= = = throughout; Shakespeare admits no "incautiousness" on her part, no unqueenly condescension in meeting the charge; (v) Bohemia takes the place of Sicily, and vice versa, "apparently from a feeling that Bohemia carried better than Sicily, the associations of deserts and remoteness"; finally, (vi) the names are changed throughout:— Polixenes Pandosto; Leontes = Egistus; Hermione Bellaria; Mamillius Garinter; Florizel = Dorastus; Perdita Fawnia. The Greek element in Shakespeare's list of names is striking, and should perhaps be considered in connection with the Alcestis motif of the closing scene of the play. The Winter's Tale, from this latter point of view, suggests comparison with the "tragi-comedy" of Euripides. One cannot but think that, by some means or other, directly or indirectly, Shakespeare owed his dénouement to the Greek dramatist, certainly to the Greek story.1 AUTOLYCUS Shakespeare's rogue has distinguished pedigree; his ancestor dwelt on Parnassus, where he was visited by his 1 Cp. the passage quoted above, which has been translated as follows: "Hercules. Toward her turn thine eyes, And say if she resembleth not thy wife. Admetus. O ye immortal gods! what can I say Some phantom of delight o'erpower my sense? Hercules. This is no phantom but your own true wife. Against all hope thou once again art mine." -(W. F. NEVINS.) Observe, too, that Alcestis dare not speak to Admetus for three days; Hermione similarly “lives, though yet she speaks not"; when she does find voice, it is to call a blessing on Perdita; no word is addressed to Leontes. There are other remarkable parallels in the two plays. grandson Ulysses. A slight character sketch is given of him in Book XIX of the Odyssey, 392–8: "Autolycus, who th' art Of theft and swearing (not out of the heart Your witty man withal, and was suborn'd Shakespeare, in all probability, first became acquainted with Autolycus in the pages of his favorite Ovid, perhaps in Golding's translation (cp. Metamorphoses, Bk. XI).2 THE SEABOARD OF BOHEMIA Drummond of Hawthornden, in his famous Conversations, recorded that Ben Jonson said, "Shakespeare wanted art and sometimes sense, for in one of his plays he brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where is no sea nearly 100 miles." This censure has been frequently repeated. As a matter of fact, Shakespeare follows Greene in this geopraphical detail. He may or may not have known better; incongruities and anachronisms are not out of place in "a winter's tale": he certainly bettered Greene's example, "making Whitsun pastorals, Christian burial, Guilio Romano, the Emperor of Russia, and Puritans singing psalms to hornpipes, all contemporary with the oracle of Delphi," the island of Delphi! Like the Chorus Time in the play, Romance might well claim: "It is in my power To o'erthrow law and in one self-born hour 1 Chapman's paraphrase (pub. 1616); cp. "My father named me Autolycus, who being as I am, littered under Mercury, was likewise a snapper up of unconsidered trifles." 2 It is possible that Shakespeare's Autolycus owed something to Thomas Newbery's Book of Dives Pragmaticus, 1563 (reprinted in Huth's Fugitive Tracts, 1875). THE DURATION OF ACTION The Winter's Tale, with its interval of sixteen years between two acts,1 may be said, too, to mark the final overthrow of Time-the hallowed "Unity of Time" by its natural adversary, the Romantic Drama. The play recalls Sir Philip Sidney's criticism, in his Apologie for Poetrie, anent the crude romantic plays popular about 1580, when he outlined a plot somewhat analogous to that of The Winter's Tale as a typical instance of the abuse of dramatic decorum by lawless playwrights, who, contrary to academic rule, neglected both "time and place." The Winter's Tale, perhaps the very last of Shakespeare's comedies, appropriately emphasizes, as it were, the essential elements of the triumph of the New over the Old. Sidney could not foresee, in 1580, the glorious future in store for the despised Cinderella of the playhouses, "Now Grown in Grace Equal with Wondering." 1 Eight days only are represented on the stage, with an interval of twenty-three days after Day 2 (Act II. sc. i.); and another short interval after Day 4 (Act III. sc. ii.); the main interval of sixteen years comes between Acts III. and IV.; again, there is a short interval between Act IV. sc. iv. and Act V., i. e. the seventh and eighth days. INTRODUCTION BY HENRY NORMAN HUDSON, A.M. The earliest notice we have of The Winter's Tale is from the manuscript Diary of Dr. Simon Forman, lately discovered in the Ashmolean Museum. The description there given is so close as to leave no room for doubt or mistake; bearing date May 15, 1611, and running thus: "Observe there how Leontes, king of Sicilia, was overcome with jealousy of his wife with the king of Bohemia, his friend that came to see him; and how he contrived his death, and would have had his cup-bearer to have poisoned him, who gave the king of Bohemia warning thereof, and fled with him to Bohemia. Remember, also, how he sent to the oracle of Apollo, and the answer of Apollo that she was guiltless, and that the king was jealous, etc.; and how, except the child was found again that was lost, the king should die without issue; for the child was carried into Bohemia, and there laid in a forest, and brought up by a shepherd; and the king of Bohemia's son married that wench, and how they fled into Sicilia to Leontes; and the shepherd having showed the letter of the nobleman whom Leontes sent, and by the jewels found about her she was known to be Leontes' daughter, and was then sixteen years old. Remember, also, the rogue that came in all tattered, like Coll Pipci, and how he feigned him sick, and to have been robbed of all he had; and how he cozened the poor man of all his money, and after came to the sheep-shear with a pedlar's pack, and there cozened them again of all their money. And how he changed apparel with the king of Bohemia's son, and then how he turned courtier, etc. Beware of trusting feigned beggars and fawning fellows," Malone once thought The Winter's Tale to have been written in 1604; but he gave up this opinion late in life upon finding it stated in the office-book of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels in 1623, that The Winter's Tale was "an old play formerly allowed of by Sir George Buck." Buck became Master of the Revels in October, 1610, which office he held till May, 1622. So that we may fairly conclude the play to have been new, and probably in its first run, when Forman saw it at the Globe Theater. It also appears from the accounts of Sir George Buck, that "a play called The Winter's Night's Tale" was acted at Whitehall by "the king's players," November 5, 1611. As the king's players were the company to which Shakespeare belonged, there can be little doubt that The Winter's Night's Tale was Shakespeare's Winter's Tale. In the same account are included eleven other plays, The Tempest being one, the oldest of which probably had not been written more than three years; which yields something of an argument that The Winter's Tale was selected for performance at court because it was then popular and new. Both this play and The Tempest are most likely referred to by Ben Jonson in his Bartholomew Fair, which was first acted in 1614; and that the style of the reference favors the opinion that the plays had not then lost the charm of novelty. Upon the whole, therefore, we have no scruple in setting down the composition of The Winter's Tale to the winter of 1610-1611, when the Poet was in his forty-sixth year. That The Winter's Tale was written after The Tempest, has been justly argued by Mr. Collier, and for this reason: Shakespeare, as we shall presently see, in his plot and story closely follows the Pandosto of Robert Greene. In the novel, however, the new-born babe is put into a boat and turned adrift at sea without a keeper, and so floats to the place where she is found by the shepherd: and there is no apparent reason why Shakespeare should have varied from the novel herein, unless it were to avoid a repetition of inci |