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Summary
In the kingdom of Sicilia, King Leontes is being visited by his childhood friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia. One of Leontes’s lords, Camillo, discusses the striking differences between the two kingdoms with a Bohemian nobleman, Archidamus. The conversation then turns to the great and enduring friendship between the two kings, and the beauty and promise of the Sicilian prince, Mamillius.
These two lords exit, and Leontes enters with his pregnant wife, Hermione, along with his son Mamillius and King Polixenes, who is preparing to depart for home. Leontes pleads with him to stay longer in Sicilia, but his friend refuses, declaring that he has been away from Bohemia for nine months, which is long enough. Hermione then takes up the argument, and Polixenes yields to her entreaties, promising to stay a little longer. He tells the Sicilian queen how wonderful his childhood with Leontes was—how “we were, fair queen / Two lads that thought there was no more behind / But such a day tomorrow as today / And to be boy eternal” (1.2.79–82).
Leontes, meanwhile, tells Hermione that she has never spoken to better effect than in convincing Polixenes to stay—save for once, when she agreed to marry him. As his wife and his friend walk along together apart from him, he feels the stirrings of jealousy and tells the audience that he suspects them of being lovers. He turns to his son and notes that the boy resembles him, and this reassures him that Mamillius is, in fact, his son and not someone else’s. However, his suspicion of his wife remains and grows quickly, until he is certain that she is sleeping with Polixenes. He sends the two of them to walk in the garden together, promising to join them later.
He then calls Camillo over, asking if he has noticed anything peculiar about Polixenes’s behavior. Camillo says that he has not. Even so, Leontes accuses him of being either negligent or ignorant. He then insists that Hermione and Polixenes have made him a cuckold—that is, a betrayed husband. Camillo is appalled and refuses to believe it. However, he eventually succumbs to the pressure exerted by his king, who orders Camillo to continue acting as the cupbearer to Polixenes, and to poison the Bohemian king at the first opportunity.
Camillo promises to obey, but his conscience is greatly troubled. When Leontes has gone and Polixenes reappears, the Bohemian king realizes that something is amiss. Saying that Leontes just gave him a peculiar and threatening look, he demands to know what is going on. Camillo, after a moment of anguish, tells him of the Sicilian king’s suspicions and desire to have him poisoned. He begs for the protection of Polixenes, who accepts him as a servant, and they decide to flee the country immediately by sneaking out of the castle and taking ship for Bohemia. Camillo promises to use his authority in Sicilia to ensure their escape, and the two men slip away together.
Read a translation of Act 1: Scenes 1 & 2.
Analysis
The appearance of the two lords at the opening of the play is a typical Shakespearean device, in which minor characters prepare the audience for what they are about to see. In Antony and Cleopatra, for instance, two Roman soldiers comment on Antony’s decline, and in King Lear, Gloucester and Kent discuss the division of the kingdom that their monarch is about to undertake. In this play, however, Shakespeare subverts this traditional device in a way that effectively obscures what is about to take place. They describe two kings with a deeply rooted friendship “which cannot choose but branch now” (1.1.25). What we see in the very next scene, however, is a friendship that’s in grave danger. Just when Polixenes is about to leave his longtime friend and go home to Bohemia, Leontes nurtures a growing sense of jealousy that leads him to take the drastic action of ordering Camillo to poison Polixenes. Here, too, Shakespeare plays with expectations. In the opening scene, Archidamus playfully comments to Camillo that when the Sicilian court comes to visit, the far less fancy Bohemian court will have to serve “sleepy drinks” (1.1.14) to distract the Sicilians from the relative poverty. However, as it turns out, it’s the Sicilian court that will aim to serve the Bohemian a drink that will put him to sleep forever.
The opening can be played many ways, of course, and one could legitimately suggest that Leontes’s jealousy does not take flight until after Hermione convinces Polixenes to stay. But several clues suggest that Leontes begins the play already having suspected Polixenes and Hermione of adultery. For one thing, the latter two characters are the only ones in act 1, scene 2, who speak with any sense of cheer. For example, the Bohemian king is given a long discourse on the bliss of his childhood friendship with Leontes. Meanwhile, the Sicilian king is conspicuously silent until he is left alone to nurse his jealousy, speaking only in short, clipped sentences. After Polixenes has gone on for nine lines expressing his gratitude for the Sicilian king’s hospitality, Leontes says only, “Stay your thanks awhile / And pay them when you part” (1.2.10–11). Then, after another speech by the Bohemian king, Leontes replies tersely, “We are tougher, brother, / Than you can put us to ’t” (1.2.18–19). Furthermore, whereas Polixenes uses the highly formal language that the nobility uses to convey respect, Leontes affects a kind of informality that indicates his impatience.
Meanwhile, the initial speech by Polixenes calls attention the fact that he has been in Sicilia for nine months—that is, “Nine changes of the watery star” (1.2.1). This period coincides, rather obviously, with the length of Hermione’s pregnancy, and suggests that Shakespeare wishes to call attention to the idea of infidelity from the beginning. And when Leontes later says, “I am angling now, / Although you perceive me not how I give line” (1.2.225–26), one can easily imagine that the entire business of asking Polixenes to stay is another “angling,” designed to trap the Bohemian king and enable Leontes to dispose of him.
Despite these hints, the roots of Leontes’s jealousy are ultimately uncertain. Shakespeare allows him some of the play’s most brilliant and biting lines, but he refuses to give an easy explanation as to why he is so certain of Hermione’s infidelity. As the coming acts will clearly demonstrate, the play allows no possibility of her guilt. Even so, Leontes believes he sees her “paddling palms and pinching fingers” (1.2.146) with Polixenes, which—unless we think Leontes hallucinates—suggest a degree of physical intimacy with her husband’s friend. Still, a wide gulf remains between such behavior and Leontes’s grim certainty of sexual relations.
There is a traditional male fear of illegitimacy at work, of course, as we observe in the king’s attempts to see his own likeness in Mamillius’s face. In a time when male heirs were critical to dynastic survival, men often had strong anxiety related to female adultery. The figure that materializes this anxiety is that of the cuckold—that is, the husband of an unfaithful wife, whose shame is made plain by the growth of devil-horns on his head. And indeed, Leontes makes several references to himself as a cuckold, as when he describes the “hard’ning of my brows” (1.2.183).
At the same time, several critics have found a clue to Leontes’s madness in the intensity of his friendship with Polixenes, whose depiction of their unfallen, innocent boyhood suggests that they have “tripped since” (1.2.96) by marrying. “Of this make no conclusion,” Hermione protests, “lest you say / Your queen and I are devils” (1.2.103–104). Yet the real suggestion is that the intimacy between Polixenes and Leontes was so great that it is difficult for the adult king of Sicilia to separate himself from his friend, even now that they are married. “To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods” (1.2.140), Leontes says, but that is exactly what he does: he feels corrupted, in some odd sense, by his marriage to Hermione, and so he projects his guilt upon his friend, “mingling friendship” too far and so destroying it.
