ABSTRACT
In the opening scene of The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare offers his audience a crash course in the social logic of hospitality. As the play opens, we learn that Polixenes and his Bohemian entourage have been enjoying the generosity of Leontes and the Sicilian court for nine months. Since the Bohemians cannot reciprocate in kind, the Sicilians’ hospitality threatens them with the specter of crushing debt. Through the conversation between the courtiers Archidamus and Camillo, Shakespeare stages the Bohemians’ sense that they are confronted with an oppressive obligation:
ARCHIDAMUS: If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia on the like occasion whereon my services are now on foot, you shall see, as I have said, great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia.
