🎵Tell me again.... That we'll be Lovers and Friends🎵
With the liberties available in Shakespeare Studies, I'm sure many people have already come up with this interpretation, but here's one I've been considering. Try this on for size:
Leontes has deep feelings for Polixenes, obviously fraternal:
They were trained together in their childhoods... (1.1)
We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' the sun, (1.2)
(He later calls him "brother")
or perhaps homoerotic:
...there rooted betwixt them then such an affection which cannot choose but branch now...their encounters, though not personal, hath been royally attorneyed with interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies, that they have seemed to be together though absent, shook hands as over a vast, and embraced as it were from the ends of opposed winds. The heavens continue their loves. (1.1)
Polixenes recalls with nostalia their youth together, lamenting the responsibilities which drove them apart, even suggesting that the bond between them would have grown stronger had they not been separated. Would they have become lovers? (Were they once lovers?)
Had we pursued that life...we should have answer'd heaven Boldly 'not guilty... (1.2)
Ultimately it's unproductive to speculate or diagnose what "type" of love they had for each other. The fact is they loved each other alot. One possible explanation of Leontes jealousy is due to his feeling of entitlement to Polixenes, which Hermoine undermines by successfully convincing him to stay when Leontes was unable to do so. Massive emotional conflict = rash, irrational behavior.
Leontes has deep feelings for Polixenes, obviously fraternal:
They were trained together in their childhoods... (1.1)
We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' the sun, (1.2)
(He later calls him "brother")
or perhaps homoerotic:
...there rooted betwixt them then such an affection which cannot choose but branch now...their encounters, though not personal, hath been royally attorneyed with interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies, that they have seemed to be together though absent, shook hands as over a vast, and embraced as it were from the ends of opposed winds. The heavens continue their loves. (1.1)
Polixenes recalls with nostalia their youth together, lamenting the responsibilities which drove them apart, even suggesting that the bond between them would have grown stronger had they not been separated. Would they have become lovers? (Were they once lovers?)
Had we pursued that life...we should have answer'd heaven Boldly 'not guilty... (1.2)
Ultimately it's unproductive to speculate or diagnose what "type" of love they had for each other. The fact is they loved each other alot. One possible explanation of Leontes jealousy is due to his feeling of entitlement to Polixenes, which Hermoine undermines by successfully convincing him to stay when Leontes was unable to do so. Massive emotional conflict = rash, irrational behavior.
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