I’m eighteen, and I’m a senior. A few years ago, my mom died of MS. After she died, my dad started drinking more and doing meth. One night, he struck me. So they put me in foster care. I live with my high school principal now. He helped me with my college applications, but he can’t help me with tuition. I inherited a few thousand dollars after my mom died, but not much. And I don’t talk to my father anymore, so I can’t get any help from him. Do you guys know anything about scholarships or work-study options? I live in North Dakota, and it’s hell. There’s no way I’ll stay here. I’m definitely going to college. I’m not sure how I’ll pay for it, but I’ll find a way, come hell or high water.
In the days that followed, I thought a lot about the kid who had written that post. I was humbled by his sad story, which put my own “problems” into stark perspective. And the remark about his mother’s death was memorable, for obvious reasons. In the year since my MS diagnosis, I had studiously avoided learning about the scarier details of my disease. As far as I knew, it wasn’t fatal. But this kid’s story threw that supposition into doubt.
He seemed great, though: resilient, hardworking, and honest. I hoped that some college would give him a generous scholarship. I wondered what he looked like. I couldn’t picture his face.
I imagined him with a baseball cap.
As much as I longed to talk to someone about what I’d read, I couldn’t talk to John. He was my closest friend in Seville by far, but I hadn’t told him about my disease. And I didn’t plan to. Instead, I went online. I did a search for “died of MS,” and discovered that, for the most part, I’d been right. Usually, MS isn’t fatal.
But sometimes it is.
“Do not weep, good fool, there is no cause,” Hermione, Leontes’s wife, scolded from inside my computer. “Life is fatal, too.” She was wearing a prison uniform.
“Can’t you let me mourn?” I asked her. “Can’t I feel sad for a minute?”
“No,” she replied. “I refuse to let you pout.”
Hermione doesn’t cry. “I am not prone to weeping, as our sex commonly are,” she says, when she fears her lack of tears will turn the lords against her at her trial. “I have that honorable grief lodg’d here which burns worse than tears drown.” To reassign Katherine’s words from Henry VIII, Hermione lets tears “turn to sparks of fire.”
Shakespeare’s strongest women do not weep: they burn.
So I focused on happier thoughts. I read blogs by current Stanford students, browsed an online version of the student newspaper, and looked at photos of the campus. The university even sent out a “game” to admitted prospective students, which just required the player to click on the word Stanford as it bounced around the screen.
Stanford. Stanford. Stanford. Stanford. Stanford.
But whenever I tried to ask John other questions about Stanford—what the dorms were like, which of the required freshman-year humanities courses I should choose—he refused to answer.
“You have to figure it out on your own,” he told me.
“You won’t even help me choose a humanities course?” I said.
“No,” he replied.
JOHN WAS SO hard to understand. For weeks, I had wondered how a guy like him had ended up selling drugs. His side job seemed so dark. And John was an optimist: How did someone who proselytized life’s highest “rating” get into cocaine? I needed answers.
One night, I convinced John to let me come with him to pick up some “product” in a neighborhood called Las Tres Mil Viviendas, which is so dangerous that postal workers, ambulances, and firefighters reportedly won’t go there without a police escort. (I was stupid.) John’s “colleague,” Javi, seemed tense and nervous, but John, an obvious foreigner in perfectly pressed jeans, seemed unafraid. It fascinated me.
“Stay in the car, Jillian,” John told me as we pulled up to the house.
“I want to come in with you,” I said.
“No,” John said. “This isn’t a field trip. Stay put.”
John and Javier disappeared inside the house. I slouched in my seat.
Wasn’t the car also a stupid place to be?
After minutes passed, I opened the door and got out of the car. I wandered up the street. It seemed like any other urban neighborhood. Firefighters really couldn’t come here without a police escort?
The door of the house opened and John and Javi walked out. From my place on the far side of the road, it looked like they were arguing. I jogged back to the car to meet them.
When John saw me, his face changed.
“What the fuck did you do, Jillian?” he said.
I slid into the backseat.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “I felt conspicuous here in the car.”
“And you don’t think it was conspicuous to wander around this neighborhood?” John said. He seemed mad. I was gratified to discover that I could shake his unnerving calm.
“In dangerous places, I think sometimes it’s safest to act like I belong.” I shrugged. “Like I have nothing to worry about.”
From the driver’s seat, Javi started laughing.
“Do something about that one, John,” he said, in Spanish.
“I plan to,” John muttered in response. Then he switched to English and twisted around in the passenger seat to face me.
“I am never bringing you here again,” he said. “So don’t even ask.”
“I have some news for you, John,” I snapped. “Sitting in a car isn’t fun. I don’t even want to come back here.”
After that, John would sometimes disappear for a night. I knew he was in Las Tres Mil.
I had some questions.
“What’s the story with the coke, John?” I asked him over lunch at an outdoor café.
“Why?” he replied, raising an eyebrow. “Do you like it?”
“Yes,” I said. “I like it a lot. I need to be careful with that stuff.” (Since that first party, I hadn’t developed a regular habit, but I did do a line from time to time, and could imagine its addictive potential.)
John laughed.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “It can have that effect.”
I pushed a few apple cubes around my glass of sangria with a straw.
“But you know that’s not what I’m asking,” I continued. “I want to know how a nerd who irons his jeans ends up selling drugs in Spain.”
“I’m the nerd, huh?” he said. “You’re the one who showed up at the apartment with a backpack full of books.”
“They are plays, John,” I replied.
“I think you just proved my point,” he said.
“And you just changed the subject,” I replied. “I asked you to explain the drugs.”
John leaned back in his seat.
“Why don’t you explain the drugs, Jillian?” he said. “Why do you keep using? Even I stopped using last year. Cocaine is not a good choice.”
To my own surprise, I replied:
“I guess I’m not a good girl.”
John raised an eyebrow.
I have a talent for ruining a moment. Right then, I poked an apple cube with my straw too hard and knocked over my sangria. Ice cubes scattered across the table. John and I both jumped up, away from the mess. Red liquid dripped onto the pavement below.
The Winter’s Tale’s tonal change, from downbeat to upbeat, seems abrupt. But it’s not an accident. Different places bring out different versions of ourselves. When The Winter’s Tale’s action shifts from Sicilia to Bohemia, the tone shifts, too. Shakespeare was aware of this shift: he even foreshadows it in the very first lines of the play, when Archidamus, a Bohemian lord, tells his Sicilian friend: “If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia . . . you shall see, as I have said, great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia.”
Even the title of the play hints at a seasonal transition: after winter, there is always a spring.
Shakespeare’s Bohemia is a kind of never-never land, a perfect place that cannot exist in real life. This is literally tru
e. Several scenes, for example, reference a Bohemian seacoast—which, as the literary scholar Andrew Gurr and others have pointed out, was a geographical improbability, since Bohemia, the present-day Czech Republic, does not have a coastline. Some people think that Shakespeare just made a mistake. Others (those Shakespearean cartographers!) have suggested that Bohemia did, in fact, command a small strip of coastline along the Adriatic Sea between 1575 and 1609.
But I’d rather think of Bohemia as Shakespeare’s intentionally impossible utopia. In Bohemia, the inhibitions of Sicilian social norms disappear and the characters are free. This kind of contrast runs throughout the Shakespearean canon: one place is cold and restrained while another place is hot and feral. (There are similar tonal contrasts between the court and the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, and between Venice and Cyprus in Othello.) In Sicilia, Perdita is the “little lost one,” who is born in a prison and almost left to die. But in Bohemia, she grows into a confident, self-assured young woman, and falls in love.
Spain was my Bohemia. I was becoming a more confident, uninhibited version of myself.
PERHAPS CONFIDENCE IS contagious.
The next night, John and I went to a friend’s apartment for the evening. Everyone had a few glasses of wine, and the platonic veneer of our friendship began to fade into teasing jokes and taunts. Things escalated into a pillow fight when, apropos of nothing, John spoke.
“Jillian,” he asked, in the same casual tone of voice. “Have you ever received a severe spanking?”
My heart stopped. His question—and the fetishistic specificity of its phrasing—hit me like a truck. I felt transparent, as if even my skin could not hide my self. I couldn’t breathe, let alone respond, so I giggled and said nothing. The conversation moved on, and John didn’t revisit the issue. But that question, so bizarre in its pointed rhetoric, lingered. I couldn’t ignore it.
The next day, as we sat in a room in the apartment we shared, I swallowed my embarrassment and fear.
“Last night—why did you ask me that question?” I asked. My chest was tight.
“What question?” John said. He seemed genuinely confused.
“I can’t say it,” I replied, covering my face with my hands. “You have to figure it out yourself.” My heart thrashed against the bones of my rib cage. Although my face, still hidden in my hands, was pointed at my feet, I knew he was looking at me.
I didn’t want to be looked at.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” John said. “Honestly.”
I dropped my hands from my face and met his eyes.
“Come on, John,” I said. “That question. Why did you ask me that question?” I filled my eyes with speechless messages.
Recognition washed over him.
“Jillian!” John breathed. There was an expression on his face that I had never seen before or since; an odd mix of delight and surprise, understanding and lust. Speech is the only antidote to isolation in this lonely world, and the most powerful of all words—I understand you—hovered beneath his breath, unsaid.
John said my name again. He wrapped his arms around my shoulders in a hug.
“No,” I moaned. I pulled away from him and put my face back into my hands. “Don’t look at me. Please stop looking at me.”
“I want to look at you,” he said.
“Well, I don’t want to look at me,” I replied.
In The Winter’s Tale, Autolycus says: “Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance.” But, then again, in the same play he also warns: “What a fool Honesty is.” So this could go either way.
After that, every conversation was tinted with danger. (In hindsight, I recognize this period as a negotiation in disguise.) What flirting is to vanilla relationships, implied “threats” are to my kink.
“Do you like Eminem?” I asked John one night over a pitcher of sangria. (It was 2004, and I was a white teenager with probable mental health problems. Of course I liked Eminem.) John shook his head and listed some other musicians as examples of what he did like. I hadn’t heard of any of them.
“That’s because you haven’t been educated about music,” he said.
“Or because you’re super old,” I replied.
“Careful,” he warned.
Days passed this way.
The stakes of our relationship were already high, every interaction charged with anticipation, when John and I both raised them.
One evening after dinner, he and I sat at the base of the Torre del Oro, a squat, cream-colored tower along the Guadalquivir River. I leaned against him, and he wrapped his arms around me. We sat like that for a while, watching as the sky darkened and the lights of Seville flickered on across the river. Given the romantic spot (and the intimate way we were sitting), I started to wonder if John would ever make a move.
John, I would learn, was thinking about something, too.
He pushed me away and looked at my face. He took a breath.
“Okay,” he said. “I want you to listen to me. You’re not going to touch coke ever again. You’re not going to buy it, from me or anyone, and you’re sure as hell not going to use it. I’m serious. I’m going to watch you and make sure you obey me on this. Am I understood?”
There’s a kind of kinesis that happens between submissives and dominants when a rule is introduced. It’s good. (And how often do people drop the word obey in casual conversation? The word alone sent a spark down my spine.) It’s a powerful, almost trancelike feeling.
I argued with him anyway.
“You’re the one who gave me the coke in the first place, John,” I pointed out.
“I don’t care,” he said. “You’re better than that. No excuses.”
“Yeah.” I sighed, picking at the grass along the riverbank. “You’re right.” (Say what you will about sadomasochism: I never used cocaine again.)
John hugged me.
“Good girl,” he said.
Kink is a trust fall. I wanted to trust him.
“I need to tell you something, John,” I said. Then I paused for a long time, working up my courage. He waited.
“I have this, like, disease thing,” I finally said. I continued to rip blades of grass with my fingers. “It’s okay. It’s not contagious. But there’s no cure. And it could mess me up, maybe.”
As I described my MS to him, something welled in my chest. Tears pricked the backs of my eyes. I was nervous. I didn’t want to ruin the game we’d been playing for the past few weeks. When The Winter’s Tale finally becomes happy and comedic, nobody wants to revisit the dark parts from the first acts. Nobody wants to shatter the perfect illusion of flirtation. Nobody wants to go back to Sicilia.
“Oh, shut up,” said Hermione, stepping out from inside the Torre del Oro. “My husband threw me in prison and tried to kill our daughter. What do you have to complain about?”
The crotch of her thin prison smock was stained dark red with dried blood.
Hermione had a point. I blinked back the tears.
John and I stayed there, on the riverbank, talking for hours. He told me about his mother’s cancer, and about how much he admired the way his father had supported her through chemotherapy. I shared my fears that it would be cruel, and selfish, to ever ask someone to tie his or her happiness to mine. By the time we walked home, John could see me more clearly than ever before, and didn’t flinch away from the sight.
“You’re stronger than you look, you know,” he said.
“Does that mean you think I look weak?” I teased.
“Jillian, I think you look just about perfect,” he said. “That should be obvious by now.” I blushed. He had never been so direct before. A hummingbird thrashed against the bones of my rib cage.
Too hot, too hot!
To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.
I have tremor cordis on me; my heart dances,
But not for joy—not joy.
AT THE END of The Winter’s Tale, the statue of Hermione unfreezes and come
s to life.
From a scientific perspective, this moment is only possible if Hermione merely pretended to be dead, and conspired with her best friend Paulina to stage this miraculous revival. (After all, King Leontes, Hermione’s husband, never actually saw Hermione die—he took Paulina’s word for it.) This literal interpretation gets some support from the text: when Leontes first sees the “statue,” he remarks that it has aged, saying: “Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing / So aged as this seems.”
But mythology suggests another possibility. After Hermione’s death—or “death”—Leontes fell into grief and regret. He commissioned a statue of Hermione: a clear literary homage to Ovid’s Pygmalion myth, in which a man carves a statue of his ideal woman that magically comes to life. A mythological interpretation of this scene would suggest that Hermione really did die, and Leontes’s regret miraculously revived her. This angle also has basis in the text: when Hermione sees Perdita, her daughter, she floods her with questions as to how Perdita survived the past sixteen years—which presumably Hermione would already know the answers to if she had faked her death and lived in hiding with Paulina during that time. Paulina herself acknowledges the unreality of this miracle: “That she is living, / Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale.” And yet, preposterous as it seems, Hermione does, against all odds, come to life.
“If this be magic,” Leontes marvels, “let it be an art / Lawful as eating.”
Neither the natural and scientific nor the artistic and mythological possibility is conclusive. But, as Scott Crider argues, Shakespeare may have purposefully designed this ambiguity to “interrogate the essence of the relationship between art and nature, between the mimetic and the real.”
So what revives Hermione: nature or art?
We don’t have to choose. As Polixenes, the king of Bohemia, tells Perdita earlier in the play, art and nature function in symbiosis with each other more often than we realize: “This is an art / Which does mend nature—change it rather—but / The art itself is nature.” What if love itself necessarily blurs the lines between art and nature? Early in the play, even Leontes himself recognizes love’s impossible possibilities:
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