SOURCE: Sanders, Wilbur. “The Good Queen (Acts 2 and 3).” In Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale, pp. 31-50. Sussex, England: Harvester Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Sanders contends that Hermione rescues The Winter's Tale from a descent into utter failure, noting that it is her presence that lends grace to the play despite Shakespeare's dramatic lapses.]

There is a long-running critical dispute concerning the first half of The Winter's Tale, in which, before I'm through, I shall probably become disgruntledly embroiled: is it ‘tragic’? or is it not? At the moment, though, I'd prefer to stave it off with a provisional remark or two. Such as: whatever tragic potential the action contains, the Leontes we have been watching is hardly the stuff tragic heroes are made of. Neither is Polixenes. If there's any tragedy about, it would seem to attach to Hermione—beset as she is by touchy, vacillating, insufficient or wrong-headed men. Even the trusty Camillo, who

          would not be a stander-by to hear
My sovereign mistress clouded so, without
My present vengeance taken,

(I.ii. 279)

—even Camillo, when the opportunity presents itself, offers no ‘vengeance’ and fails even to ‘stand by’. For all his solicitude, he leaves his sovereign mistress to her fate. The only man amongst them all, it would seem, is Mamillius.

And indeed, as Paulina pitches into Leontes (and as her husband stands modestly back, letting her ‘take the rein’), there's a strong suggestion that it is only amongst the women that any steadfastness, fidelity or courage is to be found. ‘Emilia,’ (the Queen's faithful attendant) is a name that had occurred to Shakespeare before in this context; and the glancing identifications of Paulina with Dame Partlet the hen and Lady Margery Midwife strengthen the impression of female solidarity in a weak-male-dominated world. Men who are so easily ‘unroosted’ as these, one rather feels, deserve to be ‘woman-tir'd’—or hen-pecked, as we would say (II.iii. 74-5).

The tone of all this is curious. Though dreadful things are happening in Act 2 (primarily to Hermione) and though we are even presented with a full-frontal view of attempted infanticide, there is an insidious and pervasive comedy of the sexes in the handling of it all. The treatment of Leontes, in particular, brings him dangerously close to buffoonery.

Polixenes is perhaps an exception: he is allowed a partial rehabilitation before his flight. In the hasty confabulation with Camillo that ends Act 1, his sense of the enormity of the disaster does him credit, even if his timidity before its consequences doesn't:

                                        This jealousy
Is for a precious creature; as she's rare,
Must it be great; and as his person's mighty,
Must it be violent; and as he does conceive
He is dishonour'd by a man who ever
Profess'd to him, why, his revenges must
In that be made more bitter.

(I.ii. 451)

But the thing I find striking about this résumé, with all its concatenated ‘musts’, is its tendency to exonerate Leontes. Far from finding something monstrous in the King's suspicion, Polixenes thinks it all too intelligible. He, too, is a male. And it's as if, in meeting the reddened eye of that jealousy, he is being forced to acknowledge kinship; as if he races over the sequence of escalating violences with the swift comprehension of an accomplice. Because this is the way his mind works, he presents it as the way any man's mind must work. As he says, ‘Fear o'ershades me’. But it is less a fear of Leontes' rage against himself, fear of the ‘bespic'd cup’ and the ‘lasting wink’, than a fear of himself, the self he recognises in Leontes, that sends him packing in such indecent haste. We may be glad for even that degree of self-knowledge; but under the overshading wings of the fear, Hermione gets consigned to a troubled parenthesis:

Good expedition be my friend, and comfort
The gracious Queen, part of his theme, but nothing
Of his ill-ta'en suspicion! Come, Camillo …

(I.ii. 458)

Camillo regularly receives critical commendations as ‘the Good Counsellor’. But how he and Polixenes can fail to see that their flight will give to the ‘ill-ta'en suspicion’ a weight amounting almost to proof, is really quite stupefying. The only explanation is that, in their anxiety for their own skins, they have effectively forgotten the plight of ‘the gracious Queen’. ‘'Tis safer to / Avoid what's grown than question how 'tis born.’ And so, from that fine and ancient male mess created by first deifying women as ‘precious’ / ‘gracious’ / ‘sacred’, and then treating them as property, the males flee in confusion. Which is easy for them to do because, of course, they ‘command / The keys of all the posterns’. They leave Hermione, as it were, holding the baby. Or—if we count Leontes—the babies.

All of which may sound like post-feminist anachronism. But the Shakespeare of Sonnet 143 was able to picture himself as a loudly crying infant, trailing after his mother-mistress, begging her to ‘play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind’. He was perfectly capable, surely, of noticing such behaviour in another man.

To Hermione as mother-mistress, at all events, the husband proves much more of a burden than the daughter in her womb, or the son at her skirts. Mamillius emerges with much credit: he really is ‘a gallant child’. When, with the fretfulness of advanced pregnancy, his mother pushes him away, he goes obediently and plays with the court ladies, waiting until she's ‘for him again’. Then he returns and tries (gallantly) to entertain her with one of his ‘powerful’ tales—though one notices the amusing difficulty he has in standing still while he tells it: ‘Nay, come, sit down: then on’ (like most small boys, Mamillius tends to narrate on the hoof).

All the intuitive sympathy for Hermione that's lacking in Leontes, overflows in Mamillius' small heart. The boy is so innocent of accusation that his father can even misconstrue his childish misery as chiming with his own:

                    To see his nobleness,
Conceiving the dishonour of his mother.
He straight declin'd, droop'd, took it deeply,
Fasten'd, and fix'd the shame on't in himself:
Threw off his spirit, his appetite, his sleep,
And downright languish'd.

(II.iii. 12, Folio punctuation)

For all the father's obtuseness about its cause, this behaviour is poignantly recognisable: a mute anguish of bewilderment, which will fasten and fix all the shame in itself rather than accuse those it loves. The irony is appalling. Mamillius' silent ‘languishing’ is sparing his father, amongst other things, the knowledge that he is conceiving the dishonour of his father, not his mother. Not that the child undertakes to judge between them: all he knows is that his father wants to kill his mother—from whom he has been violently snatched, like some pawn in an incomprehensible game. He fears he will never see her again. And the ‘mere [i.e. unconditional, absolute] conceit and fear’ this inspires is enough to destroy him.

Anyone who thinks the death of Mamillius is another of Shakespeare's ‘plot-postulates’ has something to learn about the grief of children over the rupture of family life. And the small pathos of his passing is made weightier by the insensitivity of the ‘gross and foolish sire’ with which it is contrasted.

The weight of the indictment that is accumulating against Leontes is, by now, so crushing that we may wonder how he can survive at all as an object of serious dramatic interest. He staggers and stammers under the onslaught of Paulina's scorn, bandies insults with his courtiers, is reduced to tweaking their noses and pulling their beards, he fumes and rages like a cardboard Herod, until it seems that the only action of which he can be the dynamic centre is one that will raise the participants (as Antigonus remarks)

                                        To laughter, as I take it,
If the good truth were known.

(II.i. 198)

Who can seriously care for such a man? The tragic matter has been dissipated, by indignity, into shallow farce.

Or would have been, if it weren't for two factors. The first concerns a primal role which is discernible through all Leontes' personal follies. A man's predicament can matter where the man himself does not. Drama, I've been arguing, naturally deals in the local and the specific of the knowable human psyche. But it need not stop there. It may also reveal ‘the translucence of the General in the Especial’—as Coleridge puts it, in a classic definition of the symbolic. And even the Especial of farcical stupidity can have this translucence. It has it, after all, in the opening scene of King Lear. There, the transcendent folly of Lear's action is backlit by another glow: it is not just folly we are witnessing, but the folly of the Father—of all fathers. And while the old fool's personality and proceedings command scant respect, the great primal force of the parental bond that burns and scorches through him is so vast as to require a theatre almost cosmic for its accommodation.

In a similar way, the acts of the contemptible, self-deluded, wilful Leontes are giving us the folly of The Husband—a perennial, possibly incurable folly from which none of us who are male can claim exemption (perhaps not even those of us who are female, since it takes two to tango to the jealousy tune). We dare not, consequently, treat it with the contempt that it very possibly deserved. Fear o'ershades us. Touched at that level of panic and emptiness, would we make out any better?

The second factor which rescues the action from contempt is, of course, the presence (and she is quite astonishingly ‘present’) of Hermione. Harrowed but calm, displaying a kind of serenity in her very anguish, she manages, somehow, to continue caring for Leontes—thus rescuing him narrowly from contempt. She is the good Queen. Paulina is right to insist on the word:

Good Queen, my lord, good Queen—I say good Queen;
And would by combat make her good, so were I
A man, the worst about you.

If anyone deserves to be called ‘good’ (using the word properly—not abusing it like the knuckle-headed males who imagine a woman can be made good by the bawling of challenges and the swashing of buckles), it is Hermione. A good Queen. One of the things Leontes is going to have to learn is the meaning of these simple words: ‘good’; ‘love’; ‘warm’. So Paulina drums the lesson into him: ‘I say good Queen’.

Hermione's palpable goodness has proved something of a snare to criticism. Commentators have tended to exclaim raptly, ‘'Tis Grace indeed!’ and then to subside into mindless adoration of a notably theological tinge. The apotheosis of femininity swiftly follows. As we've seen, Hermione suffers this misappropriation quite enough at the hands of other people in the play, without the critics joining in. And incidentally, editors have no business compounding the offence by giving grace a capital ‘G’. It's true that the Folio compositor tends to capitalise every second noun in his text, and ‘grace’ is one of them; but that's no reason for removing all the other capitals, leaving grace enjoying a specious prominence—wearing a halo, as it were. With a Hermione around, there is no need to signal transcendence so crudely. We can put ‘grace’ back into lower-case, and keep the question of its divine origins properly fluid.

Not that I want in the least to deny Hermione grace. We have seen her in Act 1, percipient, tactful, troubled, warm, making her way carefully through the tangled thickets of Leontes' misprision and self-doubt towards the honourable ‘love’ which can include both him and his friend, yet betray none of her integrity either—

                    such a kind of love as might become
A lady like me.

(III.ii. 62)

That is grace. That is ‘rare’—to use another of the play's favourite value-words. To know that there is a whole gamut of feelings properly called ‘love’, which are not rivals and competitors, but kin to each other, is rare.

Equally rare, in the face of a stunning calumny from one who should ‘best know’ otherwise, is this:

                                        Should a villain say so,
The most replenish'd villain in the world,
He were as much more villain; you, my lord,
Do but mistake.

(II.i. 78)

Integrity usually lies close to obstinacy: you honour your own truth, like Coriolanus, but at some cost to the truth of those around you. Not so Hermione. Her integrity has none of that stiffness. It is wounded, but it does not shrivel into self-righteousness. Its ear is quick, its eye observant, and its amour-propre too secure to be suddenly stung into vituperation. But it is not all charitable self-effacement either. It has its own exactly measured intransigence, an austerity of emotion which knows what does and does not ‘become’ it, and which finds its restraints within itself. This intransigence, Hermione is perfectly aware, will be open to misconstruction. But it is a part of her self and she is not ashamed of it:

                              Good my lords,
I am not prone to weeping, as our sex
Commonly are—the want of which vain dew
Perchance shall dry your pities—but I have
That honourable grief lodg'd here which burns
Worse than tears drown. …
The King's will be perform'd.

(II.i. 107)

If you're in any doubt about the fine poise of this sincerity, you need only compare the prickly defensiveness of Hamlet, when his sincerity of grief is questioned and he claims to ‘have that within which passes show’:

Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not seems.

To find a voice simultaneously, for the ‘honourable grief’, for the outrage she's submitted to, for her personal dignity, and for the impersonal concern that survives all these … this would seem an impossible task. But Hermione, miraculously, finds it:

                                        Adieu, my lord.
I never wish'd to see you sorry; now
I trust I shall.

(II.i. 122)

That grave measured speech, saddened yet dry-eyed, reproachful without sanctimony, angered without egotism, gives us the whole woman she is—a woman strong enough to wish upon her husband the misery to which his deeds have entitled him:

                                                                      now
I trust I shall.

The word ‘trust’ is very exactly chosen: it is her trust in his better nature which reveals to her the necessity of his sorrow. And with all the impersonal austerity of love, she ‘trusts’ he will undergo it.

That is ‘grace’. And it is far too rich and human a quality to be abandoned to the theologians, indeed, the theologians wouldn't be interested in the word if it didn't have that richness.

You may be wondering how I can feel so secure against ‘theologians’ when this incarnation of womanly grace is to return as a holy statue and be ‘resurrected’ by awakened ‘faith’. Objection noted. But this is a play which rewards being read forwards, and I propose to defer reading it backwards until the simpler method breaks down. I remain impenitently interested in what ‘happens’. After all, it was good enough for Shakespeare's first audience; why shouldn't it be good enough for us?

Meanwhile, in prison, Hermione gives birth to a ‘poor prisoner’—a clear case, it would seem, of the ‘imposition … Hereditary ours’ being entailed upon the infant. But the guilt turns out here to be conditional, not absolute:

                              A daughter, and a goodly babe,
Lusty, and like to live. The Queen receives
Much comfort in't; says ‘My poor prisoner,
I am as innocent as you.’

(II.ii. 27)

James Smith, no doubt, would find this heterodox; and I'm sure it is. Hermione doesn't make the orthodox comparison between two sinful inheritors of Adam's guilt—which would give ‘You are as innocent as I.’ She looks at the child—‘The innocent milk in it most innocent mouth’—and, with her characteristic neglect of the categories of guilt, claims parity: ‘I am as innocent as you.’ The essential depravity of infants has always been a difficult doctrine to impose on the human imagination and Hermione's thought is clearly running in another direction when she takes the baby in her arms and ‘receives / Much comfort in't’. She is looking at a creature which, with its very first ‘wawl and cry’, has answered heaven boldly, ‘Not guilty’. It is a sight that fortifies her in her own innocence—which is all very natural … but not very Christian.

No more Christian is Paulina's interpretation of the omen:

This child was prisoner to the womb, and is
By law and process of great Nature thence
Freed and enfranchis'd.

(II.ii. 59)

She's talking, of course, about the child's juridical right to leave a literal prison. But it's one of those utterances that reverberates through the whole play, enunciating a general truth about the phenomenon of birth. The baby is not just released from restraint (‘freed’), but given a positive place, as of right, in the human community (enfranchisement: ‘the incorporating of a man to be free of a Company or Body Politique’, as Coke has it [OED, 2a]). A new citizen is set unconditionally on the earth. The slate is wiped clean. Whatever the sins of the fathers, now we begin afresh.

Shakespeare knows all about Original Sin, certainly; he may personally have believed in it, we shall never know; but its writ, it seems, is not to run here. There is a higher court of appeal, that of great nature (or ‘Nature’, if you prefer—but then we'd better follow Folio consistently and capitalise ‘Child’ and ‘Law’ as well—it's the same problem of modernisation as with ‘grace’).

I don't want to labour the point about Shakespeare's ‘naturalism’; but I don't want, either, to ignore the extraordinary resonance of Paulina's pronouncement. Long before the arrival of the cheery amoralist, Autolycus, Shakespeare is preparing the soil in which those daffodils of his begin to peer. He has already made out the red blood reigning (or ‘raigning’—the Folio spelling keeps open a happy word-play) in the winter's pale. The tight moralism of sin/fault/guilt is slackening its grip as humanity is enfranchised in that ordinary recurrent miracle—spring, birth, great nature. The entailment and bondage melts away as the merely mental thing it was. Other forces in fact govern the world. Leontes is no more than a jealous tyrant usurping his power. He has no jurisdiction over new life.

He does however have power, alarming power, over this particular instance of new life. And the rest of the First Movement goes on to show the havoc he can still wreak with this limited power. Shakespeare may be vindicating the sovereignty of ‘great creating nature’, but it's no part of his project to minimise the capacity of human nature to thwart and destroy. That would make the demonstration a very shallow affair indeed. Both Hermione and Paulina underestimate that destructive capacity—with results that are nearly fatal to Perdita, that ‘Poor thing, condemn'd to loss’.

A lot of people besides Leontes, actually, seem to be involved in doing the condemning. Antigonus, for instance, may not be as pusillanimous as the other lords (or as his wife believes him), but he does nevertheless make rather a fetish of his feudal obligations, faithfully performing a vow that is morally repugnant to him. And though he eases his passage with rationalisations drawn from his dreams, this hardly raises him in our estimation, since we know his conclusion to be mistaken. And Paulina—I don't know how it strikes other readers?—is surely taking a gigantic risk, which it's not hers to take, when she trusts to a ‘better nature’ of which there has been not one sign, and leaves the baby to Leontes' tender mercies. In Hermione the project was forgivable: she hadn't seen the implacable obscene fury of the man who had been her husband against his own offspring. But Paulina has, and still she lays down the little bundle, consigning it, for all she knows, to the furnace its father wants it instantly consumed in. Her action does have the effect of dramatising the unthinkableness of the thing Leontes now does, but it seems pretty foolhardy none the less.

Perhaps such speculations are marginal—mistaking the ‘mode’. Certainly, as Antigonus takes up the bundle (and it would have been, of course, no more than that on Shakespeare's stage) we are not too much afeard. Something in the air is changing. A web of mythopoeic magic is being woven and cast over the savagery of the act. A fresh breeze blows from a new quarter. And there is invisible music, borne over the waves, perhaps, from ‘Delphos’ (Shakespeare's imaginary amalgam of mountain Delphi and island Delos, a place of delicate climate and sweet air, fertile, ceremonious, solemn and unearthly):

                                        Come on, poor babe.
Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens
To be thy nurses! Wolves and bears, they say,
Casting their savageness aside, have done
Like offices of pity. Sir, be prosperous
In more than this deed does require! And blessing
Against this cruelty fight on thy side,
Poor thing, condemn'd to loss.

(II.iii. 184)

Music it unmistakably is—a mere possibility of feeling substantiated into harmonious sound. For its validation it depends upon ‘some powerful spirit’, for no one can pretend that nature is necessarily benign to this tune; yet the powerful spirit is already present in the music of its own utterance.

Antigonus has scarcely departed before the messengers from Delphos are announced, their mouths full of prosperity, and their hearts brimming with the hope of ‘something rare’ that is about to ‘rush to knowledge’. The pace quickens with delectable haste:

                                        Go; fresh horses.
And gracious be the issue.

(III.i. 21)

‘Issue’, Molly Mahood has pointed out, is a rich word here. The ‘issue’, as Paulina has described it—from its frown, its ‘pretty dimples’, right down to its ‘mould and frame of hand, nail, finger’—is indeed gracious. But we have just seen it nevertheless ‘hal'd out to murder’. The whole action is poised between a kind of holy hope—which is, in the end, to make the issue more gracious than we could ever have imagined—and a kind of despairing disgust at Leontes' obscene persistence in his ‘weak-hing'd fancy’. The trial must settle it all. We refer ourselves to the oracle.

If tragedy involves our feeling, upon the very pulses of life, the possibility that life is not worth the having, then, in the Trial Scene, we touch upon tragedy—Hermione's tragedy:

                                        For life, I prize it
As I weigh grief, which I would spare.

(III.ii. 40)

More than any statement could do, the numbing cadence gives us the flatness of her misery. Life is not an unconditional good, to be clutched at any cost. For those who think it is, she feels only a pitying scorn:

                              Sir, spare your threats.
The bug which you would fright me with, I seek.

And she goes on to show how easily, with the removal of a few simple ‘comforts’, life may become utterly barren:

To me can life be no commodity.
The crown and comfort of my life, your favour,
I do give lost, for I do feel it gone,
But know not how it went; my second joy
And first fruits of my body, from his presence
I am barr'd, like one infectious; my third comfort,
Starr'd most unluckily, is from my breast—
The innocent milk in it most innocent mouth—
Hal'd out to murder; myself on every post
Proclaim'd a strumpet; with immodest hatred
The child-bed privilege denied, which 'longs
To women of all fashion; lastly, hurried
Here to this place, i'th'open air, before
I have got strength of limit. Now, my liege,
Tell me what blessings I have here alive
That I should fear to die.

(III.ii. 89)

Shakespeare can always write wonderfully for the female voice. Boy-actors notwithstanding, you never mistake his women for men. But I think he never so wonderfully caught the power of a woman's voice as here—its capacity to be all feeling and flexibility, yet at the same time implacable as steel. She faces the devastation, in full possession of her faculties, and in full knowledge of her loss, yet without blenching. That is how it is. Life can always be stripped of these things. You feel them gone, yet know not how they went. What can a mere death matter, after that?

And yet, in the authentically tragic way, her contempt of death is giving us, in extremis, the value of the life that still persists to scorn it. All the sanctities—the crown and comfort of married love, the physical presence of children, the intimacy of the breast, even the fundamental decencies of social respect—have all been violated; but Hermione's high courage survives to despise the despoiled life they have left her to. It's because she knows what life can be worth, that she scorns to prolong it on these terms. ‘The value of what was destroyed’, as D. W. Harding put it, speaking of Rosenberg's war poetry, has been ‘brought into sight only by the destruction’ (Experience into Words, 1963, p.96).

At this point in the action it is, I believe, unthinkable that there can be any return to an equable domesticity. Hermione has been driven too far out into that comfortless asocial wilderness where the tragic individual makes up his accounts with the life ‘which [he] would spare’. Her solitude is final. So is her estrangement. Leontes, suddenly catapulted back into the real world a few minutes later, may talk breathlessly of reconciliation, of ‘new-wooing’ his Queen. With the weight of obsession lifted from his own heart, facile hope floods over him:

Her heart is but o'ercharg'd; she will recover.

(III.ii. 147)

‘But o'ercharg'd’!—it shows a terrible ignorance of the human heart in general, and of Hermione's in particular! Mamillius' heart, too, was ‘but o'ercharg'd.’ But we in the audience can hardly countenance his programme of reparation. His situation is like the one that Clytemnestra holds out for Agamemnon's contemplation, as he resolves upon the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia:

                              When you return at last
To Argos, after the war, will you embrace
And kiss your daughters and your son? God forbid!
It would be sacrilege. For do you suppose
Any child of yours, when you have sent
A sister to her death, would ever look
Upon your face again, or in your eyes?

(Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, trans. C. R. Walker, 1958, 1.1191)

Or any wife? we might add. No. God forbid! It would be sacrilege.

The point is worth making strongly, so that the magnitude of the task Shakespeare has set himself will be manifest. For, although the audience is being given no inkling of it here, he is planning a ‘return’ for his Agamemnon—and not to the butchering and avenging axe of the outraged mother. The temerity of it is staggering. The scheme would seem doomed to disaster—an outrage upon both probability and justice.

Stripped of the continuities of her life—her marriage and her children—Hermione does, however, keep her hold on one or two impersonal continuities which may survive the wreck. As always, her vision extends beyond the vortex into which she is being personally sucked.

She is concerned, firstly, for her honour—not out of vanity, but because

'Tis a derivative from me to mine,
And only that I stand for.

(III.ii. 42)

She knows that the life she prizes ‘not a straw’ for herself, will nevertheless go on for others. And they must not suffer needlessly. Leontes must be obliged, therefore, to produce better proofs than his jealousies, and to observe law, not rigour. ‘Apollo be my judge.’

Nor does she allow her personal catastrophe to draw her into recriminations against the universe at large, as a meaner spirit might have been drawn:

                                        But thus—if pow'rs divine
Behold our human actions, as they do,
I doubt not then but innocence shall make
False accusation blush.

(III.ii. 26)

Not to doubt at such a moment shows a brave magnanimity, especially since she holds out to herself no hope of their intervention, only of their beholding. But she has her priorities lucidly clear, and accusing the gods of indifference is not one of them.

And there is one other task she has in hand. It is, if you like, a task of instruction for her obstinate husband, in the matter of Polixenes. He shall not again, if she can help it, confound every important distinction by dividing the integrity of ‘love’ into two halves, one innocent, the other guilty. Leontes wants to make over her love for his friend, into a ‘vice’:

LEON.
                              I ne'er heard yet
That any of these bolder vices wanted
Less impudence to gainsay what they did
Than to perform it first.
HERM.
                                                                                                              That's true enough;
Though 'tis a saying, sir, not due to me.
LEON.
You will not own it.
HERM.
                                                                                More than mistress of
Which comes to me in name of fault, I must
                                                            not
At all acknowledge.

II.ii. 52)

If boldness signals vice then, yes, she will be vicious in refusing the mere ‘name’ of vice. But that is not the issue. That is not what she ‘stands for’. She stands out here for the proper use of the word ‘love’, which she knows he wants to deny her. And as (to his mounting fury) she goes on repeating the word in the most vexing of contexts, one can see what her bold intransigence is bent on preserving. It is an essential verity, an emotional truth without which she does not care to have even his love:

                                        For Polixenes,
With whom I am accus'd, I do confess
I lov'd him …

(and her voice rises to bear down the expected objection: ‘No, Leontes, you will not stop me using the word!’)

… lov'd him as in honour he requir'd;

(‘I refuse, you see, to set love and honour at odds, as you are doing.’)

With such a kind of love as might become
A lady like me; with a love even such,
So and no other, as yourself commanded;
Which not to have done, I think had been in me
Both disobedience and ingratitude
To you and toward your friend; whose love …

(‘Yes, it is the same word, because it is the same thing’)

                                        … whose love had spoke,
Even since it could speak, from an infant, freely,
That it was yours.

(III.ii. 59)

I find it almost irresistible that the woman who speaks these lines is discovering that it had been no kindness to cosset Leontes in his jealous possessiveness, with continual assurances of love. If they are to have any future relations, it cannot be on that basis. He must understand that there are many levels of affection in her nature, all properly called ‘love’, and, in the name of human dignity, he cannot expect to monopolise them all. If he knew his own good, he wouldn't want to. He would value her ‘liberty’, her ‘bounty’, her ‘fertile bosom’ for the generosities of nature they are. He would see that they well become the agent—a lady like her. And he would be glad that she was such a lady.

In Act 1 Leontes had glimpsed how these qualities might become her; but, finding them perhaps too hard to live up to, he took the easier, more squalid course of believing them to be merely ‘a free face put on’. Possibly—for their marriage—the instruction now comes too late; but Hermione has decided that, not even for him, will she be any other lady. That is why she puts the stakes so high, why she sets his magnanimity such a searching test: she wants reconciliation at no lower rate.

Leontes seems not to hear her offer. Indeed, he only hears the words of Apollo sufficiently to note that they will not serve his obsession, and then to dismiss them with a casual wave of the hand:

There is no truth at all i'th' oracle.
The sessions shall proceed. This is mere falsehood.

(III.ii. 127)

The stunned, incredulous silence into which this falls is broken by the running Servant, and Leontes begins to pay the price of his ‘great profaneness’.

Except that it isn't he who does the paying. It is Mamillius; and Hermione; and (far away, over on the stormy, bear-encrusted shores of Bohemia) Antigonus. Which is no kind of justice, poetic or otherwise. By its own natural unfolding, the play has generated this new, and very vexing ‘problem’. You may say that, for the purposes of the fable, Mamillius and Antigonus no longer ‘count’. But they did once; and you can't claim to have solved an equation when you have simply altered the values of some of its terms. Nor can you solve it by wantonly introducing new terms (Autolycus, Perdita, the Shepherds) to which you then assign any value you choose. And the central term, Hermione, lives on, at least in Leontes' memory (if not in Paulina's chapel), with a value quite undiminished, which denies the very possibility of a solution.

In short, there is every sign—and many readers have taken the signs to be conclusive—that Shakespeare has checkmated himself. He can only gather up the shreds of his tattered fable by beginning all over again, on brand-new premisses: another generation, another country, and, by the way, the wench was not dead. And then, really to set the tone, he calls in that old Joker, Time, to warm up the studio-audience, in case they don't laugh in the right places.

That's no way to write a play! Has the old master's hand finally lost its cunning?

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