At the end of The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare offers a scene so improbable that in order to perceive it, Paulina informs Leontes, "It is requir"d / You do awake your faith" (5.3.94-95). What we are about to see, of course, is the living statue of Hermione—art become life, imagination turned into reality. This theatrical spectacle is paradigmatic of a Shakespearean aesthetic in which characters and audience alike are confronted with an impossibility that somehow gestures toward a deeper truth. The invitation to accept the living Hermione is powerful, leading to the conclusion that the playwright's gift is an invitation to accept the openness or, in more recent critical terms, the indeterminacy of both art and life. Yet the final scene is prefigured by another, less-positive encounter with an impossible image, the product of Leontes's frantic response to Hermione and Polixenes in the opening scenes of the play. In this chapter I will argue that the two scenes are more alike than is generally acknowledged, that Leontes's dilemma in facing each image involves not a choice between certitude and openness—between understanding and faith—but an ethical judgment: a response to a demand from another. And while there is no doubt that his first response is wrong, the fact that he makes a choice constitutes the ethical nature of his character contra indeterminacy, against endless deferral. It is in this choice that he asserts his responsibility and enables his future redemption.