Garrick's work upon it. In 1837 Macready opened his management of Covent Garden with the "Winter's Tale," for he liked the part of Leontes, which he had played. In November, 1845. the play was produced at Sadler's Wells by Samuel Phelps, for whose benefit it had been acted at Drury Lane on the 30th of May, 1843, by probably the best body of actors that ever joined together in its representation. In April, 1856, the "Winter's Tale" was produced in the course of Mr. Charles Kean's management of the Princess's Theatre, with all that false emphasis of archæological spectacle for which his management was famous. In that play Miss Ellen Terry, then a child, took the child's part of Mamillius. The "Winter's Tale" was acted at Drury Lane in 1878, again by the Meiningen Company during its visit to London in 1881, and again at the Lyceum in 1887.

Shakespeare's treatment of the story suggested rightly the last lines of a ballad-monger's version of it, printed in 1664: By this we see that nothing can prevent the powers divine." In the midst of the play we hear the voice of Apollo. The lapse of years in the story shows what Greene's second title described as "the Triumph of Time." by the divine guidance that turns all to good, however man may err. The error that here breaks the harmony of life, Shakespeare interprets not as crime, but as an outbreak of insanity. The jealousy of Leontes is painted throughout as an insane delusion. It is a form

of delusion very common. When the mind becomes touched with insanity, delusions run along the line of any old deep feeling, are about religion or are about love, and sexual. A good man so afflicted, and all the more if his love to his wife has been strong and his marriage happy, may suddenly, in such disorder of the brain, be incono dolusions of a sexual kind that

have lived long in a wide circle of kinsmen, friends, and acquaintance, and never to have seen Leontes. Beyond the bounds of one insane delusion, his mind is healthy enough for the daily work of life; though the disease, curable only at an early stage, may spread till other powers of thought are perverted. In Leontes Shakespeare paints so faithfully this form of madness that he, too, may perhaps have seen it. Love for a child born in the years of health, though pestered with crazy doubts, is not involved in the sexual delusions that create insane aversion to the wife. The mad certainty, based on no reason, impatient of contradiction, conjuring up insane suspicions; the restless troubled mind, the sleeplessness that makes all worse, are in Leontes; and Shakespeare shows this outbreak of disease of mind to be acute and sudden. When of old standing, it is not curable; if recent, cure is possible and a sudden shock to the mind, in which the weight of the stroke falls straight on the growing delusion, may destroy it for a time. It may depend then upon after-treatment whether it will spring up again. Shakespeare follows nature when he destroys the delusion of Leontes by a great shock to his mind. In Greene's story Pandosto at once believes the oracle that clears his wife. In the "Winter's Tale" the madness of Leontes makes him sweep aside the answer of Apollo, as he swept aside the warnings and the pleadings of his friends; but then comes the confirming stroke of his boy's death, the boy to whom his heart was bound: and his wife's death, as it seems, immediately follows. Then the delusion breaks. It might return; most probaby it would, if Hermione were now restored to him. But in the after-treatment of the case Paulina is his good physician, keeping his mind fixed on his wife's worth, and checking every disposition to stray from a full sense of it, through fifteen years of watchfulness, while the queen waits fulfilment of the

and Hermione, unclouded evening of a troubled day; and from the mad act of the exposure of the child, the merciful gods have shaped for them a happy issue. In our worst troubles, in the mad confusions of life, we may possess our souls in patience, and be sure that God is good to them that wait for Him. So Shakespeare interprets for us "the Triumph of Time."

It is from this point of view that Shakespeare gives to Hermione a quiet tenderness and a great patience. When the play opens, we have the old love shown in the first scene of Leontes with his wife and friend, and the first crack across it by the sudden outbreak of insanity, which had not yet disclosed itself, although it may have been at work within. Hermione speaks freely her love to Leontes

"Good deed, Leontes,

I love thee not a jar o' the clock behind
What lady should her lord."

When she is persuading Polixenes to stay, her speech to her husband's friend has her own love for her husband involved in it. When he and her husband were boys,

"Was not my lord the verier wag of the two?"

There is sense here of a Leontes cheerful in his day of health, and to Hermione as yet no sign that health is gone. Leontes was not conceived by Shakespeare as a moody tyrant. When the madness comes, Shakespeare takes pains to show that, outside the bounds of his delusion, he is no tyrant. In our boyhood, says Polixenes of himself and his friend

"We knew not

The doctrine of ill-doing, no, nor dreamed
That any did."

the recalling of the hour in which she first opened her white hand and clapped herself his love

"Then didst thou utter,

'I am yours for ever."
Hermione.

It is grace, indeed!

Why, lo you now, I have spoke to the purpose twice:
The one, for ever, earned a royal husband;

The other, for some while, a friend."

Doubt of the "for ever" was in the reminding of the promise, for here the paroxysm of insanity begins; but certainty of the "for ever" is assured by course of time. Shakespeare not only represents a truth of life in the mingling of love for the child with sudden outbreak of a mad aversion for the mother ("I have tremor cordis on me; my heart dances"), but he has dramatic purpose in strong indication, both in this and in another scene, of the great affection of Leontes for the child, that we may know the force of the shock to him when tidings of the boy's death follow straight on his repudiation of the oracle. The mother, too, in urging the prolonged stay of Polixenes, admits that if love to his child draws him away he is bound to go.

There is wild madness in the outbreak against Camillo's pleading to Leontes to "be cured of this diseased opinion, and betimes; for 'tis most dangerous."—" Say it be; 'tis true."-"No, no, my lord."-"It is; you lie, you lie; I say thou liest, Camillo, and I hate thee." All that follows is the reasoning of the insane. And it is now first that Polixenes observes the changed countenance of his friend. He had come to Sicily by cordial invitation; had been feasted royally; the old cheerful tone of his healthy life is in the opening dialogue of the play; but the coming crack within the mind is lightly indicated by brevity of speech in Leontes. But the first signs of disordered intellect are seen first by Hermione and Polixenes,

There is exquisite suggestion of the gentle wife within a day or two of second motherhood in the scene of Hermione and her women at the opening of the Second Act, which closes with loving attention to the child's tale in her ear. "A sad Tale's best for Winter," says the child, as, with the entrance of Leontes, the sad tale begins, of which its own death, by stricken love, will be a part. With gentle affection Hermione meets the gross suggestions of the husband whom she loves

"There's some ill planet reigns;

I must be patient, till the heavens look

With an aspect more favourable.-Good my lords,
I am not prone to weeping, as our sex
Commonly are;"

and thenceforth all is patience to the end, with love ever abiding. Love, patience, purity, and faith in the powers above, shine through all words and acts of the afflicted queen. She embodies a main part of the conception of the play. In her answer to the charges made in open court, she speaks calm truth, beginning, as in Greene's tale, with the trust in powers above, and ending with appeal to Heaven

"I do refer me to the oracle;
Apollo be my judge."

Then follows the long patience of years, while Paulina watches the mind of Leontes and retains it true to its old love, until fulfilment of the oracle and fulness of the time for which, in settled faith, Hermione is waiting. The grace of her unswerving tenderness and patience, is suggested when Leontes sees in Hermione her natural posture, and adds