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The Winter’s Tale
William Shakespeare
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.Considered one of Shakespeare’s most haunting tragic-comedies, The Winter’s Tale is an in-depth analysis of the psychology of family and friendship, jealousy and love, art and nature, all illustrated in rich poetry.Based on Robert Greene’s story Pandosto, the play tells the story of Leontes, king of Sicilia, and his childhood friend, Polixenes, king of Bohemia. In a jealous rage, Leontes mistakenly accuses Polixenes and his own his wife, Hermione, of adultery and her newborn daughter as illegitimate, casting her into the wilderness, causing their son to die of grief and Hermione to seemingly follow suit. With his family dead or believed dead, Leontes must face the tragic consequences of his actions. With unbridled honesty and the pain of love, the final act is one of Shakespeare’s most moving reconciliation scenes.


THE ALEXANDER SHAKESPEARE
General Editor
R.B. Kennedy
Additional notes and editing
Mike Gould

THE WINTER’S TALE
William Shakespeare


CONTENTS
Title Page (#uc3e3ad69-4eeb-568f-aade-705222df0141)
Prefatory Note (#u275bf6c6-7948-5152-aef2-6ac84c221b18)
The Theatre in Shakespeare’s Day (#uba092b4b-0435-5498-bbb2-49643347656c)
Shakespeare: A Timeline (#u21ccfa60-68df-54ce-904f-2f762cc90956)
Life & Times (#u71aeedbc-297b-5154-b7ba-914d3b9420ce)
Money in Shakespeare’s Day (#u1799d7a2-39bd-5886-a7c2-a459118117e3)
Introduction (#uc98e47c4-108a-5a79-b3b3-deb4de78ac12)
List of Characters (#ubfeef680-2d4d-52f4-9bd3-dbd528abf165)
Act One (#uef2e8dd7-2249-5b8f-9017-20f72af41995)
Scene I
Scene II (#uf288e54c-2197-5d78-b0a4-abbb802b4450)
Act Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Scene I
Scene II (#litres_trial_promo)
Scene III (#litres_trial_promo)
Act Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Scene I
Scene II (#litres_trial_promo)
Scene III (#litres_trial_promo)
Act Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Scene I
Scene II (#litres_trial_promo)
Scene III (#litres_trial_promo)
Scene IV (#litres_trial_promo)
Act Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Scene I
Scene II (#litres_trial_promo)
Scene III (#litres_trial_promo)
Shakespeare: Words and Phrases (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Prefatory Note
This Shakespeare play uses the full Alexander text. By keeping in mind the fact that the language has changed considerably in four hundred years, as have customs, jokes, and stage conventions, the editors have aimed at helping the modern reader – whether English is their mother tongue or not – to grasp the full significance of the play. The Notes, intended primarily for examination candidates, are presented in a simple, direct style. The needs of those unfamiliar with British culture have been specially considered.
Since quiet study of the printed word is unlikely to bring fully to life plays that were written directly for the public theatre, attention has been drawn to dramatic effects which are important in performance. The editors see Shakespeare’s plays as living works of art which can be enjoyed today on stage, film and television in many parts of the world.


An Elizabethan playhouse. Note the apron stage protruding into the auditorium, the space below it, the inner room at the rear of the stage, the gallery above the inner stage, the canopy over the main stage, and the absence of a roof over the audience.

The Theatre in Shakespeare’s Day
On the face of it, the conditions in the Elizabethan theatre were not such as to encourage great writers. The public playhouse itself was not very different from an ordinary inn-yard; it was open to the weather; among the spectators were often louts, pickpockets and prostitutes; some of the actors played up to the rowdy elements in the audience by inserting their own jokes into the authors’ lines, while others spoke their words loudly but unfeelingly; the presentation was often rough and noisy, with fireworks to represent storms and battles, and a table and a few chairs to represent a tavern; there were no actresses, so boys took the parts of women, even such subtle and mature ones as Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth; there was rarely any scenery at all in the modern sense. In fact, a quick inspection of the English theatre in the reign of Elizabeth I by a time-traveller from the twentieth century might well produce only one positive reaction: the costumes were often elaborate and beautiful.
Shakespeare himself makes frequent comments in his plays about the limitations of the playhouse and the actors of his time, often apologizing for them. At the beginning of Henry V the Prologue refers to the stage as ‘this unworthy scaffold’ and to the theatre building (the Globe, probably) as ‘this wooden O’, and emphasizes the urgent need for imagination in making up for all the deficiencies of presentation. In introducing Act IV the Chorus goes so far as to say:
… we shall much disgrace
With four or five most vile and ragged foils,
Right ill-dispos’d in brawl ridiculous,
The name of Agincourt, (lines 49–52)
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act V, Scene i) he seems to dismiss actors with the words:
The best in this kind are but shadows.
Yet Elizabeth’s theatre, with all its faults, stimulated dramatists to a variety of achievement that has never been equalled and, in Shakespeare, produced one of the greatest writers in history. In spite of all his grumbles he seems to have been fascinated by the challenge that it presented him with. It is necessary to re-examine his theatre carefully in order to understand how he was able to achieve so much with the materials he chose to use. What sort of place was the Elizabethan playhouse in reality? What sort of people were these criticized actors? And what sort of audiences gave them their living?

The Development of the Theatre up to Shakespeare’s Time
For centuries in England noblemen had employed groups of skilled people to entertain them when required. Under Tudor rule, as England became more secure and united, actors such as these were given more freedom, and they often performed in public, while still acknowledging their ‘overlords’ (in the 1570s, for example, when Shakespeare was still a schoolboy at Stratford, one famous company was called ‘Lord Leicester’s Men’). London was rapidly becoming larger and more important in the second half of the sixteenth century, and many of the companies of actors took the opportunities offered to establish themselves at inns on the main roads leading to the City (for example, the Boar’s Head in Whitechapel and the Tabard in South-wark) or in the City itself. These groups of actors would come to an agreement with the inn-keeper which would give them the use of the yard for their performances after people had eaten and drunk well in the middle of the day. Before long, some inns were taken over completely by companies of players and thus became the first public theatres. In 1574 the officials of the City of London issued an order which shows clearly that these theatres were both popular and also offensive to some respectable people, because the order complains about ‘the inordinate haunting of great multitudes of people, specially youth, to plays interludes and shows; namely occasion of frays and quarrels, evil practices of incontinency in great inns …’ There is evidence that, on public holidays, the theatres on the banks of the Thames were crowded with noisy apprentices and tradesmen, but it would be wrong to think that audiences were always undiscriminating and loudmouthed. In spite of the disapproval of Puritans and the more staid members of society, by the 1590s, when Shakespeare’s plays were beginning to be performed, audiences consisted of a good cross-section of English society, nobility as well as workers, intellectuals as well as simple people out for a laugh; also (and in this respect English theatres were unique in Europe), it was quite normal for respectable women to attend plays. So Shakespeare had to write plays which would appeal to people of widely different kinds. He had to provide ‘something for everyone’ but at the same time to take care to unify the material so that it would not seem to fall into separate pieces as they watched it. A speech like that of the drunken porter in Macbeth could provide the ‘groundlings’ with a belly-laugh, but also held a deeper significance for those who could appreciate it. The audience he wrote for was one of a number of apparent drawbacks which Shakespeare was able to turn to his and our advantage.

Shakespeare’s Actors
Nor were all the actors of the time mere ‘rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars’ as some were described in a Statute of 1572. It is true that many of them had a hard life and earned very little money, but leading actors could become partners in the ownership of the theatres in which they acted: Shakespeare was a shareholder in the Globe and the Blackfriars theatres when he was an actor as well as a playwright. In any case, the attacks made on Elizabethan actors were usually directed at their morals and not at their acting ability; it is clear that many of them must have been good at their trade if they were able to interpret complex works like the great tragedies in such a way as to attract enthusiastic audiences. Undoubtedly some of the boys took the women’s parts with skill and confidence, since a man called Coryate, visiting Venice in 1611, expressed surprise that women could act as well as they: ‘I saw women act, a thing that I never saw before … and they performed it with as good a grace, action, gesture … as ever I saw any masculine actor.’ The quality of most of the actors who first presented Shakespeare’s plays is probably accurately summed up by Fynes Moryson, who wrote, ‘… as there be, in my opinion, more plays in London than in all the parts of the world I have seen, so do these players or comedians excel all other in the world.’

The Structure of the Public Theatre
Although the ‘purpose-built’ theatres were based on the inn-yards which had been used for play-acting, most of them were circular. The walls contained galleries on three storeys from which the wealthier patrons watched, they must have been something like the ‘boxes’ in a modern theatre, except that they held much larger numbers – as many as 1500. The ‘groundlings’ stood on the floor of the building, facing a raised stage which projected from the ‘stage-wall’, the main features of which were:

1 a small room opening on to the back of the main stage and on the same level as it (rear stage),
2 a gallery above this inner stage (upper stage),
3 canopy projecting from above the gallery over the main stage, to protect the actors from the weather (the 700 or 800 members of the audience who occupied the yard, or ‘pit’ as we call it today, had the sky above them).
In addition to these features there were dressing-rooms behind the stage and a space underneath it from which entrances could be made through trap-doors. All the acting areas – main stage, rear stage, upper stage and under stage – could be entered by actors directly from their dressing rooms, and all of them were used in productions of Shakespeare’s plays. For example, the inner stage, an almost cavelike structure, would have been where Ferdinand and Miranda are ‘discovered’ playing chess in the last act of The Tempest, while the upper stage was certainly the balcony from which Romeo climbs down in Act III of Romeo and Juliet.
It can be seen that such a building, simple but adaptable, was not really unsuited to the presentation of plays like Shakespeare’s. On the contrary, its simplicity guaranteed the minimum of distraction, while its shape and construction must have produced a sense of involvement on the part of the audience that modern producers would envy.

Other Resources of the Elizabethan Theatre
Although there were few attempts at scenery in the public theatre (painted backcloths were occasionally used in court performances), Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights were able to make use of a fair variety of ‘properties’, lists of such articles have survived: they include beds, tables, thrones, and also trees, walls, a gallows, a Trojan horse and a ‘Mouth of Hell’; in a list of properties belonging to the manager, Philip Henslowe, the curious item ‘two mossy banks’ appears. Possibly one of them was used for the
bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act II, Scene i). Once again, imagination must have been required of the audience.
Costumes were the one aspect of stage production in which trouble and expense were hardly ever spared to obtain a magnificent effect. Only occasionally did they attempt any historical accuracy (almost all Elizabethan productions were what we should call ‘modern-dress’ ones), but they were appropriate to the characters who wore them: kings were seen to be kings and beggars were similarly unmistakable. It is an odd fact that there was usually no attempt at illusion in the costuming: if a costume looked fine and rich it probably was. Indeed, some of the costumes were almost unbelievably expensive. Henslowe lent his company £19 to buy a cloak, and the Alleyn brothers, well-known actors, gave £20 for a ‘black velvet cloak, with sleeves embroidered all with silver and gold, lined with black satin striped with gold’.
With the one exception of the costumes, the ‘machinery’ of the playhouse was economical and uncomplicated rather than crude and rough, as we can see from this second and more leisurely look at it. This meant that playwrights were stimulated to produce the imaginative effects that they wanted from the language that they used. In the case of a really great writer like Shakespeare, when he had learned his trade in the theatre as an actor, it seems that he received quite enough assistance of a mechanical and structural kind without having irksome restrictions and conventions imposed on him; it is interesting to try to guess what he would have done with the highly complex apparatus of a modern television studio. We can see when we look back to his time that he used his instrument, the Elizabethan theatre, to the full, but placed his ultimate reliance on the communication between his imagination and that of his audience through the medium of words. It is, above all, his rich and wonderful use of language that must have made play-going at that time a memorable experience for people of widely different kinds. Fortunately, the deep satisfaction of appreciating and enjoying Shakespeare’s work can be ours also, if we are willing to overcome the language difficulty produced by the passing of time.

Shakespeare: A Timeline
Very little indeed is known about Shakespeare’s private life; the facts included here are almost the only indisputable ones. The dates of Shakespeare’s plays are those on which they were first produced.


Life & Times
William Shakespeare the Playwright
There exists a curious paradox when it comes to the life of William Shakespeare. He easily has more words written about him than any other famous English writer, yet we know the least about him. This inevitably means that most of what is written about him is either fabrication or speculation. The reason why so little is known about Shakespeare is that he wasn’t a novelist or a historian or a man of letters. He was a playwright, and playwrights were considered fairly low on the social pecking order in Elizabethan society. Writing plays was about providing entertainment for the masses – the great unwashed. It was the equivalent to being a journalist for a tabloid newspaper.
In fact, we only know of Shakespeare’s work because two of his friends had the foresight to collect his plays together following his death and have them printed. The only reason they did so was apparently because they rated his talent and thought it would be a shame if his words were lost.
Consequently his body of work has ever since been assessed and reassessed as the greatest contribution to English literature. That is despite the fact that we know that different printers took it upon themselves to heavily edit the material they worked from. We also know that Elizabethan plays were worked and reworked frequently, so that they evolved over time until they were honed to perfection, which means that many different hands played their part in the active writing process. It would therefore be fair to say that any play attributed to Shakespeare is unlikely to contain a great deal of original input. Even the plots were based on well known historical events, so it would be hard to know what fragments of any Shakespeare play came from that single mind.
One might draw a comparison with the Christian bible, which remains such a compelling read because it came from the collaboration of many contributors and translators over centuries, who each adjusted the stories until they could no longer be improved. As virtually nothing is known of Shakespeare’s life and even less about his method of working, we shall never know the truth about his plays. They certainly contain some very elegant phrasing, clever plot devices and plenty of words never before seen in print, but as to whether Shakespeare invented them from a unique imagination or whether he simply took them from others around him is anyone’s guess.
The best bet seems to be that Shakespeare probably took the lead role in devising the original drafts of the plays, but was open to collaboration from any source when it came to developing them into workable scripts for effective performances. He would have had to work closely with his fellow actors in rehearsals, thereby finding out where to edit, abridge, alter, reword and so on.
In turn, similar adjustments would have occurred in his absence, so that definitive versions of his plays never really existed. In effect Shakespeare was only responsible for providing the framework of plays, upon which others took liberties over time. This wasn’t helped by the fact that the English language itself was not definitive at that time either. The consequence was that people took it upon themselves to spell words however they pleased or to completely change words and phrasing to suit their own preferences.
It is easy to see then, that Shakespeare’s plays were always going to have lives of their own, mutating and distorting in detail like Chinese whispers. The culture of creative preservation was simply not established in Elizabethan England. Creative ownership of Shakespeare’s plays was lost to him as soon as he released them into the consciousness of others. They saw nothing wrong with taking his ideas and running with them, because no one had ever suggested that one shouldn’t, and Shakespeare probably regarded his work in the same way. His plays weren’t sacrosanct works of art, they were templates for theatre folk to make their livings from, so they had every right to mould them into productions that drew in the crowds as effectively as possible. Shakespeare was like the helmsman of a sailing ship, steering the vessel but wholly reliant on the team work of his crew to arrive at the desired destination.
It seems that Shakespeare certainly had a natural gift, but the genius of his plays may be attributable to the collective efforts of Shakespeare and others. It is a rather satisfying notion to think that his plays might actually be the creative outpourings of the Elizabethan milieu in which Shakespeare immersed himself. That makes them important social documents as well as seminal works of the English language.

Money in Shakespeare’s Day
It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to relate the value of money in our time to its value in another age and to compare prices of commodities today and in the past. Many items are simply not comparable on grounds of quality or serviceability.
There was a bewildering variety of coins in use in Elizabethan England. As nearly all English and European coins were gold or silver, they had intrinsic value apart from their official value. This meant that foreign coins circulated freely in England and were officially recognized, for example the French crown (écu) worth about 30p (72 cents), and the Spanish ducat worth about 33p (79 cents). The following table shows some of the coins mentioned by Shakespeare and their relation to one another.


A comparison of the following prices in Shakespeare’s time with the prices of the same items today will give some idea of the change in the value of money.



INTRODUCTION
As a budding playwright, Shakespeare was attacked by an older writer, Robert Greene, for plagiarism: ‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’. Towards the end of his career, for his next-to-last play to be completed, Shakespeare drew upon a story by this same Greene, and so created The Winter’s Tale.
In Shakespeare’s own period, older playgoers, remembering Greene and seeing this work for the first time, must have thought they knew how it ended. The king, consumed by jealousy, repudiates his queen, who dies. He soon after recognises his error, but it is too late. That, at least, is the story of Greene’s Pandosto. Shakespeare, however, picks up this simple tale and turns it into a myth of resurrection. We all, like the early playgoers, think Hermione to be dead. We see her fall, deadly sick, on stage. News of her death is brought by Paulina, whom we know to be a reliable witness. Sixteen years pass, without any sign of her.
Tragedy lies very close to comedy here. The earlier episodes, the autumn and winter parts of the play, display the imagery of disease and dearth: ‘Why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing;/The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing;/my wife is nothing; nor nothing have those nothings,/If this be nothing’. But those corrugated rhythms give way to the comedy of Autolycus and his song of spring: ‘When daffodils begin to peer,/With heigh! the doxy over the dale’. There is the daughter who was thought lost, Perdita in her harvest scene, also evoking the spring: ‘daffodils,/That come before the swallow dares, and take/The winds of March with beauty’. This prefigures the restoration of Hermione, which is the key to the play.
The meeting of Perdita with Leontes, her father, which could have been one of Shakespeare’s reconciliation set-pieces, is reported at second hand in order to preserve the grand climax for the restitution of Hermione. There, at the end, is the Statue Scene when Hermione rises, as though from the dead, and joins her repentant husband.
So far from attempting to seem naturalistic, the text drives home the impossibilities: ‘That she is living,/Were it but told you, should be hooted at/Like an old tale’. But Shakespeare has paid the ‘old tale’ of his former enemy, Robert Greene, the supreme compliment of turning it into high drama. Leontes says, ‘I saw her,/As I thought, dead; and have, in vain, said many/A prayer upon her grave’. However, the prayers have not been in vain. The whole scene is an acting out of resurrection.
The extravagance of the plot is matched by that of the structure. Such critics as the Italian, Castelvetro, and the Englishman, Sir Philip Sidney, thought that the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, had imposed rules on the drama that decreed restrictions as to the time a play should encompass in its action, the place – only one – it should represent, and the plot – very simple – that it should deploy. These rules were called ‘unities’, and Shakespeare violated these unities in an exuberant fashion. The action covers sixteen years, and not smoothly: there is a gaping void between Act 3 and Act 4. The scenes swerve between Sicily, the kingdom of Leontes, and Bohemia, the kingdom of his supposed rival, Polixenes. The plot, as we have seen, is far-fetched beyond all decorum. However, the appeal is not to the intricacies of art, but to nature. In the end, what we are shown is nature’s own cycle, represented in the death and restoration of Hermione. She is a kind of earth goddess. We see the earth die, every winter. Yet it revives in the spring. It is an idea similar to that of Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son. He ‘was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found’ (Luke 15:24).

LIST OF CHARACTERS



ACT ONE
Scene I
Sicilia. The palace of Leontes.
[Enter CAMILLO and ARCHIDAMUS.]
Archidamus
If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia, on the like occasion whereon my services are now on foot, you shall see, as I have said, great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia.
Camillo

Archidamus
Wherein our entertainment shall shame us we will be justified in our loves; for indeed –
Camillo
Beseech you –
Archidamus

Camillo

Archidamus
Believe me, I speak as my understanding instructs me and as mine honesty puts it to utterance.
Camillo

Archidamus

Camillo

Archidamus
Would they else be content to die?
Camillo
Yes; if there were no other excuse why they should desire to live.
Archidamus


[Exeunt.]

Scene II
Sicilia. The palace of Leontes.
[Enter LEONTES, POLIXENES, HERMIONE, MAMILLIUS, CAMILLO, and Attendants.]
Polixenes
Nine changes of the wat’ry star hath been
The shepherd’s note since we have left our throne
Without a burden. Time as long again
Would be fill’d up, my brother, with our thanks;

Go hence in debt. And therefore, like a cipher,
Yet standing in rich place, I multiply
With one ‘We thank you’ many thousands moe
That go before it.
Leontes
Stay your thanks a while,
And pay them when you part.
Polixenes

I am question’d by my fears of what may chance
Or breed upon our absence, that may blow
No sneaping winds at home, to make us say
‘This is put forth too truly’. Besides, I have stay’d
To tire your royalty.
Leontes

Than you can put us to’t.
Polixenes
No longer stays.
Leontes
One sev’night longer.
Polixenes
Very sooth, to-morrow.
Leontes
We’ll part the time between’s then; and in that
I’ll no gainsaying.
Polixenes
Press me not, beseech you, so.

So soon as yours could win me. So it should now,
Were there necessity in your request, although
’Twere needful I denied it. My affairs
Do even drag me homeward; which to hinder

To you a charge and trouble. To save both,
Farewell, our brother.
Leontes
Tongue-tied, our Queen? Speak you.
Hermione
I had thought, sir, to have held my peace until
You had drawn oaths from him not to stay. You, sir,

All in Bohemia’s well – this satisfaction
The by-gone day proclaim’d. Say this to him,
He’s beat from his best ward.
Leontes
Well said, Hermione.
Hermione
To tell he longs to see his son were strong;

But let him swear so, and he shall not stay;
We’ll thwack him hence with distaffs.
[To POLIXENES] Yet of your royal presence I’ll adventure
The borrow of a week. When at Bohemia

To let him there a month behind the gest
Prefix’d for’s parting. – Yet, good deed, Leontes,
I love thee not a jar o’ th’ clock behind
What lady she her lord. – You’ll stay?
Polixenes
No, madam.
Hermione
Nay, but you will?
Polixenes

Hermione
Verily!
You put me off with limber vows; but I,
Though you would seek t’ unsphere the stars with oaths,
Should yet say ‘Sir, no going’. Verily,
You shall not go; a lady’s ‘verily’ is

Force me to keep you as a prisoner,
Not like a guest; so you shall pay your fees
When you depart, and save your thanks. How say you?
My prisoner or my guest? By your dread ‘verily’,
One of them you shall be.
Polixenes

To be your prisoner should import offending;
Which is for me less easy to commit
Than you to punish.
Hermione
Not your gaoler then,
But your kind hostess. Come, I’ll question you

You were pretty lordings then!
Polixenes
We were, fair Queen,
Two lads that thought there was no more behind
But such a day to-morrow as to-day,
And to be boy eternal.
Hermione
Was not my lord

Polixenes
We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ th’ sun
And bleat the one at th’ other. What we chang’d
Was innocence for innocence; we knew not
The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream’d

And our weak spirits ne’er been higher rear’d
With stronger blood, we should have answer’d heaven
Boldly ‘Not guilty’, the imposition clear’d
Hereditary ours.
Hermione
By this we gather
You have tripp’d since.
Polixenes

Temptations have since then been born to ’s, for
In those unfledg’d days was my wife a girl;
Your precious self had then not cross’d the eyes
Of my young playfellow.
Hermione
Grace to boot!

Your queen and I are devils. Yet, go on;
Th’ offences we have made you do we’ll answer,
If you first sinn’d with us, and that with us
You did continue fault, and that you slipp’d not
With any but with us.
Leontes

Hermione
He’ll stay, my lord.
Leontes
At my request he would not.
Hermione, my dearest, thou never spok’st
To better purpose.
Hermione
Never?
Leontes
Never but once.
Hermione
What! Have I twice said well? When was’t before?

As fat as tame things. One good deed dying tongueless
Slaughters a thousand waiting upon that.
Our praises are our wages; you may ride’s
With one soft kiss a thousand furlongs ere

My last good deed was to entreat his stay;
What was my first? It has an elder sister,
Or I mistake you. O, would her name were Grace!
But once before I spoke to th’ purpose – When?

Leontes
Why, that was when
Three crabbed months had sour’d themselves to death,
Ere I could make thee open thy white hand
And clap thyself my love; then didst thou utter
‘I am yours for ever’.
Hermione

Why, lo you now, I have spoke to th’ purpose twice:
The one for ever earn’d a royal husband;
Th’ other for some while a friend.
[Giving her hand to POLIXENES.]
Leontes
[Aside] Too hot, too hot!
To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.

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;

As now they are, and making practis’d 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! Mamillius,
Art thou my boy?
Mamillius
Ay, my good lord.
Leontes

Why, that’s my bawcock. What! hast smutch’d thy nose?
They say it is a copy out of mine. Come, Captain,
We must be neat – not neat, but cleanly, Captain.
And yet the steer, the heifer, and the calf,

Upon his palm? – How now, you wanton calf,
Art thou my calf?
Mamillius
Yes, if you will, my lord.
Leontes
Thou want’st a rough pash and the shoots that I have,
To be full like me; yet they say we are

That will say any thing. But were they false
As o’er-dy’d blacks, as wind, as waters – false
As dice are to be wish’d by one that fixes
No bourn ’twixt his and mine; yet were it true

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.
Thou dost make possible things not so held,

With what’s unreal thou coactive art,
And fellow’st nothing. Then ’tis very credent
Thou mayst co-join with something; and thou dost –
And that beyond commission; and I find it,

And hard’ning of my brows.
Polixenes
What means Sicilia?
Hermione
He something seems unsettled.
Polixenes
How, my lord!
What cheer? How is’t with you, best brother?
Hermione
You look
As if you held a brow of much distraction.
Are you mov’d, my lord?
Leontes

How sometimes nature will betray its folly,
Its tenderness, and make itself a pastime
To harder bosoms! Looking on the lines
Of my boy’s face, me thoughts I did recoil

In my green velvet coat; my dagger muzzl’d,
Lest it should bite its master and so prove,
As ornaments oft do, too dangerous.
How like, methought, I then was to this kernel,

Will you take eggs for money?
Mamillius
No, my lord, I’ll fight.
Leontes
You will? Why, happy man be’s dole! My brother,
Are you so fond of your young prince as we
Do seem to be of ours?
Polixenes

He’s all my exercise, my mirth, my matter;
Now my sworn friend, and then mine enemy;
My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all.
He makes a July’s day short as December,

Thoughts that would thick my blood.
Leontes
So stands this squire
Offic’d with me. We two will walk, my lord,
And leave you to your graver steps. Hermione,
How thou lov’st us show in our brother’s welcome;

Next to thyself and my young rover, he’s
Apparent to my heart.
Hermione
If you would seek us,
We are yours i’ th’ garden. Shall’s attend you there?
Leontes
To your own bents dispose you; you’ll be found,

Though you perceive me not how I give line.
Go to, go to!
How she holds up the neb, the bill to him!
And arms her with the boldness of a wife
To her allowing husband!
[Exeunt POLIXENES, HERMIONE, and Attendants.]

Inch-thick, knee-deep, o’er head and ears a fork’d one!
Go, play, boy, play; thy mother plays, and I
Play too; but so disgrac’d a part, whose issue
Will hiss me to my grave. Contempt and clamour

Or I am much deceiv’d, cuckolds ere now;
And many a man there is, even at this present,
Now while I speak this, holds his wife by th’ arm
That little thinks she has been sluic’d in’s absence,

Sir Smile, his neighbour. Nay, there’s comfort in’t,
Whiles other men have gates and those gates open’d,
As mine, against their will. Should all despair
That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind

It is a bawdy planet, that will strike
Where ’tis predominant; and ’tis pow’rful, think it,
From east, west, north, and south. Be it concluded,
No barricado for a belly. Know’t,

With bag and baggage. Many thousand on’s
Have the disease, and feel’t not. How now, boy!
Mamillius
I am like you, they say.
Leontes
Why, that’s some comfort.
What! Camillo there?
Camillo

Leontes
Go play, Mamillius; thou’rt an honest man.
[Exit MAMILLIUS.]
Camillo, this great sir will yet stay longer.
Camillo
You had much ado to make his anchor hold;
When you cast out, it still came home.
Leontes
Didst note it?
Camillo

His business more material.
Leontes
Didst perceive it?
[Aside] They’re here with me already; whisp’ring, rounding,
‘Sicilia is a so-forth’. ’Tis far gone
When I shall gust it last. – How came’t, Camillo,
That he did stay?
Camillo

Leontes
‘At the Queen’s’ be’t. ‘Good’ should be pertinent;
But so it is, it is not. Was this taken
By any understanding pate but thine?
For thy conceit is soaking, will draw in

But of the finer natures, by some severals
Of head-piece extraordinary? Lower messes
Perchance are to this business purblind? Say.
Camillo
Business, my lord? I think most understand
Bohemia stays here longer.
Leontes
Ha?

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