Power, place, patriarchy

Abstract

Though hardly on the same scale as Leontes’s outburst earlier in the play, Polixenes’s anger breaks up the feast and is a violent, ungrateful return for the Shepherd’s hospitality. His threats of vindictive punishment echo his brother king’s, but there is reversal as well as repetition. Camillo, the same wise counsellor who helped him escape Leontes’s anger, now takes the part of his own threatened victims. One question this ironic parallel raises is what enables, and apparently authorises, such arbitrary, disrupting behaviour.