Time’s queer ‘recoil’ in The Winter’s Tale’

The Winter’s Tale is always looking back to what’s come before and asking whether things really had to turn out this way. A play with a distinctly slantwise relationship to time, this insistently questioning nostalgia can also be read as queer. I mean this queerness in several senses: it is there in the play’s joyful slide over sixteen years between acts, as Heather Love explains when she writes that ‘we might understand deviations from normative time – rather than any specifically sexual form of transgression – as queer’; in the anxiety around the relationship between past action and future outcomes which compels many of the characters to act; and in the act of playgoing itself, in what a play asks of its audience. In this article, I argue that The Winter’s Tale’s defiantly queer and non-Aristotelian playing also puts pressure on audience expectations and critical responses, that it turns the canon against itself. I make this argument by examining three elements of the text: the death of Mamillius, the ‘recoil’ into their own pasts that occurs whenever Leontes and Polixenes gaze upon their sons, and the hitherto unrecognised Ganymede figure of Camillo.