SOURCE: "Oh My Most Sacred Lady': Female Metaphor in The Winter's Tale," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 5, No. 3, Autumn, 1975, pp. 375-95.

Here, Gourlay traces Shakespeare's use of female metaphors in the play to explore elements of Leontes' own nature, and asserts that he opposes dark masculinity with the qualities of love, art, and nature represented by the three principal women.

Early in The Winter's Tale, while all is still compliment and courtesy, Polixenes describes the innocent idyll he and Leontes shared as boys. He says to Hermione:

O my most sacred lady,
 Temptations have since then been born t'us, for
 In those unfledged days was my wife a girl;
 Your precious self had then not crossed the eyes
 Of my young playfellow.1 (I. ii.77—81)

When Polixenes makes his little joke, no one, least of all the gracious Hermione, takes exception to his comic aspersion on women, accompanied as...