To round out the semester and my Shakespeare class, I present to you my final regular length paper for the semester (because none of you want to read the 10 page final paper; I'm struggling to find motivation to write it), a queer reading of "The Winter's Tale." Thanks for following along with me this semester!

Adelman’s Darkness in King Leontes in “The Winter’s Tale”

Many of Shakespeare’s plays--certainly all that we have read in this course, save for “Henry IV Part 1”--concern themselves with the feminine: female autonomy, female authority, female sexuality, the male anxieties surrounding any level of female power and their own emasculation. In “Suffocating Mothers,” Janet Adelman explores these intense anxieties concerning female sexuality and male emasculation. Adelman uses King Lear as a foundational text in her argument, yet her work can easily be applied to understanding King Leontes’ profound fear of Hermione's infidelity in “The Winter’s Tale.” In the introduction to the Arden edition, editor John Pitcher postulates that “The Winter’s Tale” might be classed as “a romance that flows out of King Lear, with the catastrophe reversed and the art of the harm mysteriously undone” (24). Using Adleman’s analysis of King Lear as a guiding work, I will examine King Leontes’ monologue in Act 1 Scene 2 of “The Winter’s Tale” in an attempt to understand his fears and anxieties surrounding his relationship with Hermione, his relationship with King Polixenes, and Polixenes’ relationship with Hermione.

In Act 1 Scene 2 of the play, Leontes, King of Sicilia, his wife Hermione, and Polixenes, King of Bohemia, are in the garden, pleading with Polixenes to stay, reminiscing on his visit, and also on Polixenes and Leontes’ boyhood friendship. In his reminiscence, Polixenes says that “we were as twinned lambs” (1.2.67), “twinned” indicating that they were totally alike and inseparable, as identical twins might be, “lambs” indicating innocence. Polixenes goes on to lament their fall from innocence, saying “[had] our weak spirits ne’er been higher reared with stronger blood, we should have answered heaven boldly, ‘not guilty’” (1.2.72-74). The “weak spirits” are their innocent or childlike spirits being replaced with “stronger blood,” that is, a sort of pubescent awakening of sexual desire. Because their “weak spirits” had been replaced, Leontes and Polixenes could not “answer heaven ‘not guilty,’” because they were guilty of sexual transgression. Hermione confirms this with her statement of “you have tripped since” (1.2.76). “Tripped” indicates falling in reference to Adam and Eve’s fall from grace and loss of innocence (again, indicative of sexual transgression). This whole exchange, because it is wholly devoid of any mention of a female sexual partner (no lovely maidens), seems to imply that Polixenes and Leontes were engaged in a homosexual relationship.

Their relationship is confirmed in a somewhat roundabout way by Leontes: “to mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.” (1.2.109). According to the note, “in Renaissance physiology, bodily fluids were forms of blood” (159), meaning any and all fluids (including sexual fluids) were considered blood. “Mingling bloods,” is therefore meant quite literally. Leontes has mingled his blood with his friend Polixenes. However, these words take on a double meaning because they are said not in response to Hermione's earlier assertion (1.2.76), but rather to express his displeasure at Hermione’s inappropriate affection towards Polixenes. Therefore, even if Leontes isn’t confirming his relationship with Polixenes outright, by accusing Hermione of infidelity, Leontes has, by proxy of using Hermione’s body as the vehicle for the act, “mingled blood” with Polixenes, because they have shared the same partner.

This leads us to Leontes’ monologue, the culmination of his jealousy and confusion in this scene. By this point, Hermione has convinced Polizenes to stay longer in Sicilia, now much to Leontes’ dismay instead of delight. Leontes has worked himself into a lather, convinced that Hermione has been sleeping with Polixenes. Note that Polixenes hasbeen in Sicilia for “nine changes of the watery star” (1.2.1), and Hermione is currently very pregnant, so Leontes’ fears are perhaps not unfounded; the timeline does match up. This fear about the parentage of Hermione’s baby comes from what Adleman calls the “nervousness about the biological relation between fathers and sons, and about the place of mothers” (211). Leontes and Hermione do have an older child, a boy, who Leontes embraces because he is “like” (looks like) Leontes (1.2.207). Leontes has no proof if the new child will be a mirror of him and therefore has no proof of its parentage.

During his monologue, Leontes expresses his anxieties about Hermione's infidelity, his anger with Polixenes, and his own despair at his emasculation. If Leontes and Polixenes had indeed had a homosexual relationship, it would be one thing for them to take up female partners, but it would be the ultimate betrayal and the ultimate feminization of Leontes for Hermione to reject him in favor of Polixenes, who has also rejected him. In the opening of the monologue, Leontes says he is “angling now, though you perceive me not how I give line” (1.2.179-80). This line holds a double meaning. “Angling” could be a euphemism for sexual intercourse; “how I give line” could mean giving permission for such acts. Though it seems more likely given the context that “angling” means fishing as in fishing for truth; “how I give line” means to be catching Polixenes and Hermione in the act. Leontes is convinced of Hermione’s infidelity because he is not secure in his own sexuality and masculinity.

Leontes continues by critiquing the way Hermione acts “with the boldness of a wife to her allowing husband” (1.2.183-84). Hermione is too familiar with Polixenes; she is treating him as though he is her husband by acting in what Leontes perceives as a sexually inviting manner. Leontes goes on to refer to Hermione as “a forked one” (1.2.185), a synonym for whore or could also be referring back to “mingling friendship” (1.2.109); Hermione is “forked” as in divided between Leontes and Polixenes. “Forked one” could also be in reference to himself as a cuckold; Leontes uses “cuckold” (1.2.190) outright several lines later. Together, these lines convey a sense Leontes’ feelings of emasculation because he has lost all power and is forced to “give line” (1.2.180) until Hermione and Polixenes reveal their duplicity.

Leontes then goes on to talk about what Adleman refers to as the “dark place” or the “female sexual ‘place’” (213). Leontes speaks of adultery committed by the wife while the husband was away: “she has been sluiced in’s absence, and his pond fished by his next neighbor” (1.2.193-94). These lines are full of water imagery, which, according to Adleman, references the female “sexual wetness … that threatens to undo civilization and manhood itself” (220). According to the note, “been slucied” means to have had sex (167). Sluice itself invokes images of water because it refers to a type of gate that controls the flow of water. “Pond” refers to the “dark place” of the vaginia, “fished” is a euphemism for penis, taken together, the image of sexual intercourse is quite apparent. Leontes undeniably sees himself as having been cuckolded, and laments the fact that “physic for’t there’s none” (1.2.204), that there’s no “physic” (medicine/cure) for female lust. This is, of course, the ultimate stressor in Elizabethan England: that the female has sexual desires that cannot be fully controlled and will cause the destruction of civilization and order. In the case of Leontes, his order has certainly been disturbed by Hermione’s supposed infidelity.

Ultimately, Leontes’ monologue does the work of voicing his fears and anxieties about his relationship with Hermione and her supposedly adulterous nature, but does little to work through his relationship with Polixenes. Only by through Leontes’ contemplations about his and Hermione’s relationship can we see his anxieties about him and Polixenes. Though Polixenes makes it clear that they had once engaged in a sexual relationship, Leontes fails to make any significant mention of it in his monologue, except possibly in his reference to “forked one.” By considering Adelman's “dark place,” it is clear though, that Leontes’ emasculation comes from being cuckolded by his wife and made complicit in her birthing of a what is potentially a bastard child, but the insult is added because of his relationship with Polixenes.