The Winter's Tale

“We were as twinned lambs that did frisk i’ th’ sun

And did bleat the one at th’ other. What we changed

Was innocence for innocence.”

Polixenes says this of his childhood friendship with Leontes when Hermione asks what they were like as boys. This quote shows how close the two were through Polixenes’s comparison to twins, as well as their childhood innocence. It suggests that their innocence influenced each other, contrasting with Leontes’s later claim of Polixenes spreading an “infection.”

“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’s absence

And his pond fish’d by his next neighbour, by

Sir Smile, his neighbour: nay, there’s comfort in’t

Whiles other men have gates and those gates open’d,

As mine, against their will. Should all despair

That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind

Would hang themselves. Physic for’t there is none.”

Leontes’s asides include sexist stereotypes that imply it is in women’s “nature” to be unfaithful. However, he does not place blame solely on Hermione, mentioning Polixenes and his own involvement. Claiming there is no “physic” for infidelity connects to the recurring motifs of illness and infection.

“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.”

Illness and infection are recurring motifs, particularly in this scene. Here, Camillo explains how Leontes is affected—or “infected”—by Polixenes despite Polixenes’s innocence.