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Polixenes re-confirm her status as the “kind hostess” (1.2.60)
and not his jailor. Polixenes’s negativity is finally dissolved
when Hermione forces him, once again with her gentle and
restorative tongue, to acknowledge that to choose to stay
would be to choose to continue the innocence and purity in
the old young days between the two kings (“What we changed
/ Was innocence for innocence; we knew not / The doctrine of
ill-doing, nor dreamed / That any did,” 1.2.68-71), where
“purity” may be contrasted with that “impurity” of “mingling
bloods”
14
which threatens to breed corruption and disease.
While the “enchanting” Hermione’s deft use of wit and
words puts an end to the polite disagreement between the two
kings, her rhetorical talent also lands her in jail, and forces her
to appear in court and be formally accused of being unchaste.
Leontes invokes his privilege as man and king
—
a doubly
patriarchal justification
—
by relying not on any legal evidence
but merely on his imagination (“dreams,” 3.2.77), not on any
law but only on his own tyranny (“’Tis rigor and not law,”
3.2.111), just like those authorities in the College of Physicians
who had silenced the voices of female practitioners in the early
modern period, and deprived them of their freedom. Leontes,
like those regulating authorities and licensed physicians in the
medical world, will stop at nothing to drive Hermione, like an
unlicensed woman healer, out of the legal domain and also,
insofar as he sees her as an enchantress, out of the medical one
as well. As for losing one’s legal right to practice medicine and
facing a term in jail, we note that in 1421 legislation was
placed before the Parliament in England to confirm “that no
Woman use the practyse of Fiysk [medicine] under . . . payne
of long imprisonment” (Green, 1989: 449).
14
Huston Diehl notes that a fear of mingling, “and of the impurity that results
from it, pervades Shakespeare’s late romance,” in reference to Leontes’s
rage at the beginning of
The Winter’s Tale
where he proclaims: “To mingle
friendship far is mingling bloods” (2008: 69).