SOURCE: Richards, Jennifer. “Social Decorum in The Winter's Tale.” In Shakespeare's Late Plays: New Readings, edited by Jennifer Richards and James Knowles, pp. 75-91. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Richards maintains that a principal motivating factor in Leontes's paranoid jealousy is his anxiety about social status. The critic examines a number of Renaissance courtesy treatises to show that Shakespeare adroitly recreated a dialectical Jacobean relationship between courtly and common attitudes in The Winter's Tale.

One of the most difficult problems facing critics of The Winter's Tale is the source of Leontes' jealousy. At one moment in I, ii, Leontes is encouraging his wife, Hermione, to persuade Polixenes to extend his visit (‘Tongue-tied, our queen? Speak you’, I, ii, 28); a few minutes later, he is plunged into passionate doubts (‘To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods’, I, ii, 108). So unexpected is his rage that the search...