Jealousy in The Winter's Tale (Shakespeare c.1611)

Polixenes, King of Bohemia, thought King Leontes of Sicily’s magnificent hospitality reflected friendship ‘as twinned lambs that frisk in the sun’. However, within the 462 lines of Act 1, Leontes’ ‘rooted […] affection’ is twisted into ‘a sickness which puts some of us in distemper’. By line 44 Leontes draws apart ‘to observe’ Polixenes ‘paddling palms’, and by line 108 he is muttering ‘too hot, too hot’, as his heart ‘dances but not for joy’. Polixenes, warned to flee (’he thinks you have touched his queen forbiddenly’) accepts that ‘ ‘tis safer to avoid what’s grown than question how ‘tis born’.