THE WINTER'S TALE.

INTRODUCTION.

ROBERT GREENE, a man of much learning and little worth,

who had some skill in pen-craft, which he exercised as playwright, verse-maker, satirist, and novelist, furnished Shakespeare with the story of The Winter's Tale. This story was published in 1588, and perhaps before, under the title, Pandosto: The Triumph of Time.* It was very popular for a century; there having been at least fourteen editions of it published before 1695, in some of the later of which it is entitled, from the names of the characters corresponding to Florizel and Perdita, The History of Dorastus and Fawnia. Shakespeare changed the names not only of the lovers, but, with one exception, of all the characters in the tale. In Greene's work, the King of Sicilia is called Egistus; the King of Bohemia, Pandosto; Hermione, Bellaria; Mamillus, Garinter; Camillo, Franion; and the Old Shepherd, Porrus: Mopsa appears in both play and tale.

As to incident and the order of events, the great dramatist followed the obscure novelist so closely, that The Winter's Tale, as far as the last Scene of the third Act, is, in structure, only a dramatized version of Pandosto. Down to that point, then, comparison of the course of the novel and the play would be superfluous; but thenceforward it is interesting to mark their divergence. It should first be noticed, however, that Shakespeare, for some undiscoverable reason, transposed the scenes of

"Pandosto, the Triumph of Time, wherein is discovered by a pleasant Historie, that, although by the meanes of sinister fortune, Truth may be concealed, yet by Time, in spight of fortune, it is most manifestly revealed: Pleasant for age to avoyde drowsie thoughtes, profitable for youth to eschue other wanton Pastimes, and bringing to both a desired content. Temporis filia veritas. By Robert Greene, Maister of Artes in Cambridge. Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci. Imprinted at London by Thomas Orwin, for Thomas Cadman, &c., 1588." Reprinted in Collier's Shakespeare's Library.

action and the functions of the principal characters. The tale opens in Bohemia, and Pandosto, the jealous monarch, is King of that country, of which, of course, Bellaria (Hermione) is Queen, and Garinter (Mamillus), Prince: Fawnia (Perdita) is found by the shepherd in Sicilia, of which island Egistus (Polixenes), the innocent cause of the jealousy which is the mainspring of the action, is King: all which, it will be seen, is reversed in the play. To the important characters in the tale, Shakespeare added Antigonus, Paulina, Autolycus, and the Old Shepherd's lout of a son. 9.

When in the tale the newly born Fawnia is brought to Pandosto by one of the prison guards, (there being no counterpart to Paulina,) the infuriated King (there being again no counterpart to Antigonus) orders that without delay she shall "bee put in the boat having neither saile nor [rudder] to guide it, and so be carried into the midst of the sea, and there left to the wind and wave as the destinies please to appoint." For this Shakespeare substitutes an exposure of Perdita on the desert sea shore; which change Mr. Collier, with, perhaps, some reason, attributes to a desire on the author's part to avoid a resemblance to the shipwreck of Miranda, and which he therefore reckons among the proofs that The Winter's Tale was written after The Tempest. There seems, however, to be this good substitution. Shakespeare knew matic value of an impression produced upon the greater than that of one produced upon the ear; and on his stage Greene's disposition of the royal babe could not be represented, while that adopted by him could. The latter, too, was more in accordance with the course of classic story, which Shakespeare well knew, and did not always disregard. After the exposure of the Princess, we have in the novel, as in the play, the trial of the Queen, the response of the Oracle, the death of the Prince, followed immediately by that of his mother, and the fruitless remorse and repentance of the King. But in the tale the Queen does not revive.

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The babe, according to the tale, “beeing tossed with winde and wave, floated two whole daies without succour, readie at every

puffe to be drowned in the sea, till at last the tempest ceased, and the little boate was driven with the tyde into the coast of Sicilia, where sticking upon the sandes it rested." There it is found by the old shepherd, who takes the Princess home and

brings her up as his own child. At the age of sixteen she is encountered by Prince Dorastus as he returns from hawking, wins his heart and loses hers, and sets sail with him for Italy, fearing his father's displeasure should their marriage become known. Meantime Porrus, the old shepherd, who knows the rank of his adopted daughter's lover, is equally in dread of the King's anger; and taking the mantle, jewels, and treasure which he found with Fawnia, he sets out to acquaint Egistus of the whole affair. But he is encountered by the confidential servant of the Prince, who gets him, partly by stratagem and partly by force, on board the Prince's ship, which immediately sets sail. It does not reach Italy, but is wrecked on the coast of Bohemia. Dorastus, knowing the enmity between the two kings, assumes a false name, and gives out that he is an Italian knight of Trapolonia. But he is apprehended as a spy, and brought before Pandosto, who becomes enamoured of Fawnia and casts Dorastus into prison. Egistus hears the fate of his son, and immediately sets out for Bohemia, where on his arrival Dorastus is set free. But upon his threatening Fawnia and Porrus with fearful vengeance for their presumption in allying themselves with the blood royal, the latter tells the story which he had left home to tell; Fawnia, proving to be a princess, is married to Dorastus; and Pandosto, in remorse at having caused the death of his wife and his son, and at having vexed his own daughter with amorous solicitation, kills himself. Such is the rude structure and repulsive catastrophe of the narrative; for which Shakespeare substituted the pastoral charm and characteristic humor of the fourth Act of The Winter's Tale, and the bold design of the statue scene in the fifth, where serenity and joy descend to all from the pedestal of Hermione, as she returns, like Alcestis, from the grave.

The other variations between the incidents of the novel and those of the drama are too trivial to merit notice. But it is worthy of remark that Greene gives Pandosto more cause for his jealousy than Shakespeare gives to Leontes. For in the tale Bellaria, though entirely innocent, uses Egistus "so familiarly that her countenance bewraied how her mind was affected towardes him, oftentimes comming her selfe into his bed chamber to see that nothing should be amis to mislike him; and also "there grew such a secret uniting of their affections that the one could not well be without the company of the other." It

may possibly have been Shakespeare's intention to make its sudden birth and its extravagance characteristic traits of Leontes' jealousy; but this difference between the play and the novel seems rather due to a necessity for the compression of the latter. Shakespeare sought only to put a very popular story into a dramatic form; and of this he advertised his hearers by calling this play a Tale, just as before he had called a play similarly wanting in dramatic interest, a Dream.

The Winter's Tale is remarkable, even among Shakespeare's plays, for its defiance of all restraint of time or place. No other approaches it in its recklessness of these conditions; and it is remarkable that he produced at about the same time, probably in the same year, the two of his works most unlike in this respect, The Tempest, and the play under consideration. For while in the former (partly, it is true, on account of the nature of its story) the unities are so strictly observed that it could be played with two scenes, and that the time of its supposed action is little longer than that of the performance, and no traces of carelessness or ignorance appear; in the latter the poet puts sixteen years between two Acts, and thousands of miles between two Scenes, brings inland countries to the sea, carries the Temple of Apollo from the continent to an island, makes the Queen of Sicilia, who is waiting to hear her doom from the Delphic Oracle, say that the Emperor of Russia is her father, puts into Florizel's mouth the story that he brought the fair Perdita from Libya, and, in the midst of all this, shows us a statue the work of Giulio Romano, and gives us a clown who talks of pound and odd shilling, and a Puritan singing psalms to hornpipes! For much of this chronological confusion Greene is answerable, and it concerns us here chiefly as evidence how constantly Shakespeare had the work of his predecessor in his mind while writing this play, if indeed he did not have it before his eye.

But although counterparts of nearly all the characters and most of the incidents of The Winter's Tale exist in Pandosto, and even verbal reminiscences of the latter are to be found in the former, it cannot be said that the play is in the least indebted to the tale for the place it holds in literature, or even for the mere interest of its story. Whatever the merits of Greene's work, and it is a good tale of its sort and its time, though clumsily and pedantically told, — they are altogether different in kind (we will not consider the question of degree) from the

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merits of Shakespeare's. In characterization of personages the tale is notably coarse and common place, in thought arid and barren, and in language alternately meagre and inflated: whereas there are few more remarkable creations in all literature than Hermione, Perdita, Autolycus, Paulina, not to notice minor characters; and its teeming wealth of wisdom, and the daring and dainty beauty of its poetry, give the play a high place in the second rank of Shakespeare's works. Briefly, it is the old story over again the dry stick that seems to bloom and blossom is but hidden by the leafy luxuriance and floral splendor of the plant that has been trained upon it.

The date of the production of this drama is determinable with a near approach to accuracy. That it was written before May 15th, 1611, we have evidence in the following entry under that date in the diary of Dr. Simon Forman, now among the MSS. in the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford, England.

"In the Winter's Talle at the Glob, 1611, the 15 of Maye, Wednesday.

"Observe ther howe Lyontes the Kinge of Cicillia was overcom with jelosy of his wife with the Kinge of Bohemia, his frind, that came to see him, and howe he contrived his death, and wold have had his cup-berer to have poisoned [him] who gave the King of Bohemia warning thereof and fled with him to Bohemia.

"Remember also howe he sent to the orakell of Apollo, and the aunswer of Apollo that she was giltless, and that the king was jelouse, &c., and howe, except the child was found again that was loste, the kinge should die without yssue; for the child was caried into Bohemia, and there laid in a forrest, and brought up by a sheppard, and the Kinge of Bohemia, his sonn married that wentch; and howe they fled into Cicillia to Leontes, and the sheppard having showed the letter of the nobleman, by whom Leontes sent, it was that child, and [by] the jewells found about her, she was knowen to be Leontes daughter, and was then 16. yers old.

"Remember also the rog that cam in all tottered like roll pixci, and howe he fayned him sicke and to have him robbed of all that he had, and howe he cosoned the por man of all his money, and after cam to the shop ther with a pedlers packe, and ther cosened them again of all their money; and how he changed apparell with the Kinge of Bomia, his sonn, and then how he turned courtier, &c. Beware of trustinge feined beggars or fawninge fellouse." *

* From a precise copy carefully made from the original by Mr. Halliwell. VOL. V. R