Evident and Incomparable Suffering in Sicilia and Bohemia
William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is dichotomous and challenging in a way that many of his other plays are not. Here, there is a destructive half and a restorative half; in each half there is sufferance. King Leontes, reigning force over Sicilia, is shown in a courtly setting with a great respect for order. His former houseguest Polixenes is King of Bohemia, who presides over a rural, fruitful seacoast with a great respect for nature. These opposing landscapes are ripe fruit for calls of literary foil, but each is home to an emotional explosion that reveals the placelessness of suffering, proving that anyone can suffer regardless of setting. For the purposes of clarity and brevity, this paper will focus on one instance of suffering in each half of the play, corresponding with the setting of kings Leontes and Polixenes: Act II, scenes i-iii, when Hermione is condemned and Mamillius and his mother die and Act IV, scene iv, when Florizel is unceremoniously disowned. How does suffering reflect place? How does place influence degrees of suffering? Is it fair at all to compare degrees of suffering, or should the suffering that Leontes and Polixenes undergo remain their individual trials, free of comparison?
Seemingly jovial at the onset of the play, the landscape of Sicilia is orderly. In the stage directions, there are no calls for music to play around or behind the royal friends at court, yet the initial conversation between Archidamus and Camillo is lighthearted and friendly (Act I, scene i). This is the delicate balance of Sicilia, a light humor of conversation suspended in courtly setting. At line 184 in Act I, scene iv, Leontes speaks the play’s first aside:
Leontes. [Aside]. Too hot, too hot!
To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.
I have tremor cordis on me: my heart dances;
But not for joy; not joy. This entertainment
May a free face put on, derive a liberty
From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom,
And well become the agent; ‘t may, I grant;
But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers,
As now they are, and making practised smiles,
As in a looking-glass, and then to sigh, as ‘twere
The mort o’ the deer; O that is entertainment
My bosom likes not, nor my brows! Mamillius,
Art thou my boy?
Here, Leontes begins to suspect that Hermione and Polixenes are sexually involved. Though we know that Polixenes has been at court long enough to impregnate the queen, there seems to be no true foreshadowing for this suspicion, and Leontes’ qualms seem wholly (and confusingly) unfounded. His words alert the audience to the strange logic of the play, a quiet understanding that The Winter’s Tale will be full of strange happenings. Because of how quickly the court at Sicilia turns dark under the raging testimonial of King Leontes, we almost forget that Sicilia was at one point jolly; in fact, the coldness of the landscape clouds over its initial clean pleasantness quite immediately. It is almost as if Sicilia was never a happy place, that it has always been under the deranged rule of a cuckolded king. As Leontes speaks to Mamillius in the ensuing lines, we witness a mind-turning, near-Macbeth-like speech that reveals the strange course of Leontes’ thoughts: “Come, captain, / We must be neat; not neat, but cleanly, captain: / And yet the steer, the heifer and the calf / Are all call’d neat… Come, sir page, / Look on me with your welkin eye: sweet villain! / Most dear’st! my collop! Can thy dam? –may’t be?– / Affection! Thy intention stabs the centre: …” (lines 200-217). In comparison with other instances of madness in Shakespeare’s plays, Leontes is his own Iago, his own Vice. His insanity is even comparable to King Lear’s, yet his ultimate condemnation of an innocent baby is tenfold that of the disownment of Cordelia. How do we analyze a suffering that is so intrinsically illogical? Is an audience who witnesses an unwarranted madness capable of sympathy?
Nine months pregnant, Hermione is publicly accused and condemned by her husband. Their daughter is born in the cell. Despite awaiting the Oracle of Delphi (sacred prophetess of the Greek deity Apollo) to confirm or deny that Hermione has been unfaithful, Leontes decries that the baby girl is abandoned regardless. Antigonus, a Sicilian lord whose wife Paulina unsuccessfully rallied on behalf of Hermione and the child prior to Leontes’ decry, is sentenced to leave the child to die of exposure in the wilderness:
Leontes. …As by strange fortune
It came to us, I do in justice charge thee,
On thy soul’s peril and thy body’s torture,
That thou commend it strangely to some place
Where chance may nurse or end it. Take it up.
Antigonus. I swear to do this, though a present death
Had been more merciful… (Act II, scene iii, lines 1145-1151).
The king’s rage is utterly unfounded, and his refusal of proper procedure is only interrupted by the news of the death of Mamillius, who has passed away of grief over the treatment of his beloved mother (Act III, scene ii, lines 1366-1371). This news brings Leontes quickly out of his grief, and the consequent death of Hermione because of what has become of her children leaves Leontes utterly alone to atone for his sins. So how does his suffering (and, of course, the ultimate suffering of Mamillius and Leontes) reflect the place in which the suffering has been endured?
In a way, Leontes’ rage and disavowal of logic has tainted the landscape of Sicilia, which is awash with disorder. The court itself seems to suffer alongside its royals, with courtiers begging for Leontes’ mercy on behalf of his family, praising him for being wise enough to call to the Oracle to confirm the betrayal. Though the tragedy of this the first half of The Winter’s Tale is ultimately Leontes’ fault, he remains the only royal family member at the end of Act III, scene ii to feel the aftershock of his transgressions. He vows to daily visit “the chapel where they lie” to grieve Hermione and Mamillius, condemning himself to regret for the rest of his life (lines 1479-1480). It feels unfair to compare the degrees of suffering here, to think that Mamillius or Hermione or Leontes et alia are better off than one another. They are all human, and they all suffer; in the case of Leontes, his suffering is promised to be suspended for decades to come. Sicilia is utterly unhappy. It is a momentous sufferance.
The interlude of the play shows the abandonment and subsequent passage of time during which Perdita, the daughter of Leontes and Hermione, grows up in rural Bohemia. Our first glimpse of Bohemia is riddled with suffering, as an intense storm demolishes the ship and crew from Sicilia that has come to leave Perdita behind, and Antigonus, who is distraught with guilt, is chased off of the stage and eaten by a bear. (Thus the famous stage direction: Exit, pursued by a bear.) This landscape is a wasteland torn by uncontrolled energy (Kiefer). To recall the religious aspects of the first half of the play, in which the respect and approval of the gods is called for as Leontes summons the Oracle, a mariner exclaims that “the skies look grimly / And threaten present blusters. In my conscience, / The heavens with that we have in hand are angry / And frown upon ‘s” (Act III, scene iii, lines 1490-1493). The suffering has not yet been quenched, and it is evident that if left alone, the baby Perdita is in mortal danger. Thankfully, she is found by a Shepherd and his adult son, a Clown, and Act IV, scene i calls for sixteen years’ time to have passed in the interlude. This use of Time as both a character and a way to allow the audience to suspend their disbelief of the action that ensues is odd and feels illogical in the grand scheme of Shakespeare’s works: usually, the action of a Shakespearean play takes place within only a few hours or days, certainly not sixteen years. This strange stalling of action feels as if it may dilute the suffering in the play overall, yet the audience must recall that Leontes vowed to visit the graves of his wife and child each and every day of his life; his suffering has continued throughout these sixteen years and has, if anything, intensified. He has no knowledge that the lost baby Perdita is alive and well in Bohemia, and thus his guilt and suffering are, too. Sicilia and Bohemia are each tainted by the madness of Leontes.
In comparison to the formality and rank of Sicilia, the next visuals of Bohemia are open, rural, and awash with music and sound. The major event of the Bohemian half of the play is the sheep-shearing festival, a type of engagement party for the beloved Perdita and her undercover princely lover Florizel. To go from the stark Sicilian courts to the open, florid fields of Bohemia is to find an instantaneous rural simplicity, a preference for nature over art, a recovery of a lost innocence, and a glimpse into the restorative loveliness of nature and humanity. Before the fall, Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden, and it is this recovery of Old Testament virtues that supplies an ultimate regeneration of the natural and golden world (Kiefer). To recall Archidamus in Act I, scene i, there is “great / difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia” (lines 4-5). We are lulled into the belief that once we enter the pastoral world of Bohemia, the corrupt Sicilia is blissfully left behind.
Of course, this is not the case. The jovial Bohemia of this half of the play is false. In reality, Bohemia is not a place without crime, as evidenced by the actions of rogue Autolycus. The Shepherd who rescued Perdita is poor and though he raised her well, she has still grown up with a revulsion for hybrids of nature; she knows she is a bastard, and therefore this hatred is inwards. (Here, we look to Act IV, scene iv, as Perdita leads the sheep shearing.) As much as Florizel loves Perdita, he is still lying about his identity to the vast majority of their companions and the couple is aware of the unsustainability of their love. Yet each half of the play contains an emotional explosion, proving the frailty of the pastoral world despite its Eden-like appearance. The underlying expectation for suffering is ultimately quenched as King Polixenes, with the help of the Sicilian lord Camillo, learns that Florizel intends to marry a shepherdess and ruins the sheep shearing in a rage. Florizel is disowned after the sheep shearing and it becomes clear that unwarranted anger is not a thing of Sicilia alone, and that even the innocent would-be cuckolder Polixenes is susceptible to the same proclivity for disownment that so corrupted the life of King Leontes in the play’s first half. Eventually, everyone must abandon the idealism of the pastoral world; this is why Perdita suggests weakly that they break up, why Florizel chooses to cling to his fantasy, and why the unwed couple flees once more to Bohemia, where neither of them have consciously known suffering. The irony of their decision returns the audience to the unconscious, illogical nightmare of Sicilia.
Instances of suffering and their inability to be compared with one another is a motif convoluted by the semi-happy ending of the play. Regardless of Leontes’ continued grief and guilt, regardless of Perdita’s relative happiness, regardless of Hermione’s ‘renewed’ life, none of these characters are better off now than they would have been had Leontes acted rationally in the beginning of the play. Hermione still lost sixteen years of her life hidden away with Paulina (despite the illogic of the play, most critics and Shakespeareans do not believe that Hermione as a character was actually a statue brought to life) and Perdita still grew up feeling bastarded and unwanted (Kiefer). Polixenes had to live with the secondhand guilt of Hermione’s and Mamillius’ death, and of course, the young prince never miraculously returns to life in Sicilia as his sister and mother do. Is the experience of suffering at all diluted by the return to family dynamic at the end of the play, by the forgiveness of the mother and the love of the daughter, the happy exaltations of a father restored?
The Winter’s Tale is ultimately and uniquely puzzling. There is a fairy tale element to the play – as a winter’s tale is quite literally a fairy tale, a diverting entertainment meant to amuse women, children, and the old – that suggests that things just happen illogically and that we should not question the truth or lasting of suffering. Do we linger on how Grandmother felt, partially-digested and unable to save Red from the same fate? Do we ask ourselves how the Wolf felt, stomach sewed up with stones? Regardless of this element, however, the suffering remains, and its quiet and steadfast endurance from scene to scene distinguishes The Winter’s Tale as exemplary of the placelessness of sufferance.
Kiefer, Frederick. “The Winter’s Tale.” English 373B, Spring 2018. University of Arizona English Department, 2018, Tucson, Arizona.
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