The Winter's Tale

Illness and infection are recurring motifs in The Winter’s Tale, and typically represent the toxic nature of Leontes’s jealousy. Leontes first speaks of illness when he says “Physic for’t there is none” (1.2.292) when referring to the lack of cure for “revolted wives” (1.2.291). He refers to his thoughts of Polixenes and Hermione as an “infection of my brains” (1.2.224), as does Camillo. However, he says “were my wife’s liver / Infected as her life, she would not live / The running of one glass” (1.2.410-12), suggesting she has been infected by Polixenes. Later, Camillo tells Polixenes “There is a sickness / Which puts some of us in distemper, but / I cannot name the disease; and it is caught” (1.2.503-6), again implying that Leontes’s jealousy is an illness. Polixenes fears Leontes’s slander will cause something “hated too, worse than the great’st infection / That e’er was heard or read!” (1.2.550). During her trial, Hermione says she is “barr’d, like one infectious” (3.2.1315), showing how much Leontes’s jealousy has spread and infected those around him. A sudden unspecified illness after his mother’s arrest is what is said to kill Mamillius, symbolic of how it was his father’s jealousy that killed him.