SOURCE: Curtright, Travis. “Reconsidering the Tragic Aspects of Leontes: Death and Laughter in The Winter's Tale.” English Language Notes 40, no. 1 (September 2002): 43-57.

[In the following essay, Curtright challenges the critical position that Leontes displays characteristics of a tragic hero, arguing instead that Shakespeare envisioned him as a melodramatic villain who would evoke laughter from a Jacobean audience.]

If Hamlet is Shakespeare's most enigmatic depiction of a tragic character's confused motivations, then Leontes might be his comedic counterpart. As audiences are mystified why Hamlet does not act, they are equally perplexed why Leontes does. Like Mona Lisa's smile, Leontes's sudden jealousy, murder attempt, and rage invite speculation, which on reflection seems inadequate; such is the history of criticism on Leontes as well. Some commentators attempt to pinpoint the moment of his jealousy with the hope of explaining it in terms of early modern ideas of melancholy¹ or, more recently, in light of “mimetic desire;”² another group believes he must have been jealous before the action of the play begins; still others ignore the exact moment in which jealousy emerges, but argue that his jealousy is well founded.³ With all of these criticisms, however, the assumption is the same: Leontes is a tragi-comic hero whose actions account for the tragedy within The Winter's Tale. In this essay I argue that Leontes lacks the nobility and grandeur of a tragic hero, and, as a result, the play's first three acts are less tragic than critics believe. Instead of tragic intensity, I suggest that Robert Heilman's “world of melodrama” is at work in the early Leontes. Heilman writes in explanation of melodrama's difference from tragedy: “The issue here is not the reordering of the self, but the reordering of one's relations with others, with the world of people or things; not the knowledge of self but the maintenance of self, in its assumption of wholeness, until conflicts are won or lost.”⁴ I think that Leontes is more of a melodramatic villain than a tragic hero, but a villain whose emotional extremes Shakespeare lightly satirizes throughout the play.⁵ By exploring Leontes's character in the context of villainy exaggerated for the sake of laughter, I hope to correct previous interpretations that emphasize the tragic tone of Leontes's jealousy in the first three acts of the play. To the contrary of evoking pity and fear, I believe that Shakespeare intends his audience to laugh at Leontes's brand of villainy and the disasters it causes from the beginning so that even death may be laughed away, which The Winter's Tale emphasizes by Hermione's return. After examining Leontes's character as comic villain in the first three acts, I turn to the play's ending so that Leontes may be understood in light of Shakespeare's overall treatment of death in the play.

In his emendations on The Winter's Tale, Samuel Johnson includes a commentary on Leontes's sudden conversion at the end of act three. He writes: “This vehement retraction of Leontes, accompanied with the confession of more crimes than he was suspected of, is agreeable to our daily experience of the vicissitudes of violent tempers …”⁶ For Johnson, the jealousy and its retraction is no cause for investigation; it is an ordinary symptom of a man enslaved to violent, sudden moods. Johnson understood Leontes as significantly less complex than recent critics have considered him. As “violent tempers” quickly turn admiration to disdain, Leontes can love Polixenes in one moment and despise him in the next. The characters closest to Leontes, I believe, share Johnson's understanding of him. Given the relationship of Leontes as king to his surrounding subjects, such a low opinion results in an unexpected—comic—incongruity: Everyone finds the king ridiculous whom all should admire. By documenting how Shakespeare presents Leontes in juxtaposition to other characters, and by noting how other characters assess Leontes, a comic portrait of his character is discovered, which all the critical focus on the word “affection” has missed.⁷

Leontes is seen on stage for the first time with his wife, Hermione. They both invite Polixenes to remain in Sicily, and in their contrasting invitations, Leontes's ineptitude is unintentionally illustrated by Hermione's excellent wit. In asking Polixenes to remain, Leontes is brief, blunt, and unrefined. “One sev'nnight longer” is the climax of his appeal.⁸ In comparison to Hermione, Leontes looks strikingly inferior. For the sake of illustrating what Leontes should have said, Shakespeare details Hermione's appeal to Polixenes. Hermione first relieves Polixenes's worries over the affairs in Bohemia: “All in Bohemia's well; this satisfaction / The by-gone day proclaim'd” (I. i. 31-32). By mentioning the recent messages about Bohemia's state, she eliminates Polixenes's excuse to return home out of duty. Hermione next addresses Polixenes's concern to be with his son by giving assurances that the affection felt for him in Sicily recompenses for the affection lost in being away from family (I. ii. 34-444). After assuaging Polixenes's genuine concerns, she playfully threatens him to stay either as her guest or as her prisoner (I. ii. 51-53). Hermione's appeal shows perspicuous insight, tact, and playful audacity; in short, it is everything Leontes's appeal should have been, but was not. Although Shakespeare does not yet present a hilarious or dangerous Leontes, he begins by revealing an obtuse man, who childishly begs when he should be artful: Leontes is a character whose natural gifts are ill suited for his position.⁹ Leontes's defects are highlighted by Hermione's virtues, but this contrast is the means by which the elements of a situational comedy, one in which an oaf is placed in command of refined individuals, is set in motion.

The tension between such a leader and group of subjects is manifested immediately when Leontes orders Camillo to murder Polixenes. Leontes possesses none of the awe surrounding an Othello in giving his commands: One could imagine Cassio obeying Othello's order of execution, but for Leontes even the respectful Camillo will refuse. The two banter back and forth like Wodehouse's Wooster and Jeeves rather than admired king and obedient servant. As Leontes questions in panic—“Is whispering nothing? / Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?” (I. ii. 284-285)—Camillo remains stoic, “Good my lord, be cur'd / Of this diseas'd opinion” (I. ii. 296-297). In an unusual rebuke for a servant to give his master, Camillo hints that Leontes has thrown such unbecoming tantrums before, but that this one is the worst: “You never spoke what did become you less / Than this” (I. ii. 282-283). In the quick exchanges between Leontes and Camillo, Shakespeare presents a feverish Leontes; he exclaims his questions in short indignant words in the face of Camillo's dry statements of fact. “Ha?” questions Leontes; “Ay, but why?” he continues; “Satisfy? Th'entreaties of your mistress? Satisfy?” Leontes concludes (I. ii. 230-235). The ironic mania comes to a point when an emotional Leontes implores his servant to insult his wife by admitting she is a “hobby-horse.”

Ha' not you seen, Camillo
(But that's past doubt; you have, or your eye-glass
Is thicker than a cuckold's horn), or heard
(For to a vision so apparent rumor
Cannot be mute), or thought (for cogitation
Resides not in that man that does not think)
My wife is slippery? If thou wilt confess,
Or else be impudently negative,
To have nor eyes nor ears nor thought, then say
My wife's a hobby-horse, deserves a name
As rank as any flax-wench, that puts to
Before her troth-plight: say't and justify't.

(I. ii. 268-278)

This interchange should be played with a screaming Leontes, who continually pulls back to justify his paranoia before lashing out again, in front of an unflappable Camillo; a Leontes who begins by lightly satirizing Paul's famous “eye hath not seen nor ear heard” exhortation with glee before he concludes remorsefully, realizing he has confounded himself, with vulgarities like “hobby-horse,” and “flax-wench.”¹⁰ A man who confuses his figures of speech by misapplying scripture's sacred tone to billingsgate, but does so unwittingly, is one of Shakespeare's signs of buffoonery, and the actor should suit his performance with Leontes's mistakes in mind.¹¹ In this interchange with Camillo, Leontes uses parenthetical remarks three times so that his suspicions might seem justifiable, but, ironically, in so doing he only obfuscates the evidence of adultery—Camillo's wonder over such an accusation only increases with Leontes's speech. Leontes argues in a series of disjunctives that translate into either agreement with him or the impossible. Camillo must see the adulterous affair or he is a cuckold himself; Camillo must hear of the affair because the readily apparent cannot be missed by rumor; Camillo must think there is an affair because man possesses the capacity for reason. Antithetically playing with Paul's description of heaven, Leontes substitutes his version of the obvious for Paul's vision of supernatural bliss: eyes, ears, and thought must recognize the evil things in store for Leontes. The greatest absurdity is the passion with which Leontes urges the very thing he hopes against, Hermione's adultery. Like the audience, Camillo is appropriately flabbergasted by the imperative, “say't and justify't.” If Hermione introduces a situational comedy by showing Leontes inferiority, then Camillo shows that this inferiority is such that it descends into Leontes's relationships with his servants.

We should also observe that in Leontes's tantrum none of the inner dividedness of a tragic hero is displayed. Hamlet, Macbeth, or Othello exhibit a self-consciousness with respect to their actions (either just or unjust) and their changing emotional states, but for Leontes there is never an inner crisis of choice, nor a soliloquy that agonizes over his moral or political decisions, nor moments in which he fluctuates from anger to serenity, violence to philosophy. Leontes is monopathic in his convictions that Hermione is disloyal, and that his subjects have betrayed him. Observing the psychological differences between a tragic character and a melodramatic villain, Heilman writes:

The pathological extreme of the tragic condition is schizophrenia, where normal divideness is magnified into a split that is sheer illness. The pathological extreme of the melodramatic condition is paranoia—in one phase, the sense of one's own grandeur and, implicitly, of the downfall of others; in another phase, the sense of a hostile “they” who are conspiring to make one their victim.¹²

The pathological divide that weds a tragic hero's excellence to his fault is missing in Leontes; he is wholly evil in his persecutions (acts 2 and 3), but wholly good in his penance (act 5). The co-existence of contrary thoughts and feelings at climatic moments of choice in heroes such as Hamlet is absent from Leontes; more than that, the excellence of thought (Hamlet), or courage (Macbeth), or magnanimity (Othello) does not exist in Leontes either when he plays the villain or the penitent. But if Leontes lacks the sheer terror created by a jealous Othello pursuing vengeance, he does manifest the melodramatic villain's “paranoia” that assumes his own grandeur and the downfall of any who oppose him. The difficulty that Shakespeare presents with Leontes's paranoia is that it expands into comical extremes; indeed, Leontes's dictum that “All's true that is mistrusted” becomes the touchstone by which his servants fail to take his commands seriously. As Leontes moves from his conflicts with Camillo to Paulina, his sense of paranoia transforms into laughable villainy; he becomes a man who instigates snickering in place of fear for the audience. Instead of depicting a tragic hero, Shakespeare shows a melodramatic villain, but a villain whose emotional extremes occasion comedy.

Subjects patronizing Leontes begins with Camillo, but it is perfected with Paulina. When Paulina presents Hermione's child to Leontes, she takes liberties in speech that are unimaginable if used against a more noble character than Leontes. Emilia may repeat “My husband?” with incredulity at Desdemona's death, but she may not chastise Othello to the same degree as Paulina does Leontes; the Moor is too great a soul.¹³ Paulina begins by emphasizing her deputation from Leontes's “good queen”: “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” (II. iii. 60-62). Her repetition becomes comic: “The good queen / (For she is good) hath brought you forth a daughter” (II. iii. 65-66). As Gratiano thanked Shylock for the proclamation of “another Daniel” so that he might use it against him, Paulina borrows Leontes's questioning of Hermione's goodness for abuse.¹⁴ The scene escalates as Paulina's accusations become more intense and Leontes's anger waxes. During this time, Antigonus and the other lords are conspicuously lethargic in obeying their king. Leontes proposes that Antigonus's disobedience comes from fear of his wife; Paulina screams that Leontes is a slanderer enslaved by visions of his own fancy; meanwhile Antigonus replies to Leontes's accusations with curses on all husbands, and Leontes threatens that Paulina will be burnt (II. iii. 75-120). In this chorus of accusations, Leontes's threats to Paulina are suddenly dissolved by her suggestion that he might be behaving tyrannically. By Paulina's magnificent comic understatement the accusing section ends, incredibly enough, with Leontes's switching to the defensive in an equal passion, “Were I tyrant / Where were her life? She durst not call me so” (II. ii. 122-123). Ignoring Paulina for the moment, Leontes is here appealing to the opinion of the same lords whom he cursed for disobedience just an instant before. Never does Shakespeare present a monarch so dependent on the opinion of his servants, nor is there a monarch as insecure.¹⁵ Paulina's appeal to Leontes includes the comic elements of the bizarre and topsy-turvy: a servant's abuse of a king initiates a triangle of accusations in which the lords, standing with Paulina outside the king's chamber, are condemned; then a pause ensues with Paulina's consideration of whether Leontes is a tyrant; next the accusations are replaced by defenses, and the lords upgraded to judges. Paulina, Leontes, and Antigonus's role reversals and abuse work perfectly with their accusation and denials' manic pace and strange turns. In all of this, Shakespeare gives an example of Bahktin's carnival. The “peculiar logic” of the carnival is at work in the “continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings.”¹⁶ Leontes, Paulina, and Antigonus illustrate the carnival's “world inside out” in their hyper-banter.

Shakespeare sets the scene for Paulina's abuse of Leontes by indicating how an audience should respond to it. An audience, Shakespeare seems to suggest, should join Leontes's servants, who are already laughing at him. When Leontes discovers the flight of Camillo, he imprisons his wife; no sooner than she is jailed, however, Leontes is pre-occupied by the suspicion that people are bemused with his absurd behavior. Leontes reflects in private: “Camillo and Polixenes / Laugh at me; make their pastime at my sorrow” (II.ii. 23-24). He is concerned that there are others laughing as well. Leontes reproaches his lords for not believing him about Hermione, and, in an effort to silence the snickering, he sends Cleomines and Dion to Delphi. Leontes says: “Though I am satisfied, and need no more / Than what I know, yet shall the oracle / Give rest to th' minds of others—such as he [Antigonus], / Whose ignorant credulity will not / Come up to the truth” (II. i. 189-193). Leontes's accusation is not only highly ironic—he accuses Antigonus when his own opinion is the one unable to “come up to the truth”—but it is also representative of the lords' opinion about the kind of king Leontes is: He is a man whose moods must be tolerated on account of his position, but also ridiculed. Leontes must always justify himself to his servants because they find him to be absurd; to some extent, the servants understand Leontes's tantrums as bizarre spectacle. After mentioning the oracle, Leontes vows to make Hermione's trial public in hopes of raising popular indignation at her. At this, Antigonus speculates on Leontes effecting a different public reaction: “[Raising the people] To laughter, as I take it / If the good truth were known” (II. i. 199). Like the other lords and servants, Antigonus is no revolutionary; he is master of ceremonies in an underworld of justifiably impertinent chuckles. Whether from his wife, his lords, his personal servants, or even his wife's friends, Leontes receives smirks and badgering questions in response to his orders and ideas; those surrounding Leontes cannot take his commands seriously.

Secondary characters that challenge Leontes, like Paulina and Antigonus, reveal a paradigm for the audience's sympathies; we are sure that if others think Leontes insane to the point of carnival, then his orders will not stand. As a result of Paulina's furious play with Leontes, the audience feels nothing like the suspense experienced in tragedy—the suspense caused by foretelling the demise of a sympathetic hero before showing it in action—but joins in the servants' antipathies and abuse toward Leontes. The play cannot maintain both hope and terror around the same Leontes. Either the audience senses that the character is on a collision course with catastrophe as in tragedy, or they happily recognize his villainy will be corrected. Once Shakespeare winks in the direction of a happy ending, the formula for tragic characters is abrogated. Critics misread Leontes by searching for a tragic fault, or a cause for the tragic portion of the play:¹⁷ as a result, they miss the humor associated with Leontes's villainy, which his servants' disobedience indicates as a subject for ridicule.¹⁸ As the play moves towards resolution, Paulina expands her carnival not only with respect to the authority of Leontes, but even in regard to the authority of death. Turning to the restoration of Hermione, death is playfully overcome even as the villain whose orders initiate death is subdued; two villains, therefore, act in Leontes and in death. Both are considered with humor as they fuse into comedy's formula for happy endings.

After Hermione's trial and ostensible demise, Leontes is absent from the stage for an entire act. At the beginning of act 5, Leontes's counselors are attempting to persuade him to remarry; they argue that he has suffered enough and that the kingdom is in need of an heir (V.i. 27-29). Leontes obeys Paulina, however, following her command to refrain from marriage. Just as Paulina earlier manipulated Leontes's moods by suggesting his tyranny, she now cajoles Leontes now by triggering the emotions that overwhelm him. Before it was Leontes's desire for good opinion, now it is grief (V.i. 12-16; 34-35).¹⁹ In either case, Paulina realizes the swinging emotional extremes of Leontes should be monitored.

Shakespeare delays little in illustrating that although Leontes is penitent for his crimes he is still Sicily's clown; in this respect, Leontes is unchanged. Leontes quickly moves from the sorrow inspired by grief to the elation felt because of Perdita's beauty. On Florizel and Perdita's arrival, Leontes acknowledges Florizel's position—that social class is no impediment to marriage—before he mentions the possibility of marrying Perdita himself (V. i. 220-231). Once again, Leontes and Paulina resume their comic banter of earlier acts: Paulina's accusation that Leontes's “eye hath too much youth in't” receives Leontes's half-honest excuses that Perdita reminds him of Hermione (V. i. 225-229). The accusations and defenses between Paulina and Leontes are lighter than previous ones because Leontes returns to the model of a king subordinated to his subjects, which may have been his behavior before the jealous tantrum. Whether in jealousy or in love, however, the joke is still caused by Leontes. In loving Perdita he loves his own daughter.

After greeting Florizel and Perdita, next for Leontes is the restoration scene. In the restoration of Hermione, Shakespeare revisits the beginning of his play. Just as Leontes's reactions to Hermione and Camillo catalyzed the drama in the first part, his reactions to the waking statue are central now. In the first act, Leontes's belief that Hermione is false initiates the play's action, whereas in the last act Leontes's belief that Hermione's statue is life-like enough to be alive reveals the play's resolution. With a perfect symmetry, then, Shakespeare may conclude the significance of Leontes's actions by showing how comedy renders impotent both villainy and the deaths it causes.

When the statue is unveiled, Leontes is amazed, but, like a buffoon, he first notices the awkward details of the piece: “Her natural posture!” he exclaims insignificantly; “but yet, Paulina, Hermione was not so much wrinkled” Leontes criticizes with Perdita's youthful beauty in mind, rather than in gratitude for seeing the image of his queen once more (V. iii. 23; 27-28). Paulina explains that the statue is supposed to look as Hermione would look if she were alive today and Leontes is satisfied. As he expresses wonder and affection, however, he continues to be Shakespeare's unwitting ironist. In praising the life-like qualities of the statue, Leontes says: “The fixture of her has motion in't, / As we are mock'd with art” (V. iii. 67-68). Although the art is Shakespeare's here, the statue is not the art of Julio Romano. The statue is a living Hermione; she may move at any time, which means Leontes is truly being mocked when he gapes at her as if she were stone. Without the slightest suspicion that the statue is alive, Leontes exhibits a concern for being laughed at once again. Ever the man of insecurities and emotions, Leontes is overwhelmed by the likeness to Hermione and he resolves to kiss the statue—as long as no man mocks him for it. “What fine chisel / Could ever yet cut breath? / Let no man mock me, / For I will kiss her” (V. iii. 78-79). In these lines Leontes is still the same character of emotional extremes; still, however, Shakespeare uses Leontes's insecurities for his most poignant comments on the power of comedy. As Leontes is “mock'd by art,” so, too, is death mocked by Shakespeare's comedy. The “fine chisel” which may “cut breath” is Shakespeare's own art, which brings Hermione back from the dead for Leontes. As Hermione awakes and is returned to her family, we no longer laugh at Leontes the villain, but we laugh at that with which his antics are associated—death. Just as Leontes's antics and tantrums are exaggerated to the extent that even his servants fail to take their king seriously, so, too, is death's power and scope lightly removed by Paulina. Like two melodramatic villains, Leontes and death are extreme in their persecutions, but are rendered innocuous by those characters that refuse to take their commands and claims seriously.

It may be objected that Mamillius's death and Hermione's apparent demise are too dark to uphold such a reading of Leontes; to laugh at Leontes and the death he causes, after all, renders the division of the play into tragic and comic parts an error. Yet I think that laughing at death through Leontes's buffoonery is precisely the reading of The Winter's Tale Shakespeare indicates, and that this interpretation is echoed in other parts of the play. After Leontes causes Mamillius's death, for example, Shakespeare adds the deaths of Antigonus and his crew, only to follow it with the clown coaxing the audience into laughing at it. Antigonus's death is achieved by the wild stage direction—“Exit pursued by a bear”—before the clown further instructs the audience to consider death comically. He comments very cheerily to his father on the demise of Antigonus by land, and Antigonus's men by sea:

O, the most piteous cry of the poor souls!
Sometimes to see 'em, and not see 'em; now the
ship boring the moon with her mainmast, and anon
swallow'd with yest and froth, and you'ld thrust a
cork into a hogshead. And then for the land service,
to see how the bear tore out his shoulder-bone,
how he cried to me for help, and said his name was
Antigonus, a nobleman. But to make end of the
ship, to see how the sea flap-dragon'd it; but, first,
how the poor souls roar'd, the sea mock'd
them; and how the poor gentleman roar'd, and the
bear mock'd him, both roaring louder than the sea or
weather.

(III. iii. 90-102)

In the clown's repetition of the same words and those words' uniform brevity, his clauses achieve a parallelism which playfully mimic the ebb and flow of the waves he witnesses on the sea: “Sometimes to see 'em, and not to see 'em.” In his choice of subject matter, however, the clown uses the ebb and flow melody to alternate between scenes of death; the effect is a fearless fascination and excitement with death, which is refreshing and funny. The clown moves from one scene of death to another without empathy, but with thrills. He may hardly contain himself by the end: “but, first, how the poor souls roar'd, and the sea mock'd them; and how the poor gentleman roar'd, and the bear mock'd him, both roaring louder than the sea or weather.” The clown ends his parallelism with the roar of a bear, a symbol of death's power, which is now comically conceived. When the shepherd responds to the clown, he captures the significance for the audience of a comic posture with respect to death: “Now bless thyself: thou met'st with / things dying, I with things new-born” (III. iii. 113-114). The change indicated by the shepherd's words is not merely from Antigonus and his crew's death to new found life in Perdita, but in the new found comic perspective by which death may be considered. What once was characteristically feared and abhorred is now newborn as comedy. David Bergeron argues that Shakespeare writes his Winter's Tale under the influence of a civic pageant in which a figure called Time resurrects the dead, and, if his historical speculation is accurate, then the “things new-born” might have been recognized by Shakespeare's audience as a joyful conclusion to a comic overcoming of death.²⁰ Whatever might have influenced Shakespeare, however, he punctuates his victory over death in restoring Hermione by the play's end. The “new-born” joys spoken of by the shepherd are fully realized when Leontes is made merry with the restoration—an authentic resurrection to Leontes's eyes—of Hermione from the dead. The restoration of Hermione and its appearance as a resurrection to Leontes marks a Baroque-like triumph over death. Like Leontes's villainy, death is treated after the manner of exaggerated spectacles found in fairy tale and melodrama but re-made into Shakespearean comedy.

Notes

1. By defining the words “affection” and “intention” in terms of Timothy Bright's A Treatise on Melancholy (1586) and the vocabulary of Thomas Aquinas, Wright believes that a jealous seizure overcomes Leontes's capacity for reason. Wright argues that since Leontes's “rational faculty” is swept away by paranoia, then he cannot be a tragic figure. The “tragic-comic disruption,” Wright argues, occurs when Leontes's intellect succumbs to his mental illusions. I agree with Wright that Leontes is not a tragic character, but I think that such disqualification renders the entire tragi-comedy formula suspect. Leontes's “paranoia,” I suggest, places him in the context of a melodramatic villain, who emerges as a more laughable than fearful foe. See Laurence Wright, “Where Does The Tragi-Comic Disruption Start?: The Winter's Tale and Leontes' ‘Affection.’” English Studies 70.3 (1989): 225-32.

2. See Rene Girard, “The Crime and Conversion of Leontes in The Winter's Tale.” Religion and Literature 22.2-3 (1990): 193-219.

3. Norman Nathan takes a position between the view that Leontes is jealous before the play's action begins and the view that Leontes's jealousy is sudden and inexplicable: He thinks Leontes is jealous suddenly and with reason. The question of whether the jealousy is well founded or not, however, emerges only with the assumption that Leontes's jealousy should be justifiable. I suggest that Shakespeare meant his Leontes to be irrational in his accusations, as death strikes us as irrational and unnecessary; that we would be unable to laugh at Leontes were we to take his accusations seriously. See Norman Nathan, “Leontes' Provocation,” Shakespeare Quarterly 19 (1968): 19-24.

4. Robert Bechtold Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience. (Seattle: U of Washington P, 1968) 86.

5. I am not the first to claim that Leontes should be viewed as a villain. See James Edward Siemon, “The Canker Within: Some Observations on the Role of the Villain in Three Shakespeare Comedies.” Shakespeare Quarterly 23 (1972): 435-43.

6. Johnson, Samuel. “Notes on Shakespeare's Plays: The Winter's Tale.” Johnson on Shakespeare, Ed. Herman W. Liebert. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1968) 288-310.

7. Among others, Harold Bloom meticulously examines the speeches of Leontes, and his use of the word “affection,” in order to diagnose Leontes's jealousy. Bloom argues for a combination of “sexual jealousy and metaphysical nihilism” in Leontes. See Harold Bloom, “The Winter's Tale.” Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998) 639-61.

8. All citations from Shakespeare's plays are from The Riverside Shakespeare, Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); hereafter, they are internally noted by line.

9. Mary Nichols's excellent analysis of Hermione's “rhetoric of love” awakened my own insights into the contrasts between her words and those of Leontes. See Nichols, Mary, “The Winter's Tale: The Triumph of Comedy over Tragedy.” Interpretation 9: 2-3 (1981): 170-71.

10. Jennifer Richards points out that Leontes falls into further vulgarities during his first confrontation with Hermione. In order to avoid indecorous puns upon the word “quean” and “queen,” Leontes simply accuses Hermione of being a whore by attributing to her the “bold'st titles” that common people might give such a “bed-swerver” (II.i. 91-94). Ironically, Leontes's concern for linguistic manners about the use of puns leads him to further mar his speech with allusions to foul epithets. Richards writes: “Yet, Leontes' rantings, I suggest, should be taken seriously, because they draw attention to the linguistic transgression so characteristic of this and other late plays.” By comparing Leontes's frustrated language to manuals of decorous speaking published during the early modern period, Richards concludes that neo-classical tastes in languages—those very tastes supposed to distinguish aristocrats—are unable to distinguish classes at all. Ultimately, Richards thinks the Winter's Tale disproves any notion of social rank other than that rank produced by mere convention. I agree that Leontes's use of language marks ironic irregularity, but I argue that it functions as another sign that Leontes is misplaced, and we are not to take his orders seriously but as another sign that Leontes is a villain full of buffoonery. See Jennifer Richards, “Social Decorum in The Winter's Tale.” Shakespeare's Late Plays: New Readings, ed. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999) 75-91.

11. For example, Bottom mixes up the same Pauline passage in Midsummer Night's Dream (V. i. 210-214).

12. Heilman details the “monopathic” nature of the melodramatic villain and his conspicuous lack of any inner division in contrast to tragic characters. See Robert Bechtold Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience. (Seattle: U of Washington P, 1968).

13. Emilia repeats “My husband?” three times to Othello (Othello, V. ii. 140-48). Although she reproves Othello further, her abuse is momentary and, in part, directed at Iago.

14. See Merchant of Venice, IV. i. 333; 340-341.

15. Leontes's fear of being thought a tyrant emerges again at Hermione's trial when he says: “Let us be clear'd / Of being tyrannous …” (III. ii. 4-5).

16. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984) 10-12.

17. For example, Mary Nichols probes how Shakespeare reconciles the apparent opposites of tragedy and comedy in one play. Carefully dividing the play into two parts—acts 1-3 constitute the tragedy, whereas acts 4-5 are comedy—Nichols analyzes the characters according to Aristotelian virtues and vices for an answer. She concludes that the comedic portion of the play triumphs because of the harmonious blending together of the characters' virtues and vices; for example, boldness and moderation are linked with the marriage of Paulina and Camillo. Nichols's essay provides excellent character analysis at times, but she should have given greater attention to why the various characters—with their separate, yet compatible, virtues and vices—did not interact successfully from the play's start; her explanation that “unity” is as natural as “disunity” did not answer satisfactorily the question to my mind. I argue that the secondary characters, such as Paulina and Camillo, show the ineptitude of Leontes from the play's very beginning; indeed, their virtues are illustrated by opposing Leontes. Because of their opposition, however, the audience knows that Leontes should not be taken seriously, and, as a result, there is no “tragedy” at work in the early acts of the Winter's Tale. See Mary Nichols, “The Winter's Tale: The Triumph of Comedy over Tragedy.” Interpretation 9: 2-3 (1981): 169-90.

18. Northrop Frye observes the humor of Leontes and Paulina's interactions in this scene as well. He writes: “There is a quite funny scene where Paulina sweeps in, Leontes orders her out, a swarm of male courtiers make futile efforts at pushing her, and Paulina brushes them off like insects while Leontes blusters. We realize that as soon as he gets rid of his obsession he'll be quite a decent person again, though one doesn't go through such things unmarked.” See Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986) 163.

19. I owe this insight—that Paulina controls Leontes through emotional manipulation—to Mary Nichols. See Mary Nichols, “The Winter's Tale: The Triumph of Comedy over Tragedy.” Interpretation 9: 2-3 (1981): 169-90.

20. Bergeron speculates that the restoration scene might have been inspired from a civic pageant entitled Chruso-thriambos: The Triumphes of Golde in which a figure called Time resurrects the dead. See David Bergeron, “The Restoration of Hermione in The Winter's Tale.” Shakespeare's Romances Reconsidered, Ed. Carol McGinnis Kay and Henry E. Jacobs (Lincoln: The U of Nebraska P, 1978) 125-33.