Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction

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Distant bedfellows: Shakespearean struggles of

intimacy in Winterson’s The Gap of Time

Paul Joseph Zajac

To cite this article: Paul Joseph Zajac (2018) Distant bedfellows: Shakespearean struggles of
intimacy in Winterson’s The Gap of Time, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 59:3, 332-345,
DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2017.1378615

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2017.1378615

Published online: 08 Dec 2017.

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CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION
2018, VOL. 59, NO. 3, 332–345
https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2017.1378615

Distant bedfellows: Shakespearean struggles of intimacy in

Winterson’s The Gap of Time
Paul Joseph Zajac
Department of English, McDaniel College, Westminster, Maryland, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This essay examines the ways in which Winterson’s The Gap of Time adapts The Jeanette Winterson; William
Winter’s Tale to represent the difficulties of attaining intimacy. Winterson’s novel Shakespeare; adaptation;
updates the play’s treatment of marital jealousy to expose contemporary and intimacy; mediation
timeless obstacles to intimacy. Shakespeare’s Leontes avoids emotional close-
ness and relies on the mediation of others to sustain his relationships. Winterson
acknowledges that intimacy can be intimidating, but she cautions against any-
thing that buffers the self from the other. Characters find their desire for connec-
tion frustrated by layers of mediation, especially technological ones. However,
Winterson privileges literature (including Shakespeare) as a bridge between
selves that transcends limitations of other mediating forces. Thus The Gap of
Time contributes to Winterson’s critiques of contemporary desensitization while
positioning her novels as remedies. By analyzing the dialogue between the two
texts, I identify how each author revises relationships, and I explore the connec-
tion between intimacy and adaptation.

At the narrative midpoint of Winterson’s The Gap of Time, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s
Tale and the first entry in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, the smarmy used-car salesman Autolycus
appropriates the story of Oedipus to describe the difficulties of mediating encounters with the other. As he
puts it, the fundamental crisis of human history and the “[b]iggest theory in psychoanalysis and the western
world” can be boiled down to the moment when Oedipus encounters his father at a crossroad. Autolycus
explains, “if roundabouts had been invented sooner the whole of western civilization would be different
[…] If we had invented the roundabout in time, the calamity could never’ve happened. First it’s you, then
it’s me, y’know?” (133–34). In this retelling, the crossroad forces an otherwise avoidable confrontation
between Oedipus and his father: “the old guy, Laius, is a King and he won’t give way to some kid, and
Oedipus is a moody type, proto-democrat, not impressed with age or chariots, and he won’t give way either.
The two of ‘em fight—and Eddy ends up killing the old guy” (134). By contrast, the rules of the roundabout
would prevent a direct encounter between two already conflictual individuals. Autolycus insists that “this
entire event—crucial to western thought, a billion neurotics, a million shrinks and motherfuckers, literary
theory, all that anxiety of influence […] This entire event could not have happened if the world had
invented the roundabout” (136–37). By inciting the fateful combat, the crossroads itself accrues a kind of
agency, while the roundabout stands in for a more benevolent way of navigating our relationships with one
another. In this way, the reimagining of the Oedipal myth reflects an important area of thematic
convergence between Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Winterson’s The Gap of Time: the struggle to
attain and maintain intimacy.
The Hogarth Shakespeare series features major contemporary novelists who adapt the bard’s
dramatic works for modern situations and modern readers. The series launched with Winterson’s
novel in 2015 and has been followed by books by Anne Tyler, Howard Jacobson, and Margaret
Atwood, with many more to come. The publishers deliberately position their series within the long,

CONTACT Paul Joseph Zajac pzajac@mcdaniel.edu McDaniel College, 2 College Hill, Westminster, MD 21157, USA.
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 333

rich tradition of Shakespearean adaptation. Unlike her fellow contributors, though, Winterson
chooses to present her text as a “cover version” of The Winter’s Tale—a riff off of Shakespeare’s
original text.1 In her New York Times article on the Hogarth series, Alter states that as a cover, The
Gap of Time “takes the play’s themes of love, jealousy and estrangement and spins them into a taut
contemporary tale” (para. 7). Winterson’s adaptation gives a central place to intimacy, in particular,
and illustrates the creative ways by which Shakespearean narratives continue to shape our modern
understanding of human relations. While Shakespeare and his Renaissance contemporaries may not
have formulated intimacy in the strictest modern sense (Gil)—one rooted in a recognizable domestic
sphere and institutionalized in liberal society (Berlant 3–4)—they nonetheless identified important
pressure points of interpersonal and erotic relations, and they scripted them in ways that were both
historically specific to their own cultural moment and imaginatively productive for subsequent
authors and epochs.2 In the character of Leontes in particular, Shakespeare represents an aversion
to closeness that causes one to deny personal and political relationships altogether. As a result,
Leontes must seek help from outside his dyadic relationships in order to retain and restore them;
mediation, in other words, makes intimacy tenable. Winterson brings the Shakespearean struggle of
intimacy into the present day, yet the two authors differ in the diagnosis and the remedy. Winterson
acknowledges that the prospect of intimacy can be daunting or even traumatic, but she cautions
against anything that serves to buffer the self from the other. In The Winter’s Tale, mediation (by
time, counsel, and art) can help characters form more benevolent relationships, but in The Gap of
Time individuals find their desire for access to (and connection with) another person continually
frustrated by various layers of mediation, especially technological ones.
In this way, The Gap of Time continues Winterson’s career-long engagement with questions of love and
intimacy. Ellam identifies “[i]dealized, inevitable love” as the primary thematic concern of Winterson’s
novels (1). However, as Christy Burns notes, much of Winterson’s corpus also constitutes a “critique of
contemporary desensitization and alienation” (292). Guirat describes how, in Art and Lies in particular,
Winterson “exposes the dark side of modern life”: “People are no longer able to feel for the suffering of
others” (72). Such struggles with empathy are, in part, endemic to human interaction, yet Winterson has in
several recent novels explored the consequences of emergent technology on our relationships. Some critics
(Kiliç 287-91; Villegas-Lopez) identify positive features of technological advancements in Winterson’s
works, but others (Dolezal; Ellam 190–91; Merola 125) stress the problems that occur when those very
same technologies are implemented uncritically. Winterson herself has even described “the technological
dream/nightmare of the twenty-first century” (Art Objects 178). In light of such ambivalence, we can say that
she encourages, at the very least, a healthy skepticism about emerging technologies and illustrates that
increased opportunities for communication do not automatically increase our experiences of communion.
But as her adaptation of The Winter’s Tale shows, these technologies—and the practices they make possible
—are part of a much longer history of mediation and intimacy, and her contemporization of Shakespeare
brings him to bear on a modern incarnation of a timeless problem. The Gap of Time is not Winterson’s first
novel to address these issues, but by deploying Shakespeare to do so she demonstrates how the past can
provide a heuristic for interpreting the present, or, as she puts it, how “the past can be redeemed” (271). As
critics have noted of Winterson’s corpus elsewhere (Burns; Cokal; Eide 284–85; Guirat 72–73, 82), literature
in The Gap of Time helps to combat disaffection by using language that accounts for the irreducibility of
individual experience and the particularity of the other.3 Shakespeare and Winterson tell troubling stories of
the relationship between self and other, but they also suggest means to revise those stories.
This essay examines the intertextual relationship between Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and
Winterson’s The Gap of Time as a dialogue about the challenges of achieving intimacy. First, I chart
the ways in which the characters of Leontes and Leo avoid intimacy and use intermediaries to
negotiate their relationships with the other, often unsuccessfully. Next, I analyze specifically how
these traits shape their responses to the imagined infidelity of their wives, Hermione and MiMi.
Finally, I examine how Winterson singles out literature as a bridge between selves that escapes the
limitations of other mediating forces, and to do so I focus especially on her adaptation of The
Winter’s Tale’s final scene. Berlant explains that intimacy “involves an aspiration for a narrative
334 P. J. ZAJAC

about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way”
(1). Like The Winter’s Tale itself, such narratives of intimacy can be (to use Winterson’s word)
“covered” and recovered, and they are always, in the end, intertextual. Winterson remains sensitive
to issues of mediation and intimacy, but she privileges reading, writing, and literature as the roads to
experiencing closeness and connection—however roundabout those roads may be.

“Loving embassies”: The negotiation of intimacy

In his foundational reading of The Winter’s Tale, Cavell interprets the play as a “study of skepticism—that is,
as a response to what skepticism is a response to” (198). As Wolfe notes, Cavell concedes to the philosophical
skeptics that “we cannot know other minds” but critiques them for “analyzing this problem as an
‘intellectual lack’ rather than […] a ‘metaphysical finitude’” (A83–84). For both critics, Shakespeare’s play
reveals “the unbridgeable gap between us and those we love, the inability to hold the world as a stable
possession” (A84). By its very title, which comes from the penultimate line of The Winter’s Tale, Winterson’s
novel exhibits a similar preoccupation with such a gap. But a gap is not just a breach or a break. It is also an
entry through which one can gain access and a path through which one can move. As Winterson muses in
an epigraph to her other novel Sexing the Cherry, “Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known,
which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty
space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?” (Epigraph 2). In
The Gap of Time, the notion of a gap is similarly counterintuitive: it is perceived as real and “most solid,”
dividing us from one another in the form of geographical, temporal, or emotional distance, but it is
ultimately “empty space.” This dual status of gap—both that which effects separation and the space through
which one passes in order to reach something or someone beyond the self—informs the dialogue between
The Winter’s Tale and The Gap of Time and their mutual meditation on the emotional experiences of
distance and closeness. While I agree with Cavell and Wolfe that Shakespeare advocates accepting one’s
metaphysical limitations in order to acknowledge the other and avert tragedy, I find that Shakespeare and
Winterson are both concerned with exploring ways to compensate for these limitations, so that the gap
between selves can be narrowed, if never entirely crossed.
In the very first scene of the play, Shakespeare suggests that prolonged proximity puts a strain on
personal relationships and political alliances, and he shows how King Leontes relies on mediators to
make intimacy manageable. In response to Archidamus’s uncomfortable suggestion that the
Bohemians might drug their guests to avoid public embarrassment (or even conversation), Sicilian
courtier Camillo explains why Leontes has shown such kindness to Polixenes and his retinue:
They were trained together in their childhoods, and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection which
cannot choose but branch now. Since their more mature dignities and royal necessities made separation of their
society, 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. (1.1.19–27)

Camillo’s botanical metaphor gestures toward their childhood affection, elaborated on in the next scene, but
it also establishes their more recent separation as a necessary and even positive thing. The OED lists this
passage as an instance of “branch” meaning “bear or put forth branches,” but the Norton editors recognize
that it also means “divide.” The childhood bond must bear fruit, but it also must overcome the gap between
the now-grown men, and it does so through positive forms of mediation. Adelman, too, observes that the
very same vegetal image that unites the kings also dictates their separation as the condition of continued
relationship, though she interprets that ambivalence as “tension” and “anxiety” (220). In contrast to the
stilted, obsequious exchange of Camillo and Archidamus, the long-distance friendship apparently flourishes
apart from the pressures of face-to-face encounters.4 The two monarchs seemed to shake hands and
embrace while actually having to do no such things. Their relationship has thrived not only despite this
lack of “personal” interaction, but also because of it. Leontes’s affections are fragile, and they can survive only
when safely “attorneyed.” The system seems to work well enough, until Leontes asks Hermione to twist
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 335

Polixenes’s arm and prolong his stay, which in turn leads him to believe that they are committing adultery
and plotting to kill him. When the channels of mediation become confused and his own wife becomes the
bearer of “loving embassies,” Leontes’s tenuous attachments fall apart, and this breakdown dominates the
first three acts of the play.
Although many characters in The Gap of Time struggle to experience intimacy, Winterson follows suit
with Shakespeare and focuses the first half of her text on the jealous husband Leo Kaiser. Instead of a king,
Leo is an unapologetically materialistic banker and hedge-fund manager whose sense of self had been
unsettled by the 2008 financial crisis. Winterson translates the latent homoeroticism in the childhood
friendship of Leontes and Polixenes—who “were as twinned lambs that did frisk i’ th’ sun/And bleat the one
at th’ other” as they “changed […] innocence for innocence” (1.2.67–69)—into the teenage Leo’s homo-
sexual affair with fellow boarding school classmate Xeno. Although they remained friends through adult-
hood, their relationship never fully recovered after Leo caused Xeno to have a bike accident that nearly killed
him. When Leo first encounters MiMi (Hermione) while working in France and hears her sing, he thinks
back to Xeno’s fall: “No matter how close they were, tried to be, had been, from now on fifty feet separated
them. […] No, thought Leo, the distance was there. I didn’t know how to close the gap so I made it wider”
(52). Dilating on the word “fall,” Leo “remembered from school assembly that the Fall is an exile from
paradise and that an angel with a flaming sword bars the way.” But if Xeno’s fall and the Fall of man affected
a separation, fall can also represent a stripping away: “The fall was when the leaves are shed and Leo felt like
he was losing his cover. He felt bare and naked.” At the very moment that Leo is falling for MiMi—cued,
perhaps, by MiMi’s lyric “Is that man falling? Or is that man falling in love?”—he reflects on the multivalence
of “fall” as an event that can both produce a rupture and also result in greater vulnerability, for better and for
worse. From its inception, the relationship between Leo and MiMi is understood through his past with
Xeno, and Leo struggles to navigate these two great loves of his life. Before MiMi and Leo even formally
meet, she must contend in Leo’s heart for a plot of emotional real estate already occupied in part by Xeno.
The proximity of MiMi and Xeno to one another, as well as to Leo’s own fragile ego, risks turning love to
tragedy.
Leo’s nontraditional wooing of MiMi contributes to his confusion of feelings toward her and Xeno.
When he must move back to England for work, Leo asks MiMi to marry him, but she refuses, and the two
fall out of touch. A year later, though, Leo asks Xeno to intercede on his behalf, so he travels to Paris, meets
her at the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, and delivers Leo’s written proclamation of love. The letter
itself amounts to an awkward list of yes-or-no questions, with the utter lack of romance one would expect
from Leo’s character. In order to succeed, Xeno must not only make a strong case for his friend—or say “The
long form of ‘I love you,’” as Leo had put it (68)—but also form his own meaningful connection with MiMi.
The two rapidly develop a degree of intimacy that is rarely, if ever, exhibited in Leo’s courtship of or eventual
marriage with MiMi. This intimacy seems to influence MiMi’s decision to accept Leo’s proposal; when Xeno
mentions that he is moving to America, MiMi asks, “But you’ll be around,” to which he replies, “I’ll always
be around” (70). MiMi agrees to wed, then, as a gesture of commitment to both men, not Leo alone. Xeno
and MiMi nearly sleep together during the visit, and much later in the novel he will tell his son Zel, “I still
know, after all these years, that MiMi and I fell in love that weekend” (199).
Although Xeno has his own issues with intimacy, he maintains that their lives should have turned
out very differently:

The truth is I should have married MiMi. Not Leo. Me. There was a moment—I really think she loved
me, and I really think I loved her, enough to change everything, but he wanted her so much—and Leo
gets what he wants—and I have never had a serious relationship with a woman, and I hesitate over what
I want, and I thought I couldn’t do it, and I thought, what did it matter? We will always be together, the
three of us. I will love them both and I will be with them both. If they had wanted it I would have been
lovers with them both, too. Sometimes I think MiMi did want that. (199)

Xeno imagines an alternative arrangement in which the trio’s overlapping intimacies are mutually enrich-
ing, with or without sex. As opposed to a conflict between the dyads of homoerotic friendship and
heterosexual marriage, Xeno tries to conceive of a less restrictive structure that would allow everyone’s
336 P. J. ZAJAC

affections to coexist. Nevertheless, the first half of this quotation casts Leo as a sexual rival, such that the
triangulation of love in the second half is something of a consolation prize. Xeno admits, indirectly at least,
that he resembled Leo in being unable to act on his own behalf to win MiMi for himself. Instead, he remains
“just the messenger” (70), the mediating agent who presents MiMi with the kind of vulnerability that Leo
cannot. As the bearer of loving embassies, he successfully unites the two in marriage. In the process, Xeno
has set himself up as a Cassio to Leo’s Othello, one whose efforts to woo a woman helped foster paranoid
delusions of infidelity. Like Leontes before him, Leo will ask his wife to convince Xeno not to leave the
country, and he is similarly pained by the results: “They were both laughing. They were intimate, private.
Leo, ghost-faced, his beating heart invisible, wondered if he was in the room” (47). But by this point he
already suspects them of adultery and lashes out in turn. The seeds for this suspicion had been planted long
ago in their intertangled courtships. On the one hand, without Xeno’s involvement, Leo’s marriage would
not even have been possible. On the other hand, by inserting himself within their relationship, Xeno puts a
target on his back when Leo later tries to understand the failures of intimacy within his marriage—the chasm
between himself and his wife.
Leo’s struggles with intimacy extend beyond his obsession with the imagined affair and instead constitute
one of his defining characteristics. Early in the novel, Leo tellingly asks his therapist, “Can you ever really
know another human being?” (28). While this desire to “really know” his wife is a sympathetic one, it
reinforces his equation of love and ownership and shields him from true vulnerability. MiMi says of her
husband, “Leo is possessive but he is afraid of being close to anyone. He would push me away by seeing
someone else.” By contrast, Xeno asserts, “I don’t think he’s seeing anyone; that’s the problem. He’s blind in
his own world—I thought it was about work. He disconnects, right?” (62). Even Leo acknowledges his
tendency to disconnect, but he considers his trait less as an individual shortcoming and more as a hallmark
of masculinity:
That was the difference between men and women, Leo thought. Men need groups and gangs and sport and
clubs and institutions and women because men know that there is only nothingness and self-doubt. Women
were always trying to make a connection, build a relationship. As though one human being could know
another. As though one human being could…his buzzer buzzed…know another. (40)

Although Leo dismisses as feminine the urge to make connections and build relationships, many of the
actions he takes toward MiMi can be interpreted as (tragically misguided) attempts to do just that. He tries
desperately to know MiMi, but his preformed notion of such an impossibility becomes self-fulfilling
prophecy. Furthermore, Beckwith’s response to Leontes aptly extends to Winterson’s Leo: “the insistence
on knowing others as the very basis of our access to them, as Cavell and Shakespeare know, will make the
others in our lives disappear, petrify them, or turn them into nothings” (252). In a famous passage, which
provides Winterson with the title of a later chapter, Leontes asks, “Is whispering nothing?/Is leaning cheek to
cheek? Is meeting noses?[…]Is this nothing?” (1.2.284–85, 292). He answers his own question, though
conditionally, “Why, then, the world and all that’s in’t is nothing,/The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia
nothing,/My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings/If this be nothing” (293–96). Leo’s reflection
above echoes Leontes’s speech, as he asserts “there is only nothingness and self-doubt.” But Winterson
transforms Leontes’s raving disbelief into the quietly painful reality that Leo lives—it is a fact so obvious as to
be commonplace, and certainly not a question. Though Winterson elsewhere maintains the original
character’s arrogant pomp and bluster, she adapts this particular outburst into an introspective moment
of profound loneliness. The interruption of the buzzer, signaling Xeno’s arrival, only underscores the
fleeting quality of that moment. By elaborating a backstory and providing her characters with such complex
motivations and desires, Winterson makes Leo’s suspicions of an affair between Xeno and MiMi more
comprehensible—even as Leo’s subsequent actions remain indefensible.

Intimacy on trial: Attachment and entrapment

The manner in which Leontes and Leo go about investigating their wives’ supposed infidelities
further demonstrate the works’ respective treatments of intimacy. Shakespeare’s Leontes avoids
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 337

facing the vulnerabilities of marital intimacy by interpreting the affair as part of a treasonous plot
against his life and litigating it in a highly public fashion. Before the lords and ladies of his court,
Leontes calls his wife an “adultress” and a “bed-swerver” and claims she was “privy/To this their
[Polixenes’s and Camillo’s] late escape” (2.1.89, 94–96). Hermione counters that she was “Privy to
none of this. How will this grieve you,/When you shall come to clearer knowledge, that/You thus
have published me!” (97–99). She juxtaposes “Privy” and “published” to expose Leontes’s attempt to
publicly shame her for a private act that she did not even commit. Hermione here seems less
concerned with the substance of the accusation than with the audience on hand to witness her public
embarrassment. After defending his actions to his courtiers, he says, “We are to speak in public, for
this business/Will raise us all” (198–99). The word “raise” here most closely denotes: “To rouse or
stir up (a number of people, a district, etc.) for the purpose of common action, esp. attack or
defense” (OED “raise,” n1 2.b). By treating the infidelity as a matter of national concern, Leontes
protects himself from his own feelings of rejection and inadequacy by making the body politic into
the pregnant Hermione’s victim. Nevertheless, his diction betrays the sense of personal affront he
experiences, as “raise” also suggests: “To drive (an animal or bird) from a lair or hiding place” (n1
I.1.b). Hermione is making it more difficult for him to take emotional shelter, and the toll on Leontes
is registered in his increased disconnect with reality.
Driven from his hiding place, Leontes must resort, instead, to hiding in plain sight, which he
accomplishes with an “open trial” of his wife (2.3.204). Indeed, Leontes practically admits the self-
interestedness of his approach, saying, “Let us be cleared/Of being tyrannous, since we so openly/
Proceed in justice, which shall have due course/Even to the guilt or the purgation” (3.2.4–7).
Hermione sees the hearing for the sham that it truly is, since she can offer no defense beyond her
own impassioned speeches and her “integrity” is “counted falsehood” (24–25). Nevertheless, she
persists. First, Hermione appeals to her husband’s own knowledge of her character: “You, my lord,
best know,/Whom least will seem to do so, my past life/Hath been as continent, as chaste, as true,/As
I am now unhappy” (30–33). Importantly, Leontes offers no response to this particular appeal when
he proceeds to accuse her throughout the scene; he neither confirms nor denies Hermione’s record
of continence, chastity, and truthfulness. Leontes leaves this plea unanswered not simply to ignore
contrary evidence, but because he is seeking to suppress the very past to which Hermione alludes—to
wrest himself from the bonds of intimacy that once united them and from the narrative they once
shared together.
By contrast, Hermione absolutely insists on such bonds, describing herself as “A fellow of the royal bed,
which owe/A moiety of the throne, a great king’s daughter,/The mother to a hopeful prince” (36–38).
Hermione defines herself through marital, familial, and political ties. In denying the validity of her personal
connections, Leontes forces her “To prate and talk for life and honor fore/Who please to come and hear”
(39–40). Leontes even goes so far as to deny the oracular proclamation meant to settle the case once and for
all: “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” (130–33). He
dismisses the oracle as fake news and admits no truth beyond his own feelings, and he momentarily succeeds
in floating free from his complex web of relationships.5 Leontes’s disavowal of attachments is perversely
realized in the almost immediate death of his young son. When the guards bring news that Mamillius has
perished “with mere conceit and fear/Of the Queen’s speed” (141–42) and that Hermione seems to die
thereafter, Leontes is swiftly, brutally reminded that he lives in a world where he affects and is affected by
others. His epiphany is too late to save his family, but it is also far too early, as Paulina and the passage of time
must intervene to restore intimacy in Sicilia.
Leontes’s rejection of the oracle exposes his trial as farce, yet Winterson’s Leo seems genuinely
concerned with attaining some confirmation of his beliefs about MiMi and Xeno. Nevertheless, his
methods for doing so only isolate him further in his self-delusion, and his confrontation with MiMi
shows how forced attempts at closeness can go so terribly wrong. When Leo asked, “Can you ever
really know another human being?” Dr. Wartz had replied, “You cannot separate the observer and
the observed.” Thinking back on this moment, though, Leo muses, “But you can […] That is what a
338 P. J. ZAJAC

surveillance system is for” (28). Dr. Wartz had not said that “really know[ing]” someone else was
impossible due to either an innate mysteriousness of the other (the observed) or an intellectual or
metaphysical limitation of the individual subject (the observer); instead, the inseparability of the two
was to blame. To know the other is always, in part, to know oneself, Wartz implies. For Leo, though,
installing a webcam provides greater access to information about his wife and allows him to remain
separate from her—spatially, of course, but also emotionally. However, technological mediation
intensifies the problems intrinsic to attempted intimacy that Shakespeare explored in The Winter’s
Tale. As Winterson shows in the character of Leo, expanding our access to information is not
equivalent to expanding our emotional intelligence.
Lacking any “material reason” to suspect MiMi of adultery, Leo explains that a webcam is not just
“a camera linked to the web,” but also “a spider’s web […] for catching insects. I can’t sleep at night
because my bed is crawling with insects” (31). Leo hopes to entrap his wife, and his articulation of
that desire recalls Leontes’s famous description of jealousy in The Winter’s Tale:
There may be in the cup
A spider steeped, and one may drink, depart,
And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge
Is not infected. But if one present
Th’abhorred ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider. (2.1.40–46)6

Having “seen the spider,” Leontes believes himself poisoned by his imagined discovery and wishes that his
wife could have been unfaithful without him knowing it. But in The Gap of Time, Leo’s language is that of
infestation rather than infection, even as the allusion implicitly aligns him with Shakespeare’s spider, thus
identifying Leo as the source of venom in the marriage. Leontes is certain of Hermione’s affair with
Polixenes after observing such tokens of affection as sighing, skulking, and “[h]orsing foot on foot”
(1.2.288–89). At least initially, Leo wants to catch MiMi and Xeno in the act, to obtain the kind of “ocular
proof” of adultery that Othello demands from Iago (3.3.365). And like Othello, Leo is haunted by the
“spectre of contaminated intimacy” (Berger 251). Though he shares Leontes’s disgust, Leo is compelled to
seek more evidence of the transgression; his use of the webcam both furthers and frustrates this goal.
The next chapter in The Gap of Time, titled “Bawdy Planet,” details Leo’s response to the webcam
footage, and Winterson uses a wide range of narrative, typographic, and syntactic strategies to
display his agonized psychological state. Discussing The Winter’s Tale, Knapp suggests that “in place
of the evidence of his eyes, Leontes offers an account of the affair in conventional terms” (271–72);
for her part, Winterson depicts at considerable length the process by which Leo overwrites such
evidence to support the conclusion he has already reached. Positively littered with profanity, the
chapter begins with Leo thinking, “FUCKING STUPID, INCOMPETENT BASTARD!” when he
realizes that Cameron set up the camera without sound (54). Presented with a stream of mute
images, Leo easily projects his own insecurities and sexual frustration onto the video feed. In the
brief chapter, sentences in all-caps recur as Leo’s angry interjections (either internalized or shouted
in the privacy of his office), while italics signal the sexually explicit fantasies that he superimposes
over what truly takes place. Short sentences and fragments reflect the swiftness with which he jumps
to conclusions about the images he sees. Winterson writes, “MiMi was there. Xeno was there. In the
bedroom. Together.” Leo pounces on each additional visual stimulus; he cannot patiently observe the
situation and order the details into an accurate, or even coherent, account.7 Elsewhere, the repetition
of diction and sentence structures expresses Leo’s obsessive state and the tortuous ways in which he
manages to twist the footage to fulfill his expectations of a sexual relationship between his wife and
friend. Leo notes, “Xeno was actually lying on the actual bed. MiMi was not actually lying on the
actual bed with him but they had probably had sex already in the oversized bathtub. He needed a
camera in the bathroom” (54). The desire for more comprehensive surveillance escalates quickly:
“Leo needed a fucking camera in the dressing fucking room. […] Leo needed to webcam the whole
house.” Although the webcam gives him an “actual” view of the interactions between Xeno and
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 339

MiMi, the incompleteness of that perspective only encourages Leo to supplement this evidence with
his own erotic fictions.
As Leo watches, his possessive jealousy for MiMi meets his repressed sexual desire for Xeno. Leo’s
pleas for more cameras culminates in the belief that he needs a camera inside his wife: “Then he’d sit
inside her and see it coming, that little ramrod dick, circumcised, precise. Leo in her cervix, waiting
with his mouth open for Xeno to worm his way in” (54–55). Leo combines the policing of his wife’s
body with a participation in her imagined affair. With the camera as an extension of himself, Leo
both penetrates MiMi and performs a kind of oral sex on Xeno (“with his mouth open”).
Furthermore, Leo joins in on his wife’s undressing by removing his tie while she models dresses
for the night’s concert. His obvious arousal at the scene repeatedly contributes to his emotional and
sexual confusion. He rants, “WHY DON’T YOU MOUNT HER FROM BEHIND WHERE I CAN
SEE YOU?” only moments before raving, “GET YOUR LONG SENSITIVE FINGERS OFF MY
WIFE’S ASS!” when Xeno zips her dress. Winterson immediately follows this outburst with “(He
remembered those long, sensitive fingers on his ass.).” When Leo’s outspoken assistant Pauline
unexpectedly enters the bedroom, his responses become even more extreme. With no evidence at all,
he decides, “Pauline was a lesbian! That explained it! She couldn’t get a man, so she had to pimp
women. She was a drunk ugly lesbian. Well, OK, Pauline doesn’t drink. Call me a liar over a bottle of
whisky. She is a sober, ugly lesbian” (57). Leo’s self-correction about Pauline’s drinking proves
parodic in light of his insistent privileging of graphic, anticipated sex acts over what he actually sees
transpire. As he sees Pauline remove something from her handbag, he thinks, “VIBRATOR THE
SIZE OF A SUBMARINE, YOU SEX-SHOP SLAG” (58). Even though the next sentence clarifies that
“It was a pencil case,” fantasy trumps reality and confirms Leo’s suspicions. Admitting that every-
thing he “knew about lesbian sex came from porn sites” (57), Leo misconstrues what he sees not only
according to the limited access provided by his webcam, but through an entire history of practices
using digital media to objectify women. Pauline and, to a lesser extent, MiMi become interchange-
able with any number of women he has watched on his computer screen untold times before. Instead
of instructing Leo in new ways to experience intimacy, the Internet has taught him to approach this
situation principally as an opportunity to get off.
Leo becomes especially fixated on Xeno as the latter begins to undress, but his desire is mediated
by both the webcam and Pauline:

Leo had a dry mouth. His friend’s boyish, slender chest and back. The scar on the shoulder still visible from
where he had fallen. Pauline was looking at Xeno’s torso. The tiny gold ring through one nipple. The tiny gold
ring in his ear. Pauline’s pelvis was lifting. Her hand was up her crotch, up her skirt. Xeno went towards her and
straddled her on the bed. Then MiMi came out of the dressing room and went over to the bed and pressed her
body up against Xeno. He turned round and put his tongue down her throat. (59)

Xeno’s undressing elicits an instant physiological response from Leo, who begins anatomizing his
friend’s semi-naked body in a passage parallel to the brief blazon of his wife in her underwear. The
sexual objectification has migrated from MiMi to Xeno, but Leo is able to project this gaze onto
Pauline. Because she looks at Xeno’s chest, she licenses Leo to linger over his “tiny gold ring through
one nipple” and then, by quick association, the one “in his ear.” Pauline provides an invitation for
Leo to sexualize Xeno without admitting that their romantic history has any impact on his current
feelings toward his wife. Having been directed by Pauline’s own staring, Leo’s eyes move effortlessly
across the body of Xeno, which shortly yields more erotic delusion, signaled by the shift to italics.
However, while the earlier envisioning of Pauline with a dildo certainly suggested a degree of
titillation on the part of Leo, her presence at the start of the imagined threesome makes her into
an avatar for Leo himself. Even though this is already a fantasy anyway, it is safer for Leo to live
vicariously through Pauline. She is the momentary means by which Leo can navigate desire toward
both MiMi and Xeno, and, in that sense, she serves as a mediator far differently than Shakespeare’s
Paulina.
340 P. J. ZAJAC

Treated as pornographic, the webcam footage contributes to Leo’s dehumanization of and

disconnection from his wife. As he imagines MiMi having oral sex with Xeno, “Leo realized he
was hard. He stood in front of the screen and unzipped his fly, working in quick, brutal strokes. He
sprayed himself over the image of his wife resting on the bed, his best friend standing gently beside
her, offering her a glass of water.” Although Leo had previously promised Cameron, “I’m not jacking
off on my wife’s pixelated tits if that’s what you’re worrying about” (30), the perversion of his
paranoid obsession and voyeurism leads to a session of furious masturbation. This objectification of
his wife and violation of her trust will soon culminate in outright rape when he confronts her about
Xeno. Unable to fully recognize MiMi’s humanity while he assails her, Leo thinks of her instead as a
“dog” and “an animal being beaten” (83, 85). He asserts his ownership of his wife (“You’re mine. Say
you’re mine” [84]) and his prerogative to determine her actions. In place of Hermione’s public
exposure in The Winter’s Tale, Winterson depicts the private assault of MiMi. This significant
change helps to make sense of Leontes’s trial in a contemporary context, but it also points to a
key difference between him and Leo. Unlike Leontes in the early acts, Leo wants to feel closer to his
wife, but without actually opening himself up to sharing the experiences of another. In place of real
intimacy, Leo settles for domination.
In both The Winter’s Tale and The Gap of Time, a sixteen-year gap follows Leontes’s/Leo’s
horrible acts before the narratives resume, but the characters’ respective conditions after the time
jump are subtly different. Having asked Paulina to “Come, and lead me/To these sorrows”
(3.2.239–40), Shakespeare’s Leontes undergoes a sixteen-year tutelage in penitence, during which
he daily visits the chapel where his wife (supposedly) and son (actually) are buried. Rejecting another
courtier’s counsel to “forgive” himself for Hermione’s death (6), Leontes claims,
Whilst I remember
Her and her virtues, I cannot forget
My blemishes in them, and so still think of
The wrong I did myself, which was so much
That heirless it hath made my kingdom and
Destroyed the sweet’st companion that e’er man
Bred his hopes out of. (5.1.6–12)

Leontes once publicly prosecuted his wife for treason to protect himself from private injury, yet he
now treats the damage he had inflicted on self and state as thoroughly intertwined. Remembering his
wife’s graces and his own failings in the same thought, Leontes and Hermione now share a
conceptual closeness that stands in stark contrast to the intimacy he had denied and destroyed.
Thanks to Paulina and the passage of time, husband and wife are united in the grieving thoughts of
Leontes. Bloom views the king’s “nostalgic recollection [that] stimulates desire and/or thoughts of his
dead spouse” as the key to his “acceptance of the ways male-male relationships (whether homosocial
or homoerotic) can exist alongside marriage and heteroerotic desire” (348). In other words, his
altered perception of his wife has a positive impact on his capacity to form relationships more
generally.
Although Leo sincerely repents his mistakes over the many years, his fundamental problem is still
one of experienced distance and isolation:
He didn’t think about MiMi because he couldn’t think about her. She was radioactive. She had to be sealed.
The memory of her had to be encased in waterproof concrete. He didn’t deny what he had done or the
consequences of what he had done. To think about that was to think about himself. His stupidity. His jealousy.
His crime. He knew how to think about himself.
But her? It was the thought of her that threatened him. He could not allow her inside his head. (217–18)

His inability or unwillingness to think about someone other than himself has become less outwardly
destructive, but he still quietly commits inward violence against himself. He deems the very
possibility of thinking about MiMi to be “radioactive,” rendering real contact or intimacy impossible.
This contrasts with Leontes’s development after the apparent death of Hermione and their reunion
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 341

in Act 5 of Shakespeare’s play. Through vivid, painful memories, Hermione is more real to Leontes
than she was at the time of her death. Leo, however, has not achieved this sense of closeness. This
could reflect the severity of Leo’s crimes—the absolute violation of intimacy that rape represents—or
the differing roles of mediation in the two texts. Pauline has stuck around as an assistant, advisor,
and moral compass, but she has not directed him to a space he could inhabit with his former wife or
the memory of their relationship. As she explains, “Leo, life is personal. You held it at arm’s length
until it came too close and then you killed it” (261). The concluding chapters depict the forces (real
and imagined) that separate its characters, but art and literature help them to cross those gaps, or at
least begin to cross them.

Adapting Shakespeare and revising intimacy: How to bridge the “wide gap”
Against the sense of alienation exacerbated by modern technologies, several of Winterson’s char-
acters long for a less mediated form of existence. Shep, Perdita’s adoptive father and a much more
developed character than Shakespeare’s Shepherd, begins the novel still reeling from the guilt of
mercy-killing his wife several years prior. He muses, “Human beings don’t know about forgiveness.
Forgiveness is a word like tiger—there’s footage of it and verifiably it exists but few of us have seen it
close and wild or known it for what it is” (17). As with Leo and the webcam, mere footage cannot
suffice, and Shep longs for a direct encounter with forgiveness that is “close” and “wild.” Much later,
while enjoying a night in London with Perdita, Zel thinks, “He doesn’t take a photo or a video
because he wants to remember—by which he means he wants to misremember because the moment
is made up of what the camera can’t capture” (237). This desire to truly capture the moment may be
highly sentimental, but its sentimentality is thematically consistent with Winterson’s oeuvre.
While the novel repeatedly calls attention to the potentials of technology to increase the
experience of distance between individuals in modern society, books are depicted as uniquely
capable of helping people orient themselves toward others. In fact, books provide the gold standard
of mediating influences, and Xeno explicitly praises them as the model for his own video games. He
asks, “why shouldn’t games be as good as books,” which “change the way people think about the
world” (38–39). In particular, he praises books’ capacity for “Relationship building” and “Moral
challenge.” By contrast, he describes games as “the best technology mated with prehistoric levels of
human development […] It’s all cars, fights, theft, risk, girls and reward” (38). (For his part, Leo
suggests that Xeno add cars and tanks to his newest game.) While video games only provoke
“adrenalin,” books allow us to “understand more, see more, feel more.” In other words, books
make individuals more receptive. Instead of standing between the self and other, they actually open
up the self to greater and more meaningful connections. If Xeno overgeneralizes about the gaming
industry in the twenty-first century, he continues to articulate the novel’s skepticism of technology
and its (potentially deadening) effects on human interactions. Despite Xeno’s aspirations for his
games, he fails to achieve this transcendence of the medium, at least according to his adult son. Zel
confronts his father, saying, “You think you’re a broken hero, don’t you? But you’re just a coward.
You control life by avoiding it—relationships, children, people. You don’t know how to love—that’s
all. You pretend that’s something noble and tragic, but it’s not noble and tragic, it’s pathetic” (202).
By Zel’s account, Xeno’s video games, however narratively complex or philosophically profound, are
one more means by which he avoids life. For Leo, such avoidance proved “tragic,” but for Xeno it is
merely “pathetic.”
Although Xeno’s games may not live up to his high standards of receptivity and relationship
building, The Gap of Time provides several examples of written works that succeed in exactly these
ways. This is not to say that all texts are equally idealized. Immediately after Xeno and MiMi leave
Leo’s office to get ready for the charity performance, Leo goes to his computer and visits his wife’s
Wikipedia page. He feels so distant from his wife that he has to read her biography on the Internet,
where he is reminded of her song “Dark Angel.” (Since the antagonists of Xeno’s game are Dark
Angels, the Wikipedia entry only confirms his suspicions.) Language frustrates attempts at true
342 P. J. ZAJAC

intimacy when its goal is to translate information about another human being into something for
quick and easy consumption. At Shep’s birthday party, Clo, Zel, Perdita, and her band members take
an impromptu compatibility quiz titled “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness,”
or, as Holly puts it, “how to fall in love without really trying” (148–49). As soon as the young men
and women begin to take the quiz, Winterson makes a significant narrative maneuver by suddenly
and simply transcribing the dialogue and thereby denying her readers any access to the characters’
interiorities that they had come to expect by this point in the novel. However, Perdita and Zel are
able to shake off this narrative device when they stray from the quiz and begin a meaningful
conversation about books, including Thoreau’s Walden and Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. In
a scene that threatens to commodify human connections and reduce romance to a template, books
provide these characters with a way out, a way to one another. After Perdita’s identity is revealed and
she is reunited with her father, Winterson extends the happy endings to minor characters as well, in
part through the mediation of books. When Lorraine LaTrobe meets Clo in London, she is attracted
to him because of the gift copy of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast in his jacket. Thanks to Autolycus,
he is able to identify her reference to Shakespeare and Company as a bookstore and secure her as a
date to the climactic concert—even as Lorraine’s status as a transsexual character allows the two to
transcend the fraught gender dynamics that define relationships in the first half of the novel.
Finally, Winterson’s radical revisions to the conclusion of Shakespeare’s play help to cement the
role of literature in her own vision of intimacy. While Shakespeare underscores the extent to which
our relationships depend on mediation, however problematic, Winterson upholds Shakespeare’s
works as themselves paths to intimacy, forms of connection. In The Winter’s Tale, just as in The Gap
of Time, Leontes’s crimes are largely forgiven, and he is rejoined with Polixenes and Perdita.
Shakespeare chooses not to present the moment of recognition onstage, instead having unnamed
gentlemen teasingly describe the reunion as “a sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of”
(5.2.40–41). But these secondhand accounts are only prologue to the final scene, in which Paulina
leads the major characters through her private gallery to admire a “statue” that is revealed to be
Hermione herself, very much alive. Across the “wide gap of time” (5.3.154), Leontes had grown
closer to his late wife, in large part due to the instruction and interventions of Paulina. In the last
scene, Paulina continues to function as mediator, orchestrating the aesthetical and emotional
responses of her guests by threatening to draw the curtain, preventing them from touching the
statue, and just generally deferring the moment of revelation. The statue of Hermione provides its
own layer of mediation as well; however awed the onlookers are by the verisimilitude, the unfolding
of the scene nevertheless eases Leontes into the possibility of actually being reunited with his wife.
The magic of Paulina’s “spell,” then, lies not simply in making the statue start to move, assisted by
some musical accompaniment and the awakened faith of her audience, onstage and off (105). Equally
miraculous, equally important to the play’s conclusion is Paulina’s ability to preserve the sense of
presence, of closeness and interconnectedness, when Hermione and Leontes are confronted with the
reality of one another once more. Paulina’s success is in leading Leontes from feeling as if the couple
are “together though absent” (to use Camillo’s phrase) to feeling together while they are literally
together—when he is close enough to feel “she’s warm” (109).
Fittingly, Leontes begins and ends his final speech with addresses to Paulina, while his closing
sentiments to Hermione are nestled between these sets of lines. Hermione does not address a single
line to Leontes, though they do physically embrace. Leontes’s response to the prospect of intimacy in
his renewed marriage is infinitely superior to what it was earlier in the play, but the structure of the
final speech still suggests the fragility of that intimacy and the continued importance of intermediary
forces to prevent it from shattering once more. In the final lines of the play, Leontes calls on Paulina
one last time to “Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely/Each one demand and answer to his
part/Performed in this wide gap of time since first/We were dissevered” (152–55). Since intimacy
seeks to perceive another person—if not as they truly are, then as close as can be managed—it can be
valuable, Shakespeare suggests, to get a second opinion, or to gain some perspective as offered by
distance, time, and other people.
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 343

With the final chapters of The Gap of Time, Winterson adapts Act 5 of the play to carve a space
for her own model of intimacy, in which Shakespeare holds a prominent place. The emphases in her
adaptation are markedly different. Xeno himself pieces together Perdita’s identity, and she travels
with Zel to London for the express purpose of meeting her father. The truth comes out more
through the active efforts of Perdita than through prophecy, providence, or chance. For Leo, it “felt
like time was being demolished brick by brick. The walled place was falling” (242). Time is no longer
the wall separating him from others, but a gap that they can pass through. Shakespeare leaves most
of the reunions to the imagination in order to maximize the audience’s sense of wonder at
Hermione’s shocking return. The miracle is left unexplained, but Shakespeare allows his characters,
and his audience, ample time to process that the event has at least occurred. By contrast, Winterson
depicts the gradual reunification of most major characters but quickly brushes past the climactic
conclusion. MiMi is now a singer on stage at a charity concert performing her song “Perdita,” and
the author herself is an attendee at the performance who quietly slips out after the revelation. The
action ends even more abruptly than that of Shakespeare’s play: “So we leave them now, in the
theatre, with the music. I was sitting at the back, waiting to see what would happen, and now I’m out
on the street in the summer night, the rain tracing my face” (267). Winterson need not linger over
the miraculous return of MiMi. In effect, she had already written that scene in the conclusion to
Written on the Body, when the terminally ill and long absent, presumed dead Louise mysteriously,
impossibly reappears. Instead, this narrator becomes audience, then author, of her own work.
Earlier in the final chapter, Winterson writes, “we can’t know the lives of others. And we can’t
know our own lives beyond the details we can manage” (252–53). Indeed, this challenge of
knowing others and knowing ourselves is represented throughout the novel, and it persists even
in Perdita’s meditation on love and relationships in the closing pages. However, a work like The
Winter’s Tale can help us better know the self, better manage the details of our lives. Similarly,
Winterson suggests, The Gap of Time, in depicting the difficulties, limitations, and possibilities of
genuine human connection in the modern world, can help us to better understand and love the
other. As a result, the works serve both separately and together to spur a reimagining of human
relationships that is much needed, since, as Berlant notes, “virtually no one knows how to do
intimacy” (2). Even if few people exit pursued by bears, the experience of separateness charac-
terizes the relationship between self and other writ large. But insofar as intimacy “involves an
aspiration for a narrative about something shared” (Berlant 1), Winterson makes clear that
individuals are not merely characters slotted into a received story, or readers who only consume
and perpetuate it. Ultimately, they are coauthors of their own intimacies who adapt the narrative
as necessary.
Though books as a medium are upheld as the catalyst for emotional connection and intimacy
in The Gap of Time, the final chapter reinforces The Winter’s Tale in particular as the most
important mediating text for Winterson herself. Winterson stages the reemergence of MiMi only
to turn our attention away from the narrative action and toward her own role as author and
adaptor. Rather than dwelling on one of the most famous moments in her Shakespearean source,
she almost immediately interjects her interpretation of the play and motivations for writing the
novel. This swift transition conveys the degree to which the play remains present for her to
this day. Shakespeare moves through the gap of time, and Winterson collapses the distance
between the two texts for her readers. Moreover, she explains that The Winter’s Tale “has been a
private text for me”: “By that I mean part of the written wor(l)d I can’t live without; without, not
in the sense of lack, but in the old sense of living outside of something” (267). Winterson
portrays her own relationship to Shakespeare’s play in terms remarkably similar to Berlant’s
description of intimacy itself, which not only entails narrative but also “builds worlds” (2). By her
own account, Shakespeare has helped build the world that Winterson inhabits, and through her
novel they have come to share a narrative as well. For Winterson, intertextuality offers its own
kind of intimacy, and the close of the novel proves to be as much about the relationship between
authors as lovers. By publishing her novel in conversation with this “private text,” she allows her
344 P. J. ZAJAC

readers into that relationship and opens up the possibility for yet another form of intimacy: that
between readers and the authors who inspire them.

Notes
1. Winterson had used this language earlier in Weight: “My work is full of Cover versions. I like to take stories we
think we know and record them differently. In the re-telling comes a new emphasis or bias, and the new
arrangement of the key elements demands that fresh material be injected into the existing text” (qtd. in Gustar
57).
2. Building off of Niklas Luhmann’s model of modern intimacy, Gil identifies the early modern period as an age
“before intimacy.” According to Gil, early modern individuals, caught between two contesting worldviews (one
based on rigid class hierarchy and an emergent one stressing common, shared humanity and individual
personality), instead experienced “asocial sexuality,” a space for passion and pleasure outside (but not opposed
to) “the whole bundle of social relations that define society.” (xiv, xi). Nevertheless, intimacy remains an
important critical category for Renaissance scholars, such as Berger, Leushuis, Levao, Sagaser, Shrank, Van den
Berg, and Vendler.
3. By contrast, Winterson has repeatedly cautioned against clichéd discourse and the commonplace (Cokal 16;
Clingham 63; Smith 414-19). In The Gap of Time, Leo strategically minimizes several of his own experiences as
clichéd, including his first same-sex encounter with Xeno and his wife’s (supposed) affair with the same man
(33, 81).
4. However, Sherman notes, “The gap of intimacy that separates these two nobles—the sleepy drinks that prevent
the experience of decorum at the time—becomes mirrored in the gap of intimacy between their royal superiors”
(209).
5. Sherman, riffing on Greenblatt’s account of Tamburlaine in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, claims that
“Leontes […] becomes a sort of anti-Tamburlaine, severing each connection the stage offers, from prop to
object, body to character, space to place. Instead, he isolates himself profoundly” (207).
6. Winterson’s adaptation of this particular passage is signaled by the chapter title, “Spider in the Cup.” Leo’s
retort also alludes to Leontes’s comment to Camillo, “Dost think I am so muddy, so unsettled, / To appoint
myself in this vexation? / Sully the purity and whiteness of my sheets— / Which to preserve is sleep, which
being spotted / Is goads, thorns, nettles, tails of wasps / […] Would I do this?” (1.2.327–34).
7. The stuttering thoughts of Leo recall the irrational fit of Othello right before succumbing to jealous rage and
epileptic seizure: “Noses, ears, and lips! Is’t possible? Confess? Handkerchief? O devil!” (4.1.40–41). Stanley
Cavell makes a similar point in connecting The Winter’s Tale to this passage from Othello (206).

Disclosure statement
The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.

Acknowledgment
The author would like to thank Ryan Hackenbracht, Kit Hume, Garrett Sullivan, and the editors and staff of Critique
for their assistance with this essay.

Notes on Contributor
Paul Joseph Zajac is Assistant Professor of English at McDaniel College, and his research focuses on Shakespeare,
Spenser, genre, adaptation, and affect. His most recent publications appeared in Philological Quarterly and Studies in
Philology.

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