ABSTRACT
The Winter’s Tale begins with a series of broken relationships as Leontes abandons trust in his wife, friend, child, and subjects. Among the many devastating losses that Leontes’s jealous delusions precipitate is the breakdown of trust between penitent and confessor. As the king pressures Camillo to confirm his suspicions about Hermione, he recalls the intimacy that the two men once shared:
I have trusted thee, Camillo, With all the nearest things to my heart, as well My chamber-counsels, wherein, priest-like, thou Hast cleansed my bosom; I from thee departed Thy penitent reformed. (1.2.233-37)1
Leontes’s recollection of past confidence signals Shakespeare’s engagement with post-Reformation controversies about auricular confession, a contested feature of the abolished sacrament of penance. In medieval Catholicism, penitents traditionally confessed to priests, who were ordained with the power to assign penances for specific sins and pronounce those sins absolved. Yet these lines suggest that a penitent like Leontes can find genuine consolation from confessing to a trusted confidante, rather than a priest. In this brief glimpse of Leontes’s previous history of transgressions and recoveries, Shakespeare imagines a secular model of penitence, in which ordinary people undertake the practices of spiritual cleansing and reform traditionally reserved for priests. In this model, even if no divinity intervenes to batter a penitent’s heart and regenerate his spirit, and no priest is authorised to pronounce his absolution on God’s behalf, a friend’s counsel can suffice to ease the burden of his past sins and guide him towards a better future.
