Boy Eternal: Aging, Games, and Masculinity in The Winter's Tale

gina bloom

“Boy Eternal”: Aging, Games, and Masculinity

in The Winter’s Tale

enlr_1071 329..356

Then was Jack Falstaff, now Sir John, a boy...IseehimbreakScoggin’s

head at the court gate when a was a crack, not thus high. And the very

same day did I ﬁght with one Samson Stockﬁsh, a fruiterer, behind

Gray’s Inn. Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I have spent! And to see how

many of my old acquaintance are dead. (2 Henry IV, 3.2.15–31)

lthough early modern moralist Samuel Bird includes brawling,

along with pranking and torturing birds, among the list of “games

that be ﬁlthie,” Shakespeare’s Shallow speaks for many of Bird’s con-

temporaries who viewed aggressive play as a promising sign that a boy

is on a stable path toward becoming a man.

Shallow’s perspective on

the function and legitimacy of violent sport is perhaps best expressed

by Volumnia in Coriolanus, who commends young Martius as “[o]ne

on’s father’s moods” when she hears about how he captured a butterﬂy

and then “did so set his teeth and tear it” (1.3.62, 60). But Shallow does

more than express appreciation for little Jack Falstaff’s pugnacious

recreations. He goes on to draw a connection between young Jack’s

playful tussles with Scoggin and his own display of courage through his

ﬁght with Samson Stockﬁsh. Emphasizing that these events happened

“the very same day,” Shallow links the boy’s and the young man’s

masculine recreations. Moreover, these memories of youthful sport lead

The Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison

provided generous support when I began developing this essay. I also received useful feedback

from audiences at the University of California, Davis, the University of Iowa, and the Shakes-

peare Association of America “Shakespeare’s Geezers” seminar, as well as from Kate Chedgzoy,

Fran Dolan, and Valerie Traub.

1. Citations of Shakespeare’s plays follow The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt,

et al., 2nd ed. (New York, 1997).

2. Samuel Bird, A Friendlie Communication or Dialogue between Paule and Demas wherein is

Disputed how we are to use the pleasures of this life (1580), esp. sig. 15v.

329

Oxford OX42DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Shallow directly to contemplating his present advanced age, as he

laments his comrades’ and his own inevitable passing from life. By

using games to trace out this narrative of developing masculinity—of

the crack boy as continuous with the rakish youth who grows into an

old man—Shallow comes to terms with himself as an aging subject.

The boy in play is a crucial feature of this psychic journey, for by

memorializing recreation, Shallow afﬁrms and gains comfort from his

connection to boyhood. Signiﬁcantly, unlike the nostalgic, aging puer

eternis Falstaff, Shallow is depicted in this speech as able to pull back

from this investment. Rather than collapse the difference between boy

and youth, youth and old man, Shallow’s recollections of boyhood play

lead to acceptance of the aging process.

This essay investigates the psychic and cultural work performed by

aging men’s nostalgia for boyhood play, focusing on Shakespeare’s The

Winter’sTale.The play’s concerns with the passage of time are formalized

through its striking dramatic structure, the second half occurring sixteen

years after the ﬁrst. To explore the process by which the mature

male characters of The Winter’s Tale use games to negotiate, and fail to

negotiate, anxieties about growing old, I draw on a range of early

modern historical writings on play, from Roger Ascham’s treatise on

archery to John Stow’s recollections of English pastimes. In using the

term “play” to encompass a broad range of recreational activities, I am

not implying that early moderns considered these activities to be iden-

tical to each other. As is evident in Bird’s description of “unlawful”

sport, the deﬁnition of “play” was being contested in this period; what

one writer considered to be legitimate recreation another considered to

be sinful vice.

Yet the fact that early modern writers labor to distinguish

forms of recreation points to an underlying, uneasy assumption that

these forms share something fundamental.To investigate that common-

ality and its consequences, my essay brings modern theoretical perspec-

tives on play to bear on these historical debates. I argue that as Ascham

and his contemporaries use the ﬁgure of the boy at play to set up a

comforting narrative about growing old, so, too, TheWinter’sTale depicts

Leontes and Polixenes turning to their youthful sons in order to con-

front anxieties about aging. But what is for Shallow,Ascham, and others

a productive coping strategy fails to work for Leontes and Polixenes.

3. Gregory M. Colón Semenza, Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance

(Newark, Del., 2003).

330 English Literary Renaissance

Instead, their recollections of boyhood games lead to a displaced

obsession with youth and recreation. Ultimately, Leontes comes to terms

with aging once he demonstrates recognition of what anthropologist

Gregory Bateson calls the “frame” of play.

My reading of Leontes complements but differs from that proffered

in key feminist work on The Winter’s Tale. Following Janet Adelman’s

inﬂuential argument, critics have often seen Leontes’ paranoia and

antagonism toward Hermione as stemming from anxieties about his,

and all men’s, dependence on women.

Mamillius, according to this

reading, is a point of tension because the boy embodies a connection

to the feminine sphere that Leontes repudiates. In their assumptions

that masculinity takes shape through a conﬂicted engagement with

femininity, such arguments overlook the ways in which early moderns

deﬁne masculinity not only as a function of gender, but of age. It

is Leontes’ and Polixenes’ relations to boyhood, not just womanhood,

that threaten to emasculate them.

The model of masculinity I pro-

pose involves more than shifting attention to age. In outlining early

moderns’ emphasis on developmental masculinity, I also rework the

deconstructive models of identity that have prevailed in scholarship on

masculinity—even scholarship that attends to age difference.

For

example, in his work on the beard Will Fisher importantly recognizes

the ways facial hair materializes the difference not only between men

4. Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet

to The Tempest (New York, 1992). See, e.g., Susan Snyder, Shakespeare:AWayward Journey (Newark,

Del., 2002); Mary Ellen Lamb, “Engendering the Narrative Act: Old Wives’ Tales in The Winter’s

Tale, Macbeth, and The Tempest,” Criticism 40,no.4 (1998); Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a

Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Philadelphia,

2000), esp. pp. 162–68. A related perspective can be found in Carol Thomas Neely, Broken

Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays (New Haven, 1985). On breast-feeding as a signiﬁcant manifes-

tation of such dependency, see Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines

of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1993), esp. pp. 260–80.

5.InDreams of the Burning Child: Sacriﬁcial Sons and the Father’s Witness (Ithaca, 2003), esp.

p. 94, David Lee Miller offers a reading of Mamillius that is much closer to my own, arguing

that Leontes’ attachment to Mamillius stems from the father’s need for a ﬂesh and blood sign

of his paternal body, which is otherwise invisible. The play is thus concerned with “the father’s

desire to be copied.” I propose that the mimetic bond between Leontes and Mamillius works

in the reverse direction: rather than wishing for his son to be a copy of him, Leontes desires to

be a copy of his son.

6. E.g.,Will Fisher,“The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England,” Renais-

sance Quarterly 54,no.1 (2001); Jennifer A. Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern

Drama and Culture (New York, 2003), esp. ch. 3. Bruce R. Smith argues elegantly for a shift away

from deconstructive models, describing male identity as produced not only in opposition to

others, but in fusion with them. See Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford, 2000), esp. ch. 4.

331Gina Bloom

and women, but between men and boys; yet the beard serves for Fisher

as a sign of an “antithesis between men and boys.”

However, early

modern models of normative masculinity also emphasize continuity

between boys and men. Leontes’ and Polixenes’ anxieties stem from

their failure to place themselves comfortably within a developmental

narrative of manhood—the kind of narrative Shallow engages.

Although I diverge from Fisher in my emphasis on the proximity

between boys and men, I join him in using an historicist lens to

problematize psychoanalytic approaches to masculinity. In deﬁning the

narrative of male development, especially as it is represented in The

Winter’s Tale, the psychoanalytic critical tradition assumes male psychic

trauma stems primarily from a conﬂict with women and/or femininity,

eliding the role of age. Moreover, many of the inﬂuential feminist

readings of the play grow out of a critical consensus in the 1980s that

in the late plays male anxieties about female power and the (often

concomitant) loss of male-male friendship cause psychic and social

ruptures that ultimately are healed through the plays’ concluding

afﬁrmation of generational continuity.

Perhaps because it presumes

generational continuity to be the key signiﬁer of psychic and social

stability, this reading overlooks some of the ruptures left unhealed at

the end of The Winter’s Tale. For although the play represents Leontes’

ultimate progression toward early modern manhood in his recommit-

ment to his marriage and his acceptance of death, it simultaneously

dramatizes Polixenes’ regression through his unhealthy ﬁxation on

youth and boyhood games. In this way The Winter’s Tale questions as it

produces a linear narrative of male development, folding back on itself

to portray the cyclical nature of the aging process.

In analyzing Shakespeare’s representations of male aging, it is crucial to

keep in mind that the basic structure of early modern English society

7. Fisher, p. 178. This essay is reprinted in modiﬁed form in Will Fisher, Materializing Gender

in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge, Eng., 2006).

8. C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Develop-

ment (Berkeley, 1986); Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays ed. Murray M. Schwartz

and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore, 1980);W.Thomas MacCary, Friends and Lovers:The Phenomenology

of Desire in Shakespearean Comedy (New York, 1985).

332 English Literary Renaissance

was both patriarchal and moderately gerontocratic.Although men accu-

mulated privileges as they aged, the apex of power was imagined to be

achieved during what we might call “middle age,” the stage at which

men exhibit the most culturally valued attributes, like virility, wisdom,

and courage. In The Differences of the Ages of Man’s Life (1608), Henry

Cuffe underscores the perfections of this time of life when he labels the

ﬁrst sub-stage of manhood “Prime.”

Prime manhood is only temporary,

however, for as the body continues to age, the man begins to resemble

an infant again; in As You Like It, Jacques cites a commonplace view of

old age when he calls it a return to “second childishness and mere

oblivion” (2.7.164).

So while men may claim gerontocratic privilege as

they grow older, they also take on the burden of continuing to perform

markers of masculinity that dissolve with age as virility becomes weak-

ness, wisdom becomes forgetfulness, courage fear, stability inconstancy,

and so forth.

It is not surprising that early modern writing on age and aging

turns repeatedly to the idea that boyhood lies on a continuum

with manhood. To compete with the body’s circular narrative, which

muddles the lines between adulthood and childhood, some writers

produce a more comfortable, linear narrative that emphasizes the

development of boys into men, insuring the perpetuity of masculinity:

boys are always-already in the process of becoming men, and men, by

implication, are merely grown-up boys.This progressive narrative pro-

vides comfort on a broad, systemic level by underscoring the ways a

modiﬁed gerontocratic patriarchal society can reproduce itself; as long

as boys grow up to become men, there will be men to assume positions

of social and political power. On a more personal, psychic level, the

9. Henrie Cuffe, The Differences of the Ages of Mans Life (1607), sig. I4.

10. Several different models of the aging process remained current during Shakespeare’s

time: Ptolemaic, Galenic, Aristotelian, and Christian. See J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study

in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford, 1986). For a helpful summary of these models and

how they relate to Jacques’ speech, which draws on the ﬁrst two, see Smith, Shakespeare and

Masculinity, esp. pp. 71–75. Although Jacques’ negative view of old age was common, especially

in Shakespeare, some early modern writers, drawing on Cicero’s De Senectute, also praise old age,

claiming it brings men wisdom and moderation. See, e.g.,Thomas Sheafe, Vindiciae Senectutis, or

A Plea for Old-Age (1639). For an overview of attitudes toward aging in prose treatises of the ﬁrst

half of the seventeenth century, and particularly the ideas that old age involves a reversal of

earlier stages of life and is accompanied by undesirable characteristics, see Steven R. Smith,

“Growing Old in Early Stuart England,” Albion 8:2 (1976).

11. On early modern understandings of the cyclicality of life and their particular implications

for men, see Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, ch. 3.

333Gina Bloom

narrative of masculinity as a linear progression offers the aging subject

some illusion of control over the body’s fall into “second childishness.”

Crucially, developmental narratives of masculinity do not collapse the

difference between boyhood and manhood. The teleology of mas-

culinity, wherein boys turn naturally into men, relies on and produces

an ontological paradox: boys and men are fundamentally alike but at

the same time fundamentally different.The dialectical tension inherent

in similitude is crucial to these narratives’ cultural and psychic appeal,

for they imagine masculinity as constant and persistent despite, and

indeed because of, temporal change.

For early moderns games were an ideal forum through which to

contemplate this similitude, for defenders of games return repeatedly

to a theory of similitude and concomitant developmental theories

of masculinity in order to legitimize play. As Gregory Colón Semenza

points out, early modern English writers well into the seventeenth

century reiterated ancient functionalist arguments for sport, promoting

certain games as ways to prepare males for war.

These arguments are

interesting not only because they legitimize play in a society that was

often critical of pastimes, but because they afﬁrm a narrative about the

perpetuity of masculinity, defending the virtues of recreation by asso-

ciating pastimes with boyhood. Defenses of archery are a case in point.

Tudor monarchs intent on preserving this aristocratic sport attempted

to insure that English boys were taught to shoot. Following her father’s

example, Elizabeth I mandated that “every man having a man child or

men children” between the ages of seven and seventeen needed to

keep a bow and two shafts in his house to encourage and train youths

in the sport.

Roger Ascham’s pro-archery treatise Toxophilus (1545)

12. In effect, early modern writers enact a version of the “strategic proximation” that

Jonathan Gil Harris urges early modern scholars to practice. Using Michel Serres’ analogy of

time as a crumpled handkerchief—which demonstrates how two distant points can approach

each other at one moment and become distant from each other the next—Harris calls for

thinking about temporality as “untimely proximity and afﬁnity as well as orderly distance and

difference.” See “Untimely Mediations,” Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar, issue 6,

2000—2008 (cited April 7, 2007), available from http://emc.eserver.org/1-6/harris.html.

13. Semenza, esp. ch. 2. On the Jacobean court’s strategies for defending pastimes, see Leah

S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell and the Defense of Old Holiday

Pastimes (Chicago, 1986). Marcus’ and Semenza’s important arguments, however, do not account

for the role of age in early modern literary and political treatments of sport.

14. Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, (New Haven, 1969),

II, 359.

334 English Literary Renaissance

helps elucidate the logic behind the court’s emphasis on boyhood

recreation. Writing to gain patronage from Henry VIII,

Ascham

trumpets archery as the recreation of choice, especially for boys, claim-

ing that shooting has been integral to England’s successful military

history and that continued virility depends on training the next gen-

eration.The functionalist argument is tricky to execute, for archery was

quickly becoming simply a pastime in England, with little practical

application in war.The very battle Ascham claims to be the inspiration

for his writing (Boulogne) was not won by archery, but by guns.

Ye t

it is precisely because of the sport’s dwindling practical use that its

advocates recruited boyhood as its crucial site of preservation. Boy

shooters can better maintain the illusion that archery still serves a

long-range military purpose because, Ascham implies, they are more

distanced from military involvement, necessarily using archery only as

a form of play.

While Ascham urges all men—indeed, men of every class, occupa-

tion and age—to practice archery, he repeatedly emphasizes the impor-

tance of the young learning the sport, urging that “youth shulde use it

for the moost honest pastyme in peace, that men myght handle it as a

mooste sure weapon in warre,” and that shooting “can not be done

mightelye when they be men, excepte they learne it perﬁtelye when

they be boyes.”

At stake in this training, Ascham maintains, is the

production not simply of good soldiers, but of manly men: “Princes

beinge children oughte to be brought up in shoting; both bycause it is

an exercise moost holsom, and also a pastyme moost honest: wherin

labour prepareth the body to hardnesse, the minde to couragiousnesse,

sufferyng neither the one to be marde with tendernesse, nor yet the

other to be hurte with ydlenesse.” That this developed toughness of

15. Roger Ascham, Toxophilus, ed. Peter E. Medine (Tempe, Ariz, 2002), intro., p. 17.

16. Ascham, pp. 19–20. On the dwindling effectiveness of functionalist arguments for sport

in light of military changes, see Semenza (pp. 41–43), who argues that like other defenses of

noble pastimes, Ascham’s treatise was motivated by class-based fears about the ways guns

democratize warfare.

17. I do not mean to imply that early moderns associated games exclusively with youths and

war exclusively with adults. To be sure, youths fought on battleﬁelds and adults enjoyed many

forms of games and pastimes. But in a culture where the deﬁnition of play was hotly contested

and where leisure was politically loaded, one strategy by which writers defend recreation is by

associating it with youth. This strategy, however inaccurate in reality, enables writers to draw

more easily on ancient functionalist arguments about sport as preparation for war, and thus,

more broadly, for the legitimacy of play.

18. Ascham, p. 39, my emphasis; p. 54.

335Gina Bloom

mind and body is gendered is evident in Ascham’s warning against

those who “were not brought up with outwarde honest payneful

pastymes to be men: but cockerde up with inwarde noughtie ydle

wantonnesse to be women” (p. 53).

The role of sport in male development is elucidated in other treatises

celebrating English pastimes. In John Stow’s A Survey of London (1603),

the author recalls games he probably played as a youth, many of which

seem designed to inculcate traits of martial masculinity such as courage

and strength. In one game young men ﬁle onto a ﬁeld where they

practice “feates of warre.”

In another, two youths run on the ice and

bash each other with poles in what seems an early modern version

of ice hockey. While conceding the sport can be dangerous, Stow

maintains it serves a developmental function: “eyther one or both doe

fall, not without hurt: some breake their armes, some their legges, but

youth desirous of glorie in this sort exerciseth it selfe agaynst the time

of warre” (p. 94).

These games are not only about youth performing great feats, but

about adults watching the events. Stow relates how “[u]pon the bridge,

wharfes, and houses, by the rivers side, stand great numbers to see, &

laugh therat,” and that during Shrovetide “after dinner all the youthes

go into the ﬁelds to play at the bal.The schollers of every school have

their ball, or baston, in their hands: the auncient and wealthy men of

the Citie come foorth on horsebacke to see the sport of the yong

men, and to take part of the pleasure in beholding their agilitie” (p. 93).

Why does Stow emphasize the gerontocrats that witness these youthful

recreations? What is so pleasurable for aging men about observing

or, in Ascham’s case, describing youths playing games that mimic

war? Richard Carew’s Survey of Cornwall (1602) offers an answer in its

discussion of the sport of “hurling.” Hurling resembles modern Ameri-

can football, but, in its “country” form, it was played across several

parishes, with the teams incorporating real-world battle strategies,

like lying in wait behind bushes or riding in on horseback to ambush

the opposition. Carew is ambivalent about whether to accept hurling’s

violence, which is crucial to its manliness: “I cannot well resolve,

whether I should more commend this game, for the manhood and

exercise, or condemne it for the boysterousness and harmes which it

19. John Stow, A Survay of London: Conteyning the originall, antiquity, increase, moderne estate, and

description of that city (1603), p. 93.

336 English Literary Renaissance

begetteth: for as on the one side it makes their bodies strong, hard, and

nimble, and puts a courage into their hearts, to meete an enemie in the

face: so on the other part, it is accompanied with many dangers, some

of which doe ever fall to the players share. For proofe whereof, when

the hurling is ended, you shall see them retyring home, as from a

pitched battaile, with bloody pates, bones broken, and out of joynt, and

such bruses as serve to shorten their daies; yet al is good play, & never

Attourney nor Crowner troubled for the matter.”

Despite his con-

cerns, Carew admits he enjoys watching the sport and seeing parti-

cipants overlook its physical risks. Ultimately, “al is good play,” a

sentiment seemingly shared by the cheering fans that Stow describes.

In essence, Carew and Stow recognize what anthropologist Gregory

Bateson calls the “frame” of play: a somewhat arbitrary boundary,

predicated on consensus, it establishes a difference between play and

not-play while paradoxically recognizing that these may be indis-

tinguishable in appearance.

The bloody bodies on the ﬁeld after a

hurling match look much like the bodies of soldiers after battle, but

they are not the same, for the hurlers somehow have signaled to each

other that the ﬁghting is to be interpreted as play. For early modern

writers like Carew, this consciousness of frames has a productive

purpose not addressed in Bateson’s writings: positing similitude (rather

than equivalence) enables authors to invest masculinity with a devel-

opmental teleology. By insisting that there is some difference between

boys with their playful games and men with their serious pursuits,

authors can iterate that boys who play archery or hurl well will

become good warriors: that boys will become men.

iii

As in analogies between hurling and war, the logic of similitude

that connects boys with men functions only as long as the two terms

can also be distinguished. Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale dramatizes

what can happen when the difference between boyhood and manhood

collapses entirely, and when consciousness of the frame of play

20. Richard Carew, Survey of Cornwall (1602), sig V3v.

21. Gregory Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” in Steps to an Ecology of the

Mind (New York, 1972). I am grateful to Flagg Miller for helping me clarify my approach to

Bateson.

337Gina Bloom

disappears. The seeds of that collapse are sown early, as Leontes and

Polixenes, bidding farewell, nostalgically recall the games they played

together during their youth, “twinned lambs that did frisk i’th’ sun, /

And bleat the one at th’other” (1.2.69–70). They had no other wish

than to be “boy eternal” (1.2.66). Of course the frisking boys became

men, a transition that early moderns across the socioeconomic spec-

trum identiﬁed as happening at the time of marriage.

The responsi-

bilities of kingship and manhood demanded that Leontes and Polixenes

put aside youthful, homosocial sport as “more mature dignities

and royal necessities made separation of their society” (1.1.21–22).

Polixenes’ extended visit to Sicilia has rekindled the spirit of their

boyhood friendship, giving both men a chance to recollect their

pleasurable youth together and momentarily forget that they are

mature men, expected to govern kingdoms and families. It is no

wonder Leontes begs his friend to remain.

Leontes’ paranoid reaction to the news that Hermione has persuaded

Polixenes to stay has been the subject of much critical debate. In their

explanations for Leontes’ sudden madness, critics often focus on

Leontes’ fears of being cuckolded and his concern that his best friend

has become a rival for his wife’s affections.

Although fear of cuck-

oldry is certainly evident, Leontes seems just as ﬁxated on the ways

his wife has become a rival for his friend’s affection.

Moments

before Leontes’ famous aside, Hermione alludes to her friendship with

Polixenes and how it parallels her relationship with her husband—

22. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven,

1994).

23. See, e.g., Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge

Eng., 1996).

24. Stephen Guy-Bray, who argues for a sexual relationship between Polixenes and

Leontes, makes a similar point. Leontes “is jealous of his wife because he thinks she has sex

with his friend and of his friend because he thinks he has sex with his wife.” See Homoerotic

Space: Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Toronto, 2002), esp. p. 206. However, the

relationship between Polixenes and Leontes need not be construed as sexual in our modern

terms in order for it to be signiﬁcant. As various critics have pointed out, many early modern

texts use the language of friendship between equals to engage a classical discourse of

male-male love (amicitia), that can be erotic without necessarily being genital-centered. See,

e.g., Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance

Drama (Cambridge, Eng., 1997), and Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago, 2003). For a useful

discussion and extension of these ideas toward thinking about early modern female-female

friendship and its erotic valences, see Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early

Modern England (Cambridge, Eng., 2002).

338 English Literary Renaissance

a parallel Leontes himself had introduced when he compared Hermi-

one’s speech convincing Polixenes to the speech she gave to Leontes

when they married.

HERMIONE: I have spoke to th’ purpose twice.

The one for ever earned a royal husband;

Th’other, for some while a friend.

LEONTES [aside]: Too hot, too hot:

To mingle friendship farre is mingling bloods. (1.2.108–11)

Hermione’s response appears to conﬁrm the comparison between

“royal husband” and “friend,” but it is Leontes who forces Hermione’s

articulation of the parallel when he interrupts her full metered line,

clipping its end so that “husband” and “friend” are forced to occupy

the same syntactical position in their respective lines.

And in his

subsequent paranoid aside, Leontes focuses his concerns on this

“friendship.”

To understand that concern, it is useful to keep in mind Alan Bray’s

important argument that early modern sworn brotherhood created a

binding and reliable form of kinship that existed alongside and over-

lapped with other kinship structures such as marriage.

Although we

do not witness Leontes and Polixenes reciting oaths of sworn broth-

erhood like some of the male couples Bray describes, their acts of

friendship—the exchange of “gifts, letters, loving embassies” (1.1.24),

the ways they “shook hands” (l. 25) and “embraced” (l. 26) across the

seas—conform to this model. Polixenes’ visit to Sicilia has reinforced

these bonds of kinship, as is evident through the men’s repeated

references to each other in 1.2 as “brother” (ll. 4,15, 27). And until the

turmoil of 1.2, the brotherhood appears to have coexisted peacefully

with Leontes’ marriage to Hermione.What disrupts the fraternal bond

the men shared as children and renewed these last nine months is

not just Polixenes allegedly cuckolding Leontes or their impending

physical separation, but Polixenes’ “mingle[d]” friendship with another.

Monogamous male friendship serves a psychic purpose that is

implicit, although not directly addressed, in Bray’s work on sworn

25. Leontes’ interruption further compromises Hermione’s claim because the monosyllable

“friend” is stressed at the end of her line, underscoring the ways “husband” weakens the

preceding eleven-syllable line.

26. Bray, The Friend. See also Rebecca Ann Bach, “The Homosocial Imaginary of A Woman

Killed with Kindness,” Textual Practice 12:3 (1998).

339Gina Bloom

brotherhood. Reading the inscriptions on companionate burial tombs,

Bray emphasizes the intimacy of friends. But the tombs also attest to

the ways male friendship offers a prophylactic against anxieties about

mortality. By promising to support each other until death and arrang-

ing to be buried together, sworn brothers steady themselves against the

instabilities of aging and the unknown of the afterlife. Friendship

connects the aging subject not only to his future, but his past. As in the

nostalgic speeches of Shallow and Polixenes, fraternal bonds can be

built through the recollection of shared history and particularly memo-

ries of men having played together in childhood or adolescence. More

to the point, as aging friends recall this history of play, they bind

themselves more ﬁrmly to their youth, reafﬁrming their place in a

comforting, continuous narrative of developing masculinity.

This broader context for male friendship helps explain why at the end

of his paranoid rant, Leontes turns to his son Mamillius and proceeds to

play. His sudden engagement of Mamillius with the question “Art thou

my boy?” (1.2.122) points to Leontes’ loose rationale that Hermione’s

alleged current inﬁdelity renders suspect his paternal claim to Mamillius.

So it is not surprising that he goes on to contemplate his likeness with

his son, noting that Mamillius’s nose is said to be “a copy out of mine”

(1.2.124) and that, according to others, the two are “[a]lmost as like as

eggs” (l.132). But Leontes’ investments in Mamillius and their similari-

ties extend beyond an interest in familial resemblance.Through Mamil-

lius he seeks the connection to boyhood that Polixenes once offered.

Mamillius begins to serve as a substitute for Polixenes, a new boyhood

friend. Janet Adelman, Peter Erickson, Carol Thomas Neely, Susan

Snyder, Thomas MacCary, and others argue something similar when

they describe Leontes as seeking in Mamillius a substitute “mirror-

comrade” now that he believes he has lost Polixenes, his “twin lamb.”

In this reading Leontes wishes to polarize male and female worlds, and

ﬁxates on Mamillius because of their common maleness, epitomized

through their visual similarities.

However, Leontes cathects onto

Mamillius as much for his age as his gender.

27. Snyder, p. 215. Peter Erickson, “Patriarchal Structures in The Winter’s Tale,” PMLA 97.5

(1982), 819–29, argues that the son is the “lifeblood of the [patriarchal] system, its source of

rejuvenation” (p. 821). It is not just the son’s connection to the father that enables him to insure

the perpetuity of patriarchy; it is also his youth and his promise of eventual manhood.

28. Although offering a very different reading from these critics, Guy-Bray also focuses on

Mamillius’ gender, arguing that Leontes seeks in Mamillius a substitute object of homoerotic

affection.

340 English Literary Renaissance

Leontes does not, as Snyder argues, pursue a “premature masculizing

of his son” in order to “realign his son with himself,” or as David Lee

Miller suggests, in order to fulﬁll his “fraught and anxious demand to

be copied.”

Rather, he attempts to realign himself with his son in

order to imitate and inhabit the youth his son represents.

Leontes

proceeds to disport himself with Mamillius. Cleaning a smudge on his

son’s nose, he calls Mamillius his “captain” (1.2.124; 125), as if they are

engaging in an informal game of toy-soldiers (a game played as early

as the fourth century). Mamillius eagerly engages with Leontes, inter-

preting his father’s query, “Art thou my calf?” (1.2.129) as a typical

invitation to engage in make-believe play. Mamillius’s response, “Yes, if

you will” (129), serves as a verbal sign of cooperation that, play theorists

argue, is commonly used when children negotiate the rules of spon-

taneous imaginative ventures.

Playing with Mamillius initially seems

to ground Leontes, alleviating his sadness at the loss of his friend

(potentially to his wife) and the concomitant loss of his own connec-

tion to his youth. But Leontes’ engagement with the child aggravates

as much as it alleviates his anxieties. Unlike Shallow, whose recollec-

tions of boyhood games enable him to grapple with his age and the

losses that attend it, Leontes fails to deploy his nostalgia productively.

Pretend play, as it helps him reengage boyhood pleasures, initially

brings Leontes closer to his son, but instead of indulging in his

similarities to Mamillius, Leontes ﬁxates on the differences, observing

that his son does not yet show the “rough pash and the shoots”

(1.2.130) and is not “full” (l. 131) like his father. Disturbed by the

necessary distance between boy and man, Leontes attempts to collapse

the categories so that he can enact the fantasy of being “boy eternal.”

To accomplish this conﬂation, Leontes turns to the language of

games, ﬁguring women as enemies to the good, honest play that he and

Mamillius enjoy. Distrusting the women who say his son looks just like

him, he compares these women to gamblers who cheat at dice: they

“will say anything,” being “false / As dice are to be wished by one that

ﬁxes / No bourn twixt his and mine” (ll. 133–36). Leontes refers here

to a scheme in dice-play where the swindler substitutes his rigged dice

29. Snyder, pp. 212, 215; Miller, p. 94.

30. Mamillius would be a particularly ﬁxating presence for Leontes if he has been breeched

and thus has begun to exhibit sartorially signs of emerging manhood.

31. Among the best applications of this sociolinguistic approach to ludicity is L.R.

Goldman, Child’s Play: Myth, Mimesis, and Make-Believe (Oxford, 1998).

341Gina Bloom

for the ones currently used, claiming there is no difference between the

two.

Through this analogy Leontes distances himself and his games

with Mamillius from an adult world where cheating is rampant, and at

the same time he revisits doubts about his similarity to the boy.

The larger stakes of Leontes’ investments in his likeness to Mamillius

become more evident when Leontes responds to public queries about

his odd behavior. When asked by Hermione and Polixenes about his

apparent “distraction” (1.2.151), he relates what we can now recognize

as a conventional nostalgic narrative about the aging process:

Looking on the lines

Of my boy’s face, methoughts I did recoil

Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreeched,

In my velvet coat; my dagger muzzled,

Lest it should bite its master, and so prove,

As ornament oft does, too dangerous.

How like, methought, I then was to this kernel,

This squash, this gentleman. (1.2.155–62)

Looking on his son prompts Leontes to reminisce about his childhood,

speciﬁcally to the time before he was breeched, that point in the

life cycle when male infants were put into gender-speciﬁc clothing,

signaling their entry into the category of maleness.

Stephen Orgel reﬂects the critical consensus when he reads this

speech as an explanation for Leontes’ mental instability: Leontes’ nos-

talgia indicates his desire to “return to childhood” and thereby “retreat

from sexuality and the dangers of manhood.”

To be sure, what

Leontes fears about normative adult manhood is what follows from

marriage and the necessity of generational reproduction: sexual contact

with women. At stake in this anxiety, as Valerie Traub convincingly

argues, is the very integrity of masculine subjectivity, for early moderns

often viewed male-female intercourse as leading, either positively or

negatively, to chaos and the dissolution of the male subject, who loses

his mythic sense of wholeness in the act.

At the root of Leontes’ fear

32. A description and condemnation of this con-game appears in Bird, sig. F7v.

33. Stephen Orgel, The Winter’s Tale (Oxford, 1996), p. 23. See also Neely, who argues that

Polixenes and Leontes cannot regenerate themselves because the “continuity that they need and

desire...cannot be achieved by their own return, through their children, to the incestuous

ideals of childhood innocence and father-son symbiosis” (p. 196).

34. Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama

(London, 1992), esp. p. 27. For a related argument concerning Leontes’ anxieties about

342 English Literary Renaissance

of conjugal coupling is a concern about mortality. Leontes reveals a

signiﬁcant ﬂaw in the commonplace early modern view that sexual

reproduction immortalizes the male subject. While reproduction

insures generational continuity, a form of immortality, it does so only

at the cost of the integrity of male bodily and psychic wholeness.

While I agree with Orgel and others that Leontes ultimately

responds to this anxiety by regressing to childhood, I would qualify this

reading. For one thing, although Leontes later will regress to child-

hood, in this particular speech he pursues what early moderns would

recognize as a productive relationship to his youth; like Shallow,

Leontes attempts to reconnect through boyhood play with youth in

order to cope with anxieties about aging and mortality. Moreover,

these recollections of childhood games do not inherently comprise a

retreat from adult sexuality and its dangers. This would assume that

childhood is antithetical to adulthood, whereas Leontes depicts them as

part of the same developmental narrative. Leontes represents Mamillius

as a ﬁgure in the process of maturing: the series of descriptors for

Mamillius build on each other to create a trajectory of development

from “kernel” (or seed) to “squash” (or unripe peapod) to gentleman.

Mamillius does not represent some ontological, stable category of

“boy,” but rather signals a teleological process, a gentleman who hasn’t

yet ripened.

heterosexuality and the “[f]ear of degenerative change,” see Martin Orkin, Local Shakespeares:

Proximations and Power (London and New York, 2005), esp. p. 114. Catherine Belsey corroborates

a link between conjugal bliss and death in her analysis of early modern marriage furniture and

tapestries, which often incorporate skulls and skeletons in their Garden of Eden iconography.

See “The Serpent in the Garden: Shakespeare, Marriage and Material Culture,” The Seventeenth

Century 9:1 (1996).

35. In his analysis of the term “squash” as applied to Cesario in 12N, Jeffrey Masten points

out that the term need not necessarily refer to a boy in the process of developing into a man.

For instance, in MND “squash” refers to a woman. In the case of WT, however, where the term

follows “kernel” and leads to “gentleman,” it seems more clearly a reference to developing

manhood. Nevertheless, it is worth observing Masten’s larger point about the “deﬁnitional and

categorical ﬂuidity” of the boy ﬁgure. It is precisely because of the boy’s capacity to signify so

widely that Mamillius can emblematize this developmental narrative. See Masten’s “Editing

Boys: Gender, Eroticism, Performance, Print,” in Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, ed.

Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel, Redeﬁning British Theatre History (NewYork, 2007) esp. p. 117.

My thanks to Masten for productive conversations about boyhood. On early modern boyhood,

especially as represented on the stage, see the essays by Kate Chedgzoy and Lucy Munro in

Shakespeare and Childhood, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Robert Shaughnessy

(Cambridge, Eng., 2007) and Edel Lamb, Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theater: The

Children’s Playing Companies (1559–1613) (New York, 2008).

343Gina Bloom

This investment in continuity becomes more evident when we

observe that Leontes’ memory, like Shallow’s, focuses on childhood

play. Leontes remembers himself as a boy essentially playing a man,

holding a muzzled dagger at his side. At its simplest level the dagger

is a toy, an aristocratic version of the pen-knives that many early

modern boys carried.

While possessing a mundane utilitarian value,

pen-knives were also used for games, such as mumbledepeg, as well as

for carving playing instruments, such as spinning tops. As boys grew

into men, pen knives and muzzled daggers might be exchanged for

more manly playthings, such as weapons. Children’s games and toys

underscore the ways childhood was imagined on a continuum with

adulthood.

Far from evincing a disturbed psyche, as most critics conclude,

Leontes’ reminiscences of childhood play might put his audience on

stage and in the theater at ease insofar as they resonate with familiar

narratives about male development. The concerns of Hermione and

Polixenes are allayed, and for a moment playgoers may wonder if

Leontes’ paranoia has subsided. One way to read this speech is as a

virtuoso performance of sanity by Leontes. More likely, it conveys a

moment of clarity, intimating that Leontes is on the verge of reclaim-

ing perspective and, like Polixenes and Shallow, will emerge from

nostalgia to face the situation before him. But as we saw in his earlier

engagement with Mamillius, Leontes fails to ﬁnd comfort in the

narrative of linear male development. Instead of leading him to accept

his aging self, recollections of youthful play remind him painfully of

the boyhood he has lost. Stalled in a vicious cycle, Leontes once again

responds by clinging to Mamillius. He turns immediately to his son,

whom he calls his “honest friend,” distinguishing between Mamillius

and the deceitful Polixenes.

Leontes goes on to defend the substitution of Mamillius for

Polixenes. The ﬁrst question he asks the man whom he now suspects

has cuckolded him is, “Are you so fond of your young prince as we /

Do seem to be of ours?” (1.2.165–66). And when he hears Polixenes

describe in loving detail the ways his son is the complete companion,

the ideal playmate—“all my exercise, my mirth, my matter...My

36. Pen-knives regularly appear among the lists of schoolboys’ belongings in the period. See,

e.g., John Brinsley, tr. Corderius Dialogues (1636), book 1,p.52; Brinsley, Ludus Literarius: or, the

Grammar Schoole (1612), p. 29.

344 English Literary Renaissance

parasite, my soldier, statesman, all” (1.2.167–69)—Leontes is reminded

that he has been and will be replaced, if not by Hermione then by this

young competitor. Leontes responds with a gloriﬁed “me, too”—“So

stands this squire / Ofﬁced with me” (ll. 172–73)—and promptly sends

Polixenes and Hermione off together, while he takes Mamillius for his

company. He goes on to reafﬁrm his friendship with Mamillius when

he instructs Hermione to take care of Polixenes: “Next to thyself and

my young rover, he’s / Apparent to my heart” (ll. 177–78). What

appears a compliment to his old friend is in fact a statement of

Polixenes’ now inferior rank in Leontes’ affections.

Left alone with his son, Leontes regresses fully, becoming ﬁxated on

play, an activity, I’ve argued, that he associates with his boyhood. He

pouts to Mamillius, “Go play, boy, play. Thy mother plays, and I / Play

too;...Goplay,boy,play”(ll. 188–91). Leontes imagines his world as

a big game of make-believe, where Hermione’s secret frolicking with

Polixenes resembles his son’s boyish games, which resemble his own

regressive recreations. Rather than ﬁnding solace in comparisons

between children’s games and adult life, as Ascham, Carew, and others

do, Leontes collapses the difference between boy and man, and

between game and reality.When he sends Mamillius away, he conﬂates

the categories of boy and man: “Go play, Mamillius, thou’rt an honest

man” (l. 211).

Leontes turns his life—friends, family, kingdom—into a pastime,

but one he takes very seriously. When he ﬁrst publicly accuses

Hermione, he uses the language of games, declaring, “My wife’s a

hobby-horse” (1.2.278). Although editors gloss the term “hobby-

horse” as whore, its more literal meaning at the time is a kind of toy,

a stick topped with a horse’s head. Children ride it the way that

Leontes maintains Polixenes “rides” Hermione. The hobby-horse is

also more generally a name for a performer in a morris-dance, an

early entertainment where the performer essentially mimics a rol-

licking horse. The implication is that Hermione is the player but also

the toy with which Polixenes plays. It is worth noting that the more

limited deﬁnition of whore that most editors use attributes all the

blame for the alleged affair to Hermione, when Leontes directs part

of his anger at Polixenes, a trend we’ve seen from the beginning. The

editorial gloss also assumes that it is only the erotic nature of the

Hermione-Polixenes relationship that concerns Leontes, whereas even

their friendship is a threat.

345Gina Bloom

Leontes returns again to the language of game-playing during Her-

mione’s trial, claiming he has produced his case against Hermione the

way a schoolboy constructs a spinning top: “if I mistake / In those

foundations which I build upon, / The centre is not big enough to

bear / A schoolboy’s top” (2.1.102–15). Although “centre” can mean

earth, the gloss of most editors, the literal deﬁnition is the point of

equilibrium in a body or the axis around which an object turns.

the early modern top-spinning game, the winning top will spin the

longest because it is built with a sound center, a peg or stick that serves

as the top’s axis.

Used at a moment when life and death hang in the

balance, Leontes’ analogy is deeply troubling. Not only does he

compare the case against Hermione to a children’s game, but he offers

this analogy as proof that the case against her is sound, as if the

schoolboy’s playground game provides the benchmark for true justice.

Games have come to provide Leontes with the language through

which he understands and participates in the larger world, but he

appears wholly unconscious of this as a language. Adrift in a fantasy

world, he no longer recognizes the frame of play.

There is a parallel between Leontes’ nostalgia for the playfulness of

boyhood and Ascham’s nostalgic portrayal of England’s boys practicing

archery. In both cases boyhood recreation keeps certain kinds of loss at

bay—losses brought about by the temporality of the human body and

its inevitable move toward old age as well as by the waning of English

traditional life and the temporal movement toward modernity.

Boyhood play provides a focal point for constructing the past as an

idyllic time, whether the personal, individual past or, in the cases of

Ascham and Stow, a collective English past. Such efforts can only be

temporary, however, as the forces of time exert themselves. Readers of

Ascham’s nostalgic treatise would have known full well that the book

could not halt the modernization of England’s military. And so the

audience to The Winter’s Tale is encouraged to condemn Leontes for his

childishness, and to cheer as he is dragged in the second half of the play

sixteen years into the future.

37. OED, 3

ed., s.v. “centre/center.”

38. Andrew Leibs, Sports and Games of the Renaissance (Westport, Conn, 2004), p. 188,

describes the game as played in Renaissance Oceania. In The Sports and Pastimes of the People of

England (1801), ed. J. Charles Cox (Detroit, 1968), pp. 304–05, Joseph Strutt cites English

evidence of spinning tops, including an anecdote from a manuscript wherein Prince Henry

recalls playing with tops.

346 English Literary Renaissance

Although Leontes’ transformation is delayed until act 5, the ﬁrst

stirrings of change occur when Leontes learns that Mamillius has

suddenly died. Mamillius’ death is signiﬁcant not only because he is

heir to the throne, but because Mamillius represents for Leontes a

connection to boyhood play and the psychic security it promises. If

Leontes conﬂates manhood and boyhood, regressing to the latter in an

effort to escape the pressures of aging, Mamillius’ death reveals the

costs of such a conﬂation.

Boyhood, now associated with death rather

than continuity, no longer provides a safe haven from anxieties of

aging.

With attachment to boyhood now a source of discomfort,

Leontes relinquishes his interests in play and declares that he will make

grief for his wife and son his only sport: “Once a day I’ll visit / The

chapel where they lie, and tears shed there / Shall be my recreation”

(3.3.236–38). This total abjection of all games and play is extreme, and

insufﬁcient to Leontes’ full transformation; Leontes, The Winter’s Tale

will suggest, needs to ﬁnd a productive place for recreation, not simply

to eschew it.

The precursor to that ultimate recovery is the visit in act 5 of

Florizel, who may be the ﬁrst youth that Leontes has encountered in

sixteen years. Florizel is a dangerous temptation because he reminds

Leontes of both the boyhood friends he has lost: Florizel not only

physically resembles the young Polixenes, but he is the very age that

Mamillius would have been had he survived: “[t]here was not full a

month / Between their births” (5.1.117–18). Leontes shuns both com-

parisons, however. When Paulina muses “Had our prince, / Jewel of

children, seen this hour, he had paired / Well with this lord” (5.1.115–

17), Leontes quickly silences her, refusing to think of Mamillius as

grown and alive. As Stephen Guy-Bray observes, the suppression of

this pairing of Mamillius and Florizel is in keeping with the suppres-

sion of homoeroticism in the second part of the play. Given the pitfalls

of Leontes’ attachment to boyhood, his avoidance of this image of

39. I am extending Erickson’s insight that the death of Mamillius cures Leontes of his

delusions because it forces him to recognize that he has equated father and son (p. 821). The

problem with such an equation is that it collapses not only familial, but age, categories.

40. This is one of the many similarities between these two phases of the life cycle, as early

moderns envisioned it. Children were thought to be extremely vulnerable to sickness as a result

of their weak—wet and cold—constitutions.

347Gina Bloom

boyhood friends is also signiﬁcant to the play’s representation of his

progression through the life cycle toward normative manhood. A

notable sign of this progression is Leontes’ ability to reminisce about,

without becoming lost in, his boyhood relationship with Polixenes. To

be sure, when Leontes looks on Florizel, who so resembles the young

Polixenes, Leontes regresses momentarily to the past and almost forgets

his advanced age:

Were I but twenty-one,

Your father’s image is so hit in you,

His very air, that I should call you brother,

As I did him, and speak of something wildly

By us performed before. (5.1.125–29)

But Leontes’ nostalgia is carefully bracketed by conditionals that

frame the past as the past: “were I but twenty-one...I should call

you brother.” And in keeping with his newfound acceptance of his

mature years, Leontes does not break into a nostalgic recital of things

“wildly performed...before.” Moreover, when Florizel reminds

Leontes of his youth, urging him to think back to the time he was

Florizel’s age and take pity on the young couple, Leontes reacts very

differently than he did in act 1. When he recalls being on the cusp

of marriage, Leontes does not grip the past and repudiate women

but greedily eyes Perdita and explains (or maintains) that he thinks of

Hermione (5.1.226–27). Insofar as Leontes’ nostalgic recollection

stimulates desire and/or thoughts of his dead spouse, he demonstrates

acceptance of the ways male-male relationships (whether homo-

social or homoerotic) can exist alongside marriage and heteroerotic

desire.

Through his encounter with Florizel, Leontes may begin to perform

what early moderns deﬁne as normative adult masculinity, but the

ultimate test of his transformation is the ﬁnal scene of the play, where

Leontes not only comes to accept his aging self, but does so through

recognition of the frame of play. Leontes’ greater comfort with old age

becomes evident when he ﬁrst views the statue of Hermione and

observes that its face is wrinkled, more aged than Hermione’s face was

when she was alive. Leontes is not disturbed by Paulina’s explanation

that Hermione is represented as she would look at present, even

though the statue crystallizes the passage of time, reﬂecting back

Leontes’ own lined face. Leontes even gestures to his mortality. When

348 English Literary Renaissance

Paulina expresses concern that Leontes may think the statue moves,

Leontes swears on his life that he has seen it move,“Would I were dead

but that methinks already” (5.3.62). His contemplation of death is

expressed more explicitly when, insisting that Paulina keep the curtain

open, he declares twice that he wishes to look on the statue for the

next twenty years (5.3.71, 84). Given that Leontes is now in his forties,

he projects himself forward to his sixties, the approximate time of death

for many early modern men.

Leontes thus not only accepts his wife

as his companion into old age, but crucially accepts the aging process

and the reality of mortality.

Notably, this acceptance is developed through Leontes’ participation

in one of the period’s most popular forms of recreation, the theater.

Paulina’s carefully crafted revelation of the statue and Hermione’s

virtuoso display of stillness are theatrical performances, albeit perfor-

mances of which Leontes and his fellow audiences are at ﬁrst unaware.

By not divulging this pretense, Paulina forces Leontes to reexperience

his confounded delusions from the start of the play: where he once was

so completely emmeshed in boyhood games that he lost the ability to

recognize the frame of play, now he is denied awareness that there is a

frame. Paulina offers Leontes the opportunity to discover the frame on

his own, and he does. While Paulina expertly maintains the illusion—

naming the artist, calling attention to the wet paint, drawing and

undrawing curtains—Leontes hesitantly but persistently tests the fuzzy

41. Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven,

2000) notes that the average life expectancy rose over the course of the sixteenth century, from

about 32–34 in the ﬁrst half of the century to about 38–41 by 1580 (p. 127). It is important to

note that these averages are calculated across the life cycle and do not reﬂect that children who

lived past age ﬁve had a higher than average life expectancy. In “Growing Old,” Steven R. Smith

ﬁnds that in the seventeenth century many people lived to age sixty, with about a third living

to seventy or more (p.126). At the same time Steven R. Smith and Peter Laslett, Family Life and

Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology (Cambridge, Eng., 1977) point out

that the statistics on old age can be misleading since individuals may have inﬂated their reported

age in a culture that esteemed the elderly. For an historical overview of early modern attitudes

toward death and religious rituals involved, see David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual,

Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997).

42. Inga-Stina Ewbank, “The Triumph of Time in The Winter’s Tale,” Review of English

Literature 5,no.2 (1964) argues that Leontes, as he comes to accept time’s natural passage, also

accepts his subjection to time as a destructive force. I ﬁnd this useful but question the

presumption that the play represents Leontes as passively subject to time’s effects. Leontes’

recovery at the end of the play is contingent on his capacity to shape the relations among past,

present, and future, something games and recreations, particularly theater, ultimately encourage.

See Harris for a useful critique of Ewbank.

349Gina Bloom

boundary between pretense and reality. As he stares at the statue, he is

certain that has seen it move, that “it breathed” and wonders if others

note that “those veins / Did verily bear blood?” (5.3.64–65). He goes

on to insist, “The ﬁxture of her eye has motion in’t” (l. 67) and, again,

that he sees her breathing (ll. 78–9).There is even some intimation that

Leontes discovers the pretense before the other onstage witnesses, for

as he embraces Hermione, Camillo and Polixenes, stunned, seem

unable to grasp that this has all been a performance.Although it is now

clear that Paulina does not direct the statue’s movements, Camillo and

Polixenes still ask her to make the statue speak and narrate its history

(ll.114–16). Their deferred recognition matters little, however, for the

performance has been scripted and played primarily for Leontes, an

opportunity for him to exercise the kind of consciousness of frames

that was missing when he ﬁrst wronged Hermione.

Only once he has proven he can engage productively in play is

Leontes ready to resume his adult duties. And as Leontes becomes

aware that, in Carew’s words, “al is good play,” he confronts his aging

body and his temporally circumscribed future, like Shallow and the

gerontocrats Stow describes. Where Leontes once looked on the lines

of his boy’s face, he now looks at the wrinkles on Hermione’s statue,

and instead of retreating to the past, he projects himself into the future,

seeing before him the years he has left to live and gaze upon this

representation of passing time. Instead of abandoning games and plea-

sures, Leontes turns to recreation, theatrical recreation, as a vehicle

through which to accept the aging process. Through Leontes’ new

approach to play, The Winter’s Tale underscores early modern views of

the rejuvenating beneﬁts of sport, re-creation indeed.

The Winter’s Tale presents itself, in sum, as a story of Leontes’ devel-

opment from troubled to normative adult masculinity. Notably, the play

has been described as a triumph of linear over cyclical time, the latter

associated with the homosocial pastoral that dominates the ﬁrst act.

43. Such a triumph has been read as a function of genre (the happy ending typical of

tragicomedy) or, as Guy-Bray argues, of ideology (a conservative shift from male homoeroticism

and homosociality to heterosexual marriage and reproduction).

350 English Literary Renaissance

Nora Johnson argues, however, that ultimately this rite of passage

narrative from homoerotic youth to fertile adulthood is disrupted.

Johnson locates that disruption solely in the early modern theatrical

performance space and its use of boy actors, but the disruption is also

embedded in the play’s plot structure and representation of character,

speciﬁcally its story of Polixenes’ anxious regression to boyhood in acts

4 and 5.

To understand how and why Polixenes’ story of regressive mascu-

linity undermines Leontes’ story of progression and normative mascu-

linization, it is useful to read the play in terms of what Annamarie

Jagose calls “sexual sequence.” Jagose argues that heterosexuality asserts

its normativity by positing homosexuality as its derivative, and the

secondariness of homosexuality is insured through a logic of sequence

wherein it is ﬁgured as part of the “prehistory” to heterosexuality.

The tension Jagose describes between homosexuality’s chronological

primacy and its ideological secondariness is useful to my exploration of

aging and masculinity in The Winter’s Tale. I have argued that in a

linear, developmental model of masculinity, asserting the chronological

primacy of boyhood renders boyhood derivative of normative adult

masculinity: boys are like men, but not quite, and boyhood, as Freud

writes about homosexual desire, is something the “healthy” subject

grows out of.

And yet, as Jagose points out in relation to sexuality, the

logic of sequence cannot help but reveal itself to be an anxious effort

to distance the subject from its prehistory. In a similar fashion, The

Winter’s Tale’s triumphant master narrative of the inevitability of matu-

ration and linear development is undermined and denaturalized. For

Leontes’ story is redramatized through Polixenes, but with a difference.

Whereas Leontes’ narrative is one of progression from boyhood into

adult manhood and ultimate acceptance of marriage and mortality,

Polixenes’ is one of the failure to progress beyond childish games, of

44. Nora Johnson,“Ganymedes and Kings: Staging Male Homosexual Desire in The Winter’s

Tale,” Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998).

45. Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence

(Ithaca, 2002), esp. p. 81.

46. Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago,

1991) locates a similar rhetoric at work in early modern educational discourse. Pastoral verse,

with all its homoerotic content, was often considered a “youthful kind of poetry subject to

re-vision from the wiser perspective of middle age” (p. 93), and thus students might read and

write pastoral verse in their youth but were expected, with age and maturity, to move on to

“higher” forms, like epic.

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the persistent fear of dying, and the unﬂagging desire to remain “boy

eternal.” With Polixenes The Winter’s Tale circles back to where it

began, disrupting the sequential logic that generates momentum for

Leontes’ manly transformation and exposing this linear, developmental

narrative as by no means the last word on masculinity.

The parallels between Polixenes and Leontes are abundant. Act 4

begins with Polixenes begging his male companion, Camillo, not to

leave.

And as was true for Leontes, for Polixenes it is the fear of

growing older and of dying that partly fuels this desperation.

Polixenes associates Camillo’s departure with death (4.2.2); and

Camillo conﬁrms the link when he explains that he wants to leave

so that he can “lay my bones” (4.2.4–5) in Sicilia. Perhaps uncom-

fortable with the idea that Camillo is going home to Sicilia to die,

Polixenes avoids subsequent talk of mortality, steering quickly away

from mention of Leontes and the “loss of his most precious queen

and children” (4.2.19–20). Notably, the contemplation of loss leads

Polixenes, as it once did Leontes, to turn his attention immediately

to his youthful son.

Anxious about his son’s remoteness, Polixenes, like Leontes, uses

games, particularly games of pretend, as a way to reconcile the distance.

“I fear...the angle that plucks our son thither” (4.2.39–40), he tells

Camillo, and then recommends that they don disguises to dupe the

simple Shepherd into betraying information about Florizel’s activities.

At ﬁrst this game of pretend is ﬁgured as fairly light-hearted deception,

as Polixenes and Camillo jest with the country-folk, agreeably playing

the old men at the sheep-shearing festivities. But much like Leontes’,

Polixenes’ games are revealed to be nefarious in the hands of an aging

patriarch who uses play to escape anxieties about his mortality.

Such

47. Because of the status differences between Polixenes and Camillo, this “friendship” is of

a very different sort than that between Polixenes and Leontes. Nevertheless, the bonds between

Polixenes and Camillo are signiﬁcant and, given the unusual circumstances under which Camillo

comes into the service of Polixenes, their relationship might be read as another form of

voluntary kinship.

48. The ethical limits of sportly deception are raised quickly after Polixenes hatches his plan.

For in the very next scene Autolycus uses an analogy from the recreation of fowling to describe

how he will trick the Old Shepherd’s son out of his money: “If the springe hold, the cock’s

mine” (4.3.33). Insofar as the woodcock is known to be easy prey, Autolycus’ analogy links the

simplicity of the clown with Polixenes’ view of the simplicity of the Old Shepherd. And like

Autolycus, Polixenes lures his easy prey by pretending to be vulnerable; whereas Autolycus

pretends to have been robbed and beaten, Polixenes pretends to be old.

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an escape proves impossible. For when the Old Shepherd offers a

dowry to equal Doricles’, Florizel opaquely observes that “One being

dead, / I shall have more than you can dream of yet” (4.4.373–74).

Playing the old man, Polixenes ﬁnds he has become one in his son’s

imagination, and the game is no longer such a pleasure for him.

Although he continues to pretend, he now uses play as a façade to

cover up his effort to entrap his son. Probing into why Florizel’s father

is not present at the wedding, Polixenes intimates that Florizel, by

distancing himself from his father, relegates his father to old age:

Is not your father grown incapable

Of reasonable affairs? Is he not stupid

With age and alt’ring rheums? Can he speak, hear,

Know man from man? Dispute his own estate?

Lies he not bed-rid, and again does nothing

But what he did being childish? (4.4.385–90)

Polixenes rehearses the quintessential symptoms of what early moderns

call decrepit old age, ending with the sign of most concern to adult

men: the return in ﬁnal years to childhood. Florizel’s response aggra-

vates these concerns. Although he explains that his father is in excellent

health, he reminds Polixenes of the feebleness that accompanies old age

when he says, “He has his health, and ampler strength indeed / Than

most have of his age” (4.4.391–92). Florizel reiterates this negative view

of old age later in the play when, to avoid Leontes’ suspicions about

Polixenes’ absence from the voyage to Sicilia, Florizel explains that his

father could not travel because “inﬁrmity / Which waits upon worn

times, hath something seized / His wished ability” (5.1.140–42). Flo-

rizel’s marriage generates anxiety for other reasons as well, for mar-

riage signals Florizel’s transition into manhood and, most importantly,

out of youth, a troubling change for a gerontocrat who has already

admitted in act 1 that his son is “all my exercise, my mirth, my

matter...My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all” (1.2.167–69). Given

how much pleasure Polixenes derives from his youthful son, it is not

surprising that when he reveals himself during the wedding ceremony,

he emphasizes Florizel’s immature years, calling him “young sir”

(4.4.405) and “fond boy” (l. 414).

Although Polixenes ﬁnally accepts his son’s decision to marry,

he surrenders his young playmate to manhood only in the presence

of his childhood friend Leontes. As Leontes once used Mamillius to

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compensate for the loss of Polixenes, now Polixenes uses Leontes to

compensate for the loss of Florizel.

The reconciliation between

Leontes and Polixenes has been treated, by most critics, as an important

feature of the play’s climactic conclusion. In his inﬂuential study

Erickson points to the elasticity and power of the play’s “male

network,” maintaining that “[t]he primary indication of the resilience

of male bonds in this play is that Leontes does not have to give up his

friendship with Polixenes to regain Hermione” (p. 824). But what

evidence is there, other than critics’ desire for symmetrical reconcili-

ations across and between the genders and generations, that Leontes

and Polixenes have returned to being “twinned lambs”? The reunion of

kings is neither complete nor climactic, a point underscored by the

play’s refusal to stage it.

When the kings do appear together, their friendship seems strained

by inequalities and differences. For one thing, Polixenes expresses

reluctance about old age. When Leontes observes that the statue of

Hermione exhibits many more wrinkles than Hermione had when he

knew her, when she was “nothing / So agèd as this seems” (5.3.28–29),

Polixenes quickly responds, “O, not by much” (l. 29), as if to challenge

the idea that Hermione looks old. And unlike Leontes, Polixenes seems

unprepared to combine married life with homosocial friendship. Pre-

sumably having lost his wife, Polixenes stands alone among the cluster

of matrimonial couples that close the play. He continues to cling to

Leontes, offering himself as an emotional resource:

Dear my brother,

Let him that was the cause of this have power

To take off so much grief from you as he

Will piece up in himself. (5.3.53–56)

But Leontes does not accept the offer of fraternal comfort. Remaining

transﬁxed on the statue, Leontes implies that he would rather have his

grief than stop gazing on Hermione’s likeness. Perhaps rebuffed,

Polixenes withdraws. His remaining lines in this scene are superﬂuous:

in addition to asking Paulina to make the statue speak—a request that

49. To be sure, Polixenes supports Florizel’s marriage in large part because Perdita’s newly

discovered royal status renders her a ﬁtting dynastic match. But Perdita also serves as a ﬂesh and

blood connection to Leontes.

50. Snyder offers an interesting but not fully convincing case that the scene may have been

staged in some original version of the play, serving as its conclusion.

354 English Literary Renaissance

indicates his failure to recognize the frame of play as quickly as Leontes

does—he merely conﬁrms Leontes’ observations about the statue’s

lively form (5.3.65–66), and when the statue touches Leontes, he

observes,“She embraces him” (5.3.112). Since theater audiences can see

this embrace for themselves, the line seems to function merely as a

stage direction, which further removes Polixenes from the emotional

center of the ending. At most the line conveys a sense of surprise, and

perhaps regret, as Polixenes realizes that Leontes no longer reserves his

affections exclusively for his boyhood friend.

Critics often maintain that at the end of The Winter’s Tale, all

breaches are healed.

If one reads the perpetuation of dynasties as a

signal of healing, then this appears to be true. But if the breaches are

produced in part by men’s over-investments in boyhood as a way to

avoid anxieties of aging and mortality, then the play’s conclusion leaves

questions open. Young heirs, while they may serve as comforting

reminders of youth, can also be a source of anxiety about the aging

process. The play shows one king overcoming fear of aging and death

through a more productive engagement with games and youth, while

another undergoes the identical struggle with less success. And so The

Winter’s Tale, which valiantly works to offer a comforting linear nar-

rative of male development through the story of Leontes, cycles back

on itself, much like the process the body undergoes with age. If

Leontes represents a triumphal story of the renewal available to those

who face mortality, Polixenes points to a more sobering portrait of old

age as a return to less exalted beginnings.

More than simply dramatizing this contrast, The Winter’s Tale offers

audiences the chance to enact Leontes’ transformation. Theatrical rec-

reation provides Leontes the opportunity to deal successfully with the

paradox of similitude that structures early modern thinking about both

51. A key exception are feminist critics who question the neatness of the marital unions at

the end of the play, particularly raising doubts about whether there is evidence that Hermione

forgives Leontes (to whom she does not speak), not to mention the sudden and odd pairing of

Camillo with the vigorously independent Paulina. The reunion of the two kings, however, has

raised few if any doubts.

52. Although my focus here has been on how the parallel stories of Leontes and Polixenes

diverge from each other and what the signiﬁcance of this divergence may be for the play’s

representation of aging and masculinity, an interesting question remains why their paths should

differ. One possibility lies in their respective advisors: Polixenes is advised by Camillo, who so

fears loss of his own life that he abandoned Hermione in Sicilia; Leontes is advised by Paulina,

who herself has experienced profound loss and who, having engaged Leontes in a complex

game of pretend for sixteen years, exhibits a strong understanding of play.

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developmental masculinity and recreation. In the ﬁnal scene he proves

able to contemplate without collapsing the similarities between boys

and men and between games and more serious adult pursuits. For the

theater audience, too, the ﬁnal scene presents a series of paradoxes

around masculinity and play, as a male actor pretends to be a female

character that pretends to be a statue that comes to life. What is more,

on Shakespeare’s stage these paradoxes of similitude would have been

embodied literally by a playing boy. Even as the statue scene blurs

pretense and the real, however, it uses emphatic metatheatricality to

insure that audiences will, like Leontes, resolve these indistinctions and

recognize that “al is good play.”

university of california, davis

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