In Act 1, Scene 2, Leontes articulates his paranoia about his wife's fidelity through the extended metaphor of the cuckold's horns. In Shakespeare's day, men with adulterous wives were often depicted in art and literature with ram's horns and were subject to mockery for being deceived by their wives. Throughout this scene, Leontes's language describes the metaphorical growth of cuckold's horns on his head as his belief in his wife's infidelity cements itself.
As Leontes watches Hermione give her hand to Polixenes to welcome him to the Sicilian court, he becomes suspicious of their intimacy. As he begins to imagine an affair between them, he calls these images "entertainment / My bosom likes not, nor my brows." While examining his son's face in search of evidence that he was fathered by another man, Leontes is unable to cast aside his suspicions and becomes increasingly agitated, which leads to the imagined "hard'ning of [his] brows" and thus the progression of the growth of his horns. Finally, once Hermione and Polixenes leave together for the garden, Leontes thinks they resemble a married couple and imagines horns affixing themselves to his head: "o'er head and ears a fork'd / one!" This extended metaphor highlights Leontes's fear that his wife's adultery will render him a fool. Of course, the metaphorical growth of Leontes's horns corresponds not to Hermione's actual infidelity, but rather to the amplification of Leontes's delusions. Ironically, it is Leontes's very fear of appearing foolish that turns him into a fool.
Multiple characters in The Winter's Tale use metaphors to compare a child's face to a printed copy of the father. These metaphors suggest that a child's face or physical resemblance to their father is proof of their mother's fidelity.
For instance, when Leontes examines his son Mamillius's face to determine whether he is someone else's son in Act 1, Scene 2, he asks, "What, hast smutched thy nose? They say it is a copy out of mine." Leontes's use of the word "copy" suggests that, like a printed page, a child's facial features are a duplicate of their father's. Paulina extends this metaphor in Act 2, Scene 3 when she declares that Hermione's newborn child is the very image of Leontes: "Behold, my lords, / Although the print be little, the whole matter / And copy of the father." Combined with what Paulina identifies as the "medicinal" power of language in dispelling delusion earlier in the same scene, her use of this metaphor presents the baby's physical resemblance to Leontes as indisputable proof of Hermione's fidelity.
Leontes uses the same metaphor in Act 5, Scene 1, telling Florizell that his mother must have been "most true to wedlock, prince, / For she did print your royal father off, / Conceiving you." His acknowledgement that Florizell's face proves that he is Polixenes's son shows that Leontes, in the sixteen years since Hermione's death, has finally learned to accept a woman's faithfulness at "face value." In this way, the metaphor of printing in the play compares a child's face to a text that contains evidence of the mother's fidelity.
Hermione's conversation with Polixenes in Act 1, Scene 2 features an extended metaphor that jokingly compares staying in someone else's home as a guest to imprisonment. Encouraging Polixenes to stay longer in Sicilia, Hermione says, "Force me to keep you as a prisoner, / Not like a guest, so you shall pay your fees / When you depart and save your thanks." When Polixenes responds that he would rather be her guest than her prisoner, Hermione declares she will not be his "jailer," but rather his "hostess." Despite the playful tone of this exchange, this metaphor not only reveals that the threat of imprisonment or darker political consequences is always close at hand in the Sicilian court, but also foreshadows Hermione's own, actual imprisonment by Leontes later in the play.
Paulina similarly uses imprisonment as a metaphor in Act 2, Scene 3 when she characterizes Hermione's womb as a prison and birth as enfranchisement: "This child was prisoner to the womb, and is / By law and process of great nature thence / Freed and enfranchised." This metaphor foreshadows the way in which Hermione will be "reborn" as a statue once her name is cleared and she is freed from prison.
The aristocratic characters of "The Winter's Tale" often use an extended metaphor, applying political language to members of the family unit. As monarchs, Leontes and Polixenes must preserve their families in order to ensure that they produce heirs who will rule their respective kingdoms in the future. Therefore, their use of this metaphor highlights the way in which their social position makes domestic and political matters inextricable from each other.
For example, in Act 1, Scene 2, Polixenes uses a metaphor to describe his son as "Now my sworn friend and then mine enemy, / My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all." His characterization of his son using military terms is facetious, but it reveals the political importance of his son for the continued governance of his state.
Likewise, when Leontes begins to suspect that his wife is disloyal, Polixenes declares in the same scene that "The King hath on him such a countenance / As he had lost some province and a region / Loved as he loves himself." By comparing Leontes's presumed loss of his wife to the loss of a province of his kingdom, this simile highlights the fact that a monarch requires a wife to produce an heir.
Later, Leontes makes explicit this relationship when he laments the consequences of his past wrongdoings for the governance of his kingdom: "The wrong I did myself, which was so much / That heirless it hath made my kingdom." The extended metaphor of political language illustrates the fact that, for Leontes and Polixenes, the breakdown of the family unit has higher stakes because it impedes the continuation of the royal lineage and thus threatens the future of the kingdom.
In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare uses an extended metaphor to compare male mistrust of their wives to a disease. In Act 1, Scene 2, Camillo calls Leontes's growing distrust of his wife a "diseased opinion" and warns that it is "most dangerous." Later, he extends this metaphor when he tells Polixenes, "There is a sickness / Which puts some of us in distemper, but I cannot name the disease, and it is caught / Of you that yet are well." Camillo's language suggests that the disease of Leontes's mistrust is a contagious one originating in Polixenes, even though the latter is "yet...well" because he is not mistrustful himself.
In Act 2, Scene 1, Leontes's metaphor of a spider in his drink similarly identifies his distrust of his wife to the effects of consuming venom:
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.
Leontes asserts that when a drink contains a venomous spider, one may only experience the effects of that venom once aware of the spider's presence. However, not only is this metaphor factually false—venom is harmful regardless of whether one is aware of its presence—but Leontes also errs in mistaking his unfounded suspicions for knowledge of the truth. He doesn't know that the spider is in his drink, that is, that his wife is unfaithful; he only thinks he does. In this way, Leontes's metaphor highlights the fallacies that distort his perceptions and lead him to engineer his own downfall. Indeed, Leontes ultimately refuses to accept a cure for his diseased opinion in the form of Paulina's "medicinal" words of truth, leading to tragedy. Camillo and Leontes's diverging uses of metaphor to characterize the "disease" of the latter's mistrust thus highlight the extent of Leontes's delusion.
In Act 4, Scene 4, Perdita eschews "streaked gillyvors" because they are "nature's bastards"; that is, they are not naturally occurring and require human intervention to create. Perdita suggests that the production of these flowers entails "an art which in their piedness shares / With great creating nature." In other words, manipulating nature to create unnatural life forms such as the streaked gillyvor is like the sin of playing God. However, Polixenes responds that such artifice is not unnatural:
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean.
So, over that art
Which you say adds to nature is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.
Polixenes uses logos here to persuade Perdita that artifice should be celebrated, not rejected. Using the metaphor of these cross-bred, "pied" flowers, he contends that, contrary to Perdita's beliefs, the human intervention required for these feats of engineering is not unnatural because it is nature itself that gives humans the means of engineering it. In doing so, Polixenes contributes to the play's assertion of the power of art and artifice, which culminates in the restoration of the family through Hermione's statue.
In Act 4, Scene 4, Perdita alludes to figures from classical mythology while selecting flowers for the Shepherdesses: "O Proserpina, / For the flowers now that, frighted, thou let’st fall / From Dis’s wagon!" Perdita's allusion to the myth of Proserpina, who was abducted by the god of the underworld, Dis, and returned to the earth after six months, foreshadows her own return from Bohemia to her home in Sicilia.
Perdita also goes on to allude to Phoebus, the Roman name for Apollo, who is the source of the play's central prophecy:
[...] pale primroses,
That die unmarried ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength—a malady
Most incident to maids
This metaphor compares primroses to young maidens that die before they can marry or see the sun. Combined with the allusion to Proserpina, a goddess who, like the primrose, is deprived of the sun while confined to the underworld, Perdita's allusion to Phoebus also raises the possibility that she will not return. Perdita's allusions to classical mythology generate suspense for the audience—whom Shakespeare would have trusted to pick up on them—regarding whether she will be reunited with her father and homeland or remain lost in the "underworld," or Bohemia.
