SOURCE: Abrams, Richard H. “Leontes's Enemy: Madness in The Winter's Tale.” In Aspects of Fantasy: Selected Essays from the Second International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film, edited by William Coyle, pp. 155-62. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986.

[In the following essay, Abrams examines the source of Leontes's jealousy, noting that “[u]nder the spell of jealousy, Leontes is changed. His good angel, reason, abandons him, and the tempter, imagination, does his thinking for him.”]

Just before their duel, Hamlet apologizes to Laertes for his wild behavior at Ophelia's grave by placing the blame on an “enemy” that took over when Hamlet “from himself [was] ta'en away”(V.ii.234).¹ This “enemy” in Hamlet's expansion of the figure becomes virtually a possessing demon, like the “unclean spirits” (cacodaemones) said to afflict the mentally ill in a tradition holding from Biblical times to the Middle Ages. In the Renaissance, this view of mental illness was in retreat as evidenced by Shakespeare's broadly satiric portrait of the quack exorcist in Comedy of Errors, and we need not suppose that Hamlet seriously tries to escape responsibility for his actions by disowning the thing of darkness in himself. For though he speaks of reason and its adversary, madness, vying for control of his being, the very facetiousness with which he pursues this figure suggests the presence of a tertium quid—his assumed “antic disposition”—mediating these extremes. His apology to Laertes, which Harry Levin terms “disingenuous,” may have some corrective function in a play whose chief spokesman for absolute identity (“to thine own self be true” I.iii.78) and a “psychodynamic” approach to madness (“this effect defective comes by cause” II.ii.103) is Polonius, but it is scarcely the key, though proferred by Hamlet himself, which can unlock his heart of mystery.²

Hamlet is not the only Shakespearean tragedy in which a superstitious definition of madness is embedded with a generally realistic character portrayal, providing false perspective on Shakespeare's method. In Othello Emilia's evocation of jealousy as “a monster / Begot upon itself, born on itself” (III.iv.161-62) may have ultimate bearing on the fact that Othello is essentially self-persuaded, as critics have argued, but in the immediate sense it is naive; Shakespeare provides at least the illusion of cause in the tempter Iago, who whispers Othello's jealousy to life. In The Winter's Tale, however, the pretense of telling “an old tale still” frees Shakespeare to explore a primitive mode of psychological explanation which, in the tragedies, he is obliged to maintain at the level of poetic figure. With his causeless, self-begetting jealousy, Leontes often has been described as his own Iago, and he exhibits a splitting of reason from madness as radical as that proposed by Hamlet in his apology to Laertes. Where Hamlet's playful invocation of his madness as “enemy” leaves off, Leontes's paranoia begins. With terrible literalness, Leontes persecutes his faithful wife, Hermione, as though she were the otherness in himself, his concretized “enemy.”

Twenty-five years ago M. M. Mahood speculated, “The Elizabethans might have put Leontes' outburst down to demonic possession,” but this formula resists serious elaboration. In its favor is the incredible rapidity of Leontes's change. In the space of a single line, “Too hot, too hot!” (I, ii, 108), five minutes into his opening scene, he is visited by a full-blown revelation of his wife's seeming infidelity, and this seizure radically alters his manner of speaking. With their lightning free-associations, Leontes's mad speeches suggest glossolalia, “language that I understand not” (III.ii.80), as Hermione confesses, speaking for most of the audience. Then, as suddenly as it appeared, his madness vanishes with his son's death, leaving Leontes to answer for deeds performed by his “enemy” when, in Hamlet's phrase he was “from himself … ta'en away”: when, in his own phrase, he was “transported by my jealousies” (III.ii.158).

Strictly speaking, the possession motif gives out at this point. Shakespeare “psychologizes” evil influence, barring literal “sprites and goblins” from his winter's tale at least until Antigonus's haunting in Act III. But though we cannot speak of Leontes's possession by a particular demon (an Asmodeus, a Belial, or whatever), there survives in the Renaissance, and indeed well into the eighteenth century, an alternate tradition of “possession” by an indwelling enemy or ruling passion, for which the motif of demonic possession becomes a familiar allegory. When in a late morality play Christ casts forth from Mary Magdalene the Vice “Infidelitie” together with the “.vii. diuels which have hir possessed,” the devils, identified with the seven deadly sins, are not quite invading demons but the soul's own leanings to vice, its hypostatized temptations exorcised each by its contrary virtue. When in Book III of the Faerie Queene jealousy causes Spenser's Malbecco to gape in lewd fascination as his wife disports with a troop of satyrs till “he has quight / Forgot he was a man, and Gealosie is hight” (III.x.60), the event, loosely speaking, is one of possession (hence the rebaptism), though not by an anthropomorphic agent; rather by Malbecco's invidia—a sick predisposition to voyeuristic pleasures, to dwell in the shadow of a virile competitor—which, seizing on the mere occasion of his wife's nymphomania, tyrannizes from within.³ Shakespeare himself deals in this allegory of demonic possession as early as Love's Labor's Lost when Berowne complains that he is possessed by a “love … as mad as Ajax” (IV.ii.6) and Don Armado rages, “Love is a familiar; Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love” (I.ii.172-74). Here, as in Hamlet's apology, the metaphor of possession belongs to a rhetoric of shame that would disown its own emotions by representing them as besieging the soul rather than arising internally. Like the four humors (and “the humor of affection” is what Armado elsewhere calls his desire) linking man's emotional makeup to the material universe, desire can be conceived as having extension both within and beyond the subject, so that as the latter notion is stressed it becomes common to speak of the soul beset, hounded, possessed, by what it feels.⁴

Now, desires healthy and otherwise are normally viewed as attendant on or generated by particular love-objects; a man sees a beautiful woman and falls in love; his wife commits adultery and he becomes jealous or angry. Sometimes, however, as in the case of Malbecco with his prior disposition to voyeurism, desire exists relatively independent of particular objects; it lives a life of its own within the subject, is “self-begot.”⁵ In The Winter's Tale jealousy's “life of its own” within Leontes is attested by his notorious apostrophe to Affection as a hypostatized enemy besieging his soul. He has just been interrogating his son, Mamillius, about Hermione's supposed infidelity (“Can thy dam?—may't be?”) and, meeting with incomprehension, he turns inward to interrogate his emotions directly:

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

(I.ii.138-46)

A jealous imagination, Leontes recognizes, may deal in mere conjecture. Thus, damping down his suspicions, he tells himself that his imagination “fellow[s] nothing.”⁶ But then, a moment later, a fresh suspicion is engendered. In what J.H.P. Pafford considers an argument a fortiori, Leontes notes that if imagination can work on “nothing,” it can likewise join with “something,” and that with regard to Hermione's supposed infidelity, it does. Whereas moments before he had rejected his suspicions, now he settles into the conviction that he has indeed been made a cuckold.

How, we ask ourselves, does Leontes get from “nothing” to “something” in a single step? How is his new suspicion engendered ex nihilo? The question is not merely of philological interest, for it restates in little the problem of where Leontes's unfounded jealousy came from in the first place. Instead of trying to answer it, however, we may reflect that the question arises only if, denying Affection's status as a thinking subject, we hold Leontes himself (i.e., Leontes's reason) wholly responsible for the flow of ideas in the soliloquy. If, on the other hand, we accept Leontes's attribution of a “Thou,” an originative intelligence, to this faculty, then the entire second half of his speech has the status of an interpolation. First, in other words, Leontes's reason tries to distance itself from imagination by defining it as a mind-clouding enemy (“Affection, thy intention stabs the center!”). However, in the midst of this activity, reason loses initiative. Affection takes over and, as though it “really had the power of thought,” imposes an idea of its own.⁷ At exactly the midpoint of the soliloquy (the caesura in the fifth of nine lines), Leontes's suspicion is reborn, which is to say that Affection almost literally “stabs the center.” Conjoining with the word “nothing,” or the actual nothing of the caesura, the demon Affection begets a fresh suspicion of adultery in Leontes's mind.

Under the spell of jealousy, Leontes is changed. His good angel, reason, abandons him, and the tempter, imagination, does his thinking for him. Eliminate the pneumatological machinery hinted by Leontes's “serious personification” and this much is truism. What is remarkable, though, as underscored by the mathematic symmetry of the Affection soliloquy,⁸ is the degree to which Affection possesses originative power, figuring as a malin genie with which (or whom) Leontes shares his being. Because this other-in-himself possesses such solidity, Leontes tries to project it, lending it substance by associating it with Hermione, the most intimate “other” in his external environment. As “internal dramatist,” he translates the war in his own psyche into confrontation with a pseudo-objective enemy.⁹

The Freudian model of projection is, of course, anachronistic in this regard, though the Renaissance had ready substitutes, one of which is highly pertinent to Leontes's madness. No convention of love poetry (or modern love-chat, for that matter) is more familiar than the metonymy in which the lover refers to his inamorata, his loved one, as “my love,” calling by the name of his own passion the woman who excites it in him and without whom the passion would not exist. By similar logic of elision Leontes identifies his jealous agony with Hermione, whom he projects as its “cause” (II.iii.3). Women and their lusts are pronounced “a bawdy planet, that will strike / Where 'tis predominant” (I.ii.201-02). Leontes's metaphor of celestial influence touches incidentally on the etymology of the word “affection,” which comes from affectare, to yield or lean toward, in turn deriving from afficere, to strike or influence. Instead of Affection piercing Leontes's center, this office of intimate penetration is assigned to his wife—“one / Of us too much beloved” (III.ii.4)—whose being Leontes imagines impinging on his own. “Your actions are my dreams” (III.ii.82), he accuses Hermione; she is somehow inside him, her sexual dance providing orchestration for his nightmare, so that only when she is “gone, / Given to the fire” (II.iii.7-8), only when her evil influence is exorcised, can Leontes imagine himself whole again, restored to “The purity and whiteness of my sheets—/ Which to preserve is sleep” (I.ii.327-28).

Leontes's projection of enmity onto Hermione is merely paradigmatic. The mad king is well described by Camillo as one “Who in rebellion with himself will have / All that are his so too” (I.ii.355-56). Thus, not only his wife and best friend but his faithful retainers and newborn daughter, whom Leontes imagines joining the mockers when she comes of age and innocently calls him “father” (II.iii.155-56), “All that are his” are thrust into adversary roles, as though in dramatization of Leontes's quarrel with the other in himself. Of these instances, the last mentioned, that of the scapegoat Perdita, is the most important, for it leads to the fantasy-sequel of the tragedy in which we trace the afterlife of Leontes's “other” in certain ambiguous out-of-body activities of Hermione's ghost. Though Leontes's charges against his wife are groundless in the form in which he makes them, Shakespeare in a sense justifies his paranoia retrospectively by developing a darker side of Hermione's nature after Leontes himself is content to believe he “but dreamed it” (III.ii.84).

This movement toward the actualization of fantasy begins with Perdita, produced to testify as silent witness to Hermione's innocence. Leontes's refusal in Act II to “own” his own child, his insistence, three times reiterated, that Antigonus carry it off as a bastard, brings Hermione's ghost into the drama as her infant daughter's protectress. “Jove send [the child] / A better guiding spirit” (II.iii.126-27), says Perdita's godmother, Paulina; and Antigonus, carrying it into exile, echoes her: “Come on, poor babe / Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens / To be thy nurses” (II.iii.185-87). The angelic advocate or tutelary genius whom these words conjure is Hermione, who, appearing to Antigonus in a dream, names her daughter in Leontes's default and safely guides it to Bohemian shores, whereupon, amid the shepherds' talk of fairies hovering, she vanishes, never to be heard from again, as the audience supposes.

Throughout the pastoral scene of Act IV, we see the wind in the reeds. Though Hermione is never mentioned, she seems to oversee Perdita's growth and fortune, teaching the lost one to find herself, to “queen it” in her mother's fashion and to find her way back to Sicilia. The theme of dii minores, of tutelary gods hidden in things, is maintained from the first words of the sheepshearing scene in anticipation of Hermione's revival; and in Act V, Hermione's spirit slouches toward the scene of her resurrection, sensed only by Leontes, who, in apprehension of “the ghost that walk[s]” (V.i.63), seems once more to teeter on the brink of madness. Earlier it was Affection—imagination infected by morbid eroticism—that conjured, in its own image, the figure of Hermione the temptress. Now imagination subserving a guilty consience conjures an antithetical image, yet one which curiously produces an analogous effect. Haunted by memories of his dead wife, Leontes is drained of desire for other women, as though Hermione, “sainted spirit” that she may have been when alive, now works upon her husband succubus-fashion. If ever he were to remarry, Leontes fantasizes, Hermione's spirit would newly “possess her corpse” (V.i.58) and return to the world shrieking for explanations; the ghost, possessing him, would “incense” him “To murder her I married” (V.i.61-62). This new phase of madness then—Leontes's jealousy on the dead Hermione's behalf—inverts his earlier jealousy of Hermione. However, there is the important difference that, whereas the adultress-Hermione was merely a projection, in the present case Leontes's imagination joins with “something” after all. He is haunted by a possibility that corresponds to “what's real”; and as the statue comes to life, the audience asks itself what Leontes's imagination mates with: “How can this be?”

“[I]t appears she lives” (V.iii.117), says Paulina, and if some critics stress the verisimilitude of that appearance—the wrinkles, which contradict Leontes's idealized expectations—others stress the precariousness.¹⁰ This is and is not Hermione, as Troilus said of Cressida. Or as Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream, restraining Puck from mischief, reminds him, “we are spirits of another sort” (III.ii.388), so Hermione's resurrection is wholesome, but just barely.¹¹ Can we tolerate or even believe in this piece of virtue's having collaborated with Paulina in a cruel deception? And if not, how to escape the morbid conclusion that Hermione has “stol'n from the dead” (V.iii.115), that as she embraces Leontes, hanging about his neck like a succubus, he is in mortal danger? “It is required / You do awake your faith” (V.iii.94-95), says Paulina, mentioning “wicked powers”; and it is a kind of faith, surely, which not only revives the statue but also insulates generations of listeners and readers from noting the dark other meaning of Paulina's later admonition: “Do not shun her [Hermione] / Until you see her die again, for then / You kill her double” (V.iii.105-06), which results from taking the word “double” as a noun meaning dopplegänger rather than as an adverb meaning “twice.”¹² Is it possible? Is this Hermione's double, not Hermione herself, whom Leontes will now install in his heart of hearts, sharing with her his being? We refuse to entertain the notion and cleave in the end to an explanation that explains nothing, in proportion to our need to believe in the saving power of love, whose two-in-one reverses the mystery of the divided self. But Leontes has entertained it—“If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating” (V.iii.110-11)—and, having recognized himself as his own worst enemy, would rather risk the terror of demonic possession than the drawn-out torment of solitary life. “I cannot be / Mine own, nor anything to any, if / I be not thine” (IV.iv.43-45), said Florizel to Perdita. So, too, Leontes must give himself away in the most radical sense—must obliterate the boundary between self and other—in order to become truly his own.

Notes

1. All Shakespearean quotations are from the Pelican edition of The Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1956) and are cited in the text.

2. Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 113. An extraordinary document in the blindness of psychoanalytic insight is Theodore Lidz, Hamlet's Enemy: Madness and Myth in Hamlet (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 45. Lidz commends a “psychodynamic” orientation to Hamlet's problem, undeterred by the fact that, in citing the passage in parentheses, he is following in the footsteps of Polonius.

3. The idea of lust intensifying as it passes through a filter of envy to become jealousy is a Renaissance commonplace. Thus, in the formal pageant of vices in Spenser's Faerie Queene, we find “lustfull Lechery” riding a goat whose green eyes are “the signe of gelosy” (I.iv.24-26), a detail that recurs in Othello (III.iii.180). Similarly, as in the case of Malbecco, jealousy's fulfillment lies in gazing, whence the connection with invidia, intense looking. Spenser stresses that Malbecco, with his one good eye, can never see enough; and Shakespeare has Othello seek satisfaction in ocular proof. For an interesting modern treatment of the relation of jealousy to envy, see René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 12 ff.

4. The editor of the Arden edition of The Winter's Tale (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), J. H. P. Pafford, cites Montaigne's essay “Our affections are transported beyond our selves,” in which Montaigne writes “We are never in our selves, but beyond” (Appendix II, p. 166). Compare J. Leeds Barroll's discussion of affections as “implanted yearnings” in Artificial Persons: The Formation of Character in the Tragedies of Shakespeare (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974), p. 37.

5. C. L. Barber argues the “priority of desire to attraction” in connection with Touchstone's “as pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling” (As You Like It, III.iii.66-67) in Shakespeare's Festive Comedies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 231-32. The chicken-or-egg question of whether desire came first or was generated in the adolescent Leontes and Polixenes by the sight of their attractive wives as temptation is under debate by Hermione and Polixenes when Leontes interrupts, moments before his jealous seizure (The Winter's Tale, I.ii).

6. In reading “Affection” as Leontes's own imagination rather than Hermione's supposed lust, I do not mean to limit the word's ambiguities. Complexities arise throughout the speech since metaphors used to define the act of imagination are reflected from Leontes's obscene vision of Hermione's sexual penetration (hence Leontes's later “projection” of violations onto Hermione as external enemy). Carol Thomas Neely convincingly argues a shift in the meaning of “Affection” (which moves from Leontes's imagination to Hermione's lust) in “The Winter's Tale: The Triumph of Speech,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 15 (1975), 321-38, especially 324-27.

7. Thus Joseph Priestly discusses the trope of “serious personification” as a figure which “obtrudes itself upon [the speaker]” so strongly affecting his passions that “while the illusion continues … [it is] as if the object of them really had the power of thought” (A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, 1777).

8. The poetic strategy of the Affection soliloquy, with Affection supervening midway in the speech to change the course of Leontes's meditation, is repeated at the midpoint of the action when Time, the Chorus, pressing into the “wide gap” separating Acts III and IV, changes the dramatic mode from tragedy to comedy. For imagery establishing the Chorus's speech as geometric center of the play, see William Blissett, “‘This Wide Gap of Time’: The Winter's Tale,” English Literary Renaissance 1 (1971), 52-70. In addition, it may be noted that the Chorus, like the Affection soliloquy, is shaped around a geometric center. The speech is thirty-two lines long—the first part dominated by the word “I” and dealing in violent, tragic emotions, the third part dominated by Time's third-person references to himself and dealing in gentler, comic experience. The second part is transitional and introduces the second-person pronoun. It occupies lines 15-17, or precisely the central portion of the speech, with the pivotal phrase, “I turn my glass,” occurring in the first half of line 16.

9. See Thomas F. VanLaan, Role-Playing in Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), especially ch. 9, “The Internal Dramatist.”

10. For a discussion of the two Hermiones created by the play's improbable ending, see James Edward Siemon, “‘But It Appears She Lives’: Iteration in The Winter's Tale,” PMLA 89 (1974), 10-16.

11. See David Bevington, “‘But We Are Spirits of Another Sort’: The Dark Side of Love and Magic in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7 (1975), 80-92.

12. The word “again” in Paulina's speech is similarly unsettling.

Works Cited

Barber, C. L. Shakespeare's Festive Comedies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959.

Barroll, J. Leeds. Artificial Persons: The Formation of Character in the Tragedies of Shakespeare. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974.

Blissett, William. “‘This Wide Gap of Time’: The Winter's Tale.” English Literary Renaissance 1 (1971), 52-70.

Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965.

Levin, Harry. The Question of Hamlet. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Lidz, Theodore. Hamlet's Enemy: Madness and Myth in Hamlet. New York: Basic Books, 1975.

Neely, Carol Thomas. “The Winter's Tale: The Triumph of Speech.” Studies in English Literature 15 (1975), 321-38.

Siemon, James Edward.“‘But It Appears She Lives’: Iteration in The Winter's Tale.” PMLA 89 (1974), 10-16.

VanLaan, Thomas F. Role-Playing in Shakespeare. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978.