SOURCE: Sanders, Wilbur. “The Jealousy of Leontes: Act I.” In Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale, pp. 1-30. Brighton, Sussex, U.K.: The Harvester Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Sanders examines the issue of Leontes's jealousy, citing several conditions that may be said to cause his reaction to Hermione's successful coaxing of Polixenes to remain in Sicilia.]

Critics need problems as slugs need cabbages, and I would not blame anyone who tensed in anticipatory resistance when I say that I am writing about The Winter's Tale because I find the play problematic. However, I do: I think it wonderful, moving, grand; but I am also niggled by small discontents which have a nasty habit of growing bigger the more I think about them. I don't believe I am alone in this.

For some readers the play is a sublime diptych, a two-movement symphony whose music is only made richer by its overt structural diversity. For others, equally flatly, it is a broken-backed drama, written in two distinct modes, where Shakespeare has stymied himself by trying to do two imcompatible things at once. The dispute, at its most interesting, is about much more important matters than construction, and it's because I take it extremely seriously that I haven't, in what follows, tried to resolve it in any haste. I'm not even sure of the benefits of having it resolved; for this is, more than most, a play to be ‘wondered at’, and wondered over. So if readers find themselves wondering how long the wondering is going to continue, I can only plead a difficulty which I believe to be in the play itself, and hope that I shall have succeeded, by the end, in showing how rich a difficulty it is.

To begin at the beginning, then … well, almost the beginning: what is it that happens to Leontes in the second scene of The Winter's Tale?

The question has to be asked because readers and audiences, critics and directors keep disagreeing so spectacularly about it. Some of them will even dispute that anything ‘happens’ to Leontes at all. Inquiring into the matter, they assure us, is as foolish as trying to find out exactly how Cinderella's coach became a pumpkin. Don't we know a fairy tale when we see one? Leontes, patently, has taken a bite of the evil apple which turns a plain good man into a bewitched devil. And for as long as the poison lasts (which is just as long as the fable requires), he will be inaccessible to plain good feelings. The moment the poison is exhausted, he will emerge from his enchantment, bewildered and distraught, scarcely able to recognise the world which is now strewn with the wreckage of his evil possession. End of Phase One: the Triumph of Wickedness. And anyone familiar with the genre will then await, with minimal anxiety, the beginning of Phase Two: the Triumph of Time. That is to say, the deployment of the complementary good magic which will, after the usual pleasing delays, undo all the damage and launch us onto the calm, valedictory seas of the happy-ever-after. Easy. There's no problem except the needless one created by treating a tale for the winter fireside as if it were a documentary account of marital conflict in contemporary suburbia. We perplex ourselves with irrelevant speculation about motivation, and thus invent a problem where none exists.

It would be foolish to pretend that Shakespeare's tale doesn't have this shape. It does make some sense to describe the Leontes of I.ii as ‘possessed’, and he does seem, at the end of the trial scene (III.ii) to awaken, as if from nightmare. In a score of ways the fabular paradigm is visible through the dramatic fabric.

But it is nevertheless a dramatic fabric. And in drama things do ‘happen’. Where the fairy tale deals in isolated, portentous events, linked only by a narrative ‘and then’, in drama the event has a location and conditions, causal roots and consequential branches. The actors who encounter each other in that curious acoustic space we call a stage, do so by imitating the forms of encounter that we recognise from other rooms—rooms, even, in contemporary suburbia: they stand nearer to, or further from, each other; they raise or lower their voices; they stress one word rather than another; they reach out to touch each other, or they shrink painfully from contact. And all this we interpret as behaviour—known physical behaviour in which one thing grows out of another. Concerning dramatic events it's the most natural thing in the world to ask (as Polixenes does concerning Leontes' monstrous suspicion, the moment it is revealed to him), ‘How should this grow?’.

‘Natural it may be’, comes the retort, ‘but with this play the question is illicit. It is only being asked because of a misunderstanding of modes.’ This sort of thing:

There is no psychological interest; we don't ask (so long as we are concerning ourselves with Shakespeare): What elements in Leontes' make-up, working in what way, explain this storm? The question is irrelevant to the mode of the play.

(F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit, 1952, p. 177)

So that's that. One is sorry one asked. Leavis' argument has all the subtlety of a slammed door. But, pausing for a moment … how do we establish the ‘mode’ of a play, if not by reading it first? And why, in a piece which notably shifts modes at its mid-point, should the word ‘mode’ be in the singular? I don't know who ‘we’ are, but we seem to make a pretty supine and incurious audience. Before we conclude that Leontes' jealousy is simply a plot postulate, mightn't it be worth inquiring how Shakespeare postulates it? It may be ‘notoriously unmotivated’, as S. L. Bethell claims (Casebook, ed. K. Muir, 1968, p. 116), only because it has been notoriously unexamined.

I said dramatic events have a location and conditions. And in the first scene—to begin really at the beginning—we are given them. It's an opening that has perplexed directors, and the usual consequence has been that the scene gets cut. Those who don't cut it remain perplexed, it seems; for one ingenious Stratford director was so puzzled by the Sicilian subjects who ‘desire to live on crutches’, that he actually brought on a bevy of them, complete with crutches, to clear up the difficulty. Perhaps it's worth trying a simpler solution—entertaining the possibility, for instance, that there is a joke in the air, and that the pervasive formality of speech in the scene may not be some Shakespearian lapse upon generic courtliness, but a careful registration of a particular courtly note which helps, in turn, to delineate a particular socio-political situation. What exactly is happening here?

Two courtiers are discussing the progress of Bohemia's visit to Sicilia. And the terms they use suggest a competition in state lavishness rather than an easy munificence born of affection. Archidamus the Bohemian, indeed (who never appears again), seems to be there chiefly to express the embarrassment this ostentatious hospitality is causing his party. He worries how it can ever be requited:

we cannot with such magnificence, in so rare—I know not what to say. We will give you sleepy drinks, that your senses, unintelligent of our insufficience, may, though they cannot praise us, as little accuse us.

(I.i. 12)

Camillo tries to rescue the entertainment from the suspicion of commercial competition—‘You pay a great deal too dear for what's given freely’—but only manages to still his guest's misgivings by appealing to the boyhood friendship, long in the past, which has brought the visit about, and by affirming its continuing and mature solidity. Here perhaps the hospitable contention can come to some rest?

Archidamus, the Bohemian, seems to think so:

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

Perhaps not. And yet when you deny a possibility, you also endow it with equivocal life; and Archidamus is moved, next, to shift his ground, as if to a more ‘comfortable’ topic:

You have an unspeakable comfort of your young Prince Mamillius.

The ‘unspeakable’ of courtly hyperbole, however, may yet be spoken of:

it is a gentleman of the greatest promise that ever came into my note.

The greatest ever? Well, no doubt he'd say as much for his own young Prince, on the appropriate occasion. But Camillo doesn't quibble. He takes it in the spirit it's offered, abating the hyperbole only a shade in the interests of a modest realism:

I very well agree with you in the hopes of him. It is a gallant child.

(On a similar occasion, Hamlet had qualified the praise of his dead father, in order to pay the finer compliment of moderation: ‘A was a man, take him for all in all: / I shall not look upon his like again.’)

But hyperbole, once you're entangled in it, is a net of fine meshes, and Camillo is not yet out of it. The royal child is, he assures his guest,

one that indeed physics the subject, makes old hearts fresh; they that went on crutches ere he was born desire yet their life to see him a man.

Archidamus tries briefly to imagine such prodigies of geriatric fealty, fails, and gives it up with a laugh:

Would they else be content to die?

‘Yes’, replies Camillo stoutly, choosing to impugn his intelligence rather than his loyalty, but avoiding fatuousness by adding a sly proviso:

if there were no other excuse why they should desire to live.

Which allows a sagely nodding Archidamus to administer the coup de grace. I see, he says, po-faced,

If the King had no son, they would desire to live on crutches till he had one.

That kind of loyal subject. Ah yes, we have them in Bohemia too.

Unless it is with an unscripted grin, Camillo doesn't bother to reply. They have returned (with some relief) to the real world. The easy accord, obstructed throughout their conversation by a contention in complimentary exaggeration, arrives effortlessly now, as they confess to an artificial inflation of sentiment, and agree to abandon it. Exeunt, says the text. ‘Chuckling’, I'd be inclined to add.

It is an entente cordiale, however, which their two principals, the Kings Leontes and Polixenes, have yet to arrive at—which, indeed, they are destined never to achieve. The questioning of their hospitable fictions produces no relaxation into laughter, only stubbornness (in Leontes) and discomfort (in Polixenes). The stakes, it seems, have been raised to a level where the game can only be played in deadly earnest. But what is it that's at stake for the Kings, which was not at stake for their servants?

In the Fifteenth Book of the Odyssey, Odysseus' son, scouring Greece for his lost father, is being hospitably detained by Menelaus. Like Polixenes, Telemachus is questioned by his fears of what may chance or breed upon his absence. He has left no custodian in charge of his property and has been warned by Athene that ‘sneaping winds’ may easily blow at home. He doesn't, however, insist on this spur to departure, but appeals broadly to the generosity of his host:

‘Sire,’ he said, ‘I beg leave of you now to return to my own country, for I find myself longing to be home.’

And he meets, in Menelaus, a most un-Leontean tact:

‘Telemachus,’ the warrior king replied, ‘far be it from me to keep you here for any length of time, if you wish to get back. I condemn any host who is either too kind or not kind enough. There should be moderation in all things, and it is equally offensive to speed a guest who would like to stay and to detain one who is anxious to leave …

‘However, do give me time to bring you some presents and pack them in your chariot—they will be fine ones, as you will see for yourself. And let me tell the women to get a meal ready in the hall …’

(Homer, Odyssey, trans. E. V. Rieu, Penguin edn, 1946, pp. 238-9)

The warmth of Menelaus' welcome is not impugned by his readiness to part warmly; it is confirmed by it. He cares more for the guest's peace of mind than for the triumph of his own benevolence. Once he's satisfied that it isn't some over-polite scruple of ‘tiring his royalty’ that hastens Telemachus away, he presses him no farther. The boy clearly longs to be home. To detain him now would be ‘offensive’.

Leontes feels no such scruple. He seems to take umbrage at the mere hint of departure. His overbearing manner may contain some rough affection, but it certainly doesn't treat Polixenes' longing for home as meriting serious consideration:

                              Stay your thanks a while,
And pay them when you part.
POL.
                                                            Sir, that's tomorrow.
I am question'd by my fears of what may chance
Or breed upon our absence, that may blow
No sneaping winds at home, to make us say
‘This is put forth too truly.’ Besides, I have stay'd
To tire your royalty.
LEON.
We are tougher, brother,
Than you can put us to't.
POL.
No longer stay.
LEON.
One sev'night longer.
POL.
Very sooth, tomorrow.
LEON.
We'll part the time between's then; and in that
I'll no gainsaying.

(I.ii. 9)

There's no doubt that this plays best if it's handled jocularly. It could so easily be purely good-humoured—a little two-handed comedy of intransigence by which two friends act out the reluctance they feel at parting. But don't we also hear in Leontes' bearish gruffness an over-surfeited conviviality—as if the more he senses his own inhospitable weariness, the less able he is to admit it? Under this browbeating, at all events, Polixenes' tone becomes faintly harassed, as if (to put what is merely a glimpsed possibility, as a proposition) he is being forced to put their ‘rooted affection’ to a test that makes him unhappy:

                                        Press me not, beseech you, so.
There is no tongue that moves, none, none i'th'world,
So soon as yours could win me.

(I.ii. 19)

But there is, of course, one such tongue, and we are shortly to hear it ‘win’ him with effortless ease. The intransigence, apparently, is not about the request but the requester. And we are also, at this point, being alerted to something overbearing in Leontes' way of loving people—something which elicits these protestations-in-resistance from those who are close to him. In a minute, we are to hear a similar note from Hermione:

                                        —Yet, good deed, Leontes,
I love thee not a jar o'th'clock behind
What lady she her lord.

(I.ii. 42)

You do not say such things to a man who is secure in his own sufficiency. Something unhappy haunts these assurances of affection, as if the speaker fears to be unbelieved—as, indeed, when once the assurances become necessary, there is a good chance she (or he) will be. But that is for the future. For the moment it remains a subliminal flicker of perception.

I have foregrounded this very ‘social’ embarrassment that the two Kings find themselves in, even at the risk of over-emphasis, because it may just be one of the ‘conditions’ of what ‘happens’ to Leontes. On one level it's a perfectly commonplace thing, a familiar foolish tussle of wills over a matter of small importance. Anyone who has paid an extended visit knows that it's easy to overshoot the right time for leaving and that, once that time has passed, it may be difficult to extricate yourself without offence. Both parties having now become committed to an exaggerated version of their cordiality, the admission by either that it is so, puts both of them in the wrong.

Polixenes plainly longs for the salt air and the open seaways that lead to home. His brother's love has become a ‘whip’ to him (I.i. 25). The hospitality may be ‘freely given’, but he's not feeling it that way any more:

                                        Time as long again
Would be fill'd up, my brother, with our thanks,
And yet we should for perpetuity
Go hence in debt.

(I.ii. 3)

He is labouring under an unwieldy burden of obligation which seems to crush all remaining pleasure out of the visit. But he can't say so, any more than Leontes can say, ‘Go, if you must. But I wish you wouldn't’. Instead, Polixenes spins excuses (cares of state), which are promptly rebutted (only the bygone day he had satisfaction on that score: I.i. 31), fails to take up the ‘strong’ reason Hermione proffers him (that he ‘longs to see his son’), and is driven finally to the embarrassed insincerity of fearing to be ‘a charge and trouble’ to them—as if that could ever be an issue between real friends!

Real friends, though? Isn't that, with the dismal escalation of small misunderstandings into great, becoming precisely the question? Leontes seems to think so. That is why the friendship has to be ‘proved’ by the pointless extra ‘sev'night’. Perhaps it is also why, for the forty-odd lines that Hermione undertakes his pleading for him, he walks out on the conversation so completely that he has to inquire about its outcome. Perhaps that is why, having had a consent wrung for him, his first blurted reaction is one of resentment at the previous denial—‘At my request he would not’ (editors have no warrant for marking this as an Aside: its awkward clumsiness is there for everyone to hear). All this is the behaviour of a man plagued with a mistrust that he cannot admit to consciousness, and which he must therefore blame on someone else. ‘You don't really love me at all’, is the accusation we level against the person we're beginning to cease loving ourselves.

Some readers have found it very puzzling that Leontes is so ready to suspect his dearest friend of the ultimate betrayal, as if Polixenes were no nearer an acquaintance, and no better known to him than ‘Sir Smile his neighbour’. But perhaps, as is not impossible with dearest friends, he is no better known. For decades, their encounters have all been by attorney—‘with interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies’, as Camillo tells us (I.i. 25). In these years of separation they have traversed the critical years between puberty and manhood; they have grown up, married, had children, and assumed the government of their countries. The wide gap of time that has dissevered them will be hard to close. Hard, but not impossible, provided the gap is recognised, and their ‘more mature dignities and royal necessities’ form the basis of a re-established intimacy.

But this is a play about interrupted continuities; about gaps that remain unfilled by natural growth and maturation; about ruptured developmental bonds; about sixteen frozen years of fruitless penitence, and about equally frozen idealities which will tyrannise permanently over a budding nature, if ‘dear life’ does not redeem them.

Furthermore, natural growth and maturation is exactly what Polixenes, for one, finds it impossible to envisage. Nothing, for him, can bridge the gap between boyhood and manhood, because he has made the boy in himself nostalgically ‘eternal’, and he himself wanders like a phantom of regret in the lost green fields of youth. The processes that have intervened he mentions only to deplore. He is a man who demands that Time stand still, knowing that it won't. And we see him holding out this golden dream, to himself and to Hermione, while the man he is supposed to share it with, sullen as a rebuffed schoolboy, mooches about the stage or plays desultorily with his son, out of earshot and apparently careless of the outcome.

There are two boys eternal on stage, suffering, both of them, with all the child's capacity to be hurt and not to understand. But lamblike they are not!

I don't mean to be snide at these men's expense. The eternal child survives in all of us. It is the very quick of growth and change and hope. But a child must play. It needs to be able to giggle at its own absurdities—as we saw Camillo and Archidamus doing. It needs to be able to long irrationally for home, and be unashamed of it; to wish desperately that the friend would stay, but let him go if he wants. A child can be vulnerable without feeling humiliated. But the childness in these two Kings, obliquely reflected in their unusual attachment to their own children, is not the ‘varying childness’ Polixenes cherishes in his son—the childness that cures ‘thoughts that would thick my blood’. It has none of that spontaneous mutability. It has lost the capacity to play. The very word has become hideous with treacherous double meanings. To ‘play’ is to sin.

Shakespeare lays out for us the peculiar notion of maturation—the theology of it, almost—that has brought them to this pass:

We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i'th'sun
And bleat the one at th'other. What we chang'd
Was innocence for innocence; we knew not
The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream'd
That any did. Had we pursu'd that life,
And our weak spirits ne'er been higher rear'd
With stronger blood, we should have answer'd heaven
Boldly ‘not guilty’, the imposition clear'd
Hereditary ours.

(I.ii. 67)

So Polixenes.

That incorruptible critic and austere Jansenist, James Smith, points out what a heterodox brand of Christianity this is (J. Smith, Shakespearian and Other Essays, 1974, pp. 145-6): Polixenes speaks as if Original Sin were somehow avoidable! Smith is right. But more interesting is the way Polixenes further equates the birth of sin with the advent of sex (‘stronger blood’). Perhaps, listening to Hermione's charming persuasions and with an eye on the restless Leontes, he has already had a premonition of the dismal metamorphosis that can turn three friends into a triangle. Is he not already too susceptible to her womanliness? It seems to be beginning. He searches for a cause. What is it that went wrong? and when? Significantly, he doesn't examine the present situation. There's no need. He knows all too well the root of the evil. For Polixenes (in a pattern familiar to readers of Blake) the Fall is to be dated from puberty. The snake in the paradise is simply sex.

Hermione had started this train of thought with the kindliest of intentions. Hoping perhaps to soften her husband's graceless withdrawal from the conversation, she had proposed, as a happier topic, Childhood:

                                        Come, I'll question you
Of my lord's tricks and yours when you were boys.

(I.ii. 60)

(understood: ‘still quirky enough, in all conscience … but never mind’?)

You were pretty lordings then!

But the topic is far from happy, charged with regret and guilt as it is; and her own warm presence makes it even less happy. The boy Polixenes feels profoundly threatened in this region of memory.

It's a strange enough boyhood that the King of Bohemia projects: lambs frisking in the sun is not the image most naturally suggested by the yelling hordes in a primary school playground. But it's an even stranger notion of maturation: one grows up only to learn ‘the doctrine of ill-doing’, to be reared with ‘stronger blood’ which is, apparently, vicious in its effects. As strange, certainly, it strikes Hermione, to judge by her slightly impish primness in reply:

                                        By this we gather
You have tripp'd since.

(I.ii. 75)

Hermione knows the regions of experience Polixenes gestures towards, but her word for them is ‘tripp'd’. The ‘ill-doing’, ‘guilt’, and ‘stronger blood’ do not touch her, except to amuse by their blundering intensity. But Polixenes, quite deaf to the light rebuke, blunders on in, right up to his ears. Now we discover what it is about the ‘stronger blood’ that so alarms him:

                    O my most sacred Lady
Temptations have since then been born to's, for
In those unfledg'd days was my wife a girl;

(you can almost hear Hermione's jaw drop in amazement; but there is better to come)

Your precious self had then not cross'd the eyes
Of my young playfellow.

(I.ii. 76)

‘Grace to boot!’ interrupts Hermione, torn between incredulity and laughter,

Of this make no conclusion, lest you say
Your queen and I are devils.

(I.ii. 80)

If Polixenes doesn't blush at this point, he's thicker-skinned than I take him to be. This was, infallibly, the ‘conclusion’ he was about to make; and the moral disarray that has him call his hostess, in one breath, both ‘sacred’ and ‘temptation’ is profoundly revealing.

But Hermione takes mercy on him, deftly diverts the blow and tries to help him out of his absurdity. She has to treat him like the boy he says he wishes he was:

                                                            Yet, go on;
Th'offences we have made you do we'll answer,
If you first sinn'd with us, and that with us
You did continue fault, and that you slipp'd not
With any but with us.

(I.ii. 82)

She employs his vocabulary of ‘offences’, ‘fault’ and ‘sinning’, but the words are enclosed in audible quotation-marks and mocked by her own word, ‘slipp'd’. And the sentiments are bathed in an unmistakable sensuous glow of one who can only hope that such happy faults, so begun, will ‘continue’—and ‘with us’. Her moral world is leagues away from Polixenes'.

I would not, however, trust Polixenes to hear the quotation-marks or to relish the glow. The guilt-culture of puritanism is not renowned for its responsiveness to humour. Nor is Leontes' sense of humour in much better fettle either. And it is exactly on this note that he rejoins them. We shall never know if Shakespeare meant him to overhear and misconstrue her words, but he easily might. It could explain his choice of a potentially bitter verb: ‘Is he won yet?’

‘He'll stay, my lord’, says Hermione, still in the backwash of her own kindly amusement at Polixenes (and therefore not noticing the tone?). Leontes' next remark, however, signalling deeper trouble, cannot and does not escape her—‘At my request he would not.’

I've already indicated the kind of Polixenes-oriented trouble it contains. But it is also unquietly directed at Hermione's unnatural powers of persuasion, and she has heard it. So, with a mixture of tact and urgency she directs the conversation away from both suspicions, onto a ground of confidence, as she hopes, for all three—reminding Leontes that they are husband and wife, irrevocably bound, and choosing to be so.

Here, with his usual consummate unobtrusiveness, Shakespeare is giving us the long perspective on this particular marriage and its origins. And he's doing so because this too has contributed to the unique situation—this and no other—in which the nightmare that comes upon Leontes has its own logic.

Their courtship, we learn, had some special vicissitudes:

Three crabbed months had sour'd themselves to death,
Ere I could make thee open thy white hand
And clap thyself my love; then didst thou utter
‘I am yours for ever.’

(I.ii. 102)

Three months, some annotators say, was long for an Elizabethan courtship, and especially long for a marriage that was dynastic in origin, between a king and an emperor's daughter. It doesn't matter. It felt long to Leontes: its length is still ‘sour’ in memory. But of course the Hermione we see is exactly the woman to refuse to have her judgement hustled. The white hand opens only when the candid mind consents. She wants the words ‘for ever’ to mean what they say. And conversely, the Leontes we see is exactly the man to feel this delay as ‘crabbed’, a slur upon his sufficiency, and to be unable to grasp the importance, for a Hermione, of a clear resolution.

All marriages carry the stamp of the conditions under which they were contracted. They will crack at the point where they were least firmly cemented. And all marriages have an array of inequalities built into their mutuality. But the inequalities of this marriage are of the radical kind that may distil slow gall. The sourness lives on. Leontes speaks of the crabbed months with no softening suggestion that they have passed quietly into history. And that, too, is understandable—for Hermione, throughout this scene and beyond, seems in possession of an elasticity and largeness, a free ‘play’ of spirit which he cannot command and cannot rise to. It would be hard not to resent it, somewhere.

But the speech must go back into its context. For the way the recollection arises is just as important as the fact that it arises. Recovering from the grumpiness of ‘At my request he would not’, Leontes has tried to make amends:

Hermione, my dearest, thou never spok'st
To better purpose.

(I.ii. 88)

This could, of course, bear a very bitter construction: something along the lines of, ‘You imagine yourself to be invisible in your “purpose”, but “you'll be found, / Be you beneath the sky.”’ Something in the tone, at all events, elicits a sharp note of interrogation from Hermione, as if her ear has caught an echo of inner disquiet. ‘Never?’ she queries, looking him keenly in the eye.

He would not appear to be meeting the eye. Though he must know her meaning, he's strangely recalcitrant in acknowledging it, muttering,

‘Never but once.’

They are now in very deep waters. There can be no mystery about the other ‘once’, but for Polixenes' sake at least, the tone must be lightened to include an observer of these intimacies. That's probably why Hermione begins almost archly, teasingly—

What! Have I twice said well? When was't before?
I prithee tell me—

(I.ii. 90)

But she very quickly finds herself slipping into a bantering levity which can only make matters worse. And though she stops half-a-dozen times in hopeful expectation, Leontes will not rescue her. The ‘once before’ has become as impossible for him to name as she is determined to make him name it.

It plays unhappy tricks with her tone. He cannot know that what reaches him as provocative femininity deliberately flaunting itself before another male—

                              you may ride's
With one soft kiss a thousand furlongs ere
With spur we heat an acre,

(I.ii. 94)

and so on—is just a woman discovering distressfully that anything she says is going to be received on the level of sexual provocation. The very foreignness of guilt to her temperament will make her sound ‘loose’ to guilty ears. Or, as she puts it at her trial,

                              Mine integrity
Being counted falsehood shall, as I express it,
Be so received.

(III.ii. 34)

Her life already stands in the level of his dreams. Her words have passed out of her control, subject to the nightmare metamorphosis that suspicion can always impose on them.

She tries to arrest that miserable momentum, valiantly cheerful, but her cajolery, repelled, takes on a tone that is almost silly:

My last good deed was to entreat his stay;

(Polixenes, notice, is now completely out of account—a mere parenthic ‘him’)

What was my first? It has an elder sister,
Or I mistake you. O, would her name were Grace!
But once before I spoke to th'purpose—When?
Nay, let me have't; I long.

(I.ii. 97)

Now Leontes must reply, wretched with misgiving though he is, and name the occasion which ought to be the root and ground of sunny confidence. But there can be no sunny confidence in what he remembers, only deeper misgiving—crabbed months souring themselves to death, the white hand reluctantly opening:

                              then didst thou utter
‘I am yours for ever.’

(I.ii. 104)

That is the knife-edge. It can be the ceremony by which the bond is reconsecrated, as Hermione again opens her hand to receive his, breathing ‘'Tis Grace indeed’ with a sober fervency from which all the silliness has vanished, and which registers immense relief, I think, at being clear of the minefields of mistrust. She was right! It was just one of those fantasms that can cloud the clearest vision; and by treating it as if it didn't exist she has exorcised it.

But Leontes' words have another resonance, a questioning, probing, unhappy one—‘then didst thou utter / “I am yours for ever”’, but now … ? In the light of those crabbed months, were you concealing something? And are you now repenting? Can thy dam … may't be … affection? He is on the brink of committing himself to that hideous vision, at exactly the same moment as he struggles to affirm his trust in their mutual vows.

If Hermione hears that in his words, she hears it only to discount it as ignoble—ignoble in him, as it would be ignoble in her to respond to it. The response could only look like guilt, and does not become a lady like her. If he has put her in the false, ludicrous position of choosing between her husband and her husband's friend, she will show her superiority to the suspicion, by seeming unaware of its very possibility. He has placed his hand in hers again. She will use her renewed power over him to place her other hand in Polixenes' … and unite them, after the pitiful, trivial, transient cloud that has passed between them. Instead of being the cause of division, she will be the instrument of reconciliation.

It's an act of high courage, expressing the perilous extent of her trust in Leontes' wholesome integrity. Equally it is an act of folly. She cannot know it perhaps, but it is fatally miscalculated in its very eloquence:

Why, lo you now, I have spoke to th'purpose twice:
The one for ever earn'd a royal husband;
Th'other for some while a friend.

(I.ii. 106)

With a gracious smile for Polixenes, she stresses the antithesis between the ‘for ever’ of marriage and the ‘some while’ of friendship. But Leontes is already gone. The word he hears is ‘friend’. It's a neutral word which, like a lot of other innocent words (such as ‘play’ or ‘neat’ or ‘love’ or ‘satisfy’), must be used, because there is no other. But it reaches his ears as an obscene euphemism.

He lets the hand fall, resuming his restless pacings, toying fretfully with the bewildered Mamillius; and everything that is to follow is already there, fully formed—‘Too hot, too hot!’ He has given himself up to the foul, familiar imaginings—gone rag-picking among the ancient garbage of misogynist cynicism and misanthropic prurience, and the momentum of that will carry him far—past, even, the categorical denial of Apollo—before it is exhausted. The momentum is given us in the rhythms and cadences of his speech:

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

(I.ii. 108, Folio punctuation)

Yet one hears, potently, how, in its own demonic way, it is a kind of joy—a frenzied stimulation of the nerves and the blood, beside which everything else comes to seem pallid, insipid, and implausible.

It is also self-confirming in a thoroughly deadly way. By letting go the hand that gave her heart to him, Leontes leaves Hermione holding only … the hand of Polixenes—an action which, of necessity, must next be translated as ‘paddling palms and pinching fingers’. By the withdrawal of his hand, the breach of his trust, he has made it that. And Hermione has no redress. She cannot change her behaviour in the light of his guilty suspicion without becoming contaminated by it. It is the same merciless principle of integrity that is enunciated in Macbeth:

Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace,
Yet grace must still look so.

It's open to us in the audience to wonder—when she has noticed that her husband ‘holds a brow of much distraction’—whether Hermione is well advised to obey his request and go off into the garden arm-in-arm with Polixenes. Yet how could she refuse, since ‘grace must still look so’? To change under suspicion is to license the suspicion. There is no integrity so strong that it can dictate its own interpretation. The drama is in motion.

I don't know whether Leontes' jealousy still seems ‘notoriously unmotivated’. I would have thought that there is rather a profusion of explanations, than a scarcity of them. And they could be very easily multiplied. I might mention the curious freaks of feeling to which husbands are sometimes subject in the latter stages of pregnancy—especially husbands as emotionally centred upon hearth and home as Leontes seems to be. That is in play here, too. The parental bond is so essential to this man's stability that he clutches instinctively at a 7-year-old when he feels himself falling. Since so much hangs on it, such men are natural sniffers-out of bastardy. Rather like that idealistic family-man Leo Tolstoy, there is a passion of domesticity about Leontes which may easily turn tyrannical. Sixteen years later, you'll notice, he is still speaking of his wife as

                    the sweet'st Companion that ere man
Bred his hopes out of, true.

(V.i. 11, Folio text)

In this man's mind, true breeding, hopes, and sweetness are indissolubly connected. And now to be discarded thence. …

But I would not want to lay all the stress on psychological idiosyncrasy, meticulously though it is charted in the text. That would be to make it too much of a special case, and to lose the essential and archetypal from the tale. For there is a sense in which, the moment Leontes starts drawing water from the poisoned wells of his prurience, there is no need for explanation at all. Harold Goddard offers an illuminating comparison. ‘Leontes’ jealousy of Polixenes', he writes,

is like Shylock's hatred of Antonio (and Shakespeare uses the same two metaphors of wind and waves to convey it). In that case nothing personal, but centuries of mistreatment of the Jews, was the ‘motive.’ In this case nothing personal, but the whole history and inheritance of human jealousy, is the cause. What we are dealing with here is nature in the raw, with the fantasy-making of the unconscious mind and the emotional fury it engenders. Leontes' mind is like a fiery furnace at such a temperature that everything introduced into it—combustible or not—becomes fuel. That he threatens in turn to have his wife, the child, and Paulina burned is significant repetition and detail that indicate the volcanic depth from which his passion comes.

(H. C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, 1960, II, p.266)

There is a realm of experience—and Shakespeare knew it well—where ‘nothing is but what is not’. It is something more than delusion. Enter it, and your ‘single state of man’ will be shaken by a ‘phantasma and a hideous dream’ which inverts the categories of reality. The mind begins to feed itself upon the fascination that lies at the shadowed centre of abhorrence itself. Nor can it easily be prised loose. If a well-intentioned friend, like Camillo, questions the new categories, you are furious, and on behalf of reality!

                              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)

‘Nothing’—though a pure vacancy of matter—can nevertheless, like a vacuum, suck reality into itself. It even has a supra-reality of its own. It brings a dizzying sensation of initiation, this ‘diseased opinion’. And Leontes (there's no mistaking it) has been infecting his brains with this hallucinogen. He is able, consequently, to give a classic description of its pathology:

Affection! thy intention stabs the centre.
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicat'st with dreams—how can this be?—
With what's unreal thou coactive art,
And fellow'st nothing.

(I.ii. 137)

Leontes has here formulated the straining apart of contradictory sensation that threw Othello into an epileptic fit. The reason perhaps that he does not fall down and foam at the mouth, is that he has located and begun to relish the pleasure that even this self-appointed vexation contains.

Yes, I do mean ‘pleasure’. Nobody embarks on a course of gratuitous self-torment without promising himself some perverse satisfactions along the way. And as Leontes thrusts Mamillius away to ‘Go play’, he is clearing a space in which he can more freely ‘play’, himself. The need to do so is so powerful that it will out, even in so mangled a form as this:

                    Go play (boy) play, there have been
(Or I am much deceiv'd) cuckolds ere now,
And many a man there is (even at this present,
Now, while I speak this) holds his wife by th'arm
That little thinks she has been sluic'd in's absence,
And his pond fish'd by his next neighbour (by
Sir Smile, his neighbour): Nay, there's comfort in't,
Whiles other men have gates, and those gates open'd
(As mine) against their will. Should all despair
That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind
Would hang themselves. Physic for't there's none:
It is a bawdy planet, that will strike
Where 'tis predominant; and 'tis pow'rful: think it:
From east, west, north, and south, be it concluded,
No barricado for a belly. Know't,
It will let in and out the Enemy,
With bag and baggage …

(I.ii. 187, Folio punctuation)

The extraordinary rhythms of this, slipshod and angry-sulky, remind one of a sullen and ostracised child kicking at tussocks in the corner of the playground.

Nor is Shakespeare the playwright to forget—now, while he speaks this—the citizens who have brought their wives to the playhouse, or the gallants placing themselves strategically to catch the eye of those wives. And I daresay, as Leontes picked his grim way through the grimier alleys of his own mind, there was a citizen or two who found his grip on his wife's arm involuntarily tightening, and his eyes flitting helplessly towards his next (smiling) neighbour. The instinct touched is very primitive and very powerful. The sentiments, in a sense, require no explanation at all. They rise from a perennial stratum of the male mind, and one which (I think this is the impression conveyed by Leontes' tone of gloomy relish), one which has been made familiar by much frequentation. The frequentation is recorded in words like ‘Inch-thick’, ‘fork'd’, ‘sluic'd’, ‘fish'd’, ‘bawdy’, and in the whole swaggeringly hard-bitten manner (‘think it!’ ‘know't!’ ‘Be it concluded!’), which seems, utterly incongruously, to have a ring of gratified exultation about it: ‘Physic for't there's none’—as if the thing that torments him is also a source of unholy jubilation. ‘Nay, there's comfort in't’ has an irony beyond the fact that the fellowship of cuckolds would seem to provide scant ‘comfort’ for poor Leontes. The darker irony is that the comfort he is discovering is real and deep.

Just as the luxury of schizoid states can provide a real solvent for problems that are impervious to sanity, so jealousy consoles the man who believes himself to be merely its victim. And in Leontes' unleashed fantasy, Shakespeare has tapped the region of the psyche where we are all accessible to that satisfaction-in-revulsion, the grim exultation of the unsurprised cynic in a bawdy world. Perhaps it's even misleading to call it a region of the psyche at all, implying some dark under-consciousness. Rather, by an imperceptible jar to the perceptive faculties, all that is natural and pleasing and delightful in one's sexual nature becomes lurid with lasciviousness—yet not just lurid, also thrilling as no natural sensuality could ever be. Pleasure with the additional edge that's put upon it by believing it sin. And the self-appointed victim will feed his imagination with the picture of someone he loves committing the hideousness, rather than forgo the rapture of imagining it:

                                                            Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses?
                                                                                                              [Folio: ‘meating’]
Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career
Of laughter with a sigh?—a note infallible
Of breaking honesty. Horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift …

(I.ii. 283)

I don't think the swiftness of events here allows us time to inquire how Leontes has become so inward with the gradations of breaking honesty (certainly not by watching Hermione); but the inwardness of the knowledge is striking to the ear.

So when he demands angrily,

Dost think I am so muddy, so unsettled,
To appoint myself in this vexation; sully
The purity and whiteness of my sheets—
Which to preserve is sleep, which being spotted
Is goads, thorns, nettles, tails of wasps …
Without ripe moving to't? Would I do this?

(I.ii. 325)

without for one moment questioning the reality of his anguish (there in the uncontrolled association of sheets, spots, goads, thorns, tails—as if sexuality itself were torment and pollution), one can still reply, ‘Yes, you would do this! And that is not so strange as you think. Men do appoint themselves in this vexation, especially when they are already feeling muddy and unsettled. An Othello does not need his Iago. He can find “ripe moving” enough in the contradictory impulsions of his own nature.’

For jealousy is not a single emotion, but the confluence of many emotions. It doesn't even exclude a passionate wish to be rescued from jealousy. And Shakespeare in a masterly way also gives us the poignant wrestlings, the desperate signallings of the jealous man, as he is sucked into the quagmire. When Leontes' frantic behaviour draws the concerned eyes of his wife and his friend—‘How is't with you, best brother?’—it isn't a piece of transparent Macbeth-like lying that he offers in excuse (‘Give me your favour. My dull brain was wrought / With things forgotten’), but a kind of oblique truth:

                                        Looking on the lines
Of my boy's face, methoughts I did recoil
Twenty-three years; and saw myself unbreech'd,
In my green velvet coat; my dagger muzzl'd,
Lest it should bite its master—

(I.ii. 153)

The ‘recoil’ is vivid as a snapshot, right down to the toy dagger and the remembered garment. What we are hearing is the small, childlike voice of Leontes' embattled sanity. Trying to hold on. Trying to admit, trying to confess and, by confession, to neutralise, naturalise that terrifying recoil upon infantile vulnerability. The dizzying backward slippage across the wide gap of time has terrified him. He is feeling like that little green-coated boy—horribly dependent on a love that may not be forthcoming, reduced to childish stratagems, to crude blackmailing appeals for sympathy—like the one that cries out to us from the beginning of this very speech:

How sometimes nature will betray its folly,
Its tenderness, and make itself a pastime
To harder bosoms!

(I.ii. 151)

The catch in the voice (‘its folly, / Its tenderness’) is almost tearful. It affects jocularity, but it is crying at the same time, ‘Save me, rescue me, mother me! Don't turn that adult imperviousness of the hard bosom on my “tenderness”!’

Leontes wants to be found out, and stopped, quite as much as he craftily evades detection:

                                                            My brother,
Are you so fond of your young prince as we
Do seem to be of ours?

(I.ii. 163)

(‘I only “seem” to be fond, you see: my bosom is as hard as the next man's. And God knows whose bastard he mightn't be, if the truth were out. But if you're very smart you'll see that I only seem to be talking of this matter, because the other … the other is unspeakable.’)

And there is one last desperate throwing of himself upon Hermione's percipience, in the strangled unavowable torment of,

                                                  Hermione,
How thou lov'st us show in our brother's welcome;
Let what is dear in Sicily be cheap.

And I don't see why we need disbelieve him, when he adds,

Next to thyself and my young rover, he's
Apparent to my heart.

(I.ii. 173)

That's another grab at normality—if only it will hold. But the chuckling devil of equivocation picks his fingers loose: the Polixenes who is ‘apparent’ is not just the heir apparent to his love, but the one who is manifest, unmasked, exposed at his dirty work of betrayal. Leontes, probably, no longer knows which he meant; but there is no mistaking which angel it is that now has his ear:

                              I am angling now,
Though you perceive me not how I give line.

(I.ii. 180)

He has identified himself, fully and finally, with the Tempter who, along with other damned souls, angles in the lake of darkness.

That's as far as I need go, I think.

Leontes' jealousy is not ‘causeless’, any more than it is justified. It is both helplessly involuntary and it is recklessly chosen. In the ensuing set-to with Camillo it is unmistakable that he only shallowly believes his own suspicion, that it is all a kind of diabolically wilful game. Contradicted, he can manage only petulance:

                    It is; you lie, you lie.
I say thou liest, Camillo, and I hate thee;
Pronounce thee a gross lout, a mindless slave …

(I.ii. 199)

That is the peevish vehemence of the playground, which confirms its obstinacy by abusive repetition and has no interest in the truth. And yet we have also experienced, in the mesmeric violence of his utterances, the force of the current that has carried him away.

One only finds all this inexplicable, causeless, ‘unmotivated’, if one seeks explanation on too naïve a level. The objection to ‘psychologising’ (as so often) turns out to be simply an objection to crude psychology. To see how unconstrainedly the action accords with the known human heart and mind, is to free ourselves to grasp its huge importance.

An analogy may help. In Conrad's Chance, Marlow is reflecting on the tension of a false sexual situation, between Flora de Barral and Captain Anthony. Here, as in Sicilia, two potentially wholesome affections have ‘branched’ so drastically that they seem unable any longer to ‘embrace … as it were from the ends of opposed winds’. Marlow comments,

Of all the forms offered to us by life it is the one demanding a couple to realize it fully, which is the most imperative. Pairing off is the fate of mankind. And if two beings thrown together, mutually attracted, resist the necessity, fail in understanding and voluntarily stop short of the—the embrace, in the noblest meaning of the word, then they are committing a sin against life, the call of which is simple. Perhaps sacred. And the punishment of it is an invasion of complexity, a tormenting, forcibly tortuous involution of feelings, the deepest form of suffering …

(J. Conrad, Chance, Part II, Ch. 6, 1949, pp. 426-7)

Out of this suffering, Marlow believes, ‘something significant may come at last’—as it shiningly does in Conrad's novel, and in Shakespeare's play. The noble embrace may be achieved and the life-affections satisfied. But we will understand the process better if we realise that the tormenting complexity arises from a defiance of simplicity. Is it possible, Shakespeare is asking at the outset of his play, that this primal, commonplace, momentous human imperative will prove stronger in the end than the tortuously involuted feelings produced out of its thwarting? Must there be tragedy?

As for the ‘mode’ of the play … what is one to say? After only one Act, it already has so many! Among them, certainly, we can make out the mythic triumph of wickedness, the paradigm of fairy tale. But this co-exists with, and is empowered by, a psychological naturalism of quite amazing depth and resourcefulness. What ‘mode’ do you call that?

The mode of The Winter's Tale, perhaps.