bomia his sonn, and then howe he turned Courtiar, &c / beware of trustinge feined beggars or fawninge fellouse."

The following entry in the Accounts of the Revels, quoted by most of the editors, has been proved to be a forgery, like the similar entries concerning The Tempest (see our ed. p. 8), The Merchant of Venice (p. 19), and other of Shakespeare's plays :

The Kings
players.

The 5th of Nouember [1611]; A play called y winters nightes Tayle.

The internal tests, metrical, æsthetic, and other, all tend to show that the play was one of the poet's last productions. Dowden (Shakspere Primer, p. 151), says of it: "The versification is that of Shakspere's latest group of plays; no fivemeasure lines are rhymed; run-on lines and double-endings are numerous. The tone and feeling of The Winter's Tale place it in the same period with The Tempest and Cymbeline; its breezy air is surely that which blew over Warwickshire fields upon Shakspere now returned to Stratford; its country lads and lasses, and their junketings, are those with which the poet had in a happy spirit renewed his acquaintance. This is perhaps the last complete play that Shakspere wrote."

It may be noted here that Ben Jonson has a little fling at The Winter's Tale in the Induction of his Bartholomew Fair, published in 1614: "If there be never a ServantMonster i' the fayre, who can helpe it, he sayes; nor a nest of Antiques? He is loth to make nature afraid in his playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries." The "antiques," or antics, are evidently the dancing Satyrs of iv. 4, as the "servant-monster" is the Caliban of The Tempest (see our ed. of that play, p. 8).

The Winter's Tale is one of the most carefully printed plays in the folio, even the punctuation being exceptionally accurate. The style presents unusual difficulties, being more elliptical, involved, and perplexing than that of any other

work of Shakespeare's. Under the circumstances, as White remarks, "it is rather surprising that the text has come down to us in so pure a state; and the absolute incomprehensibility of one or two passages may safely be attributed to the attempt, on the part of the printers, to correct that which they thought corrupt in their copy, but which was only obscure."

II. THE SOURCES OF THE PLOT.

The story of The Winter's Tale is taken from Robert Greene's History of Dorastus and Fawnia, which appeared first in 1588, under the title of Pandosto, and passed through several editions. Shakespeare follows the novel in most particulars, but varies from it in a few of some importance. For instance, in the story as told by Greene, Bellaria (Hermione) dies upon hearing of the loss of her son; and Pandosto (Leontes) falls in love with his own daughter, and is finally seized with a kind of melancholy or madness, in which he kills himself. The poet appears to have changed the dénouement because he was writing a comedy, not a tragedy.

One of the minor incidents may possibly have been altered for another reason. In Pandosto the daughter of the king is cast adrift at sea in a rudderless boat. Collier suggests that this was changed in The Winter's Tale because in The Tempest the same incident had already been used in the case of Prospero and Miranda. The two plays are undoubtedly of nearly the same date, but, as Gervinus observes, this alteration in the story does not prove that The Tempest was written first, but only indicates that the plan of both pieces was sketched at the same time.

We need hardly add that the poet's indebtedness to the novelist, as in so many other cases of the kind, is really insignificant. "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 merits of Shakespeare. In characterization of personages the tale is notably coarse and commonplace, 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 splendour of the plant that has been trained upon it" (White).

III. CRITICAL COMMENTS ON THE PLAY.

[From Ulrici's "Shakspeare's Dramatic Art."*]

The general foundation and plan of the whole-the jealousy of Leontes, the seclusion of the Queen and the repentance of her husband, the young Prince's love for the exceedingly beautiful shepherdess, etc.-although unusual, are nevertheless in accordance with reality; the characters, also, are consistently developed, without sudden changes and psychological improbabilities. Individual features, however, are all the more fantastic. We have here the full sway of accident and caprice in the concatenation of events, circumstances, and relations; every thing is removed from common experience. Not only is Delphos spoken of as an island. and Bohemia as a maritime country (local reality, therefore, disregarded), but the reality of time also is completely set aside, inasmuch as the Delphic oracle is made to exist contemporaneously with Russian emperors and the great painter Julio Romano; in fact, the heroic age and the times of chivalry, the ancient customs of mythical religion, and

*Shakspeare's Dramatic Art, by Dr. Hermann Ulrici; translated from the third German ed. by L. D. Schmitz (London, 1876), vol. ii. p. 30 fol.

Christianity with its institutions are brought together sans cérémonie. It is a matter of accident that the death of the Crown Prince is announced simultaneously with the utterance of the oracle, and that the condition of the Queen appears like actual death. It is purely an accident that the babe is saved at the very moment that the nobleman who exposed it is torn to pieces by a bear, and that his ship, with all on board, is lost, so that no tidings could be carried back to Sicilia. It is mere accident that the young Prince of Bohemia strays into woods, and meets the shepherds with whom the Princess is living. In the end similar freaks of chance repair the results of the first accidents, bring all the dramatic personages together in Sicilia, put every thing into its proper order, and bring about a happy conclusion. As, therefore, the unreal, the fantastic, is here expressed in individual features rather than in the general fundamental relations of the play, so it is also more the interaction of external matters of chance that governs the whole and solves the contradiction of opinions and intentions, of deeds and events; thus, in spite of all the apparent impossibilities, that which is rational and right is ultimately brought about.

It is just this sovereignty of eternal contingency, however, that gives the play the character of a tale and its title. For pure contingency-in its outward, objective form, which, as such, interrupts the order of nature, the given disposition of time and space, the causal connection of things, and comes in between like a foreign element-stands in the closest affinity to the idea of the marvellous. A tale or fairy tale, however, does not, as might be supposed, assume the wonderful merely as a form or outward dress; the wonderful is rather an essential element in it, because it is itself essentially based upon the mystic view of things, which looks upon life only as the outward form of a deep, unrevealable mystery, to which every thing, therefore, appears an inexplicable wonder. Accordingly, that which in common life—in our

ignorance of its cause and necessity-we call chance, is made the ruling principle of the tale or fairy tale, and, in order that the principle, as such, may also be clearly and distinctly brought forward, it presents itself in strange, arbitrary, and fantastic shapes, in outward forms opposed to common reality. What is fairy-tale-like in character is, on this very account, a legitimate ingredient in the comic view of life, but only in the comic view; a tragic fairy tale would be a poetical monstrosity.* In The Winter's Tale, however, Shakspeare has not opened up the whole region of the marvellous; he has described the wonderful, not so much in its outer form as in its ideal nature and character. In fact, it exists here only in the incomprehensibility of outward contingency and the mysterious connection of the latter with the actions and fortunes of the dramatic characters. By thus modifying the idea Shakspeare has brought the whole nearer to the common reality of life, and enhances the effect by the greater illusion, for, in fact, a tale gains in poetic beauty when the representation of the marvellous is introduced noiselessly, as if it were the most ordinary of occurrences.

Shakspeare has here again, I think, intimated by the title of his play in what sense he took up and worked upon Greene's romance. He could hardly have intended merely to dramatize a traditional tale; the play is not called “A Winter's Tale," but "The Winter's Tale." The poet's intention here was again, as it were, to hold the mirror up to nature, to show the body of the time its pressure. In other words, he wished to show that from a certain point of view life itself appears like a strange, cheerful, and yet eerie winter's tale-a tale told to a circle of poetically disposed listeners gathered round the flickering fireside of a peaceful, happy home, on a raw winter's night, by a master in the art of story-telling, while the atmosphere of the warm, secure,

* Accordingly the alterations which Shakspeare made in Greene's novel were artistically necessary.