise is to address him as Doricles and say that were it not for his youth and "the true blood which peeps fairly through't", which show him to be "an unstained shepherd", she would think he was wooing her "the false way". We accept his true blood even though we know very well that he is neither really Doricles nor a shepherd, and throughout the play that which distinguishes true and false is less a matter of lying or not lying than a matter of life.
ii) Perdita and Florizel join the dance of Shepherds and Shepherdesses while Polixenes enquires of Florizel from the Shepherd. A servant enters with news of Autolycus' arrival, and after his songs and wares are enthusiastically described, he is let in, singing. Mopsa reminds the Clown of the presents he promised her, despite his excuse that he was robbed. Then they choose a ballad, making sure that it is both "true" and up-to-date. The ballads parody contemporary ballads and broadsides, being manifestly impossible, but the credulity of the country people is not purely the target of ridicule, since their consumption of stories creates a market for tales that is like the market for plays, which also have to be 'new' and 'true'. The meaning of the word 'true' is slightly extended to combine the criterion that the story actually occurred with the criterion that it be incredible, a sensation. Dorcas and Mopsa sing with Autolycus, and then exit with the Clown, leaving the Shepherd and gentlemen to their "sad talk".
The Servant enters again, this time to announce that twelve herdsmen are at the door, hoping to perform a dance. The Shepherd is worried that his guests are tired of such country entertainments but Polixenes urges him to admit them, and the servant adds that "one three of them, by their own report, sir, hath danced before the king" (4.4.357)- doubly ironic since not only is Polixenes the king, but the king in the real audience, James I, had recently seen a similar dance of satyrs in Ben Jonson's Masque of Oberon. During the dance, Polixenes taxes Florizel with the fact that unlike the Clown he has not given his "she" any presents, as has the Clown, and as had Polixenes (this is the second of the two references to Florizel's mother in the whole play). Florizel protests his love is not a matter of such trifles, and Polixenes suggests that Florizel's effusive praise of his love is a little overdone, so Florizel asks him to be witness to a profession of it. This becomes a betrothal - the Shepherd says "Take hands, a bargain" - and all seems to be going perfectly until Polixenes asks why Florizel's father is not party to the deal. Florizel insists he cannot know, Polixenes discovers himself and furiously disowns his son, sentences the Shepherd with death and Perdita with disfigurement. He then storms out, having commuted the sentences to a threat, leaving everyone "undone".
iii) Perdita sadly says she will "queen it no inch farther" but Florizel is determined not to be bowed or to compromise his oath, deciding instead to put to sea and see where chance will take them. Camillo sees his opportunity and suggests that they go to Sicily as ambassadors of good will from Polixenes.
Autolycus enters, and not noticing the plotters who have retired to the back of the stage, gloats on the rich pickings he has had at the sheep-shearing. His victims are figured as herd animals, and as senseless: he has made a killing. When Camillo and the others come forward, Autolycus is initially terrified that he has been overheard, but soon realises he is in no danger: they want him to swap clothes with Florizel for a disguise. Perdita resigns herself to yet more play-acting - "I see the play so lies / That I must bear a part" (4.4. 665). Autolycus has recognised Florizel and by the time they leave has figured out what is going on. He decides that since it would be honesty to tell the king, he is being true to himself in not doing so.
iv) Shepherd and the Clown turn up, understandably very worried about what Polixenes might do to them and plucking up the courage to tell him that Perdita is a foundling and show him the bundle found with her. Autolycus finds it easy to scare them even further, pretending to be a courtier in the know about the elaborate and painful deaths awaiting a certain old shepherd and his son, convincing them to rely on his as intercessor to the king. Fortune seems to be determined to prevent him turning honest: the scene ends with him deciding to take the pair to Florizel.