SOURCE: "Jealousy in The Winter's Tale," in Alphonse Juilland: D'Une Passion L'Autre, edited by Brigitte Gazelles and René Girard, Anma Libri, 1987, pp. 39-62.

[In the following essay, Girard interprets the jealousy of Leontes in terms of "mimetic desire, " suggesting that the motive for Leontes ' jealous behavior is based on his belief that he influenced Hermione to love Polixenes in a sort of imitation of his fondness for his friend.]

The most monstrous jealousy in Shakespeare is not that of Othello but of Leontes, the hero of The Winter's Tale. With no villain at his side to poison his mind, the king of Sicilia comes close to destroying his entire family. His victims are completely innocent and selflessly devoted to him. This Othello without an Iago is Shakespeare's last representation of jealousy, his most uncompromising and, in my opinion, his greatest. But posterity has judged otherwise. Othello rather than Leontes has always been the great symbol of jealousy in the theater of Shakespeare.

The traditional critics appreciate the sinister quality that emanates from Leontes after he becomes jealous. They find him excellent as a madly suspicious tyrant, but unconvincing as a portrayal of jealousy. They do not understand why he becomes jealous; they find him "insufficiently motivated."

One line in the very first scene, I believe, is relevant to this objection. When the curtain rises, Camillo of Sicilia and Archimadus of Bohemia are discussing the friendship of their two kings:

CAMILLO. 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!

ARCHIMADUS.

I think there is not in the world either malice or matter to alter it.

(I.i.21-32)

Unlike the thoughtful Camillo who prays for the continuation of the beautiful friendship. Archimadus sees no need for supernatural help. The bond is so strong, he believes, that it should endure forever. As we hear this, we realize, of course, that the friendship is doomed. The prophecy smacks of human pride; a friendship presented as indestructible at the outset of a play must be about to be destroyed. The amazing concord of the friends is an obvious prelude to their still more amazing discord.

Archimadus' prophecy must be false, but not entirely false, however. The terms in which it is couched are too specific to be meaningless.

Malice is what a villain can do to disturb a harmonious relationship, the wiles of an Iago for instance. Matter means all seemingly rational grounds for quarreling that two close friends may have, conflicts of passion, interest, prestige, power, whatever you will as long as it seems sufficient to legitimate the end of a friendship.

The words malice and matter cover everything that the traditional critics would regard as appropriate "motivation" for the jealousy of Leontes, everything that would make them happy if they could find some of it in The Winter's Tale.

They do not find any. In the entourage of Leontes, there is no one who wants to mislead him and flatter his jealous passion. Camillo's wife, Paulina, displays as much heroic persistence on behalf of truth and justice as Iago on behalf of deception and evil. Many courtiers do not dare contradict the king, but she puts them to shame and, thanks to her, their embarrassed silence also points to the truth. Leontes is painfully aware that no one around him shares his mad belief.

There is a religious oracle in the play and it, too, proclaims the truth. Every fact that Iago manages to distort or keep away from Othello is prominently displayed in front of the deluded husband. The play is devoid of malice and it is devoid of matter as well. Both Leontes and Polixenes are happily married and Shakespeare gives no indication that Hermione might be sexually attracted to Polixenes or Polixenes to her. Not one equivocal word passes the lips of either character, not one ambiguous glance is exchanged. Both friends are at peace with one another. Their kingdoms have no common borders. Neither one covets the possessions of the other. The play has no political matter.

This complete absence of malice and matter makes The Winter's Tale stand out as a unique exception. Shakespeare is obviously aware of the fact. All his plays until then were abundantly supplied with at least one of the two ingredients demanded by the critics. This is especially true whenever jealousy plays a prominent role. The women are invariably innocent, but the jealous hero is not really guilty either; next to him there is a villain who provides him with a convenient excuse for his violence. This is not only true of Othello but also of Much Ado About Nothing, a comedy in which Don John plays the role of the slanderer, and also of Cymbeline in which the part goes to Posthumus' own rival, Iachomo.

Even if the lack of malice and matter could be regarded as a fault from a dramatic standpoint, it cannot be an ordinary fault if Shakespeare himself planned it deliberately. The line of Archimadus resembles too much the "lack of motivation" bemoaned by the traditional critics not to allude to the same reality. These critics were wrong when they treated the whole matter in a purely negative fashion, as something to be censored rather than understood. And their modern successors will also be wrong as they rush into the void created by the absence of malice and matter with some "critical theory" of their own choosing, some kind of psychoanalytical scheme for instance. Shakespeare obviously had his own reasons for doing away with the malice and matter of the earlier plays. I would like to know what these reasons are. I am curious, above all, of Shakespeare's own idea of what his own play means.

There is not in the world either malice or matter to alter [this friendship]. Every word is true and yet the statement as a whole is misleading in regard to the long and happy life that it predicts for the friendship. Since the friendship is quickly altered, it must be altered by something other than malice or matter.

The line of Archimadus discreetly warns us about the very special nature of this play. This is Shakespeare's last meditation on jealousy and he does not want the subject to be spoiled this time. He does not want its full force to be diluted in the traditional fashion. The Winter's Tale is the only play which portrays the full horror of a passion that Shakespeare has often represented before, but always with some attenuation.

When a very old and close friendship or a happy marriage is destroyed, we automatically assume that the agent of their destruction must lie outside the relation. Either the friends and spouses listened to some malicious slander about one another, or some unexpected issue arose between them. On something of great importance they must differ importantly.

If the friendship is not destroyed from the outside and yet is destroyed, it must be destroyed from the inside. Archimadus sees quite correctly that the catastrophe cannot come from outside and he concludes incorrectly that it will not come at all. He does not even mention the most disturbing possibility; he simply cannot imagine it. His statement is true as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough and it becomes misleading because of the very truth it contains.

This is what a tragic oracle should be: a statement about the future that sounds misleadingly reassuring because of some truth in it, a pleasant enough reality that seems to exclude a quite unpleasant possibility, the fulfillment of which has been anticipated with some concern: The oracle shows up just in time to alleviate this concern and facilitate the catastrophe by putting the listeners to sleep when they should be on their guard.

In reality there is no incompatibility between the pleasant reality and the unpleasant possibility. The second follows from the first both logically and chronologically. Far from affording the protection that it seems to afford, the absence of malice and matter secretly prepares and facilitates the internal destruction of the friendship.

Archimadus' statement is the tragic oracle at the entrance of The Winter's Tale, a superb example of the genre since it relies on our fundamental misunderstanding of human relations rather than on mere wordplay, as the oracles in Macbeth for instance. If we look for irrelevant excuses and do not want to face up to the tragic possibilities of even the most harmonious human relations, we, too, will fall into the trap. Just like Archimadus himself. To this urbane and optimistic gentleman, a friendship invulnerable to malice and matter has nothing to fear.

The Archimaduses of this world never foresee the serpent in the Garden of Eden. All around them, friendships crumble; allies of long standing go to war; the most stable associations dissolve; lovers separate; spouses divorce, but every time they react as if no such thing had ever happened before. They greet each new catastrophe as an unheard of exception, a miracle in reverse that shall never occur again. Here is an event, they say to one another, that contradicts the natural order of the universe.

The critics with no affinity for the tragic fall into the oracular trap and clamor for the malice and the matter that Shakespeare, this time, will not give them. Malice and matter are the lame excuses and scapegoats that, in the face of shattered loves and friendships, a certain love of mankind requires in order to maintain its faith in the intrinsic goodness of man.

There is another clue to the author's intentions, and it confirms our interpretation of Archimadus' statement. The literary source of The Winter's Tale is Pandolfo by Robert Green. The hero of this novel has conventional motives for being jealous. They are gone from The Winter's Tale. If Shakespeare had not been himself when he wrote the play, or too uninterested in his hero to provide him with credible motives, in all probability they would still be there. I cannot believe that they disappeared accidentally; they had to be discarded on purpose, and the most important task of a critic of the play is to identify that purpose.

Let us overcome the oracular ambiguity of Archimadus and regard his statement as an invitation to rise above malice and matter. Let us reflect on the mystery of a jealousy that dispenses for the first time with the conventional motives to which Shakespeare had always resorted before, even in as great a play as Othello.

In the second scene, we learn how a trusting friend and loving husband can suddenly be metamorphosed into a wild beast. Everybody is on stage. Polixenes announces that, after nine months with Leontes and Hermione, he must return without delay to his family and the affairs of Bohemia; an additional motive is the burden that his presence might be to Leontes.

Leontes insists that Polixenes could never stay long enough to tire him and he begs his friend to wait some more, even if only a week. Several critics have questioned his sincerity. Can a man that close to an almost insane fit of jealousy seriously attempt to prevent the departure of his presumed rival? These critics assume that the suspicion of Leontes must antedate the beginning of the play. If he is serious about wanting Polixenes to stay, he must already be planning to have him murdered.

This is the wrong approach. Shakespeare is not writing a detective story. He first portrays Leontes as a man genuinely distressed at the prospect of losing his friend, and we must assume that this distress is real. With an almost childlike petulance, Leontes begs Polixenes to stay a little longer. He needs to prepare himself for a future without his friend. He cannot find the right words. Hermione stands at his side, silent. No more than two minutes, perhaps, after Polixenes' announcement, Leontes, brusquely, turns to her:

Tongue-tied our queen? speak you.

The only "tongue-tied" character is Leontes himself. He knows how charming and eloquent his wife can be and he wants her to plead his case with Polixenes. He wishes that she had intervened without being asked. He is as dependent on her as he is on his friend. The two most precious people in his life now seem to be going their separate ways, deserting him simultaneously . . . Sensing his disarray, Hermione intervenes and the first thing she does is to answer the implicit reproach of her husband:

I had thought, sir, to have held my peace until
You had drawn oaths from him not to stay. You, sir,
Charge him too coldly.

She then proceeds to do precisely what Leontes has requested; in an always dignified and humorous manner, she "charges" Polixenes warmly and eloquently; Leontes is highly pleased. Twice he repeats "well said, Hermione."

To call Hermione to the rescue was the right move. Victory crowns her efforts; Polixenes will stay a while longer. I detect no resentment in Leontes' congratulations, only admiration and gratitude:

At my request he would not.
Hermione, my dearest, thou never spok'st
To better purpose.

A playful Hermione now asks her husband if he really means his last statement. In the same lighthearted way, he answers that, on one other occasion only, she spoke as well as she just has; it was the day when she said "yes" to his marriage proposal. She then recapitulates the observations of her husband:

. . . I have spoke to th' purpose twice:
The one, for ever earn'd a royal husband;
Th' other, for some while a friend. [Giving her hand to Polixenes]

As he hears these words and sees his wife hold hands with Polixenes, Leontes feels overwhelmed with jealousy:

LEONTES:
[Aside] Too hot, too hot!
To mingle friendship far, is mingling bloods.
I have tremor cordis on me: my heart dances,
But not for joy—not joy.

Occurring as it does in front of him, this display of affection means strictly nothing. Leontes is too intelligent not to be aware of the possibility:

This entertainment
May a free face put on, derive a liberty
From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom,
And well become the agent; it may—I grant.

And yet he cannot help regard the innocent gesture of his wife as solid proof of adultery. His perverse interpretation can seem credible only in the hypothesis of a long-standing affair between Hermione and Polixenes, to which he alone would have remained blind. The deluded husband is always the last to know his own disgrace. The lovers must regard him as a man beyond enlightenment, and they have thrown precautions to the wind. They no longer hesitate to display their mutual affection in public, even in his own presence.

But to paddling palms and pinching fingers,
As now they are, and making practie'd smiles,
As in a looking-glass; and then to sigh, as 'twere
The mort o' th' deer—O, that is entertainment
My bosom likes not, nor my brows!

The words of Hermione and her physical contact with Polixenes are the two stones that produce the spark that sets off the explosion. We can see the spark and we can hear the explosion, but where is the dynamite?

Hermione was not first to place her marriage on the same footing as her friendship with Polixenes. Leontes himself used the word "earned" apropos of the two. A little before he had also asked: "Is he won yet?" meaning Polixenes. Hermione then adopted his metaphor; she follows every lead of her husband; she imitates him in everything.

Why should Leontes react as he does to this innocent mimicry? A moment before, he had interpreted Hermione's nonintervention in his debate with Polixenes as a rebuff to himself. He found her too cold and now he finds her too hot. Between too little and too much friendship is there a perfect point that would satisfy Leontes? Obviously not. Leontes puts his wife and his friend in a double bind. If they seem uninterested in each other, he feels betrayed, but as soon as they seem interested, he feels betrayed all the more.

Hermione behaves like a docile instrument in the hands of her husband. Everything she says and does, she says and does because of him. The same is true of Polixenes, who postpones his departure for the sake of Leontes. Her insistence made him understand how important it is, but not to her, to him alone, that his friend should not leave too suddenly.

Does Leontes fail to grasp all this? We take for granted that he must. If he only perceived how eager his wife and his friend are to act in the manner he himself has suggested, he would acknowledge their innocence. What can his misguided jealousy amount to if not to a gross misapprehension of the available information? This is what our common sense assumes. Our common sense is wrong. This jealousy is more intelligent than we realize.

Until the fateful line 108, no doubt, Leontes was unaware of his crucial role in the interaction of Polixenes and Hermione, but awareness has come to him in a flash of insight based on the information that we, the spectators, share with him, interpreted almost in the same way. Leontes realizes that he has been manipulating his wife for the sake of his friend. As long as he did not see this, he entertained no suspicion.

The morbidly sensitive Leontes feels hurt at the thought that his wife might not treat his best friend as her own best friend. He wants the two persons he loves most to feel toward one another the way he feels toward them. He desires a triangle of perfect love.

Until line 108, Leontes was continuing on the course that had been his during the entire visit of Polixenes. He was not suspicious in the slightest. His only problem was that he found Polixenes and Hermione too indifferent to one another, and he was doing his best to change that. As he listens to Hermione and watches her hold hands with Polixenes, all of a sudden he thinks that he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Hermione has just said that she "earned" a friend in the same way that she "earned" a husband. Leontes recognizes his own feelings as well as his own words: he has always seen the two relations as equally important, almost equivalent, and a terrifying idea takes hold of him. He thinks that his insistence on too much friendship has driven Hermione into the arms of Polixenes. He has incited her to commit adultery. To mingle friendship far, is mingling blood.

Leontes sees himself as an involuntary go-between. He thinks that his own love has exerted a perverse mimetic influence on the pair and that they love one another after his own example, but in the wrong manner.

This interpretation is based on mimetic desire, or rather on Leontes' anticipation of mimetic desire, on his belief in a mimetic contagion that does not really exist but might exist. This reading may seem excessively subtle at first and yet it is Shakespeare's own. The readers do not have to take my word for it. Shakespeare himself made it completely explicit. He placed it in the mouth of the reliable Camillo, the character best informed of what Leontes is up to. This shrewd and honest counsellor diagnoses his master's condition in the manner that I do, and there is no reason to doubt that he is right:

He thinks, nay, with all confidence he swears,
As he had seen't, or been an instrument
To vice you to't, that you have touch'd his queen
Forbiddenly. (414-17; italics mine)

Leontes sees himself as the instrument of his own cuckoldry. In the language of mimetic theory, which owes a lot to Dostoevsky, we might say that Leontes sees himself in the role of The Eternal Husband; but he reacts more violently than this antihero to a discovery that, in his case, is not even true. He thinks that he not only facilitated the love affair of Polixenes and Hermione, but that he first planted the desire in their hearts.

Camillo is present during the entire scene. When Leontes talks to him privately, he takes for granted that a man as intelligent as his advisor must have reached the same conclusion as himself. When he finds that Camillo still believes in the loyalty of Hermione, he becomes indignant and calls him "a bawd." He thinks that Camillo deliberately continues in the role that he, himself, was also playing before his illumination.

Another clue to the feelings of Leontes lies in his parting words to Hermione, when she leaves the stage with Polixenes:

Hermione,
How thou lov'st us, show in our brother's welcome;
Let what is dear in Sicily be cheap.
Next to thyself and my young rover, he's
Apparent to my heart.

(I.ii.173-77)

These lines function both as an invitation to friendship and as an invitation to sexual promiscuity. For the love of me, Leontes says to his wife, show your love to Polixenes, fall in love with him. You, my wife, prove to me that my friend is the most desirable friend by desiring him as much as I do. And you, my friend, prove to me that my wife is the most desirable wife by desiring her as I also do.

Even the most banal words of civility can seem ambiguous in an ambiguous context. If a husband desires, quite innocently, to have his wife extend the proper hospitality to his best friend, he cannot help sounding as if he were encouraging her to commit adultery.

Leontes is satirical; he gives a caricature of his former language, during the entire nine months of Polixenes' visit, a language, he now thinks, that has been obeyed to the letter.

In order to show that he is no longer fooled, Leontes exaggerates what he now perceives as the rash imprudence of his invitation to cordiality. This parody of his former self is a bitter reproach: "When you took me at my word," really means "you turned me, the trusting husband, into an innocent tool of your perversity."

Leontes is merely imagining something that really happens in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Proteus falls in love with Valentine's mistress, Silvia, for obeying too literally the too insistent suggestion of his old friend: For the love of me, Valentine keeps saying, fall in love with the woman I love!

A brief episode in Act Five confirms, I believe, this interpretation of Leontes' jealous desire. Sixteen years have elapsed; the son of Polixenes, Florizel, and Perdita, the long lost daughter of Leontes, not yet identified as such, have left Bohemia together to take refuge with Leontes. They claim that they are officially engaged and that Polixenes himself has sent them to his old friend Leontes. In reality, the king does not want his son to marry the humble shepherdess that Perdita seems to be, and the two lovers are feeling his rage.

In the midst of this first encounter with Leontes, the truth is publicly revealed, and the two young people throw themselves at the feet of their host, begging for his help. In an effort to awaken his sympathy, Florizel reminds him of his own past when he, too, was a young man in love:

Beseech you, sir,
Remember since you ow'd no more to time
Than I do now. With thought of such affections,
Step forth as mine advocate. At your request
My father will grant precious things as trifles.

The answer of Leontes is astonishing, at least for a repentant sinner and an older man forever buried, he claims, in the remembrance of his supposedly dead wife:

Would he do so, I'd beg your precious mistress,
Which he counts as a trifle.

Leontes is thinking of Perdita as a possible spouse not for Florizel but for himself His great grief, his sense of guilt, his daily visitations of the supposed tomb of Hermione, all seem forgotten. We can understand why the ever-watchful Paulina intervenes forcefully:

Sir, my liege,
Your eye hath too much youth in't. Not a month
'Fore your queen died, she was more worth such gazes
Than what you look on now.
LEONTES: I thought of her,
Even in these looks I made.

The reason Leontes behaves as he does is not that he has forgotten his wife, but that he remembers her too vividly. Perdita looks so much like Hermione and Florizel looks so much like Polixenes that the past seems resurrected. From Leontes' standpoint, this is a perfect repetition of that past, not solely because of the physical resemblance between the actors, but also because the new ones display openly, this time, the mutual love that Leontes had wrongly attributed to Polixenes and Hermione.

Another circumstance that makes the scene a perfect repetition of the past is the role of go-between and protector of their love that Florizel and Perdita want Leontes to assume. In Act One, Leontes saw himself as the involuntary go-between of his wife and friend and the engineer of a love affair that did not exist. This time, everything is real. Florizel and Perdita really love each other and they really put Leontes in charge of their love. Every reason Leontes once thought he had to be jealous has come back to haunt him. His heroic efforts to convince himself that his jealous desire was pointless are powerfully challenged by what he sees. Shakespeare does not want to cast discredit on the repentance of Leontes. His purpose is to produce circumstances identical not to the original situation as it truly was but to Leontes' distorted interpretation of it. As a result, the old jealous desire overwhelms him once again, so powerfully that Leontes forgets everything else, at least for a moment.

The same insolent happiness radiates from Florizel and Perdita as from Hermione and Polixenes when they held hands in front of Leontes. This love makes a great show of being in need, in need of Leontes but, in reality, it needs nothing at all, nothing outside of itself. It seems divinely self-sufficient, and that is the reason Leontes, once again, feels the pangs of jealousy. The very perfection of the relationship makes him feel excluded from paradise.

This is exactly how he had felt the other time. He had been pushing Hermione and Polixenes toward each other in order to reinforce his own desire for them, mimetically, through the imitation of its own mimetic replicas reflected back from them as in a mirror. And he had really succeeded. Suddenly, Polixenes and Hermione had seemed superhuman and so suited to one another that they seemed bound to love one another exclusively; it seemed impossible that they might waste any love on anyone else, especially himself. That is the reason he had felt like an outcast. As his old feelings reassert themselves, once again he sees himself abandoned and humiliated, compelled, as a result, to espouse and imitate the beautiful desire that seems to deprive him of everything desirable.

What Paulina sees in the eyes of Leontes cannot be his own vanished youth; it must be borrowed from the two young people. It is not Leontes anymore but his own rendition of Florizel's desire for Perdita, of Perdita's desire for Florizel.

Being once again in a position of power, Leontes can choose his own role. He can be the complacent go-between who favors the illicit loves that he secretly admires or he can take advantage of the situation to satisfy his own desire at the expense of the young couple. At this point, he is tempted less to marry Perdita, perhaps, than to separate these lovers once and for all, to destroy the insolent happiness of which he has no share, as he had destroyed it in the case of Polixenes and Hermione.

If we read the episode until the end, we will find a line that confirms the mimetic nature of Leontes' reawakened jealousy. Leontes once again addresses Florizel:

But your petition
Is yet unanswer'd. I will to your father.
Your honor not o'erthrown by your desires,
I am a friend to them and you. (italics mine)

The last line does not seem particularly interesting at first. It obviously means: "I am your friend in every possible way and especially in those matters that relate to the interest of your desires. You want me to intervene with your father; I will ask him to permit your marriage to Perdita; I will be an honest go-between."

Leontes' brief personal crisis is over and the episode concludes on a positive note. A happy end is in sight for the two lovers. All this is obvious and we hardly give it a thought.

And yet the wording of our line is a little strange. It seems to suggest that: I am a friend to them (meaning your desires) does not necessarily imply: I am your friend. If the alternative is not a real one, the final and you is pointless; it merely repeats what Leontes has already said. We are left wondering why Shakespeare should have ended the whole episode on a rather flat and uselessly redundant note.

How can we make the alternative real, so that the and you will not be redundant? We must explore the possibility that a friendship of the desires might not be synonymous with the friendship of the men whose desires they are. This is not as far-fetched as it seems at first. If desires are friends we may assume that they will feel like friends; they will share identical views about whatever seems important to them.

Nothing can be more important to a desire than the object that it pursues as desire, in its own energetic and single-minded fashion. If there are two desires with a single mind, it is probable, it is almost inevitable that they will pursue one and the same object "with the soul of desire," the same object for both men at once. If our two desires pursue this object single-mindedly, the same Perdita for instance, will not each desire insist on the exclusive possession of it, will they not stubbornly refuse to share it with even the friendliest desire?

They certainly will. We can see, therefore, that the friendship of men and the friendship of their desires are not at all one and the same thing. The friendship of the men means harmony and peace and the friendship of their desires means jealousy and war.

Without the addition of the final and you, nothing prevents the first part of the line, I am a friend to your desires, from harboring the dark possibilities of mimetic rivalry, of a new tragedy, in other words. The two friendships become equivalent only retrospectively, after the and you has been added.

To be a friend to Florizel or to be a friend to his desires . . . that is the question Leontes has been debating, and it is not an idle question. The beginning of our line still reflects a hesitation that is resolved only with the final and you, uttered perhaps with a sigh of regret. Only then does Leontes finally triumph over his last temptation.

If we read the line carefully, we will see that it alludes to a major Shakespearean problem, which is the problem of The Winter's Tale at least as much as jealousy is, the problem of the archetypal brothers or friends. Why do they invariably become the worst of enemies?

The ambiguousness of a friendship that makes the desires of the friends too much the same, and therefore turns them into rivals, is what our line suggests. This is made unquestionable, I feel, by Leontes' first reaction to the request by Florizel. He was immediately tempted to seek Perdita as a wife not for the young man but for himself.

The two possible meanings of I am a friend to your desires are clearly present in our text and the phrase must allude to both; its ambivalence cannot be fortuitous.

This line also reflects the temporality of Leontes' experience. The disquieting interpretation of the first six words is only half-glimpsed and it is quickly suppressed by the reassuring certainty of and you. As soon as Leontes has surmounted his temptation, we almost doubt that it ever was there. We almost doubt that once again he was tempted to rebel against the thankless role of the empty-handed go-between. He had never played that role before, I repeat, but now he is really asked to play it, and in circumstances so reminiscent of his old illusion that we can well understand why, at least for a minute, he would fall again under its horrible spell.

The use of such words as "friend," "friendship" for the mimetic affinity between desires is particularly appropriate in view of the insidious nature of mimetic rivalry, of its tendency to creep up on friends and brothers when their intentions seem most pure, when they have no other conscious purpose than to lend a helping hand. Many men think they are still friends to other men when, in fact, they are friends to their desires exclusively. There is a world of difference between the two, but the shift is so easy that the difference, most of the time, remains unseen. A man can "honestly" believe that he is acting in the interests of a friend when his allegiance has already shifted to the latter's desires and the friendship is already betrayed. The extreme pertinence of the word "friend" makes the wordplay almost invisible as wordplay.

This ambiguous use of "friend" does not occur in The Winter's Tale only, and a comparison with other plays, notably A Midsummer Night's Dream, confirms the deliberateness of the ambivalence.

When they lyrically rehash the traditional reasons why "true love" always runs into trouble, Lysander and Hermia enumerate all sorts of mythical obstacles, such as oppressive fathers and omnipotent tyrants, but they fail to mention the only relevant source of disturbance which is themselves. They keep "crossing" each other's desires because they keep imitating these same desires. We only have to observe the lovers' behavior in order to perceive the imitation that their ideology of "true love" will not acknowledge, and we only have to pay attention to their words to understand that, unwittingly, they keep defining their own mimetic desire:

LYSANDER:
Or else it [desire] stood upon the choice of friends
HERMIA:
O hell! To choose love with another's eyes!

The first emotion of Leontes when he meets Florizel and Perdita is sympathy for the young couple, but that sympathy immediately extends to their desires. As his need for sympathetic participation increases, he feels compelled to espouse these desires, to make them his own, through a process of imitation so encompassing that it includes even the youth in the eyes of the old man, the youth of Florizel and Perdita, no doubt, reflected in the eyes of their imitator.

The line we just read makes the presence and the effects of mimetic desire completely transparent to those willing to acknowledge this constant source of conflictual ambivalence in Shakespeare but, to those not so willing, this same desire remains completely invisible. The technique of the passages we have just read, the discretion in the handling of the crucial themes is most appropriate to the subject matter, of course, but it also amounts to a strategy of selective revelation.

The diabolical ambivalence of a friend to your desires can be regarded as a case of overreading since it turns out to mean exactly the same thing in the end as a friend of yours. A spectator interested only in light entertainment never suspects anything of the whole complex of themes I call mimetic desire. After everything is over, the surface of the text appears perfectly smooth and not a trace remains of what has just disappeared.

If we want to know the truth, Shakespeare will help us and he will hide nothing. If we do not want to know, if we want to be kept in the dark regarding the operation of our desires, which is the case with most men, we will see absolutely nothing. At the end of our episode, everything we just discovered has vanished and the banal meaning seems so limpid and obvious that not a trace can be found of the possibilities we only half-glimpsed.

If we belong to the group of those who want to see nothing, we will feel perfectly comfortable; the disquieting possibility that unsuspected depths remain to be explored and that we might have missed something will never enter our mind.

The jealousy of Leontes proves baseless in The Winter's Tale, but it would make a good deal of sense in the context of many earlier plays of Shakespeare.

Everywhere in Shakespeare a certain type of character keeps recurring: a man—more rarely a woman—has a spouse, or a friend of the opposite sex as well as a friend, or a brother of the same sex. Instead of a friend, it can be an esteemed associate, or a revered superior; it can even be a total stranger, the Iachomo of Cymbeline.

For one reason or another, the man brings the woman into his relationship with the male friend (in the Sonnets), or he brings his male friend into his relationship with the woman (in a number of plays). His official reason may be that he needs a helping hand in his courtship of the woman; he does not have enough selfconfidence to approach her single-handedly. In other instances, he has too much selfconfidence; he is in a "boastful" mood; he yearns for the envious looks of another man for the purpose of bolstering his own desire. Would he need this kind of reinforcement if he were as sure of himself as he seems to be?

The two types are less far apart than they seem. They are the two phases of the same personality, one that tends to oscillate between too much and too little selfconfidence, the mimetic personality par excellence.

Whatever his motives, our man works assiduously at effecting a rapprochment of the two friends. He wants to foster the same close relations between them as he already entertains with each separately. He does not seem to realize that his behavior may push the two friends into each other's arms. This often turns out to be the case in Shakespeare.

I already briefly mentioned a first example of this theme, that of Valentine and Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. I will now give a few more, beginning with the one closest to Leontes in chronological order, the Posthumus of Cymbeline. This hero boasts about the beauty and virtue of his young wife, Imogen, in front of a Roman dandy named Iachomo, instilling into him an intense desire to try his luck with this wonderful woman. Posthumus wagers that Iachomo will fail and then, quixotically, facilitates his rival's enterprise by giving him a letter of introduction to Imogen. When Iachomo returns with some spurious evidence that Imogen has succumbed to his courtship, Posthumus' loss of confidence in her is as rash, unbalanced, and unfair to this virtuous wife as the macho bragging of the previous phase.

Troilus is another illustration of the type. Not unlike Posthumus, he is prone to bragging, but he is quite insecure underneath. When he praises the superior worldliness and charm of the Greek warriors, he does not realize the impact of his words on Cressida. His mimetic envy of "the merry Greeks" suggests to the woman he has unwittingly humiliated not only that a Greek lover might be enjoyable, but that it could help her regain the upper hand with her Trojan lover. Troilus displayed the most callous indifference toward Cressida after spending only one single night in her bed.

A little later, one of the Greeks, Diomed, is taking charge of Cressida and the incorrigible Troilus loudly praises the young woman in front of him. First Troilus stupidly channeled Cressida's mimetic desire in the direction of the Greeks, and then, apparently eager to complete the job so neatly begun with his mistress, he channels Diomed's desire in her direction; he arouses the Greek warrior's vigorous sense of mimetic emulation with the Trojans. Diomed, needless to say, becomes the second lover of Cressida.

Even more than Pandarus, Troilus is Cressida's "bawd," but unlike Pandarus, he is not even aware of contributing to the process of her mimetic corruption. He has no remembrance of having been spiritually unfaithful to her before she becomes physically unfaithful to him. Since he gets hooked a second time before he has had an opportunity to succumb to a temptation similar to hers, he is sincerely convinced, as have been numerous generations of critics who have vigorously applauded him for his steadfast virtue, that he occupies the high moral ground in the whole affair. He still passes for "the only positive hero" in an otherwise distressingly cynical play.

Troilus must be regarded just as responsible as Pandarus for the prostitution of Cressida, if not more so. Were Troilus and Cressida a French play, it might be entitled L'école des putains; in this School for Whores, all the teachers are former lovers or would-be lovers of their students.

The Silvius of As You Like It is a variation on the same archetype: he carries the love letter of his cruel mistress to another man, Ganymede (in reality a woman, Rosalind), in the absurd hope that his abject submissiveness will improve his chances with the author of the letters, Phebe, who is bound to despise this spineless man. His submissiveness repels Phebe not because she differs from him to a significant extent, but because she does not. Most of these Shakespearean lovers in the comedies resemble one another enormously. They are as "masochistic" with their persecutors as they are "sadistic" with their victims, and Phebe will prove as servile as Silvius, as soon as someone shows up, Rosalind, who treats her as harshly as she does Silvius.

Another good example is Orsino, the duke of Twelfth Night, who finds the young Cesario (Viola) so charming that he dispatches him (or her) posthaste to the cruel Olivia, loaded with his own messages of love. Piqued by Viola's indifference to her, Olivia, naturally, falls in love with the ambassador.

The theme of the man who invites cuckoldry by praising his mistress or wife in public, exhibiting her as a fashion designer would his best model, dispatching possible lovers to her, acting as her go-between with other men, or otherwise making it difficult for her to remain faithful, recurs too frequently and prominently in the theater of Shakespeare to be dismissed as an inconsequential trick, an external device, alien to the sublime aspects of the noble bard, unrelated to the themes truly worthy of our critical attention.

Unless we perceive the process of these mimetically inflammable men who become "infected" (the word has a quasi-technical sense in this theater) with the desire of a boastful husband or lover, we have no grasp of dramatic interaction in the comedies. When we see that the phenomenon has its exact counterpart in the realm of power—with the Ulysses of Troilus and Cressida—we realize how widespread it is. The truth is that indirect desire, second-hand desire, desire borrowed from a friend, mimetic desire, constitutes the strongest kind of desire in the Shakespearean corpus, and the only kind that really serves the purpose of the playwright because it provides him with an inexhaustible source of conflicts.

Our survey of the erotic landscape leaves no doubt regarding the nature of Leontes' suspicion and its legitimacy in the context of the early plays. Except for his own play and, to a more limited extent, some of the plays that come immediately before it, all triangular conjunctions of a cast similar to that of The Winter's Tale quickly produce the mimetic offspring, either in the man friend, or in the woman friend, or in both, that would make Leontes' jealousy well founded if he were the hero in one of these plays. On statistical grounds, this jealousy makes sense.

There is much self-defeating eroticism in Shakespeare and it bears an undeniable resemblance to the behavior of Leontes before he becomes jealous. The supposed mystery of Leontes' jealousy stems from our inability to recognize the unity of a Shakespearean archetype behind the diversity of the examples I have mentioned.

If characters such as Valentine, or Collatine, the husband of Lucrece, or Hermia, or Troilus, had come around to the jealous perspective of Leontes early enough, they would have saved themselves a great deal of trouble. Instead of regarding them as madmen, we would congratulate them for their shrewdness.

Why is Leontes so well informed about mimetic contagion, and why does he fear its effects so much? He had to observe it somewhere. The objects of his observation could not be Hermione or Polixenes, who are immune to it. Hermione in particular is admirably unaware of all the evils imagined by Leontes. The only mimetic contagion that her husband has observed is her innocent exhibition of friendship for Polixenes and he was the one who requested it. It was possible to misinterpret this friendship, of course, but, in order to do so, Leontes had to refer it not to its real source, which is the sincere affection of his wife for him, but to the perverted source in his own mimetic desire.

The cause of Leontes' jealousy is his own heart. He condemns his victims in function of what he finds in himself. That is why his mistake is so stubborn and remains unaffected by the external evidence.

Leontes implicitly acknowledges his own mimetic obsession since he sees himself as a source of virulent contamination. Observing in himself the self-defeating impulse that invites the perverse kind of imitation, he anticipates its effects in others and erroneously believes that Hermione must have come under its influence. She slavishly follows his suggestions, to be sure, but only because of her eagerness to please him.

The only desire Leontes can know firsthand is his own; his belief in a love affair between Hermione and Polixenes is an extrapolation of this self-understanding. Modern psychologists would call this a "projection." If the attribution of mimetic desire to others is essentially projective, should it not be dismissed as the fabrication of sick mind not solely in the case of Leontes but also systematically?

This, I believe, is one of the questions that lies behind the creation of Leontes. In the early works, and even more in the so-called "cynical" works of the middle period, such as Troilus and Cressida, the system of mimetic contamination operates so infallibly that it seems a law of nature. The Winter's Tale can be read as an implicit but radical critique of the "epistemology of desire" that underlies all these plays.

I see some radical self-criticism in The Winter's Tale, but one that is perfectly compatible with a sound interpretation of the mimetic theory and therefore does not overturn it. How is this possible?

If our knowledge of mimetic desire in others comes from mimetic desire in ourselves, it is indeed a projection. In the case of Leontes, this projection is exactly what the modern theory of projection leads us to expect, an illusion. I do not believe, however, that the play invalidates the mimetic theory. It does not even invalidate the possibility of a correct insight that would be based solely on the projection of mimetic desire itself.

This apparently impossible paradox will disappear if we take the mimetic nature of mimetic desire more fully into account. If desire is as "infectious" as Shakespeare normally represents it, it will reproduce itself in routine fashion. An individual made suspicious by his own propensity to mimetic desire will expect to encounter around himself what his pessimistic view of human nature leads him to expect, the perfect replicas of his own desire, and, as a rule, he will indeed encounter them. If they were not there in the first place, his own desire would generate them.

More often than not, the expectation of mimetic contamination by mimetic desire will be self-fulfilling; it will produce its own truth. Mimetic desire is the original self-fulfilling prophecy and it is the real force behind self-fulfilling prophecies of all kinds in countless areas of human endeavor.

If, in the case of Leontes, his projection of desire encounters nothing but the void, the reason lies with Hermione's immunity to mimetic contagion. With different characters, the same projection might have turned out differently. The modern idea of projection as necessarily deceptive is not applicable to mimetic desire any more than its counterpart, the rationalistic and psychoanalytical fallacy of a completely objective knowledge of desire, entirely divorced from the desire it seeks to know.

Considerations of this type seem too abstract, theoretical, and undramatic to figure in a play, and yet they are developed at some length in The Winter's Tale; desperate jealousy is a desperate search for the truth and it is understandable, after all, that a Leontes would bring up the subject at the moment of his greatest disarray, in a fashion that is faintly reminiscent of the Marcel Proust of La prisonniére.

The text I have in mind is Leontes famous soliloquy on affection, or desire. It does not make much sense either from a traditional or from a psychoanalytical viewpoint, but it will make sense to us as a reflection on how far the intuition of mimetic desire can be trusted, coming as it does from mimetic desire itself:

LEONTES:
Affection! thy intention stabs at the centre.
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicat'st with dreams (how can this be?)
With what's unreal thou co-active art,
And fellow'st nothing. Then, 'tis very credent
Thou mayst 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).

(I. ii. 138-46)

Leontes first insists on the most misleading aspects of desire, on its overall unreality. Desire may think that it grasps something outside of itself when, in fact, it does not and clutches only at fantoms.

Two different modalities of linkage with the outside world seem to be involved. The first appears to be intellectual: Leontes obviously alludes to a kind of knowledge specific to desire; it can fail miserably, but it can also produce results. It fails when desire "fellows nothing" and, as a result, cannot compare itself to anything real. Desire may remain alone but it is not its nature that it always should. It may fasten on something that truly exists and, in that case, it may really apprehend and comprehend that something.

The second linkage seems to belong to desire itself, to its own affective dimension. Desire becomes really coactive this time and it co-joins with the desire that it has fellowed, when it does fellow something which can only be its own mimetic replica. Either a desire will be sterile in all respects and will produce no knowledge because it produces no duplicate of itself, or it will be fertile in all respects and will produce real knowledge because it has already produced the object of that knowledge. Desire understands its children just as it understands itself, for the simple reason that children resemble their parents.

The last lines of our text confirm this reading. If the communication and co-creation of desires that Leontes is talking about has really occurred between him, on the one hand, and Polixenes and Hermione, on the other, then it is "beyond commission." The two other partners of the triangle must already desire one another in the same way that Leontes desires them, and his jealous insight is unfortunately a real one. He has been irreparably cuckolded and the hard'ning of his brows coincides with the infection of his brain, with his ever-growing consumption and absorption of mimetic contamination.

Everything falls into place if we only assume that desire itself is the source of what we know about desire and, as a result, the knowledge of other people's desires is not impossible but carries no absolute certainty.

As Jean-Pierre Dupuy has observed, the only thing that mimetic theory makes predictable is the unpredictability of the mimetic contamination, from which the fallibility can be deduced of any anticipation that relies too much on its happening automatically, confusing it with a causal effect.

I have tried to distinguish between the affective and intellectual aspects that seem to be present in our text, but it cannot really be done: the distinction is contrary to the spirit of the text. Judging from the number and diversity of the words that express it, the main idea is the notion of desire as communication, as something that may or may not co-join with something else. All these essential words and, above all, the magnificent definition of desire as a co-active art, apply to both aspects at once. Taken together they account to a definition of mimetic desire that would not be complete if it did not include a definition of how we know about this desire in others as well as in ourselves. The knowledge is part of the mimetic process itself and therefore it can be true, if the mimetic contamination is reciprocal; and it can be false, if the original mimetic desire remains childless.

The idea that our own desire is the chief source of all our insights into desire itself is evident to Shakespeare but not to us, and it is largely responsible for the alleged unintelligibility of this text. We are accustomed to a complete separation between desire and its knowledge. This is a most stubborn intellectual presupposition and it coincides with the massive rationalistic blindness to the importance of mimetic contamination in human affairs. This blindness must be rooted in the platonic repression of conflictual mimesis and in the distinction of the sensible and the intelligible. It has persisted during the entire history of Western philosophy and is stronger than ever today.

Far from breaking new ground in this respect, Freud reinforces this fundamental prejudice. In the light of Shakespeare, the postulate of an "unconscious" that would be totally separated from our "consciousness" appear not as a rebellion but as a caricatural exaggeration of the old rationalism. The true knowledge of desire, if there is one, is always supposed to come from an uncontaminated source, which seeks to eliminate the role of introspection and projection in order to believe in its own "scientificity."

The text seems written hastily, but its chaotic appearance may be intended to reflect Leontes' chaotic state of mind and his permanent problem with language. And this time, the problem might well be Shakespeare's own, at least up to a point. The writer is trying to find the right words for a subject matter that does not yet exist . . .

The obscurity of this text disappears if we renounce the prejudice of an irreducible separation between the subjective or, as Lacan would say, the imaginary projections of desire on the one hand and, on the other, the truth of desire, a truth that should reach us through those non-human and therefore immaculate channels invented by our modern mythologists.

We can regard the speech on Affection as a valid expression of what Shakespeare himself believed at the time of The Winter's Tale. Our only knowledge of mimetic desire is mimetic and its application to individual human beings is uncertain. Leontes himself illustrates this uncertainty. His theory is right but his application is wrong. Leontes sees a dissemination of mimetic desire that has not occurred, but his overall theory, incomplete and misleading as it may be, is not devoid of validity. It is ironic, of course, that a man as perceptive as he about desire in general could be so completely deluded in his evaluation of the people closest to him, but such is the fate of many a theorist!