payment page
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 practiced smiles
As in a looking glass, and then to sigh, as ’twere
The mort o’ th’ deer—O, that is entertainment
My bosom likes not, nor my brows. (1.2.139–50)
Leontes utters these lines in the play’s second scene, revealing for the first time his jealous suspicion about the affair between his wife and his best friend. The confounding shock of the moment is registered in his repetitive phrases: “Too hot! Too hot!” and “not for joy, not joy.” Looking on as Hermione and Polixenes hold their own council to the side of the stage, Leontes believes that he sees them “paddling palms and pinching fingers” in a revealing display of their otherwise clandestine love. Having made this observation, he worries that they have been putting up a front with him, “making practiced smiles.” So begins the jealous fantasy that will undo the Sicilian court.
Ha’ not you seen, Camillo—
But that’s past doubt; you have, or your eyeglass
Is thicker than a cuckold’s horn—or heard—
For to a vision so apparent, rumor
Cannot be mute—or thought—for cogitation
Resides not in that man that does not think—
My wife is slippery? (1.2.329–35)
In addition to the apparent suddenness of Leontes’s jealousy, a key element in the play’s first act is the rapidity with which his jealousy transforms into wild delusion. In this passage, Leontes is trying—unsuccessfully—to convince Camillo of his wife’s infidelity. One important feature of these lines is the way Leontes emphasizes not the adulterous action he alleges against his wife and best friend, but rather the shame such action confers on him. His reference to “a cuckold’s horn” alludes to a popular folk notion that when a wife sleeps with another man, her husband will grow horns that publicly reveal his shame. In this way, he becomes a “cuckold.” Another important feature of this passage is its borderline incoherence. Characterized by numerous long dashes that mark interruptions in his deranged line of thinking, these lines fully showcase the king’s mounting lunacy.
Does not the stone rebuke me
For being more stone than it? (5.3.43–44)
When Hermione dies—or appears to die—in the third act, the event, combined with the death of Mamillius, finally breaks Leontes from his madness. No longer ruled by jealous fantasy, he immediately enters a period of mourning and penitence. Paulina, who valiantly defended Hermione’s honor against Leontes’s madness, subsequently presides over Leontes’s rehabilitation. In her bold and unrelenting way, she encourages his contrition. After sixteen years of genuine shame and penitence for his action, Paulina now stages Hermione’s miraculous resurrection: a stone statue of the queen’s likeness will come alive before the king’s eyes. But before that happens, and as if to confirm his contrition one last time, Leontes utters these poignant lines of self-rebuke.
