ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author tries to make sense of King Leontes's anxious handling of space through ideas about centers and borders advanced by political theorists and sociologists who construe the polity in terms of the mapping of a carefully limited number of pathways to and from its bounds. Although these maps do not always tell about the nature of the movements that constitute some places as home and other places as empty, this is information Shakespeare's stage also seeks to provide in The Winter's Tale. But The Winter's Tale additionally outlines how some of the forces that send female characters into exile are bent upon their exclusion rather than on the establishment of a wider or more welcoming world. The image offered by the statue of a cold and wrinkled Hermione at the end of The Winter's Tale is one measure of the compromises required to ensure stability alongside regeneration and continuance without real growth.
