ricardo marçal 27/07/2020
"After the aesthetic self-wounding of 'Cymbeline', 'The Winter's Tale' surges with Shakespeare's full power, though changed altogether from any of its earlier displays. (...) Leontes, nothing himself (as he secretly fears), beholds what is not there, as well as the nothing that is. Shakespeare's winter's tale gives us a mind of winter unable to cease its reductions until the deaths of others shock it back to reality. (...) Whether or not there is repressed homosexuality in Leonte's aberration, the principal clue to us for the king's jealous madness is the idea of tyranny, which is the judgment of Leonte's courtiers, and of the oracle of Apollo at Delphos:
'Hermione is chaste; Polixenes blameless; Camillo a true subject; Leontes a jealous tyrant; his innocent babe truly begotten; and the king shall live without an heir; if that which is lost be not found' [III.ii.132-36]"
Harold Bloom: Shakespeare - The Invention of the Human, c. 32