Winter’s Tale Acts 1/2
Comments(2) This play opens up with two commoners laying down the groundwork for this play. Two Kingdoms and 2 Kings and their friendship with each other. At this point still unsure whether it’s a comedy or tragedy. Leontes and Polixenes shows up and Leontes is trying to convince Polixenes to stay a while longer. Polixenes refuses but is persuade through Leontes’s wife Hermoine words. This is where the main plot is introduced, Leontes is a jealous man that thinks his wife and Polixenes are having an affair. Now this is rather interesting, for one it seems like Leontes jealously was already present before the play actually started. We are given no real explanation of why Leo believed himself a cuckold but instead Leo begins a tirade and assasination of his wife’s character. He even compares her to a horse, My wife’s a hobby-horse, deserves a name
As rank as any flax-wench that puts to, Before her troth-plight: say’t and justify’t. when trying to justify himself to his servant Camillo. Leontes repeated notions of himself being betrayed and his confidence in his wife infidelity is bizarre, like Iago in Othello, he seems to spout accusations for the justification of his own actions. So sure in this matter, he even commands his sevant Camillo to poison his good friend Polixeness. Thankfully Camillo seems to actually have some semblance of honor and reveals Leo’s plot to Polixeness who proceeds to exit Leo’s country along side Camillo.
Unfortunly this only furthers Leo’s delusions and he imprisions his wife. Finding Camillo’s abandonment, Leo explains it as Polixenes hiring Camillo as an assassin to kill him. Ignoring the fact that Leo was the one who actually tried to order Camillo to poison his once friend. This only furthers my belief that Leo is a completely irrational character using and spinning events around himself to justify his own actions. Despite everybody else in the kingdom insistence that Hermoine is a pure character, Leo ignores all and parades down his path of idiocy. Like when his son Mamilus falls ill, somehow Leo spins that to believe the child fell ill because of his mother’s infidelity. Leo proceeds to show himself a truly despicable man when he orders the death of his newborn daughter believing it to be a bastard via fire but relents and sends her off into the woods instead. It is also clear that Leo is a extremely misogynistic person as he lambasted a Lord for being unable to control his wife. This deep seeded hatred for woman might also explain why he is so quick to condemn his wife.
So that’s basically what occurs in Acts 1/2, it seems this might be a tragedy considering the main character is an irrational moron. .
The beginning really reminded me of the introduction to Merchant of Venice when it started off with our two characters who are best friends, Bassanio and Antonio. It begins with two friends who are also two kings of each of their own kingdoms, one of Bohemia and another of Sicily. At this point of the play when he started to believe that his wife and friend is having an affair just because she was able to easily persuade her really made me believe that he was even more of a psycho than Richard in Richard III. He only has a tunnel vision and chooses what he wants to see or not to see.
Raisa’s comment made me compare too the pairs of friends in Winter’s Tale and Merchant of Venice. It seems that at the beginning of both plays both pair were inseparable – Leonte’s tries to persuade Polixenes to stay, and Antonio dares to risk much of his own to fund Bassanio’s venture – but the former’s relationship quickly turns sour with jealousy and the latter’s bond continues (through a few trials, figurative and literal) until almost the end. It’s interesting to note that in both cases what stands between friends is a woman– Hermoine whose words trigger the irrational thoughts of Leontes near the start of Winter’s Tale, and Portia whose trickery of (and marriage to) Bassanio leads to a weaking of the friendship at the end of Merchant.