The Complexions of Shakespeare’s Voices

Abstract

Good Camillo, Your changed complexions are to me a mirror Which shows me mine changed, too; for I must be A party in this alteration, finding Myself thus altered with’t. The Winter’s Tale, 1.2.378–821 Thanks to the work of Gail Kern Paster, twenty-first-century interpreters of Shakespeare can appreciate the complex physical, psychological, and theatrical transactions in Act 1, scene 2 of The Winter’s Tale when Polixenes reads Camillo’s face and anticipates the dire news that Camillo is about to tell him: Leontes has ordered Camillo to murder Polixenes. The “changed complexions” (plural) that Polixenes observes in Camillo are visible not only in the muscles of his face but also in his skin tone. The sanguine hues of Camillo’s customary graciousness have given way to the paleness of fear and grief. Polixenes, seeing mirror-like his own condition in Camillo’s face, undergoes the same shifts in facial musculature and skin tone. These visible signs of emotion are the result of changes in body chemistry, as each man’s spiritus communicates the passions of fear and grief throughout his body. The visible signs of fear and grief are accompanied by somatic sensations of heat yielding to coldness, of moistness yielding to dryness, of relaxed muscles yielding to tight muscles.2 Also present, perhaps, in the fiction of The Winter’s Tale are differences in complexion due to different climates: the fairness of Bohemia versus the swarthiness of Sicily.3