ABSTRACT

A whole other set of stories might be shadowing the action if we enter the drama through Leontes's imagination, an imagination flagged as a study of paranoia, irrational fears and even terrors that are never fully realized. The primal imagination of the sophisticated man is a surprise, perhaps especially a surprise to the character himself. Shakespeare here takes the amazing risk of creating a man who doesn't know himself. The whole play is about the arrival of narratives from that imagination, narratives which have no other basis, shadow narratives which make no sense to anyone but Leontes, who manages with their help to make his life into the stuff of his worst nightmares, winter's tales never told and never made real that tilt his life to an unbearable series of injustices. For Shakespeare's audience, burning would have recalled the Marian martyrs they had read about in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments.