The Winter's Tale (Vol. 36) - Leontes And Perdita
LEONTES AND PERDITA
Patricia Southard Gourlay (essay date 1975)
SOURCE: "Oh My Most Sacred Lady': Female Metaphor in The Winter's Tale," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 5, No. 3, Autumn, 1975, pp. 375-95.
[Here, Gourlay traces Shakespeare's use of female metaphors in the play to explore elements of Leontes' own nature, and asserts that he opposes dark masculinity with the qualities of love, art, and nature represented by the three principal women.]
Early in The Winter's Tale, while all is still compliment and courtesy, Polixenes describes the innocent idyll he and Leontes shared as boys. He says to Hermione:
O my most sacred lady,
Temptations have since then been born t'us, for
In those unfledged days was my wife a girl;
Your precious self had then not crossed the eyes
Of my young playfellow.1 (I. ii.77—81)
When Polixenes makes his...
[The entire page is 21131 words long]
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