The early scenes of The Winter's Tale enforce an anxious distinction between boys and men, letting boys stand in for the scandal of theatrical practice. Included in that effort is an attempt to use Hermione as a sign both of the distance between Leontes and Polixenes and of the loves they bear one another.* The shared fantasy that she is impure suggests that the easy version of that story is inadequate, that desire and the implicit destabilization of identity cannot be dismissed or idealized as the province of boys. In addition, the language Leontes uses to describe that fantasy—as a promiscuous and fertile mental cojoining—resonates profoundly with what I believe to be a central part of the play's legitimation of theatrical playing.

Leontes' equation of his wife's fertility with his own mental processes—and his clear preference for the product of his own mind—recalls Plato's grounding of poetry in what Renaissance moralists would have regarded as a scandalous erotic context. In the Symposium, Socrates speaks of a lesson he has learned from the wise Diotima:

Men whose bodies only are creative, betake themselves to women and beget children. . . . But creative souls—for there are men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies—conceive that which is proper for the soul to conceive or retain. . . . And he who in youth has the seed of [virtue and wisdom] implanted in him and is himself inspired, when he comes to maturity desires to beget and generate. . . . and when he finds a fair and noble and well-nurtured soul, and there is union of the two in one person, he gladly embraces him, and to such an one he is full of fair speech about virtue and the nature and pursuits of a good man . . . and at the touch and presence of the beautiful he brings forth the beautiful which he conceived long before . . . and in company they tend that which he brings forth, and they are bound together by a far nearer tie and have a closer friendship than those who beget mortal children, for the children who are their common offspring are fairer and more immortal. Who when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than any ordinary human ones?³²

These sentiments are, according to Diotima, among the lesser teachings of love, and although Socrates emphasizes that the love of one beautiful man should lead to an appreciation of the beautiful in general, many early modern readers identified the Symposium with homosexuality.³³

The Symposium represents one way of legitimating the literary productions of an implicitly homosexual male culture, and it bears more than a passing resemblance to Polixenes' idealized male pastoral and Leontes' tormented and fertile imagination. Although the play will move to punish Leontes for his fantasy, and will reconfigure his attachment to Polixenes by way of the heterosexual marriage of their children, I emphasize Plato's idealization of a male homosexual poetics because a similar ideal is active throughout The Winter's Tale. The play works with considerable ardor to establish a convincing affiliation between the playwright's craft and "great creating nature," and while that affiliation can function as a heterosexual imperative—Hermione's pregnancy and the family bonds that guarantee an heir to the throne can be seen as the ultimate sources of truth, the play's ultimate wisdom—the affiliation between poetry and pregnancy can also serve as a platonic boast about the superiority of male poetic production. Indeed, The Winter's Tale and The Symposium employ women and fertility in ways that are, initially at least, remarkably similar. In "Why Is Diotima a Woman?" David Halperin analyzes Plato's adoption of Diotima as the mouthpiece for his erotic teachings, including, I would add, his eroticization of poetic production.³⁴ Referring to Diotima as "a version of pastoral," Halperin notes that her presence in The Symposium allows Plato simultaneously to "invest Diotima with an erotic and prophetic authority" and to evacuate that feminine authority, to use Diotima as a figure for "The male imaginary, the specular poetics of male identity and self-definition" (145). I will return to Halperin's reading of The Symposium in the final section of this essay, but I want first to trace the ways in which The Winter's Tale's pastoral celebration and recuperation of Hermione lend themselves, like Diotima, to the preoccuptions of an eroticized male poetic community. If the play's first half registers an anxious awareness of contemporary antitheatrical tracts and their complaints about the fruitlessness of the literary, its second half incorporates women and nature into a declaration of the procreative power of sexually stigmatized male theatrical production. In fact, the play goes to great lengths to emphasize the independence of women as part of a strategy, I will argue, that, like Plato's, will ultimately serve to highlight the powers and desires of men. Especially through the figures of Camillo and Hermione, The Winter's Tale legitimates its own erotic practice while simultaneously obeying the injunction to be fruitful and multiply.

In many ways, the sheep-shearing feast in act 4 is a clear vote for the kinds of fertility that are associated with spring and pregnancy and agriculture rather than with men and poetry. As in the Shepherd's reminiscences about his "old wife" and as in Perdita's preference for the flowers that nature makes, Perdita's frankly sexual remarks to Florizel indicate that this is a new pastoral to which women and heterosexual desire are most emphatically invited.³⁵

Per. O, these [flowers] I lack
To make you garlands of; and my sweet friend,
To strew him o'er and o'er!
Flo. What, like a corpse?
Per. No, like a bank, for love to lie and play on:
Not like a corpse; or if—not to be buried,
But quick, and in mine arms.

(4.4.127-32)

Perdita's next remarks indicate as well that there is a new theater in action here, charming even in its mild sexual scandal:

Per. Methinks I play as I have seen them do
In Whitsun pastorals: sure this robe of mine
Does change my disposition.
Flo. What you do,
Still betters what is done.

(4.4.133-36)

That Camillo and Polixenes should intrude upon this heterosexual pastoral suggests that this "natural" sheep-shearing feast is in some way anathema to the earlier male Eden in which twinned lambs never had to face the shearer. Their intrusion says, I think, a great deal about the uses of nature in a sexually stigmatized artistic endeavor.

Camillo is established early on as an accessory to the erotic bond between Leontes and Polixenes; he is the narrator of the opening scene's story of the two kings' affections, and he keeps Leontes from harming Polixenes. In addition, Leontes' exchange with him in act 1 casts Camillo in a role that strongly recalls a well-known icon of Renaissance homosexuality:

.. . ay, and thou
[Polixenes'] cupbearer,—whom I from meaner form
Have bench'd and rear'd to worship, who may'st see
Plainly as heaven sees earth and earth sees heaven,
How I am gall'd,—might'st bespice a cup,
To give mine enemy a lasting wink;
Which draught to me were cordial.

(1.2.312-18)

In his address to Camillo, Leontes reenacts the story of Jove's Ganymede, the cup bearer to the god who raised him from earth to heaven and who kept him as his lover. The language of raising up an inferior, combined with the sense that Camillo's vision now spans the gap between heaven and earth, recalls both the erotic myth and its allegorical implications for the merging of the divine with the physical.³⁶

Moreover, Leontes' chain of allusions implies that Camillo is, as Hermione has been imagined, somehow the favorite of both kings. Camillo is cup bearer to Polixenes, but his draught would nourish Leontes; he has been raised up by Leontes, but he attends Polixenes during his stay in Sicilia. The implied eroticism of Camillo's position is shared between the two kings, and the implication is that Camillo in some sense shares Hermione's role as erotic go-between and as actor in the theater of their affections. One of Leontes' most vivid declarations of certainty about Hermione's infidelity, after all, implies a symmetry between that infidelity and Camillo's promised poisoning of Bohemia: "I have drunk, and seen the spider" (2.1.45). As Leontes sees it, both Hermione and Camillo are objects of exchange between himself and Polixenes, and Camillo's associations with Ganymede make him a secondary player in the staging of the erotic bond between the two kings.

Camillo and Polixenes make their entrance in the play's second half negotiating once again the conflict between a man's duty to his homeland and his affection for another man. Although Polixenes stresses that he needs Camillo present for business reasons, his request that Camillo not leave is strongly reminiscent of the earlier exchange between Leontes and Polixenes: "I pray thee, good Camillo, be no more importunate: 'tis a sickness denying thee anything; a death to grant this" (4.2.1-3). That the business at hand should be Polixenes' interruption of a heterosexual pastoral (and that Florizel should apparently have no mother on hand, even in Bohemia), suggests that the concerns that shaped the earlier Edenic realm of twinned lambs have resurfaced in the relation between Camillo and Polixenes.

As mentioned above, Florizel claims that he is "heir" to his own "affections" as he makes plans to elope with Perdita. Camillo, however, who is more profoundly committed to the affections of his two masters, effects a reworking of Florizel's and Perdita's scheme for his own purposes:

Now were I happy, if
His going I could frame to serve my turn,
Save him from danger, do him love and honour,
Purchase the sight again of dear Sicilia
And that unhappy king, my master, whom
I so much thirst to see.

(4.4.509-14)

As Camillo puts it, he has "a woman's longing" to see his home and his king, and his employment here as an assistant to the young couple is a means toward the end of uniting himself and Polixenes with the object of their affections. The implication is that Camillo's participation in the staging of male affection stands in an opportunistic relation to the spectacle of heterosexual affection and to the natural pastoral upon which it intrudes. Perdita's comment upon her own participation in the elopement ("I see the play so lies / That I must bear a part," 4.4.655-66) is more apt than she realizes; she is being made to play act not only her own marriage, but also the reunion of the men whose desires are a powerful shaping force in the play.³⁷

If the play legitimates its own theatrical practice in part by staging a celebration of the "natural"—only to refigure that pastoral as implicitly in the service of the homoerotic—it moves similarly toward legitimation in the staging of Hermione's return. The Winter's Tale takes great pains to establish this source of moral veracity as having come from outside the realm of male control and male fantasy. Paulina has disciplined Leontes thoroughly, calling his imaginings "Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle / For girls of nine," and speaking out of turn repeatedly to remind him of his former tyrannies (3.2.181-82). Paulina speaks in direct opposition to male authority, and her disclaimers as she reveals the statue to be alive, protecting her from the possibility that she might be "assisted / by wicked powers" or that her "unlawful business" might be "hooted at / Like an old tale," actually serve to emphasize the power of her artistic deception, the fact that it transcends the laws that govern acceptable stagecraft.

We learn too that backstage, as it were, during the sheep-shearing celebration, Hermione and Paulina have quietly been staging their own spectacle. While Paulina has engineered Leontes' sixteen years of mourning, Hermione has "preserved / [Herself] to see the issue," with "issue" here meaning both the daughter she has lost and the outcome of a play—in this case, a play partly of her making. Given that Hermione began The Winter's Tale with the burden of representing Leontes' esteem for Polixenes, as a player in the theater of male affection, it is remarkable that in the second half of the play she and Paulina have taken control of the plot, have planned their own theatrical strategy. Even though the ultimate result of this female theater is to reward Leontes for his conversion and to prove Hermione's fidelity to her husband and his lineage, the play's ending looks like it is authorized by women, largely because of the way that Paulina stages her power over Leontes and her power over the "statue" of Hermione.³⁸ Like Diotima—in fact, much more emphatically than Diotima—Paulina speaks in a voice that insists upon its own difference, its distance from the erotic preoccupations of men.

The return of Hermione, then, looks like a kind of triumph for the feminine, an artistic coup that, like the sheep-shearing feast, seems to proclaim its independence from the all-male community that produces sexually stigmatized theatrical spectacles. As metatheater, this apparent female power could be thought to represent a final distancing from the stigmatized theatricality that marked the play's opening scenes. Hermione's coming to life as a statue seems, moreover, to be a final elision of the spectacle of the boy actor, the figure who, more than any other, represents the sexual dangers of the theater; the emphasis in the play's last scene is upon the reality of Hermione's womanhood, after all, and not upon the androgyny of the boy who represents her. Hermione appears to step forward from out of the staged representation of "woman" and to assert her living reality, a reality made more convincing by her status throughout the play as the embodiment of truth. In this sense she continues the motion begun by Polixenes in the "twinn'd lamb" pastoral, the motion to erase the figure of the boy actor.

Furthermore, Paulina makes a brief remark that raises the question of lesbian desire, apparently marking an absolute distinction between the erotic possibilities of her own stagecraft and that of the two kings. In act 5, when Florizel and the unrecognized Perdita arrive in Sicilia, a servant describes Perdita to Leontes and Paulina with a sense of wonder:

This is a creature,
Would she begin a sect, might quench the zeal
Of all professors else; make proselytes
Of who she but bid follow

(5.1.106-9)

Paulina responds with mock horror, "How! not women?" (5.1.109). By underlining for us the sexual potential of this description of Perdita, Paulina takes us into new erotic territory. She implies at least an awareness of a desire that is outside male control, either for the purposes of progeny or poetry. In fact, her joke seems to emphasize the hiddenness and unrepresentability of lesbian desire, and by extension its distance from traditional models of the literary.³⁹

However, this heightened sense of the reality of the female at the end of The Winter's Tale also works paradoxically as a boast about the fecundity of the male community that produced the play. Like the gestures made in act 4 toward a heterosexual pastoral, the efforts that act 5 has made toward establishing the independence of women are simultaneously available as part of a male homosexual stagecraft. Paulina's passing joke about lesbian desire, for instance, is answered in a manner that suggests that the scandalous boy actor has not been as thoroughly removed from the play's erotic economy as my earlier argument implied: "Women will love her, that she is a woman / More worth than any man; men, that she is / The rarest of all women" (5.1.110-12). The servant's response highlights a different erotic possibility than Paulina's joke, emphasizing not the lesbian but the bisexual possibilities of Perdita's attractiveness. His rather elaborate explanation for her ubiquitous appeal sounds a bit like Sonnet 20 ("A man in hue all hues in his controlling, / Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth," 7-8), or like the kinds of erotic play that characterize Twelfth Night; the play's response to the possibility of an independent lesbian desire is to return to the terrain of the boy actor, to reassert the fundamental androgyny of a Perdita who is played by a boy in women's clothes, and thus to remind its audience of the ganymede's participation in the broader range of theatrical eroticisms. Rather than figuring the ganymede as a sign of stigmatized sexual identity from which mature and powerful men can distance themselves, The Winter's Tale implicates the ganymede, finally, in every aspect of the stage's erotic practice. We are prepared by the play's boasts about the power and appeal of the ganymede to regard Hermione's return not so much as the elision of the boy actor but as his triumph. The boy who impersonates the "real" Hermione, along with the theatrical company that engineers his impersonation, asserts power so absolute that it dares to stage its own exclusion.

That exclusion goes beyond boasting that a boy can convincingly play a mature woman with miraculous powers, however. On a deeper level, the play uses this final moment to register in silent eloquence the cost of the effort to distance boys from men. Mamillius, identified repeatedly in the play's first half with his father's past, has died at the end of act 2 and is thus hauntingly absent in this scene of miraculous reunion. Leontes' family has in a sense acquired a son through Perdita's marriage to Florizel, but the effort to substitute Polixenes' son for Leontes' through the institution of marriage is, in light of the initial failure of Leontes' and Hermione's union to erase the past, a particularly hollow theatrical convenience. Paulina herself critiques it just before the newly wedded couple arrives in Sicilia:

Had our prince,
(Jewel of children) seen this hour, he had pair'd
Well with this lord; there was not full a month
Between their births.

(5.1.115-18)

In her wonderful sadistic way, Paulina emphasizes the fatality of Leontes' former paranoia, keeping alive the memory of the past if not in this case the actual victim of it. In addition, she speaks uncharacteristically here for the union of men, subtly replacing the image of Perdita's marriage to Florizel with a different masculine pairing. Even the most independent voice of female power in this play speaks up to long for the past of the twinned lambs.

The play's final scene of miraculous heterosexual restoration, then, is claimed by the power of the sexually stigmatized boy in at least two ways. On the one hand, the very reality of the statue's femaleness is a boast about theater, about the power of a cross-dressed boy to fool an audience, even an onstage audience. On the other hand, the legitimate claim of Mamillius to be present at this family reunion ensures that the marriage of Florizel and Perdita and the miraculous rebirth of Hermione will on some level acquire their poignancy because they are compensation for another loss, for the jewel of children who cannot be replaced by stagings of even the most forgiving and fertile heterosexual embrace.