Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Part 3)

Part 3 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 0:16 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast you're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. 0:34 Wes: We are continuing our discussion of Shakespeare's the Winter's Tale. This is part three of a multi part series on the Winter's Tale. I think we may have said in our, in the last part that we were probably going to go for four parts. I think this is going to be a six part series now because we only got through act, not all of act one. We got through part of act one in the first two parts. In part three, we are going to launch ourselves at the beginning of Act 2. 1:07 Erin: I'm predicting this is going to take roughly 16 years. So by the time Perdita is ready to marry, we will be done. 1:15 Wes: That's right. We should call on time to intervene here and just fast forward us. But yeah, so we're not going line by line, but we're, we're taking it easy. So to Speak. And I don't know if we mentioned last time that we are. We're going to be releasing weekly now. So we're doing twice as much recording, maybe a little bit more. And then we are not putting. Instead of doing Postscript, we are doing it, what's essentially a part two. And most of those will not behind. Be behind the paywall. So that's the new approach that we're taking. I don't think. Did we mention that in our last. 1:53 Erin: I don't think so. 1:54 Wes: Okay, so we left off at the point where Leontes had been very mean to Hermione and had to say the least, and had her carted off to jail. 2:09 Erin: Oh, that's where we left off. 2:10 Wes: Okay, I'm looking at act one, scene two. And we were just about to get into his conversation with Camillo. He had just finished his rant about it's a bawdy planet and there's no barricado for belly. People are getting cuckolded, Men are getting cuckolded left and right. And then that part of the scene ends with, I'm like you. Mamillius says, I am like you. They say, leontes, why, that's some comfort. So at least you're my child. So then we get Camillo, and we wanted to get into the scene a bit, in part for the. There's the famous speech about the spider and the level of paranoia. We get some real insight into that in this scene because Camillo is a wise advisor and is going to try to put the brakes on this, but to no avail. So he starts out by noting the interaction between Polixenes and Hermione and asks Camillo why it is that Polixenes stayed. And Camillo says, at the queen's. At the good queen's entreaty. And Leontes replies that the queens, be it good quote, unquote, shall be pertinent. But so it is. It is not. Was this taken by any understanding pate but thine. For thy conceit is soaking. I'm just. This isn't a major point that I'm getting at here. I just. I love this line. For thy conceit is soaking. And I had to think about what it. It meant. His imagination is absorbent, and he is likely to notice things that others are not likely to notice. So Leontes is curious. Leontes has noticed this. It's the basis for his jealousy. Camillo, at least has noticed the fact that the queen. That Polixenes stayed on the queen's entreaty. And Leontes is what he's asking here is as if other people have looked at it with the same level of suspicion. And in a way, he's making the assumption that Camilo's absorbent imagination has drawn the same conclusion that Leontes has about her infidelity, which of course he hasn't. So I guess this is important in the sense that there's a big confusion in Leontes about what constitutes evidence, what constitutes insight. He's going to tell us over and over again that it's enough for him to feel suspicion. And because of the fact that he has these very heightened senses and is very aware of the world, that's enough evidence for him. It's more trustworthy than what his advisors are going to say, for instance. And in any case. So I thought that was a. You know, I just thought that was a great way of putting. 4:54 Erin: Is great. Thy conceit is soaking. Is really wonderful turn of phrase. And then there's a discussion between Leontes and Camillo shortly thereafter about what constitutes negligence. And there's this idea in Camillo's speech about being willfully negligent, which I think is really interesting. So what Leontes sees as. What he sees as heightened understanding on Camillo's part would suggest that Camillo needs to come to the same conclusion that Leontes has, that Camillo needs to look at the evidence and see what Leontes sees in it. And the fact that he doesn't means that he's been negligent, which supposes that a sort of heightened, insane way of. Of interpreting factual information. Right. Is. Is. Is normal. And that to not see this kind of pattern that Leontes sees is negligent. The. In other words, that Camillo somehow isn't trying hard enough, right. To come to the imaginary conclusion that Leontes comes to. But since we spoke in the previous episodes about how suggestive the language is between Polixenes and Hermione, I do wonder if there's a certain amount of negligence on Camillo's part. I don't know if I've come out the other side now, and I agree with Leontes that they're acting very suspicious, as we've already hinted at before. So what constitutes negligence to a. 6:28 Wes: That was the original ending of the play, by the way. Leontes and Hermione are in bed together, reading, and she says, you know what, honey? You were actually right all along. It's okay, Hermione, I forgive you. And then roll credits. Sorry, sorry to interrupt. 6:47 Erin: No, no, yeah. It just things. Like, to put this another way, Right. We have to, in order to not go insane the way Leontes has, we have to admit a certain amount of negligence all the time. Right. In order to tamp down the things that we could be noticing, if we noticed everything around us, we would go insane. So where is the line between fact finding, or I should say clue gathering and willful negligence? And I think this is what the discussion between Leontes and Camillo is getting at. Around line 242. And then in Camilo's response, around 250. 7:27 Wes: Yeah. So right after telling Camillo that he has such a great. That he's so perceptive, he finds out that Camillo doesn't share his paranoia and then starts attacking immediately. And he does something which he will do in other places in the play with people who are trying to make him be more reasonable, which is, you guys are just so naive. You don't know how the world works. Again, it's always an appeal to the bawdy planet framework. You don't know how deceptive people are and licentious and all of that stuff. So we have been deceived in thy integrity, deceived in that which seems so. So he's, you know, now Camillo has deceived him into thinking that he was a wise counselor. And then in the next fool thou seest a game played home, the rich stake drawn and takest it all for jest. So in other words, Camillo noticed that she got him to stay. She got that Hermione got Polixenes to stay, but he's not willing to draw the right conclusions from that. He just takes it as nothing, just takes it as a jest or takes it for what it is at surface level. But Leontes sees underneath the surface. I think the thing in the first two parts of our discussion that I emphasized was the way in which this play is an ethical and epistemological reflection on the world that involves. It's a reflection on the inadequacy of the mental world and the social world to the physical world. So this question of how do you recompense hospitality? Well, you can only say thanks, and that's not anything, that's nothing. And then in this case it's about. The epistemological problem is about the role of suspicion in drawing these conclusions. But not just suspicion, but theoretical frameworks in general. So sometimes I think there's a critique of empiricism here, because Leontes will say, I don't need your advice. And again, we'll not just say this to Camillo, but to other advisors. Later. I don't need trials. I'm not even going to trust the oracle. I'm not going to trust any secondhand sources. This is like what the conspiracy theorist does. I can trust my own firsthand experience. That's what's trustworthy. I'm a radical empiricist. Except that experience is that word can include an equivocation. Is it actual empirical experience? Is it the actual observations? Or is it your own mental state or your own, the theory that you're applying to the data and that where that theory may be nothing more than suspicion, or it may be some cynical outlook, it may be the bawdy planet theory that you apply to some innocent interaction between your friend and your wife, and then the data gets interpreted into something sinister. So, again, I think we are dealing with the relationship between mind and world and the inadequacy of one to the other. In the first case, it had something to do with thankfulness, and in this case it has to do with what's going on with his jealousy. 10:50 Erin: I love that. And I'm wondering if I could wrap this around into something else that you're making me think of or if these things tie together, because I'm thinking about this idea of one's firsthand experience being paramount and wondering if that means that automatically that's going to increase the opacity of everyone else around you. 11:10 Wes: Right? 11:10 Erin: That if you only trust your own firsthand experience, you can't take anything anybody else says on faith, and it denies their own interiority, or that interiority could be useful to you in some way, could add to your own experience. Is that. 11:25 Wes: Yeah, correct. First of all, that's great. I love the way you put that. The making others opaque. 11:32 Erin: Well, and then every time you say bawdy planet, of course, I know you're saying B A W, D Y, but I hear body, B, O, D, Y. And of course, a planet is also a planetary body. And I'm thinking about the animalistic metaphors that occur throughout the first two acts, maybe longer, but I'm just thinking about those two right now. The repeated reference of Hermione to a horse or to a cow, and this is also carried out in the male equivalents of these things as well. But this reduction to the animalistic, which Then at line 276 in this conversation between Camillo and Leontes turns into something that's almost like a. Oh, what's the word? An effigy. She becomes a hobby horse, right? Which is supposed to be. It's glossed in my notes as a slut a woman who could be ridden by anybody. Right. So. So we have this sort of reduction to animals and then further reduced to just a pure hollow body. It's just a representation of something else, even a representation of an animal, not even of a woman. Shortly thereafter, we have. He calls her. Let's see, she says rank is any flax wench that puts to before her troth plight. That too is very suggestive to me, obviously. 12:50 Wes: Sorry, what line is that? 12:52 Erin: This is the following line 277. So the. This means a woman. A flax wench is a woman who works with flax to make cheap cloth. But also the phrase has contained it within the idea that the woman is made of flax. Right. She's a flax woman. 13:08 Wes: And these puts to before her troth plight has sex before marriage. Is that what that is? 13:13 Erin: Yes, yes. And so these two reductions to something which is something which is totally hollow. Right. Has no interiority that. In other words, that Hermione is not a real person, she's an animal. Or even an effigy of an animal or an effigy of a woman. Of course, this will be really interestingly turned inside out when she becomes a statue that then actually becomes a real live woman. But I'm wondering if this is a further illustration of the kind of mind that you're speaking of, which would reduce everyone to a kind of flatness or a kind of hollowness. 13:55 Wes: Yeah, I think that's great. 13:56 Erin: Also, I'm thinking too about just because empiricism made me think of this, I'm thinking also about what I believe would be a contemporary understanding of animals as right as machines. Wasn't that the theory for a long time that animals were just extremely sophisticated? 14:12 Wes: Well, that was machines on a certain level. Descartes theory this would have been. And I don't. This predates Descartes. I don't know how much it was in the air, but there's a lot in here that makes me think of Descartes, by the way, and I put that in my notes. And of course it predates that, but it wouldn't be surprising if that's already part of the culture to some extent. There's a lot in Shakespeare that's suggestive of skeptical strains in the history of ideas, which is not surprising because the Renaissance and the texts that they've discovered that are leading to this sort of perspective, I mean, I think that started in the 1400s, the rediscovery of Lucretius de rerum Natura and Epicureanism and Atomism and all the things that we take for granted in the modern world. The way of looking at things scientifically, that's been around for quite a while and of course, obviously is a big part of what makes Shakespeare the introduction of the skeptical and the scientific frame of mind and the anti superstitious frame of mind. Does that make sense? 15:23 Erin: Yes, definitely. 15:25 Wes: But you were thinking about in particular of animals. Descartes famously saying that animals are machines. And maybe that idea is at work here. Here. 15:34 Erin: Yeah, yeah, I think so. But maybe just for the sake of accuracy, I'll, I'll back off that a little bit and just say that, that I just think there's a curious, coming full circle here where Leontes is trying to see into people imagining their supposedly secret thoughts. But ultimately what that does, ironically, is reduce them to bodies or people who are just ruled by their appetites and increases the sense of the. The actual impenetrability of another human being. 16:04 Wes: Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. I think that when you talk about the opacity of others, again, I think about this in relation to conspiracy theory, and I know I've talked about this before, but the conspiracy theorist in a way is not unscientific, but ultra scientific. They are too focused on the concept of firsthand experience. So people 9, 11 truthers want to pretend that they can do experiments that show that the towers couldn't have fallen based on X, Y or Z. In other words, they don't trust the experts, which in some cases is not surprising. But more importantly, they don't trust their ability to rely on other human beings as a source of knowledge or as one of the foundations for their knowledge, which we all have to do that. And it's not because we're naive. It's not because we don't know that people can be deceptive, as someone like Leontes thinks. It's just that we think we know enough about human psychology. We know that deception is motivated in certain ways. We know that people aren't diabolical. Exactly. It's not that they're Satan incarnate. They don't deceive in order just to get for kicks. Right. They have things that they want and those are predictable and we're able to evaluate those. And part of our ability to evaluate them is about understanding the psychology of it, including the fact that if the conspiracy theorist thinks that there can be these large scale cooperative, deceptive practices, when we know that people are very bad at cooperating in that kind of way, and that the truth would probably out and so on and so forth. So this opacity to others, as you described it, I think is very important here. I really like the idea of this reduction of people to their appetites. It's a very cynical way of viewing people, and in the conspiracy theorist, it comes out as a reduction of people to their worst motives. And it's not actually psychologically realistic. It's not complex enough. And ironically, it is in this. I think this is the point you were making. It's in this reduction of people to mechanism and the failure to appreciate their subjectivity, the fact of their opacity, treating them almost like atoms or particles or something, that one becomes deceived and unrealistic. It's almost like, again, a case of being overly scientific, which turns out to be pseudo scientific about people. Right. There's certain forms of knowledge that. That involve our appreciation of the interior lives of others. And of course, in general, most of our knowledge is just secondhand. We know there was a moon landing, but not personally, not from direct experience, but because we trust the social chain of custody. 18:56 Erin: That's great. I think that leads us right into Leontes' speech about nothing at 285. Maybe I'll just read the whole thing. Camillo is telling him that actually this doesn't quite follow from what Camillo says. It's almost as if he's responding to something that Camillo has said, that. That this is all nothing. But Camillo actually never uses the word nothing. But Leontes comes back with is whispering nothing, 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, wishing clocks more swift hours, minutes, noon, midnight, and all eyes blind with a pin and web but theirs, theirs only that would unseen be wicked Is this nothing. Why then the world and all that's in it is nothing. The covering sky is nothing. Bohemia nothing, my wife is nothing nor nothing. Have these nothings. If this be nothing so great. I know we probably talked in the Much Ado about Nothing episode, of course, about nothingness as being a rather, maybe not a rude epithet, but certainly a suggestive one about female genitalia. And I wonder if this is also something we could tie into. Or that idea, of course, it's all over the speech. But if it's something that we could tie into this idea of opacity as well, which is the unknowability of a woman, in this instance, to a man, especially in light of this Theme of cuckoldry, which we've already talked quite a bit about. But this particular kind of divide, I think this gender divide is extremely. It's as if he's been asked to give evidence here for his suspicions, even though he's not quite been asked to do so. He starts out with things which maybe are suspicious or grow in suspicion. So whispering, leaning cheek to cheek, meeting noses, kissing with inside lips. So this kind of ratchets up a level of intimacy here. Then we have. Stopping the career of laughter with a sigh. 21:06 Wes: Infallible. 21:08 Erin: Yeah, A note. Infallible. Of breaking honesty. Basically playing footsie, skulking in corners. And then we have this moment, which is really interesting. Wishing clocks more swift. So he's been looking at the outside. He's been looking at people who seem to be too close to each other physically. And then suddenly we have this. We've dived into the psyche. He's now saying that they're wishing that time would go by more swiftly, presumably to the hour of their assignation. But I wonder how we get there. Or how that leap happens of their 21:42 Wes: assignation to the sexing hour. Right. 21:45 Erin: To get it on. No, but I mean from what he's giving as physical signs to being suddenly inside. Right. The wishing clock's more swift. That's actually a projection into the minds of Polixenes and Hermione, Whereas prior to this, he's looking at outside signs that anybody might be able to see, like making out with each other. 22:06 Wes: I think that's a good point. He's now thinking like it's as if he can just see into people's minds, which is very typical of this level of paranoia. 22:15 Erin: Yeah. And it's about awaiting the hour of the assignation but also wanting to speed through things. We have wishing clocks more swift. Hours, minutes. That seems to go in the wrong direction. Minutes. Hours, maybe. 22:30 Wes: Right. 22:31 Erin: Wishing the minutes go by faster then. Wishing the hours go by faster. And then we have noon, midnight, which is of course the same number. Right. So there's a collapsing. I don't know. Like I said, this seems significant to me. I can't say why. Maybe there's something about the speed with which paranoia accrues evidence to itself that's being almost enacted here. And then the collapse of two things which are actually opposite noon and midnight are opposite each other. Now he's collapsed them, or he's collapsed the distinction between them or the hours between them. So maybe he's the one. Of course he is the one who's doing this by animating thoughts that aren't there. Like he's taking. Like a. Like an empty pumpkin and filling it just with his own thoughts, right? Not seeing into the mind of somebody else. 23:20 Wes: That's a good point. He's collapsing this distinction between now and then noon and midnight, and between what's in his mind and what's in other people's minds, and between signifier and what's real, which is basically the point of this speech. He's basically saying if the signifiers are nothing, then everything is nothing. Because he's taken. What he thinks he's responding to is the idea that Camillo has seen the surface signs, but is willing to treat them as not signifying of anything deeper. And that's why Camillo is naive. And that thesis is that those things are actually nothing. Oh, it's nothing. They're just being friendly. It's nothing. There's nothing. Nothing serious about it. And Leontes wants to claim that in fact, unless we can take those signs as signs of something, then the world itself is nothing. Bohemia is nothing. My wife is nothing. Which seems to suggest that he's very attached to the significance of things. Again, something that this is a part and parcel of paranoia and. And being asked not to read significance into certain behaviors or events seems crazy to the person in this situation. And what he's most certain about is his ability to read the signs, his ability to interpret the signs. And again, I think that is anchored in the certitude about his own theoretical framework, which is the framework of suspicion and jealousy. And I think we can imagine that before all this happened. I don't know if we mentioned this in our previous discussions, but the picture we get of Leontes at the end of the play, which is a far nicer person, we have to imagine that's the way he was before all this happened. Especially given people's surprise and the long standing relationship, good relationship with Hermione. So we don't really. We never get to see the good Leontes before all this happens. That's an interesting aspect of this play. We never get to see normal, rational Leontes and then see him as jealous. We get very little of him before he just suddenly goes off the deep end. And we have to imagine that this is quite a transformation, that he's gone from someone who's more reasonable and not willing to treat everybody, everything that's going on, as if it were a sign of something nefarious to that particular type of person. It's like a psychotic break. And I think that's why this disease metaphor comes up again and again. It's not just used by Leontes, but by others. Camillo says, this is a diseased opinion. And then that's where Leontes calls him a gross lout, a mindless slave, a hovering temporizer. That's an insult that I really love. And I had to figure out what that meant. Basically, it just means someone who rationalizes, someone hovering. I think that may have something to do with flattery, but someone who minimizes, rationalizes. And so in the case of Leontes, goes on to say, at once see, canst with thine eyes at once see good and evil inclining to them both. What does that mean? He doesn't make a firm moral choice between alter alternatives. Right. It's almost like being a skeptic and say, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna draw any conclusions. Does that make sense? 26:57 Erin: Yeah, it does. It's funny, the word rationalizer that. That you use, I think is really funny in this context. Right, right, exactly. He accuses Camillo of being a rationalizer, of being rational. Right. 27:10 Wes: Or moderator is the other. I'm using the word rationalize, but it's almost like someone who's trying to moderate. 27:18 Erin: Yeah, another. Another insult from the diseased mind of Leontes. Right, right. Yeah. I'm thinking about the fact that we don't see him normal, quote unquote. And I suppose that I don't think we could have seen him in a state prior to this, because both these scenes and then the backlash scenes where he's atoning are so extreme. Like, this is just an extreme personality. So I can't imagine a Leontes who was ever happily married in a stable relationship. Right. And disease comes up again and again. I think were it not for the impossibility of him surviving with this for as many years as he does by the end of the play, I would suspect that he's syphilitic or something. Right. And that would give credence to this projection, the sudden projection, as well as the actually deluded mind that he displays here. Because it would suggest that he's just had his own affair and is wracked with guilt on top of being. On top of having these deluded thoughts. Of course, that's an impossibility on a certain level. It's an interesting pairing with all of this disease imagery. Maybe we're supposed to think that he's ridden with one of these diseases. I think it's also unlikely, considering the fact that Sicilia seemed to be a rather formal kind of martial male culture. And I don't. He seems to be surrounded by other men in court. Hermione is not ever seen, I don't think. I mean, I suppose she does have women that are around her, right? But when they tell the winter's tale with Mamillius and there are even some of her ladies in waiting who are jokingly flirting with this little. Innocently flirting with Mamillius. So I suppose there are women around and available. But. But much of what he demonstrates his understanding to be in these scenes suggests that he has very little real experience understanding women. So that would fly in the fit, like almost if he were. If he were having more affairs, maybe he would understand women better and therefore. And therefore not accuse his wife of having one. I'm not sure. But anyway, I can't imagine a normal Leontes, I think, because if we read him as having a psychotic break here and then the subsequent atoning Leontes as a response to this, I think he's someone with such an extreme personality. I can't imagine him being in a. Just regular gear. 29:49 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting because you say this idea that his suspicion of her is reflective of guilt or something like that, about his own misbehavior. And we've already pointed to his relationship with Polixenes as being this weirdly. Not necessarily weirdly, but this very close to the point that we also suspect that part of his problem. It's not just rejection by Hermione that's a problem, it's rejection by Polixenes. And that goes towards your point about little experience understanding women. It's as if he's not balanced out in a way, he's not connected enough to the feminine, which I think is a good way of. Well, it isn't. It isn't. In a way, psychosis is about being, is about not having the intervention of the father, so to speak, between the mother and the child, between that fusion. But in a way, I think it is. To the extent that we think about this as the opacity of others, as you put it, and the lack of insight into the subjectivity of others. I think he's not balanced out by the feminine, in a way. And we. We see this borne out in the play because it's Paulina who ultimately is able to deal with him and becomes his custodian, in a sense. And Paulina and Hermione are the only truly persuasive speakers in the play. I think they are representatives of the power of the rhetorical on the one hand, but they're also representative of what it is and others that we can use to evaluate their credibility independent of our firsthand experience of them or of the behaviors that we're attributing. Infidelity, we know later on we'll know. At Hermione's trial, we just know she's. She's telling the truth and we wouldn't need to know anything or she's an incredible deceiver. But there's. There are lots of internal. And we'll get to that. Internal clues to her honesty in her testimony and that. That is the case in general. We have ways of internally evaluating the credibility of what people say without doing empirical checks. Now, of course, rhetoric can be used to deceive as well. So it's a very. It becomes a very complicated, interesting subject. The persuasiveness of Paulina and Hermione, their skill at speaking about things, and the way in which that gives us a criterion of credibility and honesty, even though, of course, rhetoric can be put to more sinister ends. But in any case, where's the spider? 32:45 Erin: Yeah. Well, before we get there, I just want to say I think this question, equality is a really interesting one. And I suppose, you know, though I doubled back on my own point and said, well, you know, there are ladies in waiting around. There aren't. What's really curious about Paulina and Hermione is that Hermione almost never overlaps with her on stage or very rarely does, except for in the trial. They don't ever, I think, have a real conversation with each other. They barely overlap. Like, once Hermione is put in prison, Paulina kind of replaces her and speaks for her. And then essentially, in the years of Hermione's, whatever we want to call it, her absence, she becomes a kind of proxy, right? She becomes a. A replacement, a wife to Leontes in certain respects. But of course, the original problem here seems to me to be a problem of a lack of women, a lack of numbers, of balance. Because, of course, the elephant in the room that we haven't really talked about is Polixenes wife. She's not here. That's the whole problem. If she was there, none of this would have happened. She's barely mentioned in the text. Right, but it's that. So it's that numerical imbalance of equals, shall we say? So not like ladies in waiting, but of queens. And, you know, the number of queens to the number of kings, the number of wives to husbands. That's, I think, the sense that I have that this is an imbalanced culture somehow. And and that's, I think, reflected in Leontes own person, as you're saying, with this too close relationship to Polixenes and a lack of. Therefore a lack of understanding of women. I think it's somehow all tied together. 34:20 Wes: It's interesting because the part of what sets off, seems to set off Leonte's jealousy is witnessing not just that flirtatious moment between Mamillius and his nannies, or the women who I presume are also his nannies, saying, you'd want in with us if we'd have you, you when you got older. But that critical moment when Mamillius sits on Hermione's lap and says. And Hermione says, tell us a tale. And Mamillius says, a sad tale is best for winter. And that the tale, of course, is the winner's tale, the old wives tale, the tales of goblins and sprites or superstitions, things that aren't real, but not told in the typical way of something purely fictional or a fairy tale told as if they were real later on. Autolycus is basically. These ballads are also old wives tales and people are asking them if they're true. And he says, of course they're true. Why would I peddle in lies? But in any case, it's that moment with. As we've said before, Mamillius is also implicated in the jealousy, the relationship between Mamillius and Hermione. And there's something about. Yes, I think what I'm trying to relate this to is the important role of women in the play and the. The role of older women, for instance, telling these, quote, unquote, old wives tales or winters tales, and. And as. As purveyors of superstition, let's say, and then accusations against Paulina, for instance, that she's a witch or a crone, that type of thing. And the relationship between that and the. I don't know, the burgeoning sexuality of. Of young males. Some. Something about the way in which the. The sexuality of children as they're getting older is in some sense governed by the behavior of adults. And including this, including seemingly unrelated activities like telling stories, which I think can be ways of communicating with children about sex and death and violence. Right. Fairy tales, Grimm's tales, all that stuff. I haven't fully formulated that thought, but I was just trying to join that up with what you were saying about the importance of women, because I think there's been volumes written on that about the. And we'll get to more of that. Why is it called the winner's tale? Why does that matter? A winner's tale, essentially an old wives tale. What does that imply about the role of women here? 36:51 Erin: I really like this idea. And I'm thinking about. Maybe this doesn't align perfectly, but you use the word superstition. And now I've gone off on a little bit of a mental tangent because I'm thinking about the contagion of ideas that you seem to be getting at here with Mamillius and the nannies as being one of the things that kind of sets Leontes off. And I'm thinking about a superstition as a kind of contagious idea that originates out of nothing or maybe even out of a kind of false empiricism. And if a lot of. Right. Like. Like maybe it originated from the fact that one person had the singular experience of, whatever, putting new shoes on the bed and then something bad happened. You know what I mean? It was a correlation causation problem. Right. Which then spread to other people. Don't do that. Otherwise if you put new shoes on the bed, then your cat's gonna die that same day. Right? Whatever. 37:41 Wes: It's true. 37:42 Erin: And it spread. It spread and it. And it. And it became very contagious in that way. And the way that the play enacts this contag, where we see, as you say, this interaction with Mamillius kind of goes into Leontes mind and almost acts like. Like a sticky idea, like a superstitious idea. Same with several other little moments that we discussed in the previous two episodes. And there's also in this scene with Camillo. So I think this is also happening on a meta level as well. Shakespeare seems to be remixing or sampling. This is like a. Like a. Like a rap song in which he's sampling other songs, but all the other songs were also written by him. So there's a kind of stickiness to the repurposed language or the other plays which get recycled here, almost like they have been sticky and have gotten into the works. So we have Leontes talking about the purity and whiteness of his sheets and then this idea of preserving sleep. You know, we have like little hints of Macbeth, obviously, tons of Othello throughout. Right. But all of this happens and at the same time, not all of this, it happens throughout the play, but there are some heavy moments of Macbeth that come in, especially with. In. In relation to. To poison that happened around line 320. And at the same time that this Macbeth sampling comes in, Camillo talks about the lingering dram that. That he suggests he can use to poison polixenes and this is another, I think, or a further contagion that he's caught from Archidamus. Right. Because Archidamus gives him the idea in that very first scene of using the lingering dram to. To dull their senses, I think is the expression he uses. Just flip back, but to dull their senses. And so this is somehow like put. Camillo doesn't give Archidamus credit for this, but it somehow put this idea in Camillo's brain and then it pops up later in this new way now as a poison almost. So I wanna. And I. I can't do this effectively in a short amount of time. But basically, basically what I'm wondering is if we take this lingering dram as a case study. A contagious idea. It's like a game of telephone, or like the superstition that grows and grows. It changes shape. Something that was a sedative, relatively innocuous, if a bit odd in Archidamus original conception, becomes something poisonous when it gets recycled and regurgitated later, as if it's undergone a kind of dream warping. And I'm thinking about this in relationship to the Winter's tale, you know, a story in which one learns about life through fairy tale. People become goblins, they shape shift. I don't mean literally within a story, Right. But goblins are used to express an idea in real life outside of the story. Right. But they're maybe transposed into these magical creatures within an old wives tale. And somehow that also I think to me represents the process perhaps of a thought becoming a superstition. 40:51 Wes: Yeah, I think that's great. We talked earlier on about omnipotence of thought and the idea that our thoughts can affect the world in negative ways. That's what Polixenes was suggesting. He worries too much about what's happening in Bohemia while he's away. It might, might make it come true. And then Leontes in a way is moving to omniscience of thought. If he thinks it must be true and that this is the sort of thing that plays a role in superstition and the idea. Right. Superstitions often involve ways of predicting or controlling the world. Right. If I put the shoes on the bed, then the bad thing will happen, so I won't put them on the bed and it won't happen. Right. And those rituals ultimately come down to ways of preventing thoughts from doing bad things in the world, or controlling and then controlling the world with ritual. And then what's happening in fairy tales, which I think are different, they're not exactly the same as old wives tales, but we'll. We'll discuss that later. But the. Just overlap, I think. But the. We get. We get this displacement from things which are dangerous or taboo to monsters and creatures, and somehow this can be metabolized. All. All of the stuff about sex and death and aggression. Children need to communicate about that. And this is the form the communication takes place in. And if you take those things literally, then they become superstition. And there's a reflection here. And I think we'll get this to this later as well, about art and the difference between aesthetic than fiction and old wives tales, which are false things that people actually take as true. Right. So how does fiction work? How does the aesthetic work? It's a lie in some literal sense, but. But we're all right as long as we don't take it as such. And in fact, it has this important redeeming quality. In a way, it's going to be the thing that can prevent us from becoming like Leontes. It's the thing that can prevent us from becoming jealous and superstitious and crazy, even though it's the realm of fantasy. So fantasy can lead us to an insanity, but fantasy may be the only thing that can prevent it as well. But in any case, with the rest of this scene, it's. He finishes up the conversation with Camillo, there's a decision to poison Camillo, and then Camillo immediately basically rats out Leontes to Polixenes and will come up with this plan to escape. And I just wanted to point into one thing in that conversation, and maybe you have more to say about it too. But there is just one thing I thought was really interesting at 385ish, where Camillo says there is a sickness which puts some of us in distemper, but I cannot name the disease, and it is caught of you that yet are. Well, so the sickness of jealousy that Leontes has, he's caught it from Polixenes, even though, of course it doesn't mean that Polixenes was jealous. Therefore Leontes got jealous. So it's an interesting concept of contagion. And this is again one of the several places in which the disease metaphor emerges, and also in which this kind of asymmetry between and. This asymmetry is going to come up in the spider speeches as well, which we'll talk about soon. But the asymmetry involved in being harmed by the infidelity of others, how is it that can actually harm us? It's not like they're stabbing us or saying anything, communicating with us directly. What? What? How is it that something, something that we don't even know about, maybe can harm us without us even knowing it? 44:28 Erin: I love what you're pointing to, and it reminds me too, of what we talked about before, about the something that breeds out of nothing. So the sickness that breeds out of being. Well, here the disease is caught of you that yet are. Well, it's not that he's. That he has it, but he's asymptomatic, Right? It's that he's. Well, I mean, asymptomatic doesn't scan. But prior to that, just Polixenes saying to Camillo, just prior, like around 380. Good, Camillo, your changed complexions are to me a mirror, which shows me mine changed too, for I must be a party in this alteration, finding myself thus altered with it. I was interested in this moment for a couple of reasons. First of all, talk about remixed other Shakespeare works we have. This reminds me of Lady Macbeth saying something like, your face, My Thane is a book where men may read strange matters. This is the to beguile the time look like the time speech. It also has a little hint of Sonnet 116 in there, which is my favorite sonnet. The Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds. But what's most interesting to me is that Polixenes demonstrates more of a sense of people skills, much better people skills. Right. Than Leontes has, by being able to actually look accurately at something that Camillo is at, an emotion that Camillo is betraying on the outside and accurately intuiting what that emotion is on the inside. Right, which is something we've just discussed that Leontes is unable to do. But he does so by this idea of a mirror, which would suggest, on the one hand, a similarity with Leontes, where Leontes is projecting, right, he's projecting maybe his own bad ideas about people into the them. But here, that mirror actually, I think is indicative of a kind of empathy in Polixenes, where he's able to identify with Camillo in a positive way and thereby intuit what Camillo must be thinking. So just to the extent that these, you know, this little moment shows something good about Polixenes, but in this interesting, similar sort of counterpoint to what we've just gotten from Leontes, I just find it an interesting little glimpse into Polixenes, more positive. 46:49 Wes: Yeah, I think this is important. I had made a note to talk about this, but then I missed the note. So. Yeah, this is a gray Line. I just put mirror alteration lines. So good. That's what's in my notes. 46:59 Erin: Nice. 47:00 Wes: But it's important to, you know, as you're pointing out, we're getting another form of evidence, right? Another way in which we can evaluate the honesty of people or evaluate what's going on in the world. Later on, Polixenes will say to Camillo, yeah, I know you're being honest, because there's a possibility that Camillo is deceiving him. And what does he say exactly? He says, I guess he says, I know you're being honest because I saw how weird Leontes was acting. Maybe that's it. But I think part of this is he's able to, as you're pointing out, read Camilo's emotions and in an accurate way. And so that's the. It's that kind of social. It's really a social skill. It's not science, it's a social skill, and it's very important for evaluating reality. 47:53 Erin: But, yeah, no, that's exactly what I. That was. The phrase I was searching for, is a social skill. And what's interesting is it's this highly complex emotion, whatever that. That Polixenes has intuited, because not only does he know that Camillo is upset, but he knows that Camillo is upset, and that is indicative of Polixenes fortunes having changed. He knows that he's also. Polixenes himself is also in trouble. That's a rather complex, right? It's not just, oh, you're upset. Oh, I did something wrong too, you know. 48:26 Wes: Well, he knows that Camillo is upset about the thing that he has to communicate. Polixenes knows that Camillo is upset about the thing that Camillo has to communicate to Polixenes. So he knows he's upset because something is not good with Polixenes, right? He's not just upset for himself, he's upset for Polixenes. And Polixenes can tell, and so can most of us, in the right circumstance. 48:51 Erin: And I love this little. I love the subsequent exchange in which it's like a guessing game, or Camilla's. I promise not to tell, but if you can guess it, then if you only ask me yes or no answers, then maybe I'll tell you, you know, like in a sitcom, right? Or something. But it's a. But it's a riddle. And it's funny that when Polixity says to himself on 3 97, like he's repeating what Camillo has said to him, he says, a sickness caught of me, and yet I will, you know, he's like, okay, what could this mean? It's funny because it's like it is trying to figure out a riddle. And. And I'm wondering if that is. I'm wondering about the logic of the riddle now, and if this ties into our whole idea of our whole playing telephone with thoughts or superstition, if there's something baked into the structure of a riddle which is suggestive here of Leontes mind, of something being twisted or. 49:43 Wes: Well, we saw. Yeah, we saw with Oedipus, right? Riddles can be solved a priori, and they don't. Oedipus was good at that, but they don't require investigation. Oedipus, like Leontes, was someone who's also not good at investigating external reality, but external social reality, and was reacting to the advice of others, right, with rage, instead of. Instead of taking that advice seriously. With Oedipus, it's Tiresias, and with Leontes it's not just Camillo, but the gentlemen, the lords and Antigonus and all, everyone who's trying to help him back to reality. 50:20 Erin: One more thing. Polixenes notes or asks, rather, in addition to trying to figure out this riddle, when Camillo finally tells him what's going on, that Leontes suspects him of adultery, Polixenes asks, how should this grow? I love that question. Because Polixenes is asking, how could Leontes suspect him of adultery? Like, how did this happen? How did he get this idea? And Camillo just cuts right to the chase, which I love, you know, we've spent this whole time trying to figure out how is it that Leontes got this idea, right? This has been our obsession, Wes, for the past three episodes. Now Polixenes says, I know not, but I am sure tis safer to avoid what's grown than question how to tis born. I love this. Polixenes is questioning the parentage of Leontes misconception, as though this whole notion of Leontes is like a dangerous kind of baby. And Camillo just says, who cares? Who cares how he got this idea? The point is he has it and we have to just deal with it, right? Which I love. And maybe that's exactly the kind of fatherly advice that shows that Camillo has really good judgment here because. Because then Polixenes says as they're leaving, I will respect thee as a father if thou bearest my life off. Hence, Polixenes is going to be reborn, right? Or his life will be spared through the sort of pseudo paternity of Camillo as they. As they leave. And Camillo gets him off safely to Back to Bohemia. And I just. I love this idea that like Camillo is just the sensible one who undercuts all of our questions about Leontes and just knows that the smart thing is just to leave. And that turns out to be really smart because his life will be spared. Whereas Antigonus, who kind of stays too long and does Leontes bidding and entertains Leontes notions, of course, will receive a kind of a bad end as a result. 52:13 Wes: Very good. I have a correction before we end this part, which is that I think I said that what we're talking about comes after he has Hermione hold off to. 52:26 Erin: Yes, that's right. I think you did say that. 52:28 Wes: But yeah, no, that's what happens at the beginning of Act 2. So that hasn't happened yet. 52:34 Erin: I also have a correction to make, which is I realized right after I said it that I put that I said the superstition is new shoes on the bed, but it's not. It's new shoes on the table. Any kind of shoes on the bed. I think superstition experts don't come at me. I know the difference, I promise. 52:51 Wes: Get your. Get your. Your superstition's correct. 52:55 Erin: Yeah. 52:55 Wes: All right. All right. So that ends part three of our discussion of the winner's tale, Part four. We will get into act two, and as we promised, things will actually start to go faster because it becomes a bit more plot driven, in a sense. I don't know if that's the right word. Thank you. 53:14 Erin: Yes, thank you. patreon.com For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com Rate Please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.