SOURCE: Cutts, John P. “Boy Eternal.” In Rich and Strange: A Study of Shakespeare's Last Plays, pp. 54-83. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1968.

[In the following essay, Cutts focuses on the issue of Leontes's jealousy, contending that the “boy eternal” complex from which Leontes suffers explains the apparently sudden onset of his jealousy, bridges the supposed division between the play's first three acts and the fourth act, and is further exploited in the theme of “re-wooing” in the fifth act.]

Criticism of The Winter's Tale concerns itself sooner or later with the inception of Leontes' jealousy, about which there has been great conflict of opinion. Most modern critics support the view that Leontes shows jealousy from the very beginning of the play and carefully document this.¹ But Pafford, in the New Arden Shakespeare edition of the play, reverts to an older school of criticism which found no indication of Leontes' jealousy until I. ii. 108, and claims that all the arguments for jealousy from the start can be answered in a general way because “there is no apparent indication that Leontes says or does anything to show jealousy before I. ii. 108, or that anyone on the stage is aware of or even suspicious of anything of the kind.”² This general criticism does not take into account the possibility that the dramatis personae are not openly aware of the deeper significances of what they do. The first burst of flame obviously steals the dramatic moment, but surely this does not necessarily mean that a dramatist will take as his point of departure the moment when the kindling begins, nor does it absolve the critic from searching for the first signs of smoke. To claim that Leontes' words would all be said in a warm and friendly way, that his speeches before I. ii. 108 are those of a devoted and appreciative husband, and that the happy loving memories of his early courting days of his wife prove the loving husband's admiration for his able wife's success in managing to persuade Polixenes to stay, is to ignore the tinder which makes the fire possible. It is not enough to say Leontes is “a little uneasy, somewhat puzzled and hesitant,”³ that his worry grows, that he is probably meant to hear the equivocal lines I. ii. 83-86, and that “if he is represented in this way the audience will have some preparation for the shock.” The audience is surely being prepared much more carefully than this for the burst, and is given powerful hints and suggestions about what caused it.

Much of our difficulty with this very first part of the play lies in our willingness to watch Leontes carefully and to treat Hermione and Polixenes as adjuncts for the further clarification of the “star.” To argue that Leontes lacks the confident serenity which radiates from a Hermione is a splendid example of this attitude. Hermione is not turned into a statue, not cloistered for sixteen years, only because these are the effects of Leontes' actions, but because she herself is in need of revitalizing as a result of her own actions and involvement. Polixenes is by no means blameless either, as we shall see.

Close investigation of the first scene of the play in conjunction with the first 107 lines of the second will reveal a “boy eternal” complex in Leontes, which in many ways is not inferior to Coriolanus' in dramatic appeal, and which throws significant light on his relationship with both Hermione and Polixenes. This complex is exploited throughout the rest of the play, becomes one of the essential links with the “golden girls and lads” episode in rural Bohemia, bridging what most critics have made an unnecessary division between the first three acts and Act IV, and links carefully with the re-wooing theme of Act V.

Leontes has not seen Polixenes since they were boys together undergoing the same training and yet:

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.

(I. i. 26-31)

—which is more suggestive of the conduct between parted lovers than schoolboy friends. All that is necessary for the audience at this stage is the hint of an unusually close relationship between two gentlemen of Sicilia and Bohemia. The rest of the play will strengthen and confirm this hint, and knowledge of the speaker, Camillo, the rope that binds both kings, whom both treat almost as a father-confessor figure, will convince the audience that it was right to be suspicious even in the beginning. Camillo ends the above speech with the hope that the heavens will “continue / their loves” (I. i. 31-32), which, of course, is marked irony, not just because their loves are soon found to be altered by malice and matter, but more significantly that one personal encounter should be even suspected of being able to jeopardize years of perfectly harmonious relationship in absence.

The preparations for the one personal encounter invite close scrutiny. Leontes has striven to impress Polixenes “with such magnificence” (I. i. 12) that Polixenes' servant, Lord Archidamus, feels too overwhelmed to think his master can retaliate in kind for the projected visit of Leontes to Polixenes. The overwhelming entertainment Leontes has put on for Polixenes is not unlike Timon's need to create an embarras de richesses to make visitors incapable of repaying him in kind—an attempt to assert dominance over the visitor. Polixenes and Timon both give “freely,” but the end result is the same—their visitors feel imprisoned in their indebtedness, and no amount of being told “You pay a great deal too dear for what's given / freely” (I. i. 17-18) makes their visitors feel really at ease. Archidamus speaks as his understanding instructs him, and as his honesty puts it to utterance, because he is not the main recipient of such free honors: Polixenes is caught in Leontes' web of lavish entertainment.

The first scene might well end on the theme of there not being in the world either malice or matter to alter the friendship between Leontes and Polixenes. It has the knell of “All's well” about it, inviting dramatic doom round the next corner. But this conclusion would leave the audience with a dominant interest in the relationship between Leontes and Polixenes as adults, whereas the scene has been building up background information about their childhood friendship, the root of their affection, of which we see but the branching now. Hence the introduction of the talk about the young prince Mamillius, “a gentleman of / the greatest promise” (I. i. 35-36), a “gallant child” (I. i. 38), who “makes old hearts fresh” (I. i. 39). Critics do well to compare this extravagant praise with that given to Posthumus in Cymbeline's first scene—both are excessive for specific dramatic purposes. Praise of Posthumus is proved wrong, as I have already shown. That of Mamillius is given not for Mamillius himself, for his early death in the play removes him from consideration as a dominant persona, but for the light it throws on Leontes. Before long Leontes will draw the audience's attention to Mamillius as a reminder of his own childhood—“Looking on the lines / Of my boy's face, me thoughts I did recoil / Twenty-three years” (I. ii. 153-155). In this first scene there is only the hint that Leontes showed remarkable promise in childhood which did not come to fruition. He does not act as a cordial reinvigorating the whole nation, or does he make old hearts fresh, or give longer life to the old who are living on just “to see him a man” (I. i. 40). The king has no son in Mamillius because Mamillius is the equivalent of himself. No wonder the scene ends with the paradoxical statement—“If the king had no son, they would desire to live on / crutches till he had one” (I. i. 44-45). The visit of Polixenes is not a forward movement at all for Leontes, but a harking back to his childhood when he stood heir to men's greatest expectations of him to see him a man. To invite Polixenes and make such a fuss over him obviously argues for something wrong in the state of Leontes. Polixenes is somehow his hold onto the dream of what he was to become, but feels he is not; hence his need to revert to the days of promise rather than fulfilment. Shakespeare asks a great deal of his audience in this first scene as he does in the first scenes of Othello, Lear, Pericles, and The Tempest, to name but a few. His technique of rushing in medias res is usually acknowledged, but critics are only paying lip service to this acknowledgment if they do not give the first scenes enough emphasis.

That the dominant theme of the first scene in The Winter's Tale is the boyhood of Leontes and his relationship with Polixenes at that time is vouched for by the very organization of the first scene, and by the way the second scene is linked. No sooner has Hermione managed to persuade Polixenes to stay than she opens the conversation with—“I'll question you / Of my lord's tricks, and yours, when you were boys. / You were pretty lordings then?” (I. ii. 60-62). Hermione is seeking for an explanation of her husband in the past. Of course she is being the polite hostess and making her guest feel most comfortable by talking of his relationship with her husband when they were both boys. It all sounds harmless enough, but it is odd that Leontes should be kept waiting in the background and have to ask “Is he won yet?” (I. ii. 86), and to be told simply “He'll stay, my lord” (I. ii. 87), without a word of explanation as to how she has managed this proceeding which was so difficult for Leontes. It is also odd that Leontes should have absented himself from the felicity of Hermione a while during her attempts at persuasion. The key to the explanation of this oddness lies, I suggest, in Hermione's questioning about Leontes' boyhood. Leontes present is forgotten in her preoccupation with Leontes past. Her attitude to Leontes present here and throughout the play is consistent. Not until she is wooed for herself as a vibrant being can she really come to life for Leontes. His treatment of her as a glorified statue does not come home to him until the very end of the play. The statue that mimics life so excellently that it could be mistaken for life, but cannot be the real thing until it is given a real existence in its own right, becomes a symbol for much of the play. Leontes present, Hermione present, Polixenes present, are excellent statues mimicking life excellently well, applying various faces to meet the faces that they meet, but living in the past. Leontes and Polixenes live in the reflected vision of their boyhood made possible by the personal encounter, face to face, and by the mirror of their respective sons. The Leontes-Mamillius relationship has already been noticed. The Polixenes-Florizel relationship functions in a similar manner. It is surely a deliberate stroke to have Hermione talk of “the] by-gone day” (I. ii. 32) when asked by Leontes to speak in favor of persuading Polixenes to stay, and use as her first line of persuasion “To tell, he longs to see his son, were strong” (I. ii. 34). By the time that Leontes asks Polixenes “My brother, / Are you so fond of your young prince, as we / Do seem to be of ours” (I. ii. 163-165), the reflected image of father in son is being brought to obvious attention. Here again one could say that the dramatist is taking as his point of departure the moment at which the kindling of dramatic interest begins—Leontes' use of “seem” instead of “are” steals the dramatic moment, but all the time this has been carefully led up to, step by step. When Polixenes avers that Florizel is all his “matter” and rejuvenates him, the themes of the previous scene are being echoed:

          If at home, sir,
He's all my exercise, my mirth, my matter:
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.

(I. ii. 165-171)

This dependence on Florizel jars with Polixenes' absence for so long from him. The nine moons' absence from Bohemia is obviously a minimum to make it possible that Polixenes could be the father of Hermione's child, but it can hardly be regarded as a “reasonable holiday absence from a throne and family,”⁴ in the light of Polixenes' statement of extreme fondness for his son, and the effectiveness of Hermione's taunting him about longing to see his son. Florizel is not longed for as Florizel but as a rejuvenated Polixenes.

The effect of much of this encounter of Leontes, Polixenes, and Hermione is more that of an assembly of full-length statues in a gallery or of a painting than the action itself. The stilted language between them is similarly statuesque. Polixenes' “Nine changes of the watery star hath been / The shepherd's note since we have left our throne” (I. ii. 1-2) echoes the kind of language we expect of the player-king and player-queen in Hamlet—“Full thirty times hath Phoebus' cart gone 'round … So many journeys may the sun and moon / Make us again count o'er ere love be done!” (III. ii. 145, 151-152).⁵ The artificial banquet of thank-yous follows this immediately. Like “a cipher / (Yet standing in rich place) [Polixenes] multipl[ies] with one ‘We thank you’ many thousands moe / That go before it” (I. ii. 6-9).

Polixenes suggests that he has stayed long enough to tire Leontes, and that there is no tongue that moves, none, none in the world so soon as Leontes' could win him to stay longer. But it is painfully obvious that the whole situation is tired, that there is no movement in the language between Leontes and Polixenes. The only movement in language comes about when Hermione is successful over the recall of their boyhood, and it is this which gives them life—colorful lights of the past hover over them.

This, I think, is one of the hallmarks of Shakespeare's technique in the late plays. Critics have variously pointed out that it is not action that matters in them so much as symbol, and have shown the regenerative symbols of youth for old age, fertility for sterility, nature and natural zest for art and artificiality, but these are by no means the monopoly of the late plays. The early comedies, and Twelfth Night, and As You Like It in particular share these devices. What does mark the late plays from the others is their particular rhetoric for framing the symbol. The language becomes largely that of painting and sculpture rather than of the audience's imagination; the language of the Blackfriars theater and its cultivation of the masque with all its lavish scenic devices rather than the bare Globe. The audience watching Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest has to be a great deal more artistically sophisticated than for Globe plays.⁶ This does not mean to say that we are meant to allow the magnificence of the painting and the sculpture to overawe us and take away or suspend our critical faculties. The dark shadows behind the principal figures, the very setting in which they are depicted, should evoke critical attitudes. I have already tried to show with Pericles that the very presence of the prince in Antiochus' house of death is a criticism.

The presence of Polixenes in Leontes' court invites our critical awareness. The static main figures merely going through the gestures of courtesy are lost in the lavish display of entertainment in the foreground, but in the background are the clouds of glory of childhood when Polixenes and Leontes “were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' th' sun, / And bleat the one at th' other” (I. ii. 67-68). The foreground is concerned with the shades of the prison house. Hermione's conversation with Polixenes, before it turns to investigation of the childhood era, turns on the theme of imprisonment—“Force me to keep you as a prisoner” (I. ii. 52)—“My prisoner? or my guest (I. ii. 55)—“Your guest then, madam: / To be your prisoner should import offending” (I. ii. 56-57). The careful juxtaposition of “guest” and “prisoner,” “gaoler” and “hostess” emphasizes this even more.

When Hermione probes into the background her questions reveal that Polixenes and Leontes were boys eternal in an escape world of innocence, where their only blemish was something they could do nothing about, original sin, where they neither knew of nor dreamed of either the possibility or the actual commission of evil deeds. But “stronger blood” has taken over in the real world, and it is no longer possible to plead ‘not guilty’ on their own account before the tribunal of heaven. Hermione is quick to jump to the conclusion that they have “tripp'd” (I. ii. 76) in the real world. There is real vitality in her questioning here, and in her reply, that as long as Leontes and Polixenes “first sinn'd” with their wives, and that with them they “did continue fault, and that [they] slipp'd not / With any but with [them]” (I. ii. 85-86), as much is revealed about herself as about her husband. Talk of the boy eternal business leads directly into talk of the marital relationship. The transition from the clouds of innocence and glory of childhood into the prison house of adulthood is far from smooth. Polixenes talks about temptations along the way that have somehow been borne since entry into the married state. But it is true he phrases this negatively, for in those unfledged days of eternal boy his wife and Hermione were girls who had nor crossed the eyes of himself and Leontes. Although Polixenes addresses Hermione as “most sacred lady” (I. ii. 76) during this conversation, Hermione's caution lest he say his queen and she are “devils” (I. ii. 82) makes it quite clear that she is inferring that the wives are somehow being blamed. That this is the case is borne out immediately by her craving for praise—“What! have I twice said well? when was't before? / I prithee tell me: cram's with praise” (I. ii. 90-91); “Nay, let me have't: I long!” (I. ii. 101)—and by her strong affirmation that Leontes and Polixenes will get far more out of their wives by “one soft kiss” (I. ii. 95) than by harsh treatment. Hermione makes too much of the infrequency she is held to say well for it to be casual repartee of light conversation with no undertones. When she persists in making Leontes himself name the exact occasion of her first good deed, since the second is to have persuaded Polixenes to stay, it is powerful irony that he is thus made to acknowledge that her consent to marry him was the occasion of her first good deed. And Hermione will not let the subject of her two good deeds drop—“Why lo you now; I have spoke to th' purpose twice” (I. ii. 106). This last remark follows on Leontes' description of how Hermione had agreed to marry him, a description which is full of the winter of his discontent. The three months he took to woo her to the state at which she agreed to marry him are referred to as “crabbed” and are said to have “sour'd themselves to death” (I. ii. 102). The yielding of Hermione's love is described more as the result of a forcing by Leontes who found it difficult to make her open her white hand.

It is, of course, possible to suggest that the souring of Leontes results from Hermione's success where he had failed, but again I would counter that his crabbedness is too bitter to stem only from this. His next words will be the famous line “Too hot, too hot!” What I am suggesting is that the description of the wooing is akin to all the other themes so far exploited. The boy eternal has not matured sufficiently to woo Hermione for herself, to treat her as a woman with a woman's needs. Praises and kisses have been absent from their relationship from the very beginning. The wooing is all one-sided, and described with no words of warmth and comfort but words of harsh treatment. No wonder Hermione says that Leontes and Polixenes may ride their wives “With one soft kiss a thousand furlongs ere / With spur [they] heat an acre” (I. ii. 95-96), and that not to mention even one good deed in their favor is to deny the existence of thousands of others. It seems fairly clear that by this stage in the play we are meant to understand that Leontes has made of his wife something akin to a white statue, a most sacred goddess.

How fitting it thus becomes at the end of the play that Leontes has to praise the “living” quality of Hermione, the way she breathes, the vibrance of her veins, her very air which makes him want to kiss her. By that stage he can claim that “thus she stood, / Even with such life of majesty, warm life” (V. iii. 34-35) when “first [he] woo'd her!” (V. iii. 36), as if the magic of art has been able to draw a convenient veil for him over the last approximately thirty years.⁷ The statue that stands coldly (V. iii. 35) at the end of the play and rebukes him for being more stone than it is the same as he sculpted all those years ago. What irony it is, too, that almost immediately after the offer he makes to kiss the statue it comes alive. One soft kiss all those years ago would have maintained the warmth of life which now he is apparently seeking.

Hermione's words give her away, too. Apart from the obvious overwillingness to dismiss consideration of Leontes present in her preoccupation with what Polixenes can tell her of Leontes past, and her offhanded treatment of Leontes by not telling him as soon as Polixenes has agreed to stay, she does give herself away by talking of praises as wages, as if these were in the first level of her demands. And it may well be that subconsciously she is herself conducing to being treated as a marble goddess by revelling in the power which this brings. She is by no means hesitant in tackling the job of persuading Polixenes to stay, even though her husband, his closest friend, has failed. There is no deference to Leontes, no tempering of the discomfort Leontes must feel by his own lack of success, but an outright claim that he is going about matters “too coldly” (I. ii. 30), that all he has to do is assure Polixenes that all is well in Bohemia, and Polixenes' best defenses are down. When she meets with a negative response from Polixenes, she is prepared to outgo his seeking to “unsphere the stars with oaths” (I. ii. 48) in order to get her way. But the biggest clue of all to her success is the kind of ultimatum she presents—prisoner or guest. In some ways Hermione is just as much imprisoning Polixenes with her forced hospitality as Leontes is with his overwhelming entertainment. Her success in this direction is a compensation for the wages she is not getting in the other. As soon as she feels she has won, she can descend to ask questions about his and her lord's boyhood, which, as we have seen, totally undermine the confident act that she has put on. She is far more interested in Polixenes' and Leontes' past, and does lose herself in this reverie.

It is much easier to see Polixenes' guilt. In the first place he has spent an over-long time away from his courtly responsibilities in Bohemia, and yet can only come up with vague expressions of fears for the affairs of state in his absence. Hermione is very clever in calling his bluff over Bohemian affairs. The real reason for his not wanting to stay is tacked on to the end of his talk about the possibility of “sneaping winds at home” (I. ii. 13)—“Besides, I have stay'd / To tire your royalty” (I. ii. 14-15). That Polixenes feels he has outlasted his welcome is further emphasized by his choice of words. Leontes can claim that he is tougher than Polixenes can put him to it, but Polixenes reiterates the theme of “tiredness.” He could easily have stated that no one could better persuade him to stay than Leontes, but he uses the tired metaphor—“There is no tongue that moves, none, none i' th' world, / So soon as yours, could win me” (I. ii. 20-21). He could easily have stated that Bohemian affairs urgently demanded his return home, but he uses the tired metaphor of the horse—“My affairs / Do even drag me homeward” (I. ii. 23-24). For Leontes to ask him to stay is the quickest way to whip him home.

The situation between Leontes and Polixenes, as I have tried to outline it, is again made powerful mainly through the visual appeal to the awkwardness of these two main figures. Polixenes says that he would “for perpetuity / Go hence in debt” (I. ii. 5-6), and both of them are paying a great deal too dearly for what should be given freely but is not. Ironically they are shaking hands “as over a vast” (I. i. 30). Their only link is in the past: talk of present affairs has little or no meaning. That is why Hermione's questioning about their childhood friendship so successfully breaks down the negative barrier of the present and focusses attention on the positive past—the background of eternal boy where there had been amity. Polixenes responds immediately: Leontes ought to, but the fact that it is his wife who can spark Polixenes into life again rather than himself jolts him out of that comforting link with the past into a terrifying combat with the present. He does not know how to function in terms of the present. For a short but terrible period he plays up sexual jealousy for all it is worth, knowing as he does all the time that Paulina will come to pull him into line. His only hold onto this terrifying present is through Paulina, to whose apron strings he clings until she releases him from this kind of dependence and tries to supervise his marrying a wife not a statue.

I have concentrated on this very early part of the play because I am convinced that it is generally treated too casually by the critics who in their preoccupation with the dramatic outburst of sexual jealousy (line 108) have rushed in extremitas res rather than in medias res. In this early part lie so many of the play's themes and preparations for developments, not just in the immediately following scenes but in the play as a whole. To miss the “eternal boy” complex, for instance, is to put the play on quite a wrong footing. To treat Leontes as a mature adult whom sexual jealousy turns inside out is to mistake the outward show for the inward worth. It is not sexual jealousy which maddens Leontes so much as having his whole world picture, the convenient framework he has been operating in up to this point, suddenly destroyed for him. When Polixenes accedes to Hermione's persuasion rather than to his, the feeling of displacement, of inadequacy, is more than he can take. Like a boy he wildly lashes out at the destroyers, and at any reminders of their success. After this he clearly lapses into the “boy eternal” complex with Paulina as his mother.

When Leontes gives vent to violent sexual jealousy he is too consciously applying sexual jealousy to himself for it to carry conviction. He desperately wants everyone to think of him as cuckolded because this at least will ensure being thought of as a wronged husband, not a disappointed boy. His first words—“This entertainment / May a free face put on, derive a liberty / From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom, / And well become the agent” (I. ii. 111-114)—are supposed to be directed at describing Hermione's false cover-up for her “free” entertainment of Polixenes, but they apply far more appropriately, because truthfully, to his own entertainment of Polixenes. Leontes is obviously the one who has been putting a free face on, has been “making practis'd smiles / As in a looking-glass” (I. ii. 116-117) to his narcissistic counterpart, conjured up from his boyhood. And this procedure has not become him. He cannot recapture that image for himself by himself, and has had to apply the very agent that has thwarted the attempt—his wife.

When he turns to Mamillius he tries to find identity there—“they say we are / Almost as like as eggs” (I. ii. 129-230) and “yet were it true / To say this boy were like me” (I. ii. 134-135). But again any comfortable association is destroyed by his wife. This double frustration leads him into the clouded, bitter language of what has been called “the obscurest passage in Shakespeare.”⁸ Pafford is surely right in suggesting that the speech is meant to be incoherent to Polixenes and Hermione, for Leontes dare not speak openly to them. More importantly, however, it marks Leontes' inability to be coherent. It is he himself, not lustful passion personified, who “c]ommunicat'st with dreams” and is coactive with what is unreal, fellowing nothing (I. ii. 140-142). I find it highly significant that his mental turmoil should be characterized by the terminology of “dreams” and “nothing.” Like Imogen in the cave, and Posthumus in prison, it is “but a bolt of nothing, shot at nothing, / Which the brain makes of fumes” (Cymbeline, IV. ii. 300-301), “senseless speaking, or a speaking such / As sense cannot untie” (V. iv. 148-149).⁹ Whatever it is with Leontes, the “action of [his] life is like it” (Cymbeline, V. iv. 150). He has been communicating with the dream of his boyhood, and has had that dream turned into nothing. His image of himself as a youth, the image which Polixenes was conjured up to recall, has now conjoined with the image of his wife. What he was and what he should be are in league against what he is. But rather than face this he plays the easy part of the cuckold, throwing himself into it with such vigor that he rivals even Iago and Othello on the topic. Iago's statements that he suspects both the Moor and Cassio of having done his office between his sheets, and Othello's about Desdemona and Cassio, are no wilder than Leontes' about his wife and Polixenes. All such sets of statements by Leontes, Iago, and Othello detract from the real basis of their troubles—their own inadequacy.

How revealing it is that when Hermione and Polixenes ask Leontes what is troubling him, why he is unsettled with so much distraction, Leontes can only direct their attention to his preoccupation with Mamillius, recalling his own youth as he looks on the lines of his boy's face. What he would make his excuse, namely recalling his youth, is the real thing: what he would have the audience believe is the real thing, sexual jealousy, is his excuse. It is, of course, possible to suggest that he plays the cuckold so forcibly that he has managed to convince himself that this is his real concern. Like Hamlet he may be said to fall in love with the role he casts for himself and finds it difficult to snap out of it. That he is beginning to enjoy his role would seem to be indicated by his inability to resist drawing attention to it—“I am angling now, / Though you perceive me not how I give line” (I. ii. 180-181). He may even be enjoying creating the situation in which Hermione and Polixenes are to be left alone while he takes his son alone into the garden. Again he would like the audience's attention to be drawn to Hermione and Polixenes and away from himself and his son. All that Mamillius is allowed to say at this juncture is—“I am like you, they say” (I. ii. 208), which is fairly clear evidence that he is there not for himself but for further confirmation of his father's boy complex. Leontes dismisses his son by bidding him go play, and with the final comment “thou'rt an honest man” (I. ii. 211), which would seem to me to be an attempt to exonerate his own dishonesty in his proceedings. He will be much caught up in the dichotomy between false appearance and true reality. Asking Polixenes if he is as fond of Florizel as he, Leontes, does “seem” (I. ii. 165) to be of Mamillius should alert us to his obvious playing with the role of deception. Soon he will be asserting to Camillo that “good” should be “pertinent, / But so it is, it is not” (I. ii. 221-222), and that one is deceived in integrity, “deceiv'd / In that which seems so” (I. ii. 240-241).

It is surely more than purely fortuitous that Camillo's first words to Leontes are cast in nautical terms. Leontes has just drawn attention to his own angling, giving line, and now Camillo says that Leontes has had much ado to “make his anchor hold,” for when Leontes “cast out, it still came home” (I. ii. 213-214). That Camillo has no idea of Leontes' suspicions at this point makes the irony all the more acute. No matter how Leontes casts about to throw suspicion away from himself, to anchor his fears, doubts, suspicions on others, everything comes back at him. False meanings on “good,” “satisfy,” and “mistress” in Camillo's straightforward expressions—“At the good queen's entreaty” (I. ii. 220), “To satisfy your highness, and the entreaties / Of our most gracious mistress” (I. ii. 232-233)—will not anchor; they still come back home to him. His very admission that Camillo has been trusted with all the nearest things to Leontes' heart, as well as with his chamber counsels, “wherein, priest-like” (I. ii. 237) he has cleansed Leontes' bosom, redounds against any duplicity or lack of integrity on Camillo's part. It is Leontes who is the real penitent in need of reformation (I. ii. 238-239), not Camillo, the father confessor. Camillo can only accuse himself of “such allow'd infirmities that honesty / Is never free of” (I. ii. 263-264). What Leontes is trying to do with Camillo is turn him into the penitent and himself into the father confessor. This perversion is echoed by his biblical parody. Camillo's eye hath not seen, his ear hath not heard, nor hath his mind conceived the things that Leontes is preparing for him (Corinth. 2.9).

Leontes wants to hear the “racy” things of the confessional from the standpoint of a father confessor's putative immunity. How else are we to understand his desire to have Camillo confess that Hermione's a “hobby-horse, deserves a name / As rank as any flax-wench that puts to / Before her troth-plight” (I. ii. 276-278)? His mind is still reverting to those long by-gone days, still trying to prove that his innocence was lost when he plighted troth to Hermione. Camillo, reasserting himself as a father confessor, merely proclaims that Leontes' sin in slandering his wife is as deep as the sin of which he now accuses his wife, even if it were true, which it is not. But Leontes rushes in with his famous speech on “nothing” as if Camillo had flung that very word in his face. Listing “leaning cheek to cheek,” “whispering,” “meeting noses” (I. ii. 284-291) still adds to nothing, despite Leontes' desperate attempt to make something of it. Leontes is monstering his own nothings, like Coriolanus:

          is this nothing?
Why then the world, and all that's in't, is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,
My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.

(I. ii. 292-296)

In adding the destruction of his relationship with Camillo to that of his destruction of his relationship with Polixenes, Leontes is indeed paring his “wit o' both / sides, and leav[ing] nothing i' th' middle” (I. iv. 194-195).¹⁰ What he asks of Camillo, to spice Polixenes' cup, to give him “a lasting wink” (I. ii. 317), is so preposterous that he cannot really expect it to be carried out. It is almost as if he were preparing the way for getting rid of Camillo. There is no surprise in his words when a lord brings him word that Camillo has left with Polixenes, only expressions of self-satisfaction. It is also suspicious that Leontes expresses himself so willing to take Hermione again as his queen, and give no blemish to her honor once Polixenes has been removed. The removal of Polixenes alone would not solve his sexual jealousy problem, as they both very well know, but they both act the part. Leontes angles with Camillo for getting rid of Polixenes, and hopes Camillo does not perceive how the line is being given for Camillo's own expulsion. Camillo angles, too, equivocating with words, promising to “fetch off” Polixenes, and asking not to be accounted Leontes' servant if Polixenes have wholesome beverage. Leontes' obvious insincerity is marked by his promise to “seem friendly” (I. ii. 350), and by his opposite action in wafting his eyes away from the customary compliment when he meets Polixenes, and showing a “lip of much contempt” (I. ii. 373) speeding from his presence. In the angling match between Camillo and Leontes it is Leontes who wins. By getting rid of both Polixenes and Camillo he has built up his case successfully against Hermione, and on a conspiratorial basis. He has also removed his priest-like conscience. From this stage to the open and public trial of Hermione it is an easy step. Camillo loses out by making the conspiracy charge possible, and by jeopardizing the very safety of Hermione in whose defense he had spoken.

This latter development is an indictment against Polixenes, also. By accepting Camillo's means to save his own life he imperils Hermione's, and casts suspicions where there should have been open truth. He can claim that it is strange how his favor begins to warp because Leontes has just refused to speak to him, but his earlier speeches have shown that he senses he has overstayed his welcome. He can accuse Leontes of lack of breeding in thus changing his manners, but he himself has been guilty of the very same thing in changing his manners with Hermione, and showing lack of breeding in turning down his host's request on such flimsy excuses. One averted look from Leontes should hardly be enough to make a winter's tale between friends of years' standing if that friendship were really solidly established. What I am suggesting is that Polixenes, in abandoning Hermione to the lion's wrath on his own backdoor escape with Camillo, is not really abandoning Hermione as Hermione, but being made to relinquish his schoolboy connection with Leontes which she had so powerfully recalled. She had acted as a mirror in which he saw himself again as he was in his childhood friendship with Leontes, but now Camillo's changed complexions are to him “a mirror / Which shows [him his] chang'd too; for [he] must be / A party in this alteration, finding / [Him]self thus alter'd with it” (I. ii. 381-384). It is significant that Polixenes cleaves to Camillo as to a “father” (I. ii. 461). Both Leontes and Polixenes are concerned with their boy image, treating Hermione and Camillo as mother and father figures.

The question of sex is largely irrelevant, but makes an excellent smokescreen. No wonder there can be no astonishment, no real emotional outburst from Polixenes, when he is told by Camillo that Leontes is as certain that Polixenes has “touch'd his queen / forbiddenly” (I. ii. 416-417), as if he himself had incited him to the crime. Polixenes' only response is an immediate denial of being a Judas betraying Christ. It would be an odd juxtaposition indeed if we were to think of sexual matters, but it is perfectly in keeping with offended personal innocence of boyhood idealism. The fabric of Leontes' and Polixenes' folly is piled upon their faith in childhood innocence, upon which adult life with its doctrine of ill-doing would too insidiously encroach. Their only difference at this stage, perhaps, is that Polixenes is still hanging onto his boyhood image and trying to strengthen it by adherence to his father-figure, Camillo, while Leontes is in the state of just having his image smashed, and is in a world of broken bits and pieces which he is unwilling and unable to assemble. Polixenes can retire to his Bohemian shell until his son Florizel's escapades with Perdita force him out into conflict with the world again, and then he fares no better than Leontes, who has drunk the cup of his own poisoning and is caught in the web of his own making.

How ironical it is that it should be the boy Mamillius who is about to tell a sad tale that is best for winter by beginning with the words—“There was a man—,” “Dwelt by a churchyard” (II. i. 29). The sprites and goblins to frighten Hermione are such as a boy would talk about; the whole situation echoes a boy's preoccupation with story-book disaster. The man who dwelt by a churchyard is a boy's projection of a man. Leontes is acting out a story-book tale of a man who dwelt by a churchyard and had his wife forbiddenly touched by the ghost of his imagination. How preposterous it is that he should calumniate Hermione in front of her ladies and some lords of the court, that he should accuse her of being big with Polixenes' child in front of Mamillius, and that he should tell her tale of supposed adultery in such story-book fashion—“I have said / She's an adultress; I have said with whom: / More; she's a traitor, and Camillo is / A federary with her” (II. i. 87-90). Everything is too pat, too organized, for it to be a burst of real emotion, for it to represent real human feelings that have been trodden on. It is story-book technique consciously applied. Even Hermione's reply is too pat to be spontaneous. She is not so much shocked by the accusation, by having Mamillius taken from her, as by the affront to her dignity. One detects in her words—“How will this grieve you, / When you shall come to clearer knowledge, that / You thus have publish'd me! Gentle my lord, / You scarce can right me throughly, then, to say / You did mistake” (II. i. 96-100)—a greater desire merely to have Leontes proved wrong and herself proved right rather than that the charge itself be tackled and discounted. It is entirely possible that she is already mentally prepared for some outlandish behavior from Leontes, and is merely following her usual pattern in dealing with him, assuming the stance of patience on a monument smiling at grief, rebuking Leontes for being more stone than herself.

Hermione's opening remark to one of her waiting ladies about Mamillius—“take the boy to you: he so troubles me, / 'Tis past enduring” (II. i. 1-2)—is not made in mock-annoyance; nor is this episode one of happiness.¹¹ By asking to have a winter's tale told her about a man who dwelt by a churchyard she is already steeling herself against the impending fright which Leontes as well as Mamillius is so “powerful at” (II. i. 28). Both she and Leontes know that in those foundations which he builds upon the “centre is not big enough to bear / A school-boy's top” (II. i. 102-103). What really matters in their confrontation over this preposterous “affair” is not the affair itself but the way they go about it. There was a man who dwelt by a churchyard: there was a woman “not prone to weeping, as [her] sex / Commonly are” (II. i. 108-109) who dwelt in “honourable grief” (II. i. 111). Hermione almost too willingly accepts banishment from Leontes, she organizes it so quickly and efficiently. It is, after all, symbolic recognition of their obviously long-standing lack of affinity. But again, I suggest, the clue to her attitude at this stage resides rather in her wish to see Leontes sorry (II. i. 122-124) than to have herself cleared. Her suggestion that the action she is now going on is for her “better grace” (II. i. 122) may echo the proverbial belief that life's sorrows are ultimately for her own good, but ironically she may well be in need of better grace. Like Queen Katherine she can rest her case on her believed innocence, can appeal to the highest order of morality to keep her own honor from corruption, but there is still need of grace and charity, as Griffin successfully reminds Queen Katherine over her attitude toward Wolsey. The statue of Hermione needs to warm into life for her own sake as well as for Leontes'.

Human considerations do not figure, because the dramatis personae insist on seeing everything in black and white. Antigonus and the lords swear by Hermione's innocence as if she were Diana herself, and Leontes ignores them because his prerogative does not need their counsels, because he is following his own forceful instigation, his own “putter-on” (II. i. 141). Even the potential natural vigor of Antigonus' claim that he will geld all three of his daughters if Hermione be “honour-flaw'd” (II. i. 143) is dissipated by the aura of offering his daughters as human sacrifices to a god. Antigonus would have us believe that his own natural goodness imparts this defense of Hermione, but his words are empty devotion; his actions will call for a disastrous “Exit, pursued by a bear” (III. iii. 58). The shadow of his works destroys the shadow of his faith. The hollowness of Antigonus serves to emphasize that of Leontes. When Antigonus climaxes his confrontation with Leontes by wishing that Leontes had in his silent judgment tried the issue without more overture, he is unknowingly, perhaps, shattering Leontes' image of himself in the most effective way. Leontes is vociferous in claiming that no other proceeding was open to him, but has to admit, though he is personally satisfied and needs no more proof than what he knows, that he has, nevertheless, “for a great confirmation” (II. i. 180), already dispatched in haste messengers to the delphic oracle. The shadow of Leontes' works will thus destroy the shadow of his faith in his justice. And this is clearly made evident by his need to ask Antigonus and the lords—“Have I done well?” (II. i. 187), and by his suggestion that he has done this in order to give rest to the minds of others, when it is obviously his mind that has suffered the nature of an insurrection, is in rebellion with itself, is wearing itself out with the to-and-fro conflicting motion of impossibly trying to prove how right he is. The futility of it all is emphasized by his talking in one breath of how the oracle will raise the minds of others from ignorant credulity up to the truth itself, and in the very next of the need to keep Hermione confined lest she perform the political assassination which Polixenes and Camillo have left her to do. Sexual jealousy, political assassination, appeal to the oracle—all are remarkable smokescreens for Leontes' basic terrible inadequacy and displacement, which only Paulina seems to understand and know how to deal with, almost entirely from the angle of motherly intuition, though she at first has to break down Leontes' unwillingness to lapse into his erstwhile boy role.

No matter how many restless days and nights Leontes has to spend, he knows that sooner or later he will have to face Paulina, who little by little will exert a bitterly scolding influence over him. He would like to blame Antigonus for setting Paulina against him, and even takes the precaution of charging Antigonus not to let her come about him, so that he can have an easy scapegoat. The truth is that he would be bitterly disappointed if Paulina did not rise to the occasion of ministering to him. It is almost as if he wanted to be scolded, and to be told how wicked he is. This is why Paulina is allowed to get away with her scolding. Leontes needs to have her around. She gives him some identity, no matter how uncomfortable it is. Of course he makes her pardon for scolding him consequent on Antigonus' promise to bear Perdita to some remote and desert place where chance may nurse or end it. But he knows he can successfully bully Antigonus. Perhaps this is the best explanation of his consultation of the oracle, too. Although he is not aware of this deep-seated motive, he does basically want to be caught out and to be punished. In this sense he is genuinely concerned with meting out justice—to himself—but the prices he has to pay for these awful growing-up pains are immense, and in some instances irrecoverable. He is indeed fortunate by the end of the play to be able to re-woo his wife as a woman, and to regain his daughter, but his son Mamillius died with his own lost youth, and has to be replaced by Polixenes' son, Florizel. The association with Polixenes is indelibly printed on his life, and this is, perhaps, some ironic kind of justice. It would hardly be fitting for him to emerge into a seemingly fuller, adult existence without bearing some visible signs and scars of the pains of progress. In this sense the death of Mamillius is crucial to the overall significance of the play. Pericles' actions lose him wife and daughter, but he regains both: Leontes' actions lose him wife and daughter, and a son who can only be symbolically returned to him in the form of Florizel, who should be a constant reminder to him of the price he had to pay for refusing to grow up.

In the great trial scene of the play it is not so much Hermione who is on trial as Leontes himself. He is desperately trying to justify himself to himself. That he would like to be cleared of being tyrannous, since he so openly proceeds in justice, forcibly indicates how tyrannical he knows he is being with justice. He also knows that in due course he will be punished for it. The application of the oracle is his own doing, too. He would like the court to think that the oracle is being consulted for the court's clarification, but he knows that he is challenging the very source of justice and morality, that he is rebelling against it “to th' utterance” (Macbeth, III. i. 71).¹² Unlike Macbeth he is not equivocating with fate, playing for a little more time of a tomorrow that is already dwindling, but tyrannically controlling his own fate, and just delaying the great clash for something in the nature of the excitement of suspense and the destruction of himself. This is why, to my way of thinking, he can challenge the oracle's findings, and why his supreme defiance is the moment of Mamillius' death. Rather than face the long corridors of tomorrow's growing up, he is prepared to die on the altar of the false gods.

The oracle talks of Hermione's chastity, Polixenes' blamelessness, and Camillo's true service as a subject—all of which are open to scrutiny, as we have already indicated. But true to its enigmatic character, the oracle deals in double meanings and betrays the turmoil of the mind consulting it. Because they would not give Leontes his youth forever, his eternal boyhood, he will refuse to play the gods' game of life. His chaste innocence of those days was not blameless, nor was he a true subject to its idealism, but a jealous tyrant refusing to let his precious infancy blossom into responsibility and the continuity of maturity.

It is bitterly ironical, too, that Hermione should refer to the oracle, and think that she will be getting Apollo's judgment. Her life has always stood in the level of Leontes' dreams. He has always spoken a language that she does not understand, and her actions have always been his dreams. They magnificently bandy the dream-texture charge at one another as if it were a very recently experienced lack of active, here and now, present dialogue. The trial is as static and statuesque as the earlier scenes. It does not throb with the vitality of flesh-and-blood altercation, but stares at the audience from its painting on the stage in magnificent spectacle, devoid of sound and fury, but signifying everything through the texture. Both Hermione and Leontes are metaphorically seeking a more open, and therefore to be hoped more convincing, symbol of their death, a “bug” (III. ii. 92) which frightens neither of them in contemplation, because they have lived with its undeclared state for so long. No wonder Hermione agrees to Paulina's plan to be thought of as dead, and to go on living in death for sixteen years. All she is doing is living out a more “honest” version of what her so-called life had been. No wonder Leontes never once sees through the device which is so open that an ordinary gentleman can suspiciously observe that Paulina “hath privately twice or thrice a day, / ever since the death of Hermione, visited that re- / moved house” (V. ii. 105-107). Leontes is living out in the sixteen years an “honest” version of the way he had treated Hermione all along. He had kept her at a distance, left her to her own privacy, and never really been curious about the daily business of living with her.

How vastly different is this trial scene of Hermione with that of Queen Katherine in Henry VIII with which it is usually compared. Henry VIII really has the physical thought of Anne Boleyn to weigh against Katherine. Leontes would like to use the thought of an adulterous Polixenes to weigh against Hermione, but is really weighing himself in the balance and is found wanting. The past life of Hermione and Leontes “h]ath been as continent, as chaste, as true” (III. ii. 33-34) as they are both now unhappy. Hermione's boast that history cannot pattern a life more perfect in this respect prizes life at little more than a statue's fee. Her life has become a perfect exemplum “devis'd / And play'd to take spectators” (III. ii. 36-37), but not to be livingly shared in. In some respects it is fitting that she should be under Paulina's guardianship in her sixteen-year seclusion from life. It is almost as if she were being prepared by an overprotective mother for her eventual appearance as a debutante. There is this “precious” quality about her, delicate workmanship more honored in the observance than the breach, like a china shepherdess. Perhaps this is the connection between Perdita in the rural Bohemia of Act IV and Hermione in the first three acts. Perdita is “m]ost goddess-like prank'd up” (IV. iv. 10). Both are retired as if they were always the feasted one, always the exalted one, and never part of the daily traffic of life's banquet.

There is significance in the way Leontes reacts to the effects of his denying Apollo's oracle. When he is told that the death of Mamillius is mortal to the queen, he rather casually asserts that “h]er heart is but o'ercharged: she will recover” (III. ii. 150), and asks others tenderly to apply to her some remedies for life. There is even less personal emotion over the death of Mamillius. What Leontes is immediately concerned with is his own injustice in so far as it affects only himself; Mamillius and Hermione are merely adjuncts. His rapid list of proposed amendments—“I'll reconcile me to Polixenes, / New woo my queen, recall the good Camillo” (III. ii. 155-156)—is an attempt to clear himself quickly of all the charges that he has been mounting up against himself, almost as if he were making a cheap confession to god Apollo. It is surely indicative of his peculiar sense of values that he should first think of reconciling himself to Polixenes, and then of new-wooing Hermione. Even when he knows the heavens themselves are striking at his injustice, he cannot see clearly that it is his order of relationships which has all along been at fault. To think of Polixenes first is to place primary emphasis on his premarital state, his boy eternal existence. Even at the very end of the play Leontes seems to be as much overjoyed at having Polixenes restored to him as of regaining Hermione. The order is exactly the same—Polixenes first, Hermione second. Even the wording of his rapid confession, reconciliation with Polixenes, and re-wooing of Hermione, is paralleled at the end of the play. The meeting of the two kings, in which Leontes asks Bohemia forgiveness, is described as laming any report to follow it, and undoing any description to do it (V. ii. 58-59). The restoration of Hermione is brought about not as in Pericles by wishful thoughts that somehow his wife might be as miraculously restored to him as his daughter, but by Perdita's desire to find out what her mother was like. It is Perdita's “hearing of her mother's / statue, which is in the keeping of Paulina” (V. ii. 93-94) which prevents the royal group from retiring to the court, and instead sends it to feast its eyes on statuary, at which time Leontes is moved to remark that the statue “stood, / Even with such life of majesty, warm life, / As now it coldly stands, when first [he] woo'd her!” (V. iii. 34-36).

Leontes' confession rapidly passes over Polixenes and Hermione, in that order, but lingers over Camillo. It is easier for Leontes to confess his guilt before the thought of Camillo. It gives him the easy satisfaction of thinking that he is putting things right with the gods, that he is gaining absolution. There is a daily beauty in his father-confessor's life which makes his own ugly—“how [Camillo] glisters / Thorough [Leontes'] rust! and how his piety / Does [Leontes'] deeds make the blacker” (III. ii. 170-172). But it is his mother figure, Paulina, who comes in to assess the guilt of this sinner and to apportion him his penance.

Paulina cleverly makes light of Leontes' guilt with regard to Polixenes, Camillo, Perdita, and Mamillius—they are the by-gone fooleries of “f]ancies too weak for boys, too green and idle / For girls of nine” (III. ii. 181-182), but his sins against Hermione are too heavy to be forgiven:

          A thousand knees
Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,
Upon a barren mountain, and still winter
In storm perpetual.

(III. ii. 210-213)

Paulina is trying to strike at the root of Leontes' guilt, but she is obviously too preoccupied with the visible outward, direct manifestation of that guilt to see the inner, less direct but much more powerful expression of it. Paulina's motherly protectiveness of Leontes does obscure the boy complex to herself. It is fitting that at the end of the play Leontes symbolically breaks the apron ties with Paulina by marrying her off to Camillo. In a powerful sense he is then emerging from the stifling influence of this mother-father complex on him and establishing it as an independent unit outside himself. But at this stage he applies Paulina to himself, craving her castigation, demanding she speak her bitterest. When Paulina, who is certainly not known hitherto for sparing Leontes' feelings, says she has showed too much the rashness of a woman, and begins to pity Leontes, it is a good enough indication how excessive is Leontes' need to be punished, when he refuses this kind of pity. He will punish himself repeatedly by visiting once a day the double grave of Mamillius and Hermione as long as nature will bear up with this exercise. In the comfort of his daily tears he is still largely weeping for himself in the grave in the form of Mamillius there with Hermione. It is not unlike Timon fixing his grave by the sea shore so that the flowing tide may regularly shed its tears over him.

Leontes has lulled the tempest in his mind by inflicting this daily punishment on himself and by securely attaching himself to Paulina's apron strings. But the tempest of his effects blusters everywhere, and is felt particularly strongly on the coasts of Bohemia, in Bohemia's royal court, and in Bohemia's rural arcadia. Nor does that tempest blow itself out until it returns to its origin—Leontes in Sicilia.

Antigonus' waking dreams, like Imogen's and Posthumus', reflects his own life. He knows in his waking moments that in accepting the job of abandoning the baby on the deserts of Bohemia he is an accomplice to Leontes, but he represses this uncomfortable recognition as if it were unreal. The vision he describes of Hermione like a vessel of great purity and beauty, gliding with the ghostly motion and beauty of a ship moving easily under all sail, as opposed to his own ship's movements,¹³ reflects what deep down he knows to be true. Yet he refuses to accept its obvious implications about the innocence of Hermione, and perversely and “superstitiously” (III. iii. 40) argues that the very thought of Hermione as a ghost means that “Hermione hath suffer'd death” (III. iii. 42) because she was guilty (50). Antigonus has the vision, like Macbeth of Banquo, Brutus of Caesar, Richard III of his victims, because his disturbed mental state, suffering the nature of an insurrection, is betraying his guilt.¹⁴ Of course the vision serves the obvious purpose of allowing the audience to think that Hermione is dead, but it should not escape us that Antigonus (whose name literally means “against child”), in an effort to repress his guilt, has symbolically killed her! It is bitterly¹⁵ ironical that Antigonus should think the storm begins after he has abandoned the baby, and that he should be destroyed by that very beastliness to which he had consented to sacrifice innocence. Antigonus has brought a corrupted mind with him, too, and passes on the effects of that corruption.

The shepherd's description of Perdita as the result of “some / stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door- / work” (III. iii. 73-75) is too closely juxtaposed to Antigonus' expressed belief that Perdita is the result of her “mother's fault” (III. iii. 50), and is indeed the issue of King Polixenes, for it to be coincidental. Antigonus has fathered the shepherd's description. One could argue that the shepherd had no need of outside confirmation of what he was all too willing to suspect, because his first words in the play decry the fact that between the ages of ten and twenty-three there is nothing “but getting / wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting” (III. iii. 61-63). However, Antigonus does present him with proof, and does afford a far more powerful means of corruption in the form of the riches left with Perdita which the shepherd and his son treat as “fairy gold.” Gold has been introduced into this rural Bohemia and corrupts it every bit as effectively as it does Sidney's Arcadia through Dametas, or more pertinently, perhaps, as it does the forest of Arden in As You Like It though Rosalind, Celia, and Touchstone buying rural rights (As You Like It, II. iv. 65, 71, 92).¹⁶

Gold immediately causes the shepherd to let his sheep go (III. iii. 124). It is this gold which makes it possible for the shepherd to grow from “very nothing, and beyond the imagination of his neighbors … into an unspeakable estate” (IV. ii. 40-41), and to think of matching his daughter with Doricles, for if “young Doricles / Do light upon her, she shall bring him that / Which he not dreams of” (IV. iv. 180-182). In the actual contract preparations the shepherd promises to make Perdita's portion equal Doricles' (IV. iv. 387).

Rural Bohemia thus functions not as a separate world of natural unsophistication from which the tired worlds of Sicilia and Bohemia are to receive a new life, a reinvigoration, a refertilization. It does not represent Spring's fertility as opposed to the Winter of the courts' discontent. It is a world of corruption, that is living out an immense fraud, a “disguize [which] hath almost / Antick'd” (Antony and Cleopatra, II. vii. 123-124) it.¹⁷ It is a great temptation to take the shepherd's words to his son—“thou met'st with things / dying, I with things new-born” (III. iii. 112-113)—as marking a turn in the play from destruction to the beginning of a new life. Most critics follow this line of development. The Clown has just described Antigonus' death, and the shepherd has taken up the babe Perdita for pity. Critics who favor the general theme of grace and fertility born out of passion and jealousy, of spiritual generation by baptism,¹⁸ attach great importance to this statement. But surely to do so is to ignore the element of corruption. It is inescapable that the normal, natural life of the shepherd and his son is dying, and what is being new-born for them is an unnatural, abnormal life, based on the transmuting power of fairy gold; and the corruption had stemmed from Leontes.

If we could bear this well in mind then we need not see an arbitrary division of the play at this point. It is as if the chorus, Time, were flashing us back as well as forward; as if it were making us investigate the boyhood, lamb-like innocence that Leontes and Polixenes were trying to hold on to, and trying to make us realize that it was and is an illusion, and very largely an escapism from the real business of maturing and fulfilling one's responsibility to government and family. In a very important sense Leontes has created in his own family as artificial a unit as is created in rural Bohemia. Hermione is as dead metaphorically to Leontes as ever the shepherd's wife was to the shepherd: his children are every bit as adopted metaphorically as Perdita is to the shepherd. For sixteen years Leontes will live out the lie that he is mourning for a real Hermione and a real Mamillius when they have been dead all along in his treatment of them. For sixteen years the shepherd and his son will live a monstrous lie. They are the adopted family not so much of Perdita as of the material riches they found with her. Their sheep-shearing festival is turned by this gold into a prenuptial ceremony for the provider of the golden opportunity. The ceremony invites comparison with Prospero's prenuptial masque engineered by the gold of Prospero's magic. The shepherd puts on the two-part ceremony, the dance of shepherds and shepherdesses in which Perdita is celebrated as the May queen of the feast, and the dance of satyrs; and as with Prospero's entertainment it is the second part that precipitates a crisis.

The first part has the full country look about it, but is painstakingly revealed as a glistering semblance: the second part is openly avowed for as marking the intrusion of the court on the country, for “o]ne three of them, by their own report … hath / danced before the king” (IV. iv. 337-338). Shepherds and shepherdesses are juxtaposed with satyrs in a very deliberate way.

Florizel has obscured himself in shepherd's clothing for the better pursuit of his shepherdess. Like Sir Calidore for Pastorella or Musidorus for Pamela he has transformed himself to a station which can only bring dishonor. Perdita knows well enough that it is folly to do so, and that this extreme lowering of his high station is to be chided. Her criticism, of course, is largely bound up with the fear that he will be caught out by a chance visitation of his father, and that she will not be able to withstand the sternness of Polixenes' presence. But these personal fears do not detract from her basic criticism of Florizel for so vilely binding up (IV. iv. 22) his greatness. She, of course, knows exactly who Florizel is and thus becomes a party to the deceit, a position which entirely undermines her defense of the natural against “streak'd gillyvors, / Which some call nature's bastards” (IV. iv. 82-83). It will be recalled that in her “father”'s eyes she is an adopted bastard herself! Her rustic garden is not rustic—it is streaked with art and artfulness, which Florizel and herself represent. Perdita's words vigorously oppose Polixenes' side of the art-versus-nature debate which defends the idea of marrying a “gentler scion to the wildest stock” and making “a bark of baser kind” conceive by “bud of nobler race” (IV. iv. 92-95), but her actions and compliance with Florizel confute her words every bit as much as Polixenes' actions confute his.

The flowers with which Perdita would like to associate herself in her rustic garden and which critics would like to accept as evidence of Spring's fertility and regeneration are not free from the streaking of artfulness either. The flower passage “O Proserpina / For the flowers now …” (IV. iv. 116-127) has taken the winds of too much criticism with its beauty, just as Perdita's beauty temporarily sweeps Polixenes off his feet. Perdita recalls the flowers specifically in her need to make garlands to strew Florizel's body “like a bank, for love to lie and play on” (IV. iv. 130-131), not like the corpse of physical death as Florizel suggests, but the sexual death of him buried alive and in her arms. And she has enough presence of mind to know that in saying this she has actually become something of the Whitsun May queen, a process she decries, for it lowers her stature from simple shepherdess to what Autolycus conveniently reminds us of all through the sheep-shearing episode, a “doxy over the dale” (IV. iii. 2), an “aunt[.], /. … tumbling in the hay” (IV. iii. 11-12), a “troll-my-dames” (IV. iii. 85), whose “red blood reigns in the winter's pale” (IV. iii. 4), whose blood looks out to woo the false way.

It is not just Perdita's goddess stature, pranked up for Florizel and by his assistance, which is changing her disposition from that of a chaste nymph to a lusting goddess, but the very artfulness of the situation, the deceit of disguise under cover of which she is conscious of seducing Florizel. Autolycus weaving in and out of rural Bohemia links all the episodes with his songs, and it is to be noted that all the prettiest love songs for maids which he has in his pack have “delicate burdens” from indelicate songs. Daffodils in this context do peer with borrowed flaunts, trumpeting their beauty, though Perdita would have her hearers believe they “come before the swallow dares” (IV. iv. 119). In this part of the play where transformations, changing of dispositions, and metamorphoses are so much in evidence, the swallow may well carry with it associations of Procne from the Tereus legend. Autolycus' thrush and jay are obviously sexual symbols for the red blood reigning. Perdita's violets, just as Ophelia's, are mentioned for their obvious appeal to modesty and chastity, but they are dim to command attention, whereas “the lids of Juno's eyes / Or Cytherea's breath” (IV. iv. 121-122), to which they are likened, are memorably and poetically powerful. Juno and Venus are not exempla of single chastity. Pale primroses do pale by comparison with the potential strength of bright Phoebus “marrying” them. Bold, standing oxlips, crown imperial, and lilies of all kinds conclude Perdita's lack—“w]hat maids lack from head to heel” (IV. iv. 229), as she herself is only too well aware, though she excuses this immodesty by claiming the robe she wears as May queen changes her normal maidenly position.

Perdita tries to project her “lack” in a rather subtle way in her distribution of flowers appropriate to age before her famous flower passage. Having called “streak'd gillyvors” nature's bastards, she makes the parallel between herself and the “streak'd gillyvors” quite openly in an effort to detract from its significance. She will not put the dibble in the earth to set one slip of the gillyvors—“No more than, were [she] painted, [she] would wish / This youth should say ’twere well, and only therefore / Desire to breed by [her]” (IV. iv. 101-103). But she is painted in borrowed flaunts, and pranked up like a goddess, and the flowers she distributes immediately after this disarming move are all “hot” (lavender, mints, savory, marigold),¹⁹ and are mentioned in terms of going to “bed wi' th' sun,” and rising and weeping with him. The same kind of sexual implication is to be found in Cloten's aubade “Hark hark the lark” to Imogen, but the significant difference here is that Perdita, unlike Cloten, is applying the seductive language to herself. When, immediately after this, Camillo remarks that were he of Perdita's flock he would leave grazing and only live by gazing, and is told by Perdita that if he did so he would be “so lean that blasts of January / Would blow [him] through and through” (IV. iv. 111-112), it would seem that the episode is being carefully roped, tied, and linked to the main part of The Winter's Tale.

The shepherd and his son left grazing, looking after their sheep, lived by gazing on their fairy wealth, and will find that blasts of January blow them through and through. Leontes has found his winter's tale as a result of gazing on the images of his “eternal boy,” and on the statue he has made of the queen, instead of grazing his way to maturity. All are different aspects of false utopias where men are idle all, and prey to their own ignoble ease and peaceful sloth about the things which they should be doing, but vigorously active in covering up the things which they should not have done.

When Perdita turns to Mopsa and the other girls and wishes she had flowers to celebrate the fact that they yet wear their “maidenheads growing” (IV. iv. 116) upon their virgin branches (IV. iv. 115), it is an awkward association for her because these are country lasses who will soon be characterized by their aggressiveness in “wooing” the Clown to whom they have obviously paid too much for them not to feel ashamed when the Clown accuses them of wearing “their plackets where they should bear their / faces” (IV. iv. 245-246), and whistling secrets which are best left for milking-time, kiln-hole, or going to bed. The two maids wooing a man are not just simple country maids either. They have been streaked with courtly sophistication, both knowing their singing parts in “Get you hence, for I must go” having had the “tune on't a month ago” (IV. iv. 295). Autolycus tries to peddle this item as a ballad, but its metrical and musical structure mark it out as much too sophisticated to be sung to a ballad tune.²⁰

The ballads Autolycus does talk about have satirical relevance for the situation, too. An “usurer's wife … brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a / burden” and longing to eat “adder's heads / and toads carbonadoed” (IV. iv. 263-266) is very true and but a month old (268), according to Autolycus. The linking of money and sex ironically reflects the way the lavish sheep-shearing entertainment brought to bed by the burden of fairy gold is turning into obvious extravagance in which “maids” are longing to woo a man. The ballad of the maid turned fish “for she would not exchange flesh with one that loved her” (IV. iv. 281) sounds topsy turvy—the usual metamorphosis into half beast, half human, emphasizes passion not its avoidance. Presumably this is a less obvious part of Autolycus' clothing of his accounts of the ballads in laughter-provoking extravagance, and playing on the ridiculous credulity of the peasants by flattering his audience with thoughts of propriety and chastity it does not have. Autolycus' continued presence among these rustics is predicated by the effects of the fairy gold. He himself has been whipped out of court where he had once been a servant of prince Florizel, and is known to the Clown by hearsay for haunting “wakes, fairs, and bear-baitings” (IV. iii. 99). He is in this sense courtly corruption invading what he thinks is country innocence and naiveté, and about to shear the sheep. But even he little knows how golden the fleece is, what “preposterous estate” (V. ii. 148) it is in as the result of a much larger corruption.

Autolycus' merriment, tricks and all, are summer songs before the wintry blast of having to bow and scrape to the new-born gentlemen, the shepherd and the Clown, his son, for their favors of a “good report to the prince [his] master” (V. ii. 151). The country becomes an established court for hearing of suits, and is as corrupt in its sense of justice as can be. The Clown's words—“If it be ne'er so false, a true gentleman may swear it / in the behalf of his friend” (V. ii. 162-163)—are little different from the words of Justice Shallow's man, Davy—“I grant your worship that he is a knave, sir; but yet … The knave is mine honest friend, sir; therefore, I / beseech you, let him be countenanc'd” (2 Henry IV, V. i. 47-48; 56-57).²¹ It is one of the play's greatest ironies that Autolycus should think he is stepping into innocence when he is but clarifying the fallen pastoral. When he “wander(s) here and there” in this pastoral world and thinks he then does “most go right” (IV. iii. 17-18), he little suspects that he will end metaphorically in the stocks himself trying to avouch his account. What has been labeled “sunny, roguish competence”²² is nothing more than the uncertain glory of a summer's day before the inevitability of winter's blast, without the prospect of Spring's promise, for to receive favors at the shepherd's and Clown's hands is degrading, even if his philosophy is to “look out for number one.”²³ It is almost as if one were to make Falstaff dependent on a triumphant Justice Shallow and Davy, rather than the other way around.

Florizel's sojourn in the country is also a brief lull before an expected storm. He is obviously running away from courtly responsibility, and setting up court on his own terms in the country. Like Prince Hal he is living madcap days of irresponsibility, trying to forestall the inevitable, more “straining on for plucking back” (IV. iv. 466). It is quite possible that he feels displaced by Camillo at his father's court, where his “father's music” is to speak Camillo's deeds and “not little of his care / To have them recompens'd as thought on” (IV. iv. 521). Conversation between Polixenes and Camillo reveals the former's heavy dependence on the latter, but the reason Polixenes gives for needing Camillo, that Camillo had made businesses for Polixenes which no one else can sufficiently manage, and if Camillo does not execute them himself the businesses will become null and void, is only part of the truth. Polixenes needs Camillo's continued presence as a constant reminder that another man agreed he was right in leaving Sicilia the way he did. The management of this arrangement between Polixenes and Camillo at the beginning of Act IV recalls the very first part of the play. Polixenes is trying to hold onto an image of the past, reflected in Camillo. By offering lavish entertainment in the way of bountiful thanks and promise of study how to be more thankful, he is desperately trying to hold onto the past, and to fight off present thoughts of Leontes whose very name punishes him. Camillo's open excuse to Polixenes for wanting to return to Sicilia—to lay his bones there, and to be some kind of allay to Leontes' sorrows (IV. ii. 6-8)—hides his real need, which is his “woman's longing” (IV. iv. 667) to see Leontes. Both Polixenes and Leontes have made of Camillo a father figure, and yet ironically he thinks in womanly terms of needing them. His imagined reception of Florizel and Perdita at Leontes' court is decidedly full of womanly emotion, for he sees “Leontes opening his free arms and weeping / His welcomes forth” (IV. iv. 549-550).

The only way in which both kings can keep Camillo is through Florizel. Thoughts of Polixenes do not alter Camillo's expressed wish to go back to Sicilia, but thoughts of Florizel do. The scene harks back to the first one in the play in which Hermione was successful in recalling Polixenes' youth. Investigating Florizel's relationship with the shepherdess is obviously a far bigger incentive for Camillo's staying in Bohemia than heeding Polixenes' personal need of him. It suggests to me that Camillo is willing to obey a command which allows him the chance to be trusted with the nearest things to men's hearts, so that he may play the role of confessor and adviser, knowing all their chamber-counsels. By means of disguise he can be a witness to Florizel's angling in the country episode, and then openly suggest a course for future life with some promise of amendment. In this respect his manipulation of Florizel follows the same pattern as his manipulation of Polixenes at the beginning of the play, and is not unlike Paulina's method of procedure with Leontes.

Florizel's wooing of Perdita certainly has elements of wooing the “false way” (IV. iv. 151), as Perdita's intelligent sensitivity makes her suggest. His attempt to force the betrothal contract before what he takes to be only country witnesses is largely suspicious. He is adamant in not wanting his father to “hold some counsel / In such a business” (IV. iv. 410-411), and is guilty of those very presumptuous thoughts about the death of his father (IV. iv. 388) which Prospero has to plant in Ferdinand's mind in order to be able to accuse him of them. It is very suspicious, too, that he should feel it necessary to explain to Camillo that the vessel he has riding fast by, in which he now intends to put to sea with Perdita, was “not prepar'd / For this design” (IV. iv. 502-503). We do not have to take Autolycus' word for it when he says the “prince himself is about a piece of iniquity / (stealing away from his father with his clog at his / heels)” (IV. iv. 678-680), and when he threatens the shepherds with drawing the “throne into a / sheepcote” (IV. iv. 780-781), because Autolycus is again caught out by the dishonest goings on in the country, having had to change suits with Florizel at Camillo's command. What does tend to clinch the kind of relationship Florizel is seeking with Perdita is his description of the sheep-shearing as a “meeting of the petty gods” (IV. iv. 4) of which he has made Perdita queen and himself a god. He feels it necessary to claim that his desires do not run before his honor and that his lusts do not burn hotter than his faith. But unfortunately his rhetoric is too powerful in its use of “transformations” and metamorphoses for his intentions to be allowed purely chaste propriety. The gods who humbled their deities to love took the shapes of beasts upon them, but whether it was Jupiter in the form of a bull, Neptune in the form of a ram, or Apollo in the form of “a poor humble swain,” as Florizel would describe himself, the metamorphosis does not argue honorable intention. The gods transformed themselves into beasts and various shapes in order to accomplish their bestial desires.²⁴ Florizel's treatment of Perdita as a goddess, and excessive praise of her every act as queenly, makes her cry out that with wisdom she might fear he wooed her the false way, if she did not believe his birth and breeding plainly gave him out an “unstain'd shepherd” (IV. iv. 149). But here as elsewhere in her arguments with him her fears are far more eloquent than her faith.

Florizel's “seduction” of Perdita, Perdita's “seduction” of Florizel, and Polixenes' and Camillo's aiding and abetting the proceedings by looking on as admiring witnesses reach their dramatic climax at the dance of twelve satyrs. The satyr traditionally represents lust and lasciviousness. The pastoral setting in which he is found may look harmless, but his very presence there spells goatish dispositions. No wonder Polixenes suggests it is time to part Florizel and Perdita, and that the matter may already have gone too far. It is possible, of course, that he has gleaned enough information from the old shepherd, who is “simple and tells much” (IV. iv. 346), to make him want to call a halt to everything without being prompted by the presence of the satyrs. But what the shepherd can tell him is hardly the kind of thing he cross-examines Florizel about, whereas the thought of “satyrs” would automatically lead into exactly such questioning. Polixenes is suspicious of the fact that unlike the Clown for his mistress, and unlike Polixenes himself in his own courting days, Florizel has not loaded Perdita with knacks from the pedlar's silken treasury—“What maids lack from head to heel”—without which Polixenes is assured “your lasses cry,” and you are in danger of not happily holding her. Florizel's estimation of these things as mere trifles temporarily disarms Polixenes. The knacks of the pedlar are like “Lawn as white as driven snow” (IV. iv. 220), but Perdita's hand is as “soft as dove's down and as white as it, / Or Ethiopian's tooth, or the fann'd snow that's bolted / By th' northern blasts twice o'er” (IV. iv. 364-366). The description has all the appearance of representing Florizel and Perdita as “chaste as unsunn'd snow,” so much in contrast with the country shepherd and satyr look. Its strength, however, comes from its too close reminder of Polixenes' own courting days, and through Polixenes of Leontes' courting of Hermione. A white statue mentally intervenes. The whole episode is replete with reminders of the Leontes situation.

Polixenes becomes another Leontes as he angles and then destroys. In his condemnation of his son, utterly disclaiming him from succession as not of his blood or kin, he is re-enacting Leontes' role in the death of Mamillius. In his desire to have Perdita's beauty “scratch'd with briers” (IV. iv. 426), her grace and charm denigrated as the enchantment of “excellent witchcraft” (IV. iv. 424), and her physical attraction lowered to that of a country brothel with its rural latches open, he is re-enacting Leontes' role in the calumniation and denigration of Hermione. Even in his threat to devise a death as cruel for Perdita as she is tender to it, the parallel with the “devised” death of Hermione is not far absent. The bullying of the old shepherd, threatening him one minute with hanging, and then the next minute lifting the dead blow of such punishment, but not the fullness of royal displeasure, would seem to echo Leontes' treatment of Antigonus.

The old shepherd's reaction to this wintry blast is not too far removed from Antigonus' either. He hides behind Perdita's guilt as much as Antigonus hides behind his belief in Hermione's fault. There is the same kind of waking-dream texture about both their speeches (III. iii. 16-58; IV. iv. 452-463). The old shepherd conveniently forgets how his acquisition of fairy gold has made it impossible that he should be able to fill his grave in quiet, to die upon the bed his father died, and to lie close by his honest bones. Antigonus conveniently forgot the need to follow through his passionate defense of a new-born babe's innocence by practical application. Even Perdita's exclamation that her dignity “would last / But till 'twere known” (IV. iv. 476-477), and talk in terms of this dream of hers from which she is now awakening, would seem to reflect something of Hermione's inner insecurity, and belief that the journey she is going on is for her “better grace” (II. i. 122). Polixenes' tyrannical action is like the blast of January blowing through Bohemia, and it has very largely the same effects as Leontes' winter's rage in Sicilia. Leontes' actions send everything scurrying toward Bohemia: Polixenes' actions send everything scurrying toward Sicilia. Bohemia and Sicilia are inextricably bound up.

The play ends as it began with a visitation from Polixenes to the court of Leontes, and with talk of their friendship and its basis. The whole matter of the relationship between Polixenes and Leontes, and Leontes and Hermione, is resumed. Leontes does not greet Florizel as Florizel so much as an exact image of Polixenes, his very air, as Polixenes had been when he was twenty-one. He cannot refrain from recalling “something wildly / By us perform'd before” (V. i. 129). This is fairly good evidence that he is still thinking of Polixenes and himself in terms of the eternal boy, despite sixteen years of saint-like sorrow. It is only when Florizel brings him back to the present moment by reminding him of Polixenes' “infirmity / (Which waits upon worn times)” (V. i. 140-141) that Leontes is moved to think of Polixenes, sixteen years ago, at the time when he visited Sicilia, and then it is of wrongs he has done him. Leontes talks of Polixenes as a “holy father, / A graceful gentleman; against whose person / (So sacred as it is) [he] ha[s] done sin” (V. i. 169-171), and labels this sin as the reason for which the heavens taking angry note have left him issueless. It is almost as if he were his own Ariel-harpy-revenge figure claiming that the “powers, delaying, not forgetting, have / Incens'd the seas and shores … / Against [his] peace” (The Tempest, III. iii. 73-74), and bereft him of his heir (75-76) for the “foul deed” of sinning against Polixenes! Thoughts of Polixenes dominate Leontes until Perdita makes him think of Hermione, and insists on bringing him to Paulina's house to see the statue of Hermione. It is true that the play's return to Sicilia is immediately characterized by Paulina's continual references to Hermione to prevent Leontes from heeding his courtiers' advice to wed again. But Leontes does not seem to be averse from the idea of marrying again, and despite his promise to Paulina not to marry till she bids him, Leontes makes a bid for Perdita (V. i. 222-223), and answers Paulina's criticism of this by claiming Perdita reminded him of Hermione. It is almost entirely Paulina and Perdita who keep the memory of Hermione alive for Leontes. He is preoccupied with thoughts of Polixenes. Even his advocacy of Florizel, his willingness to befriend Florizel in the face of Polixenes' displeasure, is basically motivated by his attempt to restore the youthful amity between Leontes and Polixenes when they were “but twenty-one” (V. i. 125).

The reconciliation of the two kings, joined by Camillo, is a fitting climax for Leontes. Not even the fulfillment of the oracle in the finding of Leontes' heir detracts from the importance of the meeting of the two kings—it is practically subsumed by it. Joy in sorrow links the recoveries of Polixenes and Perdita for Leontes, and again the only thought of Hermione comes in connection with Perdita to whom Leontes in his joy felt it necessary to relate the woe of the queen's death. It is Perdita who brings color to their marble, speech to their dumbness, and language to their gestures, but not because she represents the freshness of youth, nor yet its innocence, nor any reinvigoration. She is a living embodiment of the past. She herself is a dethroned goddess, fallen from the pedestal of false worship, and finding her identity, first by losing herself in the present disguise of “disliken[ing] / The truth of [her] own seeming” (IV. iv. 652-653), and then recovering it from the long past through the rough seams of the garments made as possible for her by the shepherds as for Pericles by the fishermen, with the vital distinction that the shepherds unlike Pericles' fishermen actually receive condolements, and so preposterously so that they are in danger of needing an advocate themselves for the real purpose of living. They have been turned into statues of “gentlemen born.”

The statue of Hermione is so carefully prepared for throughout the whole play and particularly through Perdita that it is astonishing it should ever have been thought an unnecessary addition to the play. The stone rebukes its critics for being more stone than it. Leontes and Polixenes have rediscovered themselves in the gallery of their youthful statues, and almost accidentally stroll into the women's gallery. It is very questionable indeed whether Leontes really comes alive to Hermione. Paulina pushes him, prods him, into making the right moves to woo Hermione, but the situation is charged with the irony of Hermione once again “becom[ing] the suitor” (V. iii. 109), and of her dominant interest in the statue of her youth, Perdita, coming alive before her very eyes. There is no doubt that Hermione preserved herself, not so much for Leontes, but because the oracle gave hope Perdita was alive.

The awkwardness of all these restorations is pointed up particularly by Paulina claiming that everyone is a precious winner except herself, and then likening herself to an old turtle lamenting the loss of her mate, Antigonus, when there has not been the slightest indication in the play that the relationship between Paulina and Antigonus was marked by such lifetime constancy. The truth for Paulina surely lies in the fact that she feels she has no more mothering to do, and is lamenting this lack, which she conveniently projects on her lost husband Antigonus. Tied to Camillo she is symbolically presented with the image she has all along made of herself.

When each one demands and answers to his part performed in the wide gap of time's winter's tale, since first he was dissevered, it should result in recognition of how he has built statues to his own imagination and worshipped them in his heart, but instead, as always, he will look at the comfortable and comforting image he wants to see.

Notes

1. See R. J. Trienens, “The Inception of Leontes' Jealousy in The Winter's Tale,” Shakespeare Quarterly, IV (July, 1953), 321-326, and Nevill Coghill, “Six Points of Stage-Craft in The Winter's Tale,” Shakespeare Survey, XI (1968), 31-41 particularly.

2. J. H. P. Pafford, ed., The Winter's Tale (New Arden Shakespeare, Methuen, and Harvard, 1963, rep. 1965), Introduction, lvii. All my references to the play will be to this edition.

3. Pafford, Introduction, lviii.

4. Pafford, p. 5, fn. 1-2.

5. H. H. Furness, ed., Hamlet (A new Variorum edition, Dover Publications, 1963).

6. Despite the evidence in Simon Forman's Bocke of Plaies about productions of Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale at the Globe there can be no doubt that the Globe would have to adapt its productions somewhat if it were to compete in any way with the Blackfriars' productions.

7. Based on the ages of Mamillius at about 10, and Perdita at 16.

8. Pafford, p. 165.

9. J. M. Nosworthy, ed., Cymbeline (New Arden, Methuen, and Harvard, 1955, rep. 1966).

10. Kenneth Muir, ed., King Lear (New Arden, Methuen, and Harvard, 1952, rep. 1959).

11. Pafford, p. 30, fn. 1.

12. Kenneth Muir, ed., Macbeth (New Arden, Methuen, and Harvard, 1951, rep. 1957).

13. Pafford, p. 67, fn. 21-2.

14. Pafford, Introduction, lix, fn. 4, where the vision is interpreted literally as derived entirely from outside.

15. Pafford, p. 69, fn. 58, rightly takes Coghill, op. cit., to task for treating the episode as comic.

16. W. A. Neilson and C. J. Hill, eds., The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass., 1942).

17. M. R. Ridley, ed., Antony and Cleopatra (New Arden, Methuen, and Harvard, 1954, rep. 1956).

18. S. L. Bethell, The Winter's Tale (London, 1944).

19. Pafford, p. 95, fn. 104.

20. Pafford, p. 107, fn. 298, does not take into account the nature of the musical setting that has proved extant.

21. A. R. Humphreys, ed., 2 Henry IV (New Arden, Methuen, and Harvard, 1966).

22. Pafford, Introduction, lxxx, fn. 5.

23. Pafford, Introduction, lxxx.

24. See George Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis (London, 1632 and 1640), The Table to the Commentary, under “Jupiter.”