The Winter's Tale (Vol. 57) - David McCandless (essay date 1990)
David McCandless (essay date 1990)
SOURCE: “‘Verily Bearing Blood’: Pornography, Sexual Love, and the Reclaimed Feminine in The Winter's Tale,” in Essays in Theatre, Vol. 9, No. 1, November, 1990, pp. 61-81.
[In the following essay, McCandless posits that Leontes's persecution of Hermione represents his attempt to cast away his source of sexual shame.]
Early in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Polixenes recalls the boyhood paradise he shared with Leontes and attributes its end to the intrusion of “blood”—here a synonym for man's “sensual, animal appetite” (OED 1: 929).
We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ th’ sun, And bleat the one at th’ other. What we chang’d Was innocence for innocence; we knew not The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream’d That any did. Had we pursu’d that life, And our weak spirits ne’er been higher rear’d With stronger blood, we should have...
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