I am drawn to this depiction of theater—as place in which sexual determinism negotiates with courtly erotic play—in part because it accords with my sense of late-Shakespearean romance. The romances seem to me preoccupied with two of the more prominent features of antitheatrical discourse: the suggestion that stage practice is inherently associated with illicit sexuality and the suggestion that play acting is an assault upon the stability of the individual self. Using the example of The Winter's Tale, I want to argue that the romances locate theatrical practice in close relation to illicit desire, acknowledging sodomy as a characteristic mode of being for the players and playwrights implicated in theatrical practice, incorporating both the erotic play of selfhood that typifies James's letters and the sense of sexual identity that characterizes the ganymede. While the ganymede and the courtier are not the only figures one can imagine participating in sodomy in the period—much of Bray's work, for instance, documents the prevalence of homosexual behaviors in households and villages, noting that there, as at court, the perpetrator of sodomy was in no way identified as "homosexual"—the ganymede and courtier represent two poles of sodomy's power to characterize. These two poles, moreover, figure prominently in the erotic imagination of The Winter's Tale, which juxtaposes questions of sexual stigma with questions of theatrical practice. What The Winter's Tale comes to associate with theater, finally, is not only the erotic indeterminancy that Valerie Traub has identified,¹⁶ but also a dependance upon the notion of sexual fixity, a deployment of the ganymede as a figure for sodomy's power to characterize participants in theatrical practice. Furthermore, I will argue, the play uses these very stigmatized features of theatrical practice to legitimate playing. As a kind of defense of the institution, The Winter's Tale reinscribes theater as a force both sexual and moral.

The theater was, after all, the source of seemingly endless sexual allegations in early modern England. Anthony Munday notes the power of playgoing to corrupt women:

Some citizens wives, upon whom the Lord for ensample to others hath laide his hands, have even on their death beds with tears confessed, that they have received at those spectacles such filthie infections as have turned their minds from chast cogitations, and made them of honest women light huswives.¹⁷

Jonson himself, in Poetaster, has his stage version of the historical Ovid assume an automatic connection between playing and sodomy: "What? shall I have my son a stager now? an enghle for players?"¹⁸ In "A Common Player" J. Cocke claims that an actor "If hee marries, hee mistakes the Woman for the Boy in Woman's attire, by not respecting a difference in the mischiefe."¹⁹ Phillip Stubbes complains that after a stage play "every mate sorts to his mate, every one bringes another homeward of their way verye freendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the Sodomits, or worse."²⁰ Cocke also notes that these sexually undiscriminating actors participate in an unacceptably protean selfhood because of the many roles they play and the costumes they wear: "Take him at the best, he is but a shifting companion; for he lives effectually by putting on, and putting off. . . . His own [profession] . . . is compounded of all Natures, all humours, all professions" (257). The net effect of this sexual and ontological impurity is for Thomas White a scandal of self-loss: "Wherefore if thou be a father, thou losest thy child: if thou be a maister, thou losest thy servaunt; and thou be what thou canst be, thou losest thy selfe that hauntest those scholes of vice, dennes of theeves, and Theaters of all lewdness."²¹ The chaotic play of identity and desire that the aristocratic sodomite is imagined to enjoy freely becomes in these descriptions a sinister aspect of theatrical practice, a cause for the player's notoriety.

Moreover, as the title of one of these antitheatrical tracts, A Very Fruitful Exposition of The Commandements, suggests, those who protested theater's alleged sexual excess tended to position themselves on the side of fertility and nature, condemning plays for their failure to bear moral fruit.²² John Northbrooke refers to plays as "unfruitfull and barren trees [that] shall be cut down" (75), while the author of the Refutation of the Apology for Actors refers to plays as "fruitless," and Henry Crosse says of the attraction to earthly pleasures that it "yeeld[s] no fruite at all."²³ Standing in opposition to the reaping of both orthodox spiritual profits and all-important economic profits, theater, with its alleged enticements to nonprocreative sexuality, seemed to fly in the face of God's great commandment to be fruiful and multiply. Ultimately, as The Winter's Tale figures and refigures theatrical practice, it will reappropriate this notion of fertility and claim it for the stage.

I begin my discussion of The Winter's Tale, however, by asking why the play's many descriptions of boyhood sound so like these early modern descriptions of theatrical practice. Like theater, it seems, boyhood is figured as a realm of sexual and ontological instability, as Leontes makes clear in a paranoid aside to Mamillius: "Go, play, boy, play: thy mother plays, and I / Play too; but so disgrac'd a part, whose issue / Will hiss me to my grave."²⁴ Child's play, sexual play, theatrical play—boyhood, illicit sexuality, theatrical stigma—are what come to mind when Leontes looks at his son. Childhood has become one repository for the scandal of the undifferentiated theatrical self. In a later passage, in fact, Polixenes describes youth in terms that again bring theater to mind. Leontes asks him, "Are you so fond of your young prince, as we / Do seem to be of ours?" and Polixenes describes his own son:

Now my sworn friend, and then mine enemy;
My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all.
He makes a July's day short as December;
And with his varying childness cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood.

(1.2.167-71)

To be free to cast off one's identity and assume another as boyhood does here is a pleasure—and a threat—associated with theatrical practice.²⁵ As the ganymede does for the sodomite, the child does for the institution of the theater in these passages. Talking about boys becomes an implicit way of talking about men.

Leontes also associated boyhood with an ambiguity of gender that is again a familiar component of attacks upon the theater:

Looking on the lines
Of my boy's face, methoughts I did recoil
Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech'd,
In my green velvet coat; my dagger muzzl'd
Lest it should bite its master, and so prove,
As ornaments oft do, too dangerous.

(1.2.153-58)

To be "unbreech'd" is to be dressed in gender-neutral clothing; for a boy this implies a less than absolute separation from the female gender.²⁶ Mamillius (or, really, Leontes' fantasy of his own past, occasioned by Mamillius) wears his dagger muzzled, as if to indicate that he has not reached phallic manhood. There is, furthermore, the implication that Mamillius's relative ambiguity of gender is imperiled by mature masculinity. Rather than imagine the harm that an unsheathed dagger might do to others, Leontes focuses upon the danger to the dagger's wearer. Sexual maturity, according to Leontes' fantasy, must mean an end to a fluidity of gender that has much in common with the fluidity of the theatrical self. At the heart of the play's anxious reminiscences about boyhood, then, is a larger cultural uneasiness about the theater.

At the same time, however, Polixenes sanitizes boyhood, idealizing the instability of self that characterizes both boyhood and the stage:

Herrn. Was not my lord
The verier wag o' th' two?
Pol. 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 answer'd heaven
Boldly "not guilty," the imposition clear'd
Hereditary ours.
Herrn. By this we gather
You have tripp'd since.
Pol O my most sacred lady,
Temptations have since then been born to's: for
In those unfledg'd days was my wife a girl;
Your precious self had then not cross'd the eyes
Of my young play-fellow.

(1.2.65-80)

The absence of the individual self in this passage, the impossibility of distinguishing Leontes from Polixenes, has, ironically, become a sign of Edenic purity, a pastoral opposite to the ungodly crisis of self-definition provoked for tract writers by the scandal of theatrical role playing.²⁷ Polixenes has also managed in this passage to refigure fertility, the marital sexuality that culminates in Hermione's pregnancy, as the interruption of that Eden.²⁸ In much the same way that Polixenes makes the stigma of theatrical practice into an Eden, The Winter's Tale works to make that stigma into a more fertile pastoral, a realm that welcomes and ultimately makes use of heterosexual fertility as a way of legitimating the scandalous stage.²⁹ In its reflection upon the relationships between theatrical practice and illicit desire, moreover, the play negotiates a position for the theater that incorporates elements both of courtly erotic play and of the erotic fixity of the ganymede.

Polixenes' articulation of an all-male pastoral, and its interruption by Hermione, effects a double movement away from the realm of scandalous theatrical sexuality. First, the idealization of boyhood moves toward erasing any trace of the relation between youth and the stigmatized elements of theater embodied in the boy actor, a relation hinted at several times in the passages I have cited. Second, Polixenes posits Hermione's arrival as an absolute end to his union with Leontes, and as Camillo implies in the play's opening scene, that union is bound up both with theater and with homosexual desire. Camillo tells the courtier Archidamus:

Sicilia cannot show himself over-kind to Bohemia. They were trained together in their childhoods, and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection which cannot choose but branch now. Since their more mature dignities and royal necessities made separation of their society, their encounters, though not personal, have been royally attorneyed with interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies, that they have seemed to be together, though absent; shook hands, as over a vast; and embraced, as it were, from the ends of opposed winds. The heavens continue their loves! (1.1.21-32)

According to the logic of Camillo's narration, Leontes and Polixenes want to be together but must be separated. As Leontes and Polixenes abandon physical immediacy for "mature dignity," they begin to employ others as go-betweens, as expressions of their relationship. What is at stake here is the public representation of relationship between men, an interchange of loving embassies and letters that will ultimately come to seem at least partially defensive, an assurance that the contact between Leontes and Polixenes is "not personal."

Furthermore, their very identity as mature men, as kings, demands that they be kept apart. The literal import of these lines is that Leontes and Polixenes want to touch, but the lines also reveal that these men owe their mature dignities to the fact that they cannot embrace. As they move apart they grow in stature, so that by the end of this speech they seem larger than life, reaching out across a vast, from the opposite ends of the earth. The extent to which these men avoid touching one another, finally, is the extent to which they tower over other men. Their affection for one another, associated with boyhood, stands in opposition to their kingly stature. If boys could embody the homoerotic in the cultural imagination of early modern England, and if in doing so they allowed adult men to avoid the possible consequences of homosexual desire, that potential of boyhood, as Camillo's speech asserts, comes down to a more personal level; however wistfully, he narrates the all important distance here between men and sexualized, undifferentiated youth. It was a sign of the sodomite's power that he could play with desire and identity and not get caught, but players, outside the circle of privilege that supported courtly indiscretions, are much more likely to require a justification for their participation in sexual play. The Winter's Tale, concerned as it is with legitimating theatrical practice, voices at least initially an anxious desire to separate mature men from the scandal of the playing boy.

Camillo has implied that go-betweens and a narrative of maturation are the tools through which Leontes and Polixenes will be distanced from the sexual and ontological threats of boyhood. Important as boys are in this staging of kings, however, it is Hermione who symbolically continues their loves. If Hermione comes between Leontes and Polixenes, then she is also the most obvious of their intermediaries, the chief actor in the theater of their relationship. In act 1 Leontes calls her in to speak for him when he wants Polixenes to extend his visit ("Tongue-tied our queen? speak you" 1.2.27), an act she performs, to her peril, all too enthusiastically.³⁰ As she fulfills this function, Polixenes begins to cast her in the part I have described above: "O my most sacred lady, / Temptations have . . . been born to's." Part sacred and part temptation, Hermione is placed by both men in the position of go-between, and imagined by both of them to be sexually compromised. Leontes and Polixenes collaborate in the staging of Hermione as a necessary expression of their relationship, as a means of imagining that their "affections" have been replaced by "mature dignities." At the same time, their shared willingness to imagine her sexual impurity hints at the instability of their erotic compromise with what the play at this point posits as maturity, as a kingly distance from the desire they associate with boyhood. For all the play's work to distance the king from the ganymede, it ultimately recuperates both figures, both in its representation of these men and in its exploration of theatrical practice.

Of course Hermione is not impure, in spite of Polixenes' fantasy that she has corrupted the men's youth and Leontes' mad conviction that she poisons their friendship in the present moment. Such an admission, moreover, creeps into the very language that Leontes uses to imagine her as an adulteress:

Affection! thy intention stabs the centre:
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicat'st with dreams;—how can this be?—
With what's unreal thou coactive art,
And fellow'st nothing: then 'tis very credent
Thou may'st co-join with something; and thou dost,
(And that beyond commission) and I find it,
(And that to the infection of my brains
And hard'ning of my brows).

(1.2.138-46)

The speech is echoed at the moment Leontes sentences his wife, meant as a statement of confidence in his own suspicions, but expressed as a tacit admission that he has projected his own desires onto her: "Your actions are my dreams."³¹ Leontes' own mind is engaging in the actions he attributes to Hermione. Affection—perhaps Leontes' own emotions and imaginings—"stabs the centre." For all the obscurity of the image, its sexual referent is clear, and the rest of the language used to describe Leontes' mental processes furthers the sexual implications. Moreover, Leontes' own thinking in this passage is fellowing, cojoining, coactive, both promiscuous and fertile, culminating in a kind of mental pregnancy, a swelling of horns upon Leontes' brow that parallels the swelling of Hermione's womb. Not only does his deranged creativity imply an admission that there is no reason to condemn his wife; it suggests further a strategy that the play as a whole takes up: the recuperation of sexual scandal as a fertile power. Leontes' individual use of Hermione as an expression of his imaginings is accompanied, ultimately, by the play's use of her as an expression and even a celebration of the imaginative power of a sexually stigmatized male theatrical community.