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MAMILLIUS, THE YOUNG SON OF LEONTES AND HERMIONE in The Winters Sale, is onstage for only two scenes. In 1.2 he is in attendance for most of the scene, but like a good child present at an adult occasion, he speaks only when spoken to; and he is spoken to only by his father. Leontes runs the usual gamut of adult address to a child, from affectionate endearment ("that's my bawcock," "sweet villain" [1.2.119, 135] 1) to dialogue with a pseudo-grownup ("Come, captain," "thou'rt an honest man" [ll. 121, 208]), but he returns again and again to the progenitorial bond that identifies son with father. Since the fidelity of his wife has suddenly become an issue, paternal pride keeps being destabilized by anxious question, too-vehement assertion, or dependence on doubtful authority: "Art thou my boy? . . . Art thou my calf. . . they say we are / Almost as like as eggs; women say so, / That will say anything.... yet were it true / To say this boy were like me" (11. 116-34). The question posed rhetorically in familiar kitchy-koo gambits-are you my own darling child?-is freighted here with real neurotic need for confirmation. Mamillius tries to supply that need verbally as well as visually. Yes, he says confidently, he is Leontes's boy; yes, he is Leontes's calf-but now less confidently, puzzled at his father's mood, turning declaration into accommodation with his cautious proviso "if you will, my lord" (I. 127). His last attempt to give the desired answer resorts to the same dubious third-person authority that troubled Leontes's own perceptions of filial likeness: "I am like you, they say" (1. 206).2
Sent off to play soon after this, Mamillius next appears in 2.1. Again he is with adults, his mother and other court ladies, but now they attend on him rather than the other way round, as it was in the court scene. He initiates the conversational gambits, and they respond. In this milieu he doesn't have to wait to be noticed by grownups or guess the right answers to their mystifying questions. He is fully at home, the center of attention. But happy self-display abruptly ends when his father, with other lords, breaks into this women's world to wrench him...