Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Part 2)

Part 2 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.” Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, St. John’s College. Learn more about undergraduate–and graduate–Great Books programs at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:12 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part. Part two of our discussion of the Winter's Tale. We had just been talking about the way that Hermione persuades Polixenes to stay and the, as I count them, four different sections to that argument ending with this concept of imprisonment. I think, Erin, you were about to move on to the next phase where we get some pretty serious flirtation between Hermione and Polixenes. Obviously, Leontes has been activated by several different things that have already gone on. And he's even. He's drawn apart before that whole Verily section to observe them unobserved. And then now he's going to look on as Hermione gets very flirty. Go ahead. 1:06 Erin: Yeah. She wants to know what he was like. When he was little. And interestingly, he's been there for nine months. 1:12 Wes: But he's a bad boy. 1:15 Erin: That's right. And he reveals their backstory after being. I don't know what they were talking about for the first nine months, but now he has something new to tell her. He says, we were two lads. He's speaking of his childhood friendship with Leontes. When they were BFFs, they were two lads that thought there was no more behind but such a day tomorrow as today and to be boy eternal. So this is a very strange way of putting this, right? First of all, there's this. The boy eternal. There's this Peter Pan quality to this, right? They wanted to be. They wanted to stay young forever. But two lads that thought there was no more behind but such a day tomorrow as today. So behind here, meaning after, there was nothing after today but a tomorrow. That's just like today. So this idea of the stillness of time, I think is really interesting in this word behind, because besides the fact that it's a funny word for other reasons, but the fact that behind means both before and after. 2:21 Wes: Yeah, it sounds like. No, it sounds like what he's saying is they thought they would live forever. So she brings the conversation back to their youth and says, was not my lord the verier wag o' th' two? And my Lord probably refers to Leontes, right? But I think it's at least syntactic. Or semantically, it could just as well refer to the person she's talking to, since he's also Lord. I don't know. But in any case, she sets up this idea. Who's. Who's the. Who's the more bad? You're both bad, but who's more bad? And Polixenes, I think, is trying to. I don't know, he's trying to be a little bit evasive. We're twin lambs, all right? So it's not one of us. We're lambs. We're innocent and we're twinned. One of us wasn't worse than the other. And we. What we changed was innocence for innocence. And they hadn't dreamed of ill doing and all that stuff. But they. He's already alluded to this idea that they might be eternally youthful. And then there's the idea that they're twinned innocent. Except he alludes to the idea that they didn't stay innocent because he says, and our weak spirits never been higher, reared with stronger blood, we should have answered heaven boldly, not guilty. The imposition cleared hereditary ours. So he's saying we could have gone on being innocent forever if we hadn't been reared with stronger blood. And then she says, by this we gather you've tripped since. So she's pushing the conversation once again into the idea that they've tripped up, that they've been sinful, that they've been bad boys. She's pushing them. She's pushing Polixenes for some sort of confession to their youthful sexual indiscretions. That's what all of this is about. And each time he tries to evade that, she puts that back on track. 4:24 Erin: Yeah, there's this. There are so many strange things happening here. I mean, to say that they were not even guilty of original sin is really fascinating. So. So there's a transposition of. In the sort of pre sexual existence that the two of them had in which they were twin lambs. So they were. They were one and the same. They were the same thing. So this is the pre. Pre branching. Right. They were. And they were bleating at each other. B, L, E A T bleating like ba at each other. So they were sort of pre. Language as well. They had no original sin, so they were pre. Pre lapsarian as well. Which they then. Sorry. So then Polixenes locates the moment of the fall or the trip, partly because of Hermione's suggestion, with the idea of a woman rather than he's transposing Eve for the apple is essentially what he's doing. 5:23 Wes: Interesting. 5:23 Erin: Right, Because Adam and Eve live together as a couple, pre original sin, in a sinless state. The apple was the introduction of sin, not anything that he did with Eve. It's not as though in a Judeo Christian society, people believe that like, just to be with a woman is inherently sinful or something like that. Right, but there's a. But there's a transposition happening in which the object, the apple, is replaced by Eve herself. Eve's person. Just the very existence of women is somehow a sinful quantity with which these boys must reckon. Right, so. So then we have. By this, we gather you have tripped since. So since then you've tripped, you've sinned since. But of course, as you've suggested, right. To trip, to fall, the fall of man is associated with like your foot slipped, which is, you know, it's a euphemism for having an affair. So that was the introduction of sin with woman. Well, so he then says, oh, my most sacred lady, temptations have since then been born to us. Which is an interesting turn of phrase for in those unfledged days was my wife a girl? Your precious self had then not crossed the eyes of my young playfellow. So temptation is created, oddly enough, with the introduction of their wives into their lives. Yeah, right. When his wife was a girl, this is the only mention I think we get of Polixenes wife. She's a wife first, then a girl in that ordering. And then all she had to do was cross their eyes. There's something strange about that. Eyes crossing and crossing across one's path. Right. Or sort of commingled there. All they had to do was walk in front of them and then something is broken. 7:10 Wes: Yeah, I like that. So he. When he talks about the not guilty hereditary ours, he's saying that that would have been the case if we hadn't been raised with stronger blood, which I don't know exactly what being reared with stronger blood means. I mean, if he's talking about nature or nurture there, right. If we hadn't been such lusty young men or if it was just a matter of how they were raised. But he's suggesting, yes, like she. She gathers that they have tripped since he's alluding to not being innocent anymore. And I think she's already taking that to be a reference to sexual activity by young men. And she's pushing for confessions about, did you. Who did you date before you got married? Who did my man date before he got married? 8:01 Erin: What's your body count? 8:02 Wes: That's. 8:03 Erin: They say now. 8:03 Wes: Yeah, what's your body count? And. And then he says something, which I think he's trying to evade that by saying, well, yes, I think he's trying to suggest that they've only been involved in sexual sins with the wives. Although she makes a remark about that the offenses we have made you do will answer if you first sinned with us, and that with us you did continue fault and that you slipped not with any. But with us. He's trying to skip over any previous relationships and say, okay, we've sinned with you because you're our wives. Right. And she says, okay, well, that's fine as long as you didn't sleep with anyone before us. And what's also interesting is that it's a foursome at this point in the way they're speaking. There's already this kind of swingers element to. Is it infidelity outside of the foursome or outside of the twosome? 9:08 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. I'm wondering if we can tie this. What's strange is that they're talking about something which is not a Sin as a sin. Right. Obviously, if you have sex with your wife, it's not sinful in the traditional sense of that term or in any other sense. But it seems like this suggestion is maybe that the first time they sinned in this imaginary scenario which Hermione is trying to get him to sort of cop to. So the first sin here might have been an out of wedlock tryst perhaps, but it has not been. But even that has not been separated from like, whatever sex that they've had once they had actually gotten married. It's as if every. It's as if every sexual experience one can have, even with one's own wife, is somehow an infidelity or. Or a. It's a. It's all fornication. So. So the swingers idea that you're talking about I think is really interesting because if it's all fornication, it might as well be with anyone, right? It might as well be with somebody else's wife. If all sex is sinful, there is no fidelity. And so the other interesting element that's added to this little chunk of speech that Hermione has here is she first says the word grace. She says Grace to boot is glossed in my text as heaven help me. But this is the first time that she's said this word, which she'll subsequently say many other times, which is this idea of, as we've talked about in previous episodes of Right. Unmerited favor that one gets from God. In a way, the opposite of sin. Not literally, but it runs at cross purposes to sin. And so she's introducing this idea of grace at the same time that any kind of human sexual activity is being painted with the broad brush of sin. And I don't know what to make of that. I haven't really thought about it, but I just think it's an interesting moment at which this grace idea is injected into the conversation. 11:08 Wes: Yeah, yep, it's sin. Lest you. Lest you say your queen and I are devils, they're the temptresses. But, yeah, I think that's very interesting. At the very least. I haven't thought about the grace part of this, but at the very least, it's really interesting that she is pushing Polixenes for this sexual gossip, essentially. And meanwhile Leontes is spying on them and this is the nail in the coffin that's catastrophic. He. It's right at this point that he comes up on them and enters the conversation again and says, is he won yet? And she says, yeah. And he has that little aside and I love all the asides in this, by the way, and in the BBC production that I recommended from 1981, I think it's all done so well. So he has this little aside where he says, at my request, he would not. These sides are really interesting in this because a lot of Leonte's insanity, his insane musings happen through those little asides. But yeah, so there it seems like, I think if you were reading this quickly and you might. Or seeing it performed, you might say, huh, this is an awfully abrupt transition. He's upset that Hermione could convince Polixenes now, and this is what's going to set him off, that he couldn't get Polixenes to stay, but Hermione did. But if you look back at all of this has been set up in various ways that not only psychologically account for the jealousy, but very tightly integrated into everything that's going on thematically. 12:55 Erin: Yeah, we have this idea. Is he won yet winning in terms of winning over a lover. Right. Or winning someone to you in terms of being in a relationship or even for marriage or something like that. So, yeah, that phrasing already suggests that. 13:12 Wes: Well, it's even extended. So it's even extended because it. He, Leontes will say, you never spoke to a better purpose. And she'll say, never. And he'll go, oh, yeah, do duh, never but once when you said yes to my proposal. So he creates this direct parallel between his proposal to marry to Hermione to marry him and her persuasion of Polixenes to stay. 13:46 Erin: That's right. And in his description of the efforts that he made to win Hermione over. It's pretty. It's not a happy memory, this winning her over, that he waited three crabbed months which had soured themselves to death. Ere I could make thee open thy white hand. This is not the eternal summer of the twin lambs. This is a time of bitterness that he waited for Hermione to accept him. He was not happy in the process of winning her over. So there's already this almost nastiness, not explicitly so, but I think within Leontes own heart. We can see a kind of nastiness towards Hermione in this characterization. 14:29 Wes: Well, it's interesting because it suggests she teases him an awful lot, including that previous tease where she says, not that I don't love you, if you want to go spend time with your buddies or your buddy here for an extra month, that doesn't mean I don't want you around. But in this case to my eye, she's playfully teasing him, which. Well, so anyway, in any case, let me make the larger point. Regardless of what's going on here, there's some teasing in this that suggests that they have a relationship, which allows for that. And it's even the case. We should point out that Polixenes has been there for nine months and it doesn't seem like Leontes has gotten jealous yet. Things are a little off in the beginning, but we see everything build up within the context of the play. So whatever has gone on Leontes, it's the leave taking that's really important to stimulating Leonte's suspicions. It's this concept of gratitude that is pivotal. It hadn't happened before the leave taking, and now it is. And of course, the fact that they're reaching the nine month mark, they're nearing the nine month mark on the pregnancy and that's. It's been nine months of visit and various other things are important as well. But, yeah, at this point, I think he's primed. He's primed for what comes next. Too hot. Too hot to mingle. Friendship. Far as mingling bloods, which is really fascinating because it sounds like he's talking about. Is he talking about his friendship with Polixenes or is he talking about her friendship with him? Or both? 16:24 Erin: This is the question, who is he jealous of here? 16:28 Wes: Exactly. 16:28 Erin: Right, Yeah. 16:30 Wes: I mean, yeah, no, I think you're exactly right. Who is he jealous of? I think in the end it's probably both, but we have to. I don't think we can avoid a conclusion that a big part of it is he's upset that this, his twinned lamb, this person with whom he has a very strong relationship that's described as love, has said no to him, but said yes to his wife. And I'm sure reams of literature have been written on the homoerotic aspect of this, but which plays a greater role here, his love of Hermione or his love of Polixenes? I don't think we can answer that question. I think they both play a role, but I think we. I don't think we can avoid the conclusion that his love of Polixenes plays a huge role in what's about to happen. 17:24 Erin: I think too, I. In conversations that I had with a professor of mine, my thinking on this has evolved a little bit. But what's interesting. So we have Hermione right before Leontes is too hot. Too hot. Says basically that she's. She's thrilled that, yeah, that this is Grace. I've gotten something extra. Right. Two for the price of one, which is a kind of grace economy. Right. So I have both a husband and a friend. And of course, in my edition, friend, it's noted, can also mean lover. Right. And Leontes then has this very. When Harry Met Sally, kind of, you know, men and women can't be friends. Right. 18:01 Wes: And I've got my husband, I've got a friend with benefits. Friend with gratitude has had the benefit. 18:07 Erin: Right, well, and of. And of course. Yeah, that's good. And of course, Leontes wouldn't think, so long as he has this. The same kind of attitude towards women as Polixenes does. Of course, he wouldn't think that a man can be friends with a woman, seeing as women are devils, they are sin incarnate, and just walking in front of you can cause you to slip. So. So of course he wouldn't think that they could. 18:27 Wes: There's some truth in that. 18:29 Erin: Well, come on. Well, this, therefore, this. This idea of the inherent impossibility of the. Of a chaste relationship between men and women, I think it speaks to, obviously to Leontes, misogyny. But then at the end of this little speech, he immediately turns. Well, he turns not immediately, but abruptly, I should say, to Mamillius. And this is, I think, where things really get interesting. 19:00 Wes: Yeah, I think this is great. I just want to. I just want to make one more comment about this line. Mingling friendship is mingling bloods, because there's an ambiguity in that line. Mingling bloods in what sense? In a metaphorical sense. Right. As in one meaning of. It is obviously that they're involved in a romantic and sexual relationship. But the mingling of bloods also seems to allude to the idea that they've created a child together. 19:33 Erin: Yep. 19:34 Wes: And so he goes on to recount what he thinks he's seen from afar, which is them paddling palms and pinching fingers and things. But. But anyway, then there's this turn to Mamillius, as you pointed out. Go ahead with that. Yeah. 19:49 Erin: He's in the middle of talking about this idea of his cuckoldry. And a reference to his brows, which might be sprouting horns over this current pregnancy of Hermiones, and then abruptly turns to Mamillius and says, art thou my boy? And this turn, this repeated turn back to Mamillius is a theme of this section. I think that I was convinced in this conversation with a professor that I had that Mamillius is far more important to Leonti's psychology here than we might think that it might be, and I don't want to get ahead of myself, but maybe I'll say it now. I'll state my thesis now and then make my case as we go. Go along. But the thesis which was lent to me, really by this professor, is that it's Mamillius who Leontes is actually jealous of, which is a really interesting idea. I'll try to make the case as we go along. I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced of it. I think that there's. I think there. That there's something here with the closeness with Polixenes, which. I don't know if we want to call it homoerotic or not. I'm not terribly interested in any homoerotic elements there. I'm more interested in this kind of misogynistic view of women that. That both Leontes and Polixenes seem to have mingled maybe with Leontes kind of jealousy over Hermione's pregnancy, which is maybe some fertile ground there for conversation. But Leontes looks at Mamillius nose and says, they say it is a copy out of mine. He's convinced that Mamillius is his child and that maybe is the problem. That's why he continually turns back to Mamillius. So there are a few things at work here, first of all, and I think they go together, I think that Leontes. I'm calling it misogyny. It's a strong word. I think it's appropriate here. But in the Renaissance period, as now, arguably, but especially back when establishing kingship and having a male heir was so important, there's this desire, I think, being expressed in the play of women as the mere conduits for the reproduction or replication of the man. Right. The man needs a copy of himself to keep going. And this is. Nowhere is this more important than when the man is king of something and needs a male heir to inherit and to succeed him. So the woman in the equation is the problem to be solved, really. They're the thing that's in the way of the man who desires an asexual reproduction, if you will, to replicate himself. The woman is the variable. She's the one who may cheat on you and thereby you cannot produce yourself again. She might be producing somebody else, some other man. So this obsession with cuckoldry, the printing 22:45 Wes: press might be exactly copying out someone else's play. 22:49 Erin: Exactly. And this problem of cuckoldry is one with which Shakespeare is obsessed, and perhaps rightly so, in the time that he came up or shortly before it. 22:58 Wes: Right. 22:58 Erin: Henry VIII was Obsessed with this idea of replicating himself, of producing a male heir. In Elizabeth's time there's this vacuum in which she has no heirs. She's also a woman. And so anyway, so, so all of this I think is important to stress that there's a. There's an inherent misogyny in this idea of the male progeny taking over. This idea that the woman can, can betray you and thereby rob you of yourself projected into the future. And at the same time, I think the fact that Mamillius actually is his is causing Leontes a lot of problems. The fact that he has actually replicated himself is an issue for him. And again, I don't want to see, and I don't want to move too far in advance, but even just say, looking at the next subsequent pages, like in around line 155, when he looks on the lines of his boy's face and sees himself 23 years younger, we have this Peter Pan complex. We have these two men who want to be boys again, but you can't be a boy as long as you have a boy, then you're a dad. Right? So I think there's a problem here with his self replication is what I'm trying to say. 24:15 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think Mamillius may be a stand in for the twin lambs as well. So that he and Polixenes constitute in their boy eternal fusion. I think this idea of replicating oneself and so vicariously living eternally connects to this idea of being a boy eternally and a boy with one's friend. For any complications of the opposite sex, sexual attachments, marriage, reproduction, all of that before the domestic scene intrudes on that kind of perfection inherent in that sort of same sex love, that same sex friendship that's highly sublimated, right, and not sexual. I think the word homoerotic actually misses the point because the attraction of it is the innocent part, the lamb part, the lack of sexual complication. And in Mamillius I think you get an emblem or a symbol of that. And the danger here, if Mamillius in a way represents that childhood boy eternal fusion with Polixenes, I think it's just one more step to the idea that that Polixenes could be the father. And so that's part of where the jealousy comes from. But I think the other aspect of this is, and I think you're right, and I'm just extending what you're saying is that there's a threat to the idea of that eternal youth. He's somehow still attached to that. There's a threat to this idea of a perfect replication of the self through which one lives. But also, if I'm right, a perfect replication of a certain type of friendship, a certain type of relationship that's supposed to live on forever as well. And that's what has been threatened. So, again, it goes both ways. Jealousy of Polixenes, jealousy of Hermione. 26:35 Erin: Yeah, I think that's good. I like, too, that Mamillius is obviously what that. That name is like, means. Breast. Is that right? 26:44 Wes: You know, it does seem evocative of that. 26:47 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So he has this. So Mamillius is, in a way, like a living embodiment, a living reminder of the break in the relationship with Polixenes. Right. In the way that any child is. Is evidence of the fact that you have had sex. Right. Mamillius, even in his name, is a constant reminder to Leontes of his mother and of the relationship that produced Mamillius as being sort of at cross purposes to. Or the thing that occasioned the break with the relationship with Polixenes. So he's again, at the end of this, of another little speech after he refers to his brows and first turns to Mamillius and says, art thou my boy? We get just. Just about seven more lines after that in which she. He's going through again, as a kind of, on a smaller scale, the same paces as he did earlier, looking at the two of them, Hermione and Polixenes, holding hands, continuing this heifer, this really unattractive heifer metaphor that's been introduced the page before, and then says again turns to Mamillius. And now with this heifer idea carried through, Mamillius becomes the calf. So this is how. Now you wanton calf. 27:57 Wes: Wanton calf. 27:57 Erin: Are thou my calf? Yeah. Wanton calf. 28:00 Wes: Yeah. So wanton calf. Right. In contradistinction to the innocent lambs, we're gonna get an echo of that when the ladies playfully tell Mamillius that if he were older, he would wanton with them. I was pretty shocked by that. But in any case. Yeah. Art thou my calf? So he's worried about provenance of his offspring, or is it his offspring? 28:27 Erin: I mean, it seems very clear that he is and that even that Leontes believes he is, that there's something. 28:32 Wes: Oh, yeah, I totally agree. 28:34 Erin: Yeah. 28:35 Wes: Yep. He hasn't gone that far. But he's leading himself towards the idea that her current pregnancy is not his and he has to rely on her word in general. 28:48 Erin: Right, right. And in a way, it isn't I mean, what. I think what allows Perdita to be Perdita, to come back, to be reconciled, is the fact that she's a girl. There are different stakes there, unfortunately. Right. So in a way, a female child, whoever that is, isn't going to be like Leontes, though much is made of the fact that she looks quite a bit like him. There isn't the same kind of threat there. So in. In line 131, when Leontes says of Mamillius that they are almost as like as eggs, which is a really. 29:26 Wes: Women say so, but she can't trust them. 29:30 Erin: I take two eggs sitting together. I mean, in addition to the fact that an egg is obviously a sort of feminine image, two eggs sitting next to each other also look like something else, and they're featureless. And implies Leontes takes both himself and Mamillius back to this sort of pre inseminated state where they're both pre embryonic. And again, the twinnedness of that, I think, is what's threatening here. 30:01 Wes: Yeah. As you've pointed out, he must partly be jealous of Mamillius at least. And that's very common, of course, for men. It's usually more common, I think, earlier in childhood. Right. Men with wives, with new babies, they often regress into a more childlike dependent state and have a lot of problems with the attentions of the woman being more on the child. But yeah, so there's a lot of different. There's a lot of different ways in which the jealousy is running here. But I think you also have another good point about the separation allowed by Perdita Lost. Right. Her name means lost and means loss, which is an important part of establishing the separation where you don't go insane because the bloods mingle too much. There's too much closeness, there's too much fusion. In the whole early boy, eternal lamb situation, there's possibly too much fusion between your friend and your wife. We need some kind of barrier. Part of that is distance in time, distance in country, a change in sex. The line is going to run through her, Right? I think the royal line will run through her, but it'll be her child. With Polixenes son, Florizel, we assume, I think, that they will produce a male heir that will unite both kingdoms. Maybe, I don't know, but. But at the very least, whether or not it unites the kingdoms, it unites Polixenes and Leontes. They finally get to have a child together, but it's a grandchild and so you get. It's less. I Think it feels less dangerous. 31:56 Erin: Polixenes and Hermione get to have baby as well. Yeah, it works both ways, Right? 32:03 Wes: Exactly. The swingers all get to have a baby together. 32:07 Erin: Exactly. Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice all have one grandchild. 32:12 Wes: Yeah. I think we should move on here to this affection speech. Which is amazing. 32:19 Erin: Yes. 32:19 Wes: And confusing. But here. So now he's going to make the movement. From reflecting on the impossibility of knowing whether the child is yours. So he says, affection thy intention stabs the center. Thou dost make possible things not so held. Communicatest with dreams. How can this be with what's unreal? Though thou coactive art and fellowest nothing. Then tis very credent. Thou mayst co join with something, and thou dost. And that beyond commission. And I find it. And that to the infection of my brains and hardening of my brows. So what does that mean? I think there's been, you know, there's debate on what this is supposed to mean. It sounds like. I don't know if affection. So affection is obviously paired with infection down below. I don't know if it's meant to mean insanity. Or just the feeling of jealousy. Or the feeling of love. But in any case, it seems to be personified and have an intention which stabs the center and the center of what? The center of the world. His center, his heart. And makes possible things not so held. So it makes the impossible possible. And is coactive with the unreal. Communicates with dreams, but doesn't produce anything. So, again, I think there's this contrast between the concrete world and the mental world. So when he says 'tis credent, it conjoins with something. I think the idea is that affection, when it reproduces. It reproduces something only within the domain of the imagination. But by doing that, it's almost like a vision that reveals the truth. He's going to go on to say a lot of other things about basically his emotional state of mind. And lack of reasonableness. Lack of attention to evidence. And all that he portrays as a kind of virtue. Because he thinks he's been. By way of his emotional state. He's actually been plugged into a more direct connection to the truth of things. And I think that's part of what's going on here. But I'm curious about hearing about how you read this. 34:49 Erin: That's great. I mean, I think that to the extent that I was able to figure this out. I think that's along those lines. I mean, I literally have in the margins. Which are otherwise really full. This section. I just have crazy talk. That's all I wrote. 35:02 Wes: I did a little research on this, and everyone, I think, is quite confused by this. So. 35:08 Erin: Well, it seems that there's this. 35:09 Wes: There's a lot of conflicting theories about what this actually means, which I think is just brilliant. If you want a crazy person, you got to have them say indecipherable things, or at least they could be deciphered in a number of different ways. 35:25 Erin: That's right. Yeah. There's something of the cipher here. This idea comes up again and again that if we have nothing, then it has to hook up with something in order to have meaning, and thereby it makes meaning. I hesitate to bring this up, and yet I feel I have to. At the same time that I was reading this, I got these blood test results back, which. This has nothing to do with anything, except that I'm reading almost everything Leontes is saying as being like. Like a newspaper article about my current predicament. I. It's a report from the front lines. But anyway, I got. I got these blood test results back. I had to figure out why I was getting sick so much. And it turns out that I have a very low white blood cell count right now. And I'm trying to figure out why that is. But basically the supposition is that I had been so stressed out and my cortisol levels might have been high, thereby reducing my white blood cell count, that basically I. The exact same thing. I'm just like Leontes in pretty much every possible way. But that. In other words, that something that I thought. 36:33 Wes: Do you look at the camera all the time and give mad speeches to. 36:36 Erin: Exactly. 36:36 Wes: Or at the audience? 36:38 Erin: No, but, I mean. But this whole idea, this. This magical thinking has been an obsession of mine since I read this, because I feel it's happening to me. You know, this idea that the things that you think, the nothings that. That you think can somehow. The. The mind can somehow produce this effect on reality, which is truly superstitious. Which. Which I've always been guilty of. But this. This. The idea that. That. That through magical thinking, you can actually affect something that will show up on a blood test result, you know, through being stressed out. I mean, not that this. The stress is magical thinking. Right. But through something that happens purely process, that it can actually have a physical effect on you is just something that has been. I almost like Leontes in the Oracle. I almost said these blood test results are wrong because this can't possibly be true. That. Right? That when you're presented with the evidence of this still, it seems unbelievable that you could have, in the sense that you've stressed yourself out and thereby caused a physical problem. You thought yourself into a change in your physical state. And so some barrier has been punctured. I hope it's relevant. But this is what I'm trying to talk about. I think this is what he's saying here, that something has been transmuted between states. Between states of matter, you might say. But here it's between the state of ideas into the plane of reality. Something like that. 38:01 Wes: Yeah. I think that's really interesting in light of Polixenes worry, his omnipotence of thought. Worry that his fears about bad things going on in the kingdom while he's away might make them come true. 38:17 Erin: Exactly. 38:18 Wes: And that seems to be the idea that you're entertaining here. And I think that this is so spot on. Because we've been introduced to the idea of omnipotence of thought on the one hand. And impotence of thought on the other. The impotence being thank yous are impotent in a way. Gratitude attitude is impotent. And what else? I forget, There are various other things that we mentioned. But this domain of the psychosocial, which is not concrete, there's a kind of impotence in that. And here he's discovered a domain in which that may not be the case. Because there may actually be an omniscience to being touched. Or it's a weird type of inspiration, right? It's not just jealousy. And this is what will allow him to be certain. Even in the face of the oracle, right? He's his own oracle. It's almost a sort of prophet like inspiration that he's undergoing. In which by feeling something. And this is not uncommon, right? We all do this actually by feeling. We feel like our feelings are a kind of evidence that they can give us a kind of certainty about things. And that's what I think this speech. I think this speech has something to do with that. Something to do with this idea that a certain realm of thought is not impotent emotion, or whatever you want to call it. Or maybe jealousy. Maybe jealousy is a form of power because it produces certainty, because it produces a kind of omniscience. Now, is it inventing the question about the truth aspect of this breaks down a little bit. Because is he making it happen in the way Polixenes might make something happen at home? Is he making it happen through his fears? Not in the sense that he's going to drive them together? But in the sense that it no longer matters what the concrete reality is. The reality just is one's internal emotional reality and that's all that matters. I think this is a very important idea and it's so psychologically true and it has a very strong political importance as well. I think it's relevant, for instance, to what Orwell calls doublethink, or what I think on the Daily show was called truthiness. This idea that it's almost aesthetic in the sense that there's a higher truth that's more important than facts, than the actual facts, and that higher truth is just one's own sentiments and they're typically moral sentiments of certain kind or sentiments about what's just or not. It doesn't matter what really happened because I'm outraged by something that happens. Happen, for instance. So I think that's part of what's going on here. So we've gone from gratitude and mental states to being impotent to finding a domain in which they are actually powerful in the sense of conferring a type of omniscience. 41:38 Erin: Yeah, that's great. I think in what you said about the effectiveness of Leontes jealousy in potentially in pushing Polixenes and Hermione into an affair or yet to create this reality. I think that obviously that doesn't quite work, but I think that the deeper impulse is maybe not that he wants them to have an affair or he wants to make it true, but that he wants to, as you've already said, like, push them away from him. Right. He wants to. He wants to get out of this too close relationship to both of them and to Mamillius. And that is what he successfully occasions. Right. What he does is pushes them. Them away. I mean, his. The way that his thoughts affect reality. I mean, it's actually shocking. It's. That's why I brought up my blood test results, which were equally, to me, in my current state, equally shocking in that people actually die as a result of what he thinks. Right. I mean, it's a bit silly that Mamillius and Hermione both kind of swoon and it's more realistic because Hermione's just given birth in what we imagine are 42:46 Wes: pretty and is also not really dead. 42:48 Erin: Right. 42:49 Wes: Well, although I know there's two readings of that. 42:51 Erin: Yeah. Right. But what he does is what he wants is distance and that's what he gets, that's what he produces. 42:58 Wes: Yeah, great point. 43:00 Erin: Yeah. 43:01 Wes: So when we go from there, Hermione, I love the transition from affection to infection of the brains and this infection, disease metaphor is going to start becoming predominant. But then distraction. Hermione puts it as distraction. So affection, infection, distraction. You look as if you held a brow of much distraction. And then he. And then he gives that line about. He hides the fact that he's been worrying about the parentage of the boy and says, I thought I saw myself as you already mentioned. But I think, as we've discussed, there's an element of truth in that. Mamillius is the representative of the boy, eternal. And the fusion of him and Polixenes. But. 43:43 Erin: Yeah, yeah, well, in this. Speaking of fusion, I'll just, If I'm not going too quickly, turn our attention to Polixenes's discussion of his own son, which I think provides some credence for this reading of Mamillius being the problem. Polixenes says that his son is 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, and with his varying childness, cures in me thoughts that would thick my blood. So I love this idea that kids are the problem for which they are also the cure. That's how I'm reading this, that kids cause all these. These issues they bring out. Right. All of these various elements of their parents. They cause them a lot of grief, they cause them a lot of stress. They are, in this instance, it seems, for Polixenes, they're a kind of threat, kind of competition, but then also they cure the very thoughts that they produce. 44:44 Wes: Yep. 44:45 Erin: It seems to me that he wouldn't have any of these. He wouldn't have need of a cure if he hadn't a child to thick his blood. Right. In a kind of literal way, in the way that we're talking about. 44:55 Wes: Yeah. The fears that. The fears created by the. Well, not only because children are pain in the ass, because you're worried about them all the time. 45:02 Erin: Right, right. 45:03 Wes: What could happen to them? 45:05 Erin: And that. That Polixenes is no longer the main character. Right. He's. He has to give way to this young person who is all of these. 45:12 Wes: Right. 45:13 Erin: He's the main character now. He has all the characteristics. He's soldier and statesman. Everything. 45:17 Wes: Okay. 45:18 Erin: Yeah. 45:18 Wes: Right, Right. Okay. Yep. That's the more profound reading of that. 45:23 Erin: No. 45:24 Wes: And it. So at this point, we get a transition to Leonte's, to use his word, angling, trying to set them up by saying things like, let what is dear in Sicily be cheap, show all your. Be as nice as you can be hermione to Polixenes. I'm gonna. You guys go off to the garden, do your thing to your own bents, dispose you. You'll be found, although, you know, be beneath the sky. And then there's the aside I'm angling now. So anyway, that it's not going to take him long, of course, to. 45:59 Erin: To. 45:59 Wes: To come to the position of absolute certainty, which that affection speech suggests that he's. He's already nearly there, if not there, but he's pretending like he's setting them up to sin again and be found out. 46:19 Erin: Yeah, he's. The transformation of these metaphors are what is most interesting to me in these subsequent speeches. The way that things change or become perverted or turned inside out. I think it happens with the fishing metaphor, and it really happens, of course, with the infection, disease, contagion metaphor, where that keeps changing who has the disease, who doesn't know they have the disease, et cetera. You know, that the. The referent keeps being transposed. But I think that something of that is happening on a microscopic level at the opening of this speech of Leontes once he sent off Polixenes and Hermione, when he says to Mamillius, go play, boy, play. Thy mother plays. And I play too. But so disgraced a part. Just that the changing of the word play there, the meanings of play is kind of the evolution that some of the metaphors undergo, which again is suggestive of this early idea that you brought up of this word associative thing. Now it seems like Leontes is like party of one. He's playing his own word association game that leads him down the mental garden path to the thing that he believed in the first place. He gets himself there. 47:40 Wes: Yeah, I love this. I love this. Yeah, exactly. I love the speech. This association of Mamillius playing with the mothers and fidelity. It's great. So he can't encounter any phenomenon in the world without interpreting it through this lens that he's created. And then he says, and I love this speech as well. There have been or I am much deceived cuckolds ere now. And many a man there is even at this present now, while I speak this holds his wife by the arm, that little thinks she has been sluiced in his absence and his pond fished by his neighbor. I think we should bring sluiced back as a. But anyway, I just love these crazy speeches by Leontes. You know, a tenth of mankind would hang themselves if they knew that their wives were getting sluiced the way they are. If they. If everyone whose wife were cheating on them actually knew that, then. I don't know, 10% might be a low estimate. I'm just kidding. Physic for it. There's none. It is a bawdy planet. I love that. Oh, my God, there's just so much I love in this play. And a bawdy planet that will strike where it is predominant and then no barricado for a belly. 49:07 Erin: That's great. 49:08 Wes: Kingdoms can have gates and psyches can have gates. They can have defenses that work. Right. But there's no way to ensure the fidelity of another person. 49:21 Erin: Yeah. Which is such a. Which is so interesting, because the belly is. That seems to be the impermeable membrane. Right. That seems to be the. It's the belly itself. Right. Is not the port of entry, shall we say? 49:36 Wes: It's not. 49:38 Erin: And so there's. So the. But the illogic of that is what makes this so great. Right. I mean, the literal illogic, the impermeability becomes. Leontes imagines himself, I think, to have, like, X ray vision, because this becomes a theme and I'm skipping ahead. I won't go all the way there. Right. But this becomes the whole point of the spider thing. Right. I have drunk and seen the spider. That's a very odd order. Right. You don't see the spider if you drank it. It. Right. So there's something of this, I think, of this X ray vision. Right. That's happening where he could see inside someone here. Before we get to that, I just want to say, though, that the. You know, this belly, too, it will let in and out the enemy with bag and baggage. Obviously, that's a very sexual metaphor, but it's also indicative of a baby, too. Right. The baby is also. 50:28 Wes: Right. Well, that's. I think by belly, he means the pregnant swollen belly. 50:34 Erin: Sure. Absolutely. 50:34 Wes: That's the way I took it. Yeah. There's no way to determine parentage. There's no way to know. You can defend a kingdom, you can defend your mind, but you can't defend yourself against being cuckolded. 50:47 Erin: Right, Right. 50:48 Wes: Or having offspring that you might think is yours but isn't. Which psychologically, it's interesting to think about. Why is that such a terrible thing? Intuitively, we can understand it, but if we try to parse it out rationally, it becomes much more difficult. What is the danger of another's offspring? 51:10 Erin: Well, he immediately switches back to the disease metaphor, which. It's a kind of an odd place for it because I think there's a lot of association Going on here. I mean, same thing with the fishing metaphor. So earlier he talks about angling, right? So he's the fisherman and the couple, both Polixenes and Hermione are like the pond of information and in which he's fishing. What the fish is, we don't know, Right? But the two of them together, maybe in this metaphor, like the pond. Then in this speech, the fishing metaphor comes back, but as a symbol of a man who fishes in another man's pond with the woman, as the woman is the pond, or she's the conduit from which the men extract the goods, the fish maybe being the sons or something like that. And so Leonti's pond has been violated by another fisherman. Someone else is angling in his pond in the same way. I think there's this idea of no barricado for a belly. There's no. You can't block access to the womb, as it's glossed in my edition. So. So a man can enter a woman and she will let in and out men who are not her husband in terms of an affair. Also, the enemy, as we've already said, is the child who will exit the issue of the adulterous relationship and then he immediately goes to. Many thousands on us have the disease and feel it not. And here I'm taking, you know, because of. It's in such close relation, or close. Close proximity, rather to this very explicit sexual language, I'm taking this almost as like a. Like a sexual disease. But he's flipped it or he's twisted it, right? It's the woman's body that's being violated, or that's not the right word, Right, but that's being invaded by outside forces. So presumably she would be the one who has the disease. In the previous metaphor, if we take it for. If we take the disease to be what literally? A sexual disease, a sexually transmitted disease, because she's been the. The gate through which people are coming in and out, or the disease of sin or whatever. Right, but she's the thing that's been the conduit for others. She's the thing that has been, if you like, violated, I'll use that term. Right, but he's the one then who becomes the violated one. He's the one. So. So just as he. He went from being angler to landowner whose pond has been violated, she has gone from being the violated pond to now he's the one who is infected with the disease. So it's almost as though he is put in the woman's Place. And Polixenes is the fisherman taking something out of him. So there's a transposition in which he is in the feminine role in this metaphor. 54:03 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting. And just to reinforce your point, it's a really odd way to describe being cuckolded as having a disease. Because it's something that really, in a way, doesn't involve you. And this is the weird thing about jealousy. And it's also something worth reflecting on. What does it matter what the other person is doing out of sight? What does it matter? Why is sexual fidelity so important psychologically? I mean, it can be explained, obviously, but it's not like someone is taking a knife literally and putting it into your body. You're not being physically harmed. No one's yelling at you. You're not being verbally abused. But there's this need for another to have a certain kind of comportment to you. Not just love, but complete faith and fidelity such that they are not engaged in some pleasurable, maybe loving, but maybe just physically pleasurable experience with another person without you. So there's a lot to be said about why would we be jealous? Why would we be envious? Those are very puzzling ideas, I think, when you begin to think about them. And here, this idea of describing it as a disease captures some of that. He has a disease that involves the activity of his wife with another, does it? That actually he's not. He can't actually catch it. It's not really. It's an odd metaphor in a way, to capture some odd emotions. But what else was I going to say about this? The real disease is that he's insane. The real disease is the jealousy, not the thing that he's jealous of. So by calling it a disease, he's, I think, a little bit conscious of the. The fact that there's a kind of insanity involved in jealousy. But he's thinking of this and consciously, at least in terms of catching the disease of someone else's unfaithfulness of cuckoldry and becoming like all those other men on the bawdy planet. 56:28 Erin: Well, I like that because then, you know, it pushes this metaphor even further. Arguably, you know that if he's the byproduct. Right. Of the affair, in other words, these two people produce an infection which is registered in his body. He's almost like the cuckolded man is almost like the child of the affair in that metaphoric relation. Right? The affair produces something. Its product is the disease in the third party. Maybe that's pushing things too far. But the. 57:01 Wes: I think that's good. Is this a good place to end, do you think? I think it is. Since we're just going to do Leontes and Camillo next. 57:09 Erin: Okay. Yes. 57:10 Wes: All right, so we will stop there and next time we will finish up act one and. And I think things are going to go a bit faster. So I'm not sure what we're going to get through in the next part of the discussion and the part following that, but I was not surprised that we spent a lot of time on this first act. 57:30 Erin: This is where all the meat is, not all the meat, but it's important. Yeah. 57:38 Wes: Things get more action oriented. They move much quicker in a way after this. But so I. Yeah. So we will continue on with Leontes and Camillo next time. 57:51 Erin: Thank you, thank you. 57:54 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. [email protected] subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast network. airwavemedia.com airwavemedia.com 58:31 Erin: hey