RICHARD III AND MACBETH are criminals who come to power by killing the legitimate rulers who stand in their way. But Shakespeare was also interested in a more insidious problem, that posed by those who begin as legitimate rulers and are then drawn by their mental and emotional instability toward tyrannical behavior. The horrors they inflict on their subjects and, ultimately, on themselves are the consequences of psychological degeneration. They may have thoughtful counselors and friends, people with a healthy instinct for self-preservation and a concern for their nation. But it is extremely difficult for such people to counter madness-induced tyranny, both because it is unanticipated and because their long-term loyalty and trust have inculcated habits of obedience.
In the Britain of King Lear, though the aged king begins to act with the unchecked willfulness of a tyrannical child, at first no one dares to say a word. Having decided to retire—“To shake all cares and business from our age,/Conferring them on younger strengths” (King Lear 1.1.37–38)—he assembles his court and announces his “fast intent,”—that is, his fixed decision. He declares that he will divide his kingdom into three, distributing the parts to his daughters in proportion to their ability to flatter him:
Tell me, my daughters,
Since now we will divest us both of rule,
Interest of territory, cares of state,
Which of you shall we say doth love us most,
That we our largest bounty may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge? (1.1.46–51)
The idea is insane, and yet no one intervenes.
It is possible that the spectators to this grotesque contest say nothing because they believe it is merely a formal ritual, designed to gratify the autocrat’s vanity on the occasion of his retirement. After all, one of the highest-ranking noblemen, the Earl of Gloucester, remarks in the play’s first moments that he has already seen a map with the division of the kingdom scrupulously plotted out. And at this point in Lear’s long reign, everyone may be accustomed to the great leader’s boundless desire to hear his praises sung. While inwardly rolling their eyes, they sit around the table and give him the “mouth-honor” he wants, telling him how blessed they are to stand in his shadow, how overwhelmed they are by his accomplishments, and how they value him more “than eye-sight, space and liberty” (1.1.54).
But when Lear’s youngest daughter, Cordelia, his favorite, refuses to play the nauseating game, it all suddenly becomes deadly serious. Enraged by Cordelia’s principled recalcitrance—“I love your majesty/According to my bond,” she says, “no more nor less” (1.1.90–91)—Lear disinherits and curses her. Then finally is opposition to Lear’s behavior openly expressed, and only by a solitary person, the Earl of Kent. The loyal Kent begins to speak with the requisite ceremonious courtesy, but Lear abruptly cuts him off. Dropping the courtly manner altogether, the earl then voices his objection directly:
What wouldst thou do, old man?
Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak
When power to flattery bows?
To plainness honor’s bound
When majesty falls to folly. Reserve thy state,
And in thy best consideration check
This hideous rashness. (1.2.143–49)
There are other responsible adults in the court. Watching the scene unfold are the king’s elder daughters, Goneril and Regan, and their husbands, the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall. But none of them or any of the others in attendance seconds the objection or voices even a modest protest. Only Kent dares to say openly what everyone plainly sees: “Lear is mad” (1.1.143). For his frankness, the truth-teller is banished forever from the kingdom, on pain of death. And still no one else speaks out.
Lear’s court faces a serious, possibly insuperable problem. In the distant age in which the play is set, roughly in the eighth century B.C.E., Britain does not seem to have any institutions or offices—parliament, privy council, commissioners, high priests—to moderate or dilute royal power. Though the king, surrounded by his family, his loyal thanes, and his servants, may solicit and receive advice, the crucial decision-making power remains his and his alone. When he expresses his wishes, he expects to be obeyed. But the whole system depends on the assumption that he is in his right mind.
Even in systems that have multiple moderating institutions, the chief executive almost always has considerable power. But what happens when that executive is not mentally fit to hold office? What if he begins to make decisions that threaten the well-being and security of the realm? In the case of King Lear, the ruler had probably never been a model of stability or emotional maturity. Discussing his impulsive cursing of his youngest daughter, the king’s cynical older daughters, Goneril and Regan, remark that his advancing years are only intensifying qualities that they have long observed in him. “’Tis the infirmity of his age,” one notes, “yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself.” “The best and soundest of his time,” agrees the other, “hath been but rash” (1.1.289–92).
The disinheriting of their sister Cordelia does not threaten Goneril and Regan. On the contrary, since they get to gobble up her share of the kingdom, it is in their immediate interest. They therefore make no attempt to mitigate their father’s tyrannical rage. But they know that he may at any moment turn on them as well. They are dealing with both his deep-rooted habits of mind—what they call their father’s “long engraffed condition”—and the effects of old age: “Then must we look from his age to receive not alone the imperfections of long engraffed condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them” (1.1.292–95). What particularly worries them are his “unconstant starts” (1.1.296)—that is, outbursts such as they have just witnessed in the banishing of Kent. It is extremely dangerous to have a state run by someone who governs by impulse.
Goneril and Regan are very nasty pieces of work, concerned only for themselves. But they grasp that they have a serious problem on their hands, and they quickly take steps at least to protect their own interests, if not those of the realm. Though their father has decided to turn over the actual running of the state to them and their husbands, he has retained a retinue of a hundred armed servants. These the daughters act almost immediately to remove from his control, lest he do something rash. First they cut the number to fifty, then twenty-five; then the downward spiral continues: “What need you five-and-twenty? Ten? Or five?” asks Goneril. Regan: “What need one?” (2.2.442–44). It is ugly, and it is about to get still uglier. But the stripping away of the retainers stems from the recognition that an impulsive narcissist, accustomed to ordering people about, should not have control even of a very small army.
When he first began to act rashly and self-destructively, Cordelia and Kent were the only ones willing to speak out against Lear’s tyrannical behavior. Both of them did so out of loyalty to the very person most outraged by their words, a person they lovingly hoped to protect. With their banishment and Lear’s abdication, there is nothing to prevent the country from disintegrating. The disintegration was set off by the king’s lawless whim, but it is not he—stripped of his power and falling into madness—who will assume the mantle of tyranny. Rather, it is his vicious daughters, who show themselves to be unconstrained by any respect for the rule of law and indifferent to fundamental norms of human decency.
Kent’s loyalty to Lear leads him, at the risk of his life, to return in disguise in order to serve his ruined master. But it is too late to avert the disaster that the king has brought upon himself. Kent has been effectively muzzled; Cordelia has been exiled. The only person who can still say openly what everyone perceives has happened is the Fool, a satirical entertainer—the equivalent of a late-night comedian—who is permitted by social convention to articulate what would otherwise be suppressed or punished. “I am better than thou art now,” the Fool says to Lear. “I am a fool, thou art nothing” (1.4.161). And in the new regime presided over by Lear’s daughters, even this limited form of free speech is impermissible. Goneril makes clear to her father that she will no longer endure the insolence of his “all-licensed fool” (1.4.168), and Regan is no better. Shivering and miserable, having been driven out into the wild storm along with the mad king, by the middle of the play the Fool disappears forever.
With Lear, unlike Richard III or Coriolanus, we have almost no glimpses into his childhood, where the seeds of his personality disorder may have been sown. We see only a man who has been long accustomed to getting his way in everything and who cannot abide contradiction. In the midst of his madness, sitting in a wretched hovel with a blind man and a beggar for his company, he still has delusions of grandeur: “When I do stare, see how the subject quakes” (4.6.108). But his insanity is shot through with lightning flashes of hard-earned truth. “They flattered me like a dog,” he recalls. Everyone fawned upon him, he now grasps, praising him for mature wisdom when he was in fact still only a callow youth. This is the closest we get to the roots of his narcissism: “To say ‘Ay’ and ‘No’ to everything I said! ‘Ay’ and ‘No’ too was no good divinity” (4.6.97–100).
Nothing in such an upbringing could prepare Lear to grasp reality in his family, in his realm, or even in his own body. He is a father who wrecks his children; he is a leader who cannot distinguish between honest, truthful servants and corrupt scoundrels; he is a ruler who is unable to perceive, let alone address, the needs of his people. In the first part of the play, when Lear is still on the throne, those people are entirely invisible. It is as if the king has never bothered to take in their existence. Looking into a mirror, he has always seen someone larger than life, “every inch a king” (4.6.108).
Hence his horrible surprise when, cold and shaking with fever, he grasps finally that he has been surrounded by flatterers who have constantly lied to him:
When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter, when the thunder would not peace at my bidding, there I found ’em, there I smelt ’em out. Go to, they are not men o’ their words. They told me I was everything. ’Tis a lie. I am not ague-proof. (4.6.100–105)
“They told me I was everything.” It is a moral triumph of some kind for so extreme a solipsist to realize that he is, after all, subject to the same bodily afflictions as everyone else.
But Shakespeare’s play looks soberly at the tragic cost of this quite modest realization. Lear insists that he is “more sinned against than sinning,” but he cannot be held entirely innocent of the fact that his two older daughters are twisted monsters who seek to kill him. He is certainly not innocent of the disastrous fate of his youngest daughter, whose moral integrity he spurned and whose love he failed to understand. He has evidently failed, as well, to distinguish between the basic decency of Goneril’s husband, Albany, and the sadism of Regan’s husband, Cornwall, and he has split his kingdom without grasping the high likelihood of violent conflict between the two ruling parties.
It is only when Lear himself wanders out into a wild storm that he takes in the plight of the homeless in the land over which he has ruled for many decades. As the rain beats down on him, the question he asks is a powerful one:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you
From seasons such as these? (3.4.29–33)
But even as he asks the question, he knows that it is too late for him to do anything to relieve their suffering: “Oh, I have ta’en/Too little care of this!” (3.4.33–34). And what he now thinks—that the rich should expose themselves to what wretches feel so that they may share some of their superfluous wealth with them—hardly constitutes a new economic vision for the country he has ruled.
The monstrous self-absorption that fueled Lear’s catastrophic decisions does not vanish because of his exposure to adversity; it remains the organizing principle of perception. When he encounters a homeless beggar, he can only imagine that the man’s miseries came about for the same reason as his own: “Didst thou give all to thy daughters, and art come to this?” (3.4.47–48). Certain that the answer must be yes, Lear begins to curse the poor man’s ungrateful daughters. And when Kent (in disguise) corrects the mistake—“He hath no daughters, sir”—Lear explodes in rage: “Death, traitor! Nothing could have subdued nature/To such a lowness but his unkind daughters” (3.4.66–68). Lear has lost everything by this point, but he still has the mind of the tyrant who will brook no disagreement: “Death, traitor!”
Nearing the play’s end, after Lear has recovered at least partial sanity, acknowledged the folly of his actions, and begged the forgiveness of Cordelia (who has returned to England to fight on his behalf), he continues to have difficulty distancing himself from the self-centeredness that precipitated the disaster in the first place. Taken captive, along with Cordelia, by forces under the command of the ruthless Edmund, Lear emphatically overrules his daughter’s request that they be brought to see her sisters: “No, no, no, no” (5.3.8). Why does he not think that they should try at least to beg some mercy? Because he is in the grip of a fantasy—poignant, hopelessly unrealistic, and in its way supremely selfish—that in prison with his youngest daughter he will, after all, obtain what he had originally intended: to set his rest, as he put it, “on her kind nursery” (1.1.121). “We two alone will sing like birds in a cage,” he tells Cordelia;
So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses, and who wins; who’s in, who’s out—
And take upon ’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies. (5.3.9–17)
Even were this a fantasy that Cordelia could possibly share and find appealing, she is too realistic to think it is remotely possible. Led away to prison and to the almost certain death that she knows looms there, she is conspicuously, painfully silent.
IN THE WINTER’S TALE, a play he wrote late in his career, Shakespeare returned to the idea of a legitimate ruler who, descending into madness, begins to behave like a tyrant. In the case of Leontes, king of Sicilia, the precipitating cause is not senile rage; rather, it is a sudden onset of paranoia, which takes the form of a conviction that his wife, Hermione, then nearing the full term of a pregnancy, has had an adulterous affair and is carrying a child that is not his. His suspicion falls on his best friend, Polixenes, the king of Bohemia, who has been visiting Sicilia for the past nine months. Leontes initially broaches his conviction to his chief counselor, Camillo, who, horrified, tries to disabuse the king of his fixed idea: “Good my lord, be cured/Of this diseased opinion,” he urges, and quickly, “For ’tis most dangerous” (The Winter’s Tale 1.2.296–98). Leontes insists that his charge is true and, when the counselor again demurs, explodes with rage: “It is. You lie, you lie./I say thou liest, Camillo, and I hate thee” (1.2.299–300). The jealous king offers no proof; only his emphatic insistence.
A tyrant does not need to traffic in facts or supply evidence. He expects his accusation to be enough. If he says that someone has been betraying him, or laughing at him, or spying on him, it must be the case. Anyone who contradicts him is either a liar or an idiot. The last thing the tyrant wants, even when he appears to solicit it, is an independent opinion. What he actually wants is loyalty, and by loyalty he does not mean integrity, honor, or responsibility. He means an immediate, unreserved confirmation of his own views and a willingness to carry out his orders without hesitation. When an autocratic, paranoid, narcissistic ruler sits down with a civil servant and asks for his loyalty, the state is in danger.
Hence when Camillo fails to echo Leontes’s lunatic suspicion, Leontes bitterly charges him with dishonesty, cowardice, or negligence. And it is not enough to berate him as “a gross lout, a mindless slave,/Or else a hovering temporizer” (1.2.301–2); the king demands that his counselor act to demonstrate absolute loyalty. There is, as Leontes has conceived it, a perfect way to do so. He orders Camillo to poison Polixenes.
Now the counselor is in deep trouble, and he knows it. His royal master is not only mad but also extremely dangerous. Honest attempts to dissuade him have only called forth more rage, and Camillo is aware that if he refuses to act on the king’s behest, he will himself be killed. He briefly considers carrying out the order: “To do this deed,” he reflects, “Promotion follows.” Camillo is a decent human being, not a time-serving villain; this is why he dared to challenge the king in the first place. At the same time, he has no interest in being a martyr. He has therefore only a single option: he warns Polixenes, and at night the two of them, along with the attendants who have accompanied the Bohemian king on his state visit, precipitately flee from Sicilia.
Flight is a desperate option, one from which there is no looking back, and it is by no means accessible to everyone. As the king’s principal counselor, Camillo has the authority to command that the city gates be opened, and Polixenes’s ships are already waiting for him in the harbor. Camillo has presumably abandoned all his possessions, along with the high place of trust he has long held, but he evidently has no family to worry about, and the ruler whose life he has just saved will protect and support him. The important thing, in this moment of extremity, is to “take the urgent hour,” as Camillo puts it, and get out of the tyrant’s range.
But it is not possible for poor Hermione to do so; nor, until he erupts, does she have any inkling that her husband has been eyeing her with increasing suspicion and anger. Awaiting the impending ordeal of childbirth, she has been taking care of her young son, Mamillius, gossiping with her friend Paulina, and serving as the gracious hostess to her husband’s best friend. It is indeed Leontes who has urged her to help him induce Polixenes to agree to extend his already long stay in Sicilia. But all of her sweet gestures to that effect have been interpreted by the paranoid Leontes as proofs of her infidelity. “Is whispering nothing?” he fumes, when Camillo attempts to counter his fears.
Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career
Of laughter with a sigh—a note infallible
Of breaking honesty? Horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? (1.2.284–89)
How much of this is actually true does not matter; it is what Leontes thinks he has seen, and that is sufficient to convict her in his mind.
The flight of Polixenes and Camillo confirms this conviction and intensifies Leontes’s sense that he has been made a fool of. It seems abundantly clear to him now that Camillo, whom he had trusted, was Polixenes’s co-conspirator, “his pander.” There is, he concludes, “a plot against my life,” and he moves to counter it by ordering the arrest and imprisonment of his wife: “She’s an adulteress,” he tells the shocked court. At first his courtiers attempt, as Camillo had done, to dispute the charge and to blame it on a villainous slanderer, “some putter-on/That will be damned for’t” (2.1.142–43). “Beseech your highness,” one urges. “Call the Queen again.” “Be certain what you do, sir,” warns another, “lest your justice/Prove violence” (2.1.127–29).
Leontes will not listen. “You smell this business,” he tells them, “with a sense as cold/As is a dead man’s nose” (2.1.152–53). He is not interested in hearing what they have observed and does not require their approval. “What need we/Commune with you of this,” he asks dismissively, “but rather follow/Our forceful instigation?” (2.1.162–64). To follow his instigation means to go with his impulse and his alone:
We need no more of your advice. The matter—
The loss, the gain, the ordering on’t—
Is all properly ours. (2.1.169–71)
Of course, from the perspective of the court, the “matter”—an accusation of a plot against the life of the ruler, the flight of the king’s principal counselor, and the imprisonment of the queen—is hardly Leontes’s alone. But in the manner characteristic of tyrants, he has folded the whole state into himself. The one concession he has made—a concession, as he puts it, “to th’ minds of others”—is to send ambassadors to “Sacred Delphos, to Apollo’s temple,” to consult the oracle. The courtiers, otherwise silenced, approve.
As in King Lear a woman—the autocrat’s youngest daughter—takes the decisive, public step of refusing her father’s peremptory demand, so, too, in The Winter’s Tale it is a woman who most strongly opposes the tyrant’s will. The principal challenger is not Leontes’s wronged wife, Hermione—though she defends herself courageously and eloquently—but Hermione’s friend Paulina. It is she who visits the imprisoned queen and proposes, in the hopes of returning the king to his senses, to present to him the baby the queen has newly delivered. When the jailor worries, perfectly reasonably, that he may run a risk if he allows the baby to be removed from the prison without a warrant, Paulina eloquently reassures him:
You need not fear it, sir.
This child was prisoner to the womb and is
By law and process of great nature thence
Freed and enfranchised, not a party to
The anger of the King, nor guilty of—
If any be—the trespass of the Queen. (2.2.59–64)
For a brief, telling moment we glimpse the bureaucratic structure that characterizes all regimes and that becomes particularly important when the leader is behaving in alarming ways. If there is a procedural anomaly, a high-ranking person—and Paulina, the aristocratic wife of the king’s counselor Antigonus, is of very high rank indeed—needs to step forward and take responsibility. “Do not you fear,” she again tells the jailor; “I/Will stand betwixt you and danger” (2.2.66–67).
There is, we immediately learn, good reason to fear. The tyrant is unable to sleep: “Nor night, nor day, no rest” (2.3.1). His son, Mamillius, has fallen ill, in the wake of the charges brought against Hermione, and in addition to worrying about the boy, Leontes has been brooding constantly on revenge. Polixenes and Camillo are beyond his reach—“plot-proof,” as he puts it—but “th’ adulteress” is within his power (2.3.4–6). “Say that she were gone,/Given to the fire” (2.3.7–8), he muses darkly, then he might recover at least some of his ability to sleep.
Small wonder that when Paulina arrives carrying the baby, the lords who attend on Leontes tell her that she cannot enter. But far from leaving quietly, she appeals to them to help her. “Fear you his tyrannous passion,” she asks, “more, alas,/Than the Queen’s life?” (2.3.27–28). They explain that he has not been able to sleep, but she counters, “I come to bring him sleep” and blames them, in effect, for heightening his insanity:
That creep like shadows by him and do sigh
At each his needless heavings—such as you
Nourish the cause of his awaking. (2.3.33–36)
Hers is a wildly audacious strategy—to try to snap the king out of his madness by forcing him to take up a child he fervently believes is not his—and it fails. Leontes’s rage only intensifies. He orders that the “bastard” be burned and then turns on Paulina and threatens to have her burned as well. “I care not,” the intrepid woman replies, adding some of the most magnificent words of defiance in all of Shakespeare:
It is an heretic that makes the fire,
Not she which burns in’t. (2.3.114–15)
It is the effect of tyranny to invert the whole structure of authority: legitimacy no longer resides at the center of the state; instead, it is vested in the victims of its violence.
Paulina has already referred to the king’s “tyrannous passion,” and she has said flatly, to his face, “you are mad.” But it is a sign of the gravity of the direct charge of tyranny that she slightly holds back. “I’ll not call you tyrant,” she tells him,
But this most cruel usage of your queen—
Not able to produce more accusation
Than your own weak-hinged fancy—something savors
Of tyranny. (2.3.115–18)
For his part, Leontes does not let these words pass unchallenged. “Were I a tyrant,” he tells the courtiers, “Where were her life? She durst not call me so,/If she did know me one” (2.3.121–23). Perhaps Paulina’s words were strategic: given his response, Leontes is scarcely in a position to follow up on his order that she be burned. He simply orders her out of the room.
Paulina’s life is spared, but Leontes’s madness and his tyrannical impulses are unchecked. Suspecting that her husband, Antigonus, has contrived to have Paulina bring the baby to him, he accuses the counselor of treason. To demonstrate that he is not a traitor, Antigonus must kill the infant. “Take it up straight,” Leontes commands him.
Within this hour bring me word ’tis done,
And by good testimony, or I’ll seize thy life
With what thou else call’st thine. (2.3.134–37)
There is no legal process; no respect for civilized norms; no decency. In a society where suspicion and certainty are indistinguishable, loyalty is proved by carrying out the tyrant’s murderous commands.
There remains, however, some moral strength in Sicilia. Leontes’s tyranny is the result of a sudden, inexplicable descent into madness; until very recently he has been not a clownish thug but a respected, entirely legitimate ruler. Hence, as Camillo and Paulina have both demonstrated, he is surrounded not by timeservers but by decent people who have been accustomed to speaking their minds. And though his court is shocked and terrified—“You’re liars all” (2.3.145), Leontes rages at them—they are not completely silenced, even now. “We have always truly served you, and beseech/So to esteem of us” (2.3.147–48), says one of the courtiers, kneeling down and pleading with the king to change his horrible command to have the newborn child burned to death. Leontes reluctantly agrees, but only to the extent of ordering Antigonus to take the infant to some remote place and expose it to the elements.
In the tangled romance plot that then unfolds, this changed command has important consequences. It leads to the death of Antigonus (via the notorious stage direction “Exit, pursued by a bear” [3.3.57]) and eventually to the near-miraculous recovery, sixteen years later, of Leontes’s daughter, Perdita. But at the moment that, in response to the court’s pleading, Leontes slightly modifies his order to kill the infant, very little has changed in his behavior or intention. That is part of the point: once the state is in the hands of an unstable, impulsive, and vindictive tyrant, there is almost nothing that the ordinary mechanisms of moderation can accomplish. Sensible advice falls on deaf ears; dignified demurrals are brushed aside; outspoken protests only seem to make matters worse.
Determined to avenge himself on the wife he believes has betrayed him, Leontes puts Hermione on trial for high treason. “Let us be cleared/Of being tyrannous,” he declares, as he calls for the prisoner to appear, “since we so openly/Proceed in justice” (3.2.4–6). The open proceeding may seem preferable, from a public relations standpoint, to the poison with which he intended to dispatch his best friend, but everyone in Shakespeare’s world knew perfectly well that there was only one possible outcome. The ruler controlled the institutions that conferred the stamp of reality upon even his wildest claims. This is a show trial, in the manner of Henry VIII or, in our own time, Stalin.
There is, however, one small but significant difference: in The Winter’s Tale, the person accused of treason is not so broken in spirit as to confess to the imaginary crime. On the contrary, with dignity and steely grace she exposes the tyrant’s “justice” for what it is:
Since what I am to say must be but that
Which contradicts my accusation, and
The testimony on my part no other
But what comes from myself, it shall scarce boot me
To say, “Not guilty.” (3.2.20–24)
All the same, she professes her faith that “if powers divine/Behold our human actions—as they do,” then her “innocence shall make/False accusation blush and tyranny/Tremble at patience” (3.2.26–30).
What would it mean for tyranny to tremble at patience? There are forms of resistance whose power resides not in striking back against unjust blows—something that Hermione, in any case, is in no position to do—but in enduring and waiting, waiting both for personal vindication and for the oppressor’s possible moral awakening. In the grip of his delusion and self-righteous indignation, Leontes cannot perceive this power, let alone tremble at it. As he continues to bring charges against his wife, one more fantastical than the last, Hermione ceases even to attempt to make sense of them: “You speak a language that I understand not” (3.2.78), she says. “My life stands in the level”—that is, as the target—“of your dreams” (3.2.79). Leontes’s response inadvertently gets at the heart of the problem: “Your actions are my dreams” (3.2.80). If the tyrant dreams that there is fraud, or betrayal, or treason, then there is fraud, or betrayal, or treason.
It is, in consequence, almost impossible to break through the solipsistic, self-justifying fantasies. The ambassadors return from Apollo’s temple bearing the sealed oracle, which has, when opened and read out in the courtroom, none of the ambiguity in which such messages usually trafficked:
“Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, his innocent babe truly begotten; and the King shall live without an heir if that which is lost be not found.” (3.2.130–33)
But even now, there is no relief from the jealous tyrant’s fixed idea. “There is no truth at all i’ th’ oracle,” he stubbornly declares and then orders the trial to proceed.
It is only when word is brought that his son, Mamillius, has died from sheer anguish over and fear at his mother’s fate that Leontes finally receives a shock severe enough to snap him out of his madness. Taking his son’s death as a dreadful sign of Apollo’s anger at his injustice, he wishes to act at once to rectify at least some of the damage he has done: “I’ll reconcile me to Polixenes,/New woo my queen, recall the good Camillo” (3.4.152–53). But it is not so easy. Hermione has collapsed at the news of her son’s death, and now the distraught Paulina enters with bitter words. Earlier, she had struggled to temper her sharp tongue: “I’ll not call you tyrant.” Now, dropping all vestige of restraint, she bitterly asks Leontes, “What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?” (3.2.172). His tyranny and his jealousies together, she tells him, have not merely tempted him to try to corrupt Camillo into murdering Polixenes, and not merely induced him to cast his infant daughter to the crows, and not merely led to the death of his son. Now, as their masterpiece, they have caused the death of his wife.
The court is horrified by Paulina’s brutal frankness. But the trauma has made Leontes a different ruler and a different man. He welcomes the truth and acknowledges the terrible destruction he has caused. The play does not depict him driven from his throne and wandering as a homeless wretch, like Lear, through his former kingdom. He continues as the king of Sicilia, but he embarks on a long exercise of remorse and self-reproach. It is only after sixteen years have elapsed—Father Time makes an appearance and urges the audience to think that it has somehow slept through this extended interval—that the story resumes.
When it does so, Leontes is still in the midst of the deepest penance. His courtiers urge him finally to forgive himself, remarry, and give the kingdom an heir to the throne. But Paulina, who serves, in effect, as his therapist, is unrelenting in forcing him to face what he has done and to remain unmarried. “If one by one you wedded all the world,” she tells him,
Or from the all that are took something good
To make a perfect woman, she you killed
Would be unparalleled. (5.1.13–16)
“Killed?/She I killed?” Leontes replies. “I did so,” he acknowledges, “but thou strik’st me/Sorely to say I did” (5.1.16–18). He agrees never to remarry without Paulina’s consent.
In the end, The Winter’s Tale contrives to reunite the king with his lost daughter and, through a spectacular theatrical coup, with the wife he had believed dead. In the hushed space of Paulina’s gallery, Leontes comes to view what he is told is a statue of Hermione. Seemingly miraculously, the statue comes to life, steps down from the pedestal, and embraces her husband and her daughter. But nothing can fully erase the memory of tyranny, nothing can bring back the sixteen years spent in isolation and misery, nothing can restore the sweet innocence of friendship, trust, and love. When Leontes is astonished to see his wife again, he is at first struck by the signs of her aging: “Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing/So aged as this seems” (5.3.28–29). New life may lie on the other side of years lost to tyranny, but this life will not be the same as it once was. The most poignant emblem in the play for all that tyranny makes unrecoverable is the little boy Mamillius, who died of grief and who is not magically resurrected in the giddy succession of happy reunions.
Still, more than any of Shakespeare’s other plays, The Winter’s Tale allows itself the dream of a second chance. The event that makes this renewal possible, in the wake of disaster, is one of the playwright’s most daring and implausible fantasies: the tyrant’s full, unfeigned, utterly sincere repentance. Imagining this inner transformation is almost as difficult as imagining a statue coming to life.