ABSTRACT
King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, undaunted by his lack of substantive evidence, pronounces his pregnant wife guilty of sexual relations with his best friend, Polixenes. Like Leontes, the author of A Discourse of the Married and Single Life (1621) presumes the unseen mechanisms of the female body to contain potentially treacherous secrets: ‘[s]ometimes at marriages Walnuts are scattered up and downe; which sheweth, that a woman is like unto a Walnut, that hath a great shell, but a little kernell; faire without, but rotten within’.1 For Leontes and his peers, in a culture devoid of DNA-sensitive technology, anxiety about paternity could translate readily and unchecked into the assumption of transgression. Indeed, Leontes names his newborn daughter a bastard – a child, he tells his son Mamillius, who will ‘hiss me to my grave’ (1.2.190).2 As recent criticism on midwifery has emphasized, the early modern husband was excluded from the birthing chamber, where women might confess sexual indiscretions to the attending midwives and select community women.3 Yet critics have not examined how The Winter’s Tale, in addition to raising the familiar literary specter of bastardry, suggests that paternity,
1 I would like to thank Jonathan Gil Harris, Judith Haber and Caroline Bicks for their insights and comments that greatly contributed to the final version of this essay. Roland du Jardin, A Discourse of the Married and Single Life (London, 1621), 96.
