"These lines," says Chalmers, "were called forth by the occasion of the conspiracy of Essex." "No," says Malone, "these lines could never have been intended for the ear of her who had deprived the Queen of Scots of her life. To the son of Mary they could not but have been agreeable." Upon this ground he assigned the comedy to 1604. There is a third critic, of much higher acuteness than the greater number of those who have given us speculations on the chronology of Shakspere's plays,—we mean Horace Walpole, whose conjecture is so ingenious and amusing that we copy it without abridgment :

"The Winter's Tale may be ranked among the historic plays of Shakspere, though not one of his numerous critics and commentators have discovered the drift of it. It was certainly intended (in compliment to Queen Elizabeth) as an indirect apology for her mother, Anne Boleyn. The address of the poet appears nowhere to more advantage. The subject was too delicate to be exhibited on the stage without a veil; and it was too recent, and touched the queen too nearly, for the bard to have ventured so home an allusion on any other ground than compliment. The unreasonable jealousy of Leontes, and his violent conduct in consequence, form a true portrait of Henry VIII., who generally made the law the engine of his boisterous passions. Not only the general plan of the story is most applicable, but several passages are so marked that they touch the real history nearer than the fable. Hermione, on her trial, says,

For honour,

'Tis a derivative from me to mine,
And only that I stand for.'

"This seems to be taken from the very letter of Anne Boleyn to the king before her execution, where she pleads for the infant princess his daughter. Mamillius, the young prince, an unnecessary character, dies in his infancy; but it confirms the allusion, as Queen Anne, before Elizabeth, bore a still-born son. But the most striking passage, and which had nothing to do in the tragedy but as it pictured Elizabeth, is where Paulina, describing the new-born princess, and her likeness to her father, says, ' She has the very trick of his frown.' There is one sentence, indeed, so applicable, both to Elizabeth and her father, that I should suspect the poet inserted it after her death. Paulina, speaking of the child, tells the king

'Tis yours;

And might we lay the old proverb to your charge,
So like you, 't is the worse.'

The Winter's Tale was therefore in reality a second part of Henry VIII."

Plausible as this may appear, the conjecture falls to the ground when we consider that Shakspere adopted all that part of the plot of this comedy which relates to the " unreasonable jealousy of Leontes" from a novel, of which we have an edition as early as 1588. Robert Greene, the author of 'Pandosto,' could scarcely have intended his story as "a compliment to Queen Elizabeth" and a "true portrait of Henry VIII.," for he makes the jealous king of his novel terminate his career with suicide. In truth, as we have repeatedly inferred, questions such as this are very pretty conundrums, and worthy to be cherished as the amusement of elderly gentlemen who have outlived their relish for early sports, and leave to others who are less careful of their dignity to

"Play at push-pin with the boys."

Beyond this they are for the most part worthless.

In the absence of any satisfactory internal evidence of the date of this comedy, beyond that furnished by the general character of the language and versification, it was at length pointed out by Malone that an entry in the office-book of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels in 1623, mentions "an old play called Winter's Tale, formerly allowed of by Sir George Bucke and likewise by me." Sir George Bucke first exercised the office of Master of the Revels in 1610. The play, therefore, could not have been earlier than this year; and Mr. Collier has produced conclusive evidence that it was acted in 1611. In our Introductory Notice to Richard II. mention will be found of “ a book of plays, and notes thereof, for common policy " kept by Dr. Symon Forman, and discovered some few years ago in the Bodleian Library. Forman saw the Winter's Tale acted on the 15th of May, 1611, at Shakspere's theatre, the Globe. It was most probably then a new play; for he is very minute in his description of the plot.

"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 cupbearer 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, &c., 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, it was that child, and by the jewels found about her she was known to be Leontes' daughter, and was then sixteen years old.

And how

"Remember, also, the rogue that came in all tattered, like Coll Pipin, 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. be changed apparel with the King of Bohemia's son, and then how he turned courtier, &c. "Beware of trusting feigned beggars or fawning fellows."

SUPPOSED SOURCE OF THE PLOT.

THE novel of Robert Greene, called ' Pandosto,' and The History of Dorastus and Fawnia,' which Shakspere undoubtedly followed, with very few important deviations, in the construction of the plot of his Winter's Tale, is a small book, occupying fifty-nine pages in the reprint lately published, with an Introductory Notice by Mr. Collier. It was a work of extraordinary popularity, there being fourteen editions known to exist. Of the nature of Shakspere's obligations to this work, Mr.

"Robert Greene was a man who possessed all the advantages of education: he was a graduate of both Universities-he was skilled in ancient learning and in modern languages-he had, besides, a prolific imagination, a lively and elegant fancy, and a grace of expression rarely exceeded; yet, let any person well acquainted with The Winter's Tale read the novel of 'Pandosto,' upon which it was founded, and he will be struck at once with the vast pre-eminence of Shakespeare, and with the admirable manner in which he has converted materials supplied by another to his own use. The bare outline of the story (with the exception of Shakespeare's miraculous conclusion) is nearly the same in both; but this is all they have in common, and Shakespeare may be said to have scarcely adopted a single hint for his descriptions, or a line for his dialogue; while in point of passion and sentiment Greene is cold, formal, and artificial-the very opposite of everything in Shakespeare."

Without wearying the reader with any very extensive comparisons of the novel and the drama, we shall run through the production of Greene, to which our great poet has incidentally imparted a real interest; and in doing so we shall take occasion so to analyse the action and characterisation of the Winter's Tale as to supersede the necessity for a Supplementary Notice.

"In the country of Bohemia," says the novel, "there reigned a king called Pandosto." The Leontes of Shakspere is the Pandosto of Greene. The Polixenes of the play is Egistus in the novel:

"It so happened that Egistus, King of Sicilia, who in his youth had been brought up with Pandosto, desirous to show that neither tract of time nor distance of place could diminish their former friendship, provided a navy of ships, and sailed into Bohemia to visit his old friend and companion."

Here, then, we have the scene of the action reversed. The jealous king is of Bohemia,-his injured friend of Sicilia. But the visitor sails into Bohemia. We have noticed this point under the head Costume, and shall be content to refer the reader to what we have there said. The wife of Pandosto is Bellaria; and they have a young son called Garinter. Pandosto becomes jealous, alowly, and by degrees; and there is at least some want of caution in the queen to justify it :"Bellaria noting in Egistus a princely and bountiful mind, adorned with sundry and excellent qualities, and Egistus finding in her a virtuous and courteous disposition, there grew such a secret uniting of their affections, that the one could not well be without the company of the other."

The great author of Othello would not deal with jealousy after this fashion. He had already produced that immortal portrait

"Of one, not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplex'd in the extreme.'

He had now to exhibit the distractions of a mind to which jealousy was native; to depict the terrible access of passion, uprooting in a moment all deliberation, all reason, all gentleness. The instant the idea enters the mind of Leontes the passion is at its height::

"I have tremor cordis on me :-my heart dances."

Very different is the jealous king of Greene :

"These and such-like doubtful thoughts, a long time smothering in his stomach, began at last to kindle in his mind a secret mistrust, which, increased by suspicion, grew at last to a flaming jealousy that so tormented him as he could take no rest."

Coleridge has described the jealousy of Leontes with incomparable truth of analysis:

"The idea of this delightful drama is a genuine jealousy of disposition, and it should be immediately followed by the perusal of Othello, which is the direct contrast of it in every particular. For jealousy is a vice of the mind, a culpable tendency of the temper, having certain well-known and well-defined effects and concomitants, all of which are visible in Leontes, and, I boldly say, not one of which marks its presence in Othello;-such as, first, an excitability by the most inadequate causes, and an eagerness to snatch at proofs; secondly, a grossness of conception, and a disposition to degrade the object of the passion by sensual fancies and images; thirdly, a sense of shame of his own feelings exhibited in a solitary moodiness of humour, and yet, from the violence of the passion, forced to utter itself, and therefore catching occasions to ease the mind by ambiguities, equivoques, by talking to those who cannot, and who are known not to be able to, understand what is said to them,-in short, by soliloquy in the form of dialogue, and hence a confused, broken, and fragmentary manner; fourthly, a dread of vulgar ridicule, as distinct from a high sense of honour, or a mistaken sense of duty; and lastly, and immediately consequent on this, a spirit of selfish vindictiveness."*

The action of the novel and that of the drama continue in a pretty equal course. Pandosto tampers with his cupbearer, Franion, to poison Egistus; and the cupbearer, terrified at the fearful commission, reveals the design to the object of his master's hatred. Eventually they escape together:

"Egistus, fearing that delay might breed danger, and willing that the grass should not be cut from under his feet, taking bag and baggage, by the help of Franion conveyed himself and his men out at a postern gate of the city, so secretly and speedily, that without any suspicion they got to the sea-shore; where, with many a bitter curse taking their leave of Bohemia, they went aboard."

Bellaria is committed to prison, where she gives birth to a daughter. The guard

"carried the child to the king, who, quite devoid of pity, commanded that without delay it should be put in the boat, having neither sail nor rudder to guide it, and so to be carried into the midst of the sea, and there left to the wind and wave as the destinies please to appoint."

The queen appeals to the oracle of Apollo; and certain lords are sent to Delphos, where they

receive this decree:

SUSPICION IS NO PROOF: JEALOUSY IS AN UNEQUAL JUDGE:
FRANION A TRUE SUBJECT; PANDOSTO TREACHEROUS: HIS

OUT AN HEIR, IF THAT WHICH IS LOST BE NOT FOUND.

BELLARIA IS CHASTE; EGISTUS BLAMELESS: BABE INNOCENT, AND THE KING SHALL LIVE WITH

On their return, upon an appointed day, the queen was "brought in before the judgment-seat." Shakspere has followed a part of the tragical ending of this scene; but he preserves his injured Hermione, to be reunited to her daughter after years of solitude and suffering.

"Bellaria had no sooner said but the king commanded that one of his dukes should read the contents of the scroll, which, after the commons had heard, they gave a great shout, rejoicing and clapping their hands that the queen was clear of that false accusation. But the king, whose conscience was a witness against him of his witless fury and false suspected jealousy, was so ashamed of his rash folly that he entreated his

Literary Remains,' vol. ii,

nobles to persuade Bellaria to forgive and forget these injuries; promising not only to show himself a loyal and loving husband, but also to reconcile himself to Egistus and Franion: revealing then before them all the cause of their secret flight, and how treacherously he thought to have practised his death, if the good mind of his cupbearer had not prevented his purpose. As thus he was relating the whole matter, there was word brought him that his young son Garinter was suddenly dead, which news so soon as Bellaria beard, surcharged before with extreme joy and now suppressed with heavy sorrow, her vital spirits were so stopped that she fell down presently dead, and could never be revived."

Greene mentions only the existence and the death of the king's son. The dramatic exhibition of Mamillius by Shakspere is amongst the most charming of his sketches. The affection of the father for his boy in the midst of his distraction, and the tenderness of the poor child, to whom his father's ravings are unintelligible

"I am like you, they say,"

are touches of nature such as only one man has produced. How must he have studied the inmost character of childhood to have given us the delicious little scene of the second act:

It requires the subsequent charm of a Perdita to put that poor boy out of our thoughts.
The story of the preservation of the deserted infant is prettily told in the novel :—

"It fortuned a poor mercenary shepherd that dwelt in Sicilia, who got his living by other men's flocks, missed one of his sheep, and thinking it had strayed into the covert that was hard by, sought very diligently to find that which he could not see, fearing either that the wolves or eagles had undone him (for he was so poor as a sheep was half his substance), wandered down towards the sea-cliffs to see if perchance the sheep was browsing on the sea-ivy, whereon they greatly do feed; but not finding her there, as he was ready to return to his flock he heard a child cry, but, knowing there was no house near, he thought he had mistaken the sound, and that it was the bleating of his sheep. Wherefore looking more narrowly, as he cast his eye to the sea he spied a little boat, from whence, as he attentively listened, he might hear the cry to come. Standing a good while in amaze, at last he went to the shore, and, wading to the boat, as he looked in he saw the little babe lying all alone ready to die for hunger and cold, wrapped in a mantle of scarlet richly embroidered with gold, and having a chain about the neck."

Although the circumstances of the child's exposure are different, Shakspere adopts the shepherd's discovery pretty literally. He even makes him about to seek his sheep by the sea-side, "browsing on the sea-ivy." The infant in the novel is taken to the shepherd's home, and is brought up by his wife and himself under the name of Fawnia. In a narrative the lapse of sixteen years may occur without any violation of propriety. The shepherd of Greene, every night at his coming home, would sing to the child and dance it on his knee; then, a few lines onward, the little Fawnia is seven years old; and, very shortly,

"when she came to the age of sixteen years she so increased with exquisite perfection both of body and mind, as her natural disposition did bewray that she was born of some high parentage."

These changes, we see, are gradual. But in a drama, whose action depends upon a manifest lapse of time, there must be a sudden transition. Shakspere is perfectly aware of the difficulty; and he diminishes it by the introduction of Time as a Chorus :

"Impute it not a crime

To me, or my swift passage, that I slide

O'er sixteen years, and leave the growth untried
Of that wide gap; since it is in my power

To o'erthrow law, and in one self-born hour
To plant and o'erwhelm custom."

Lyly, without such an apology, gives us a lapse of forty years in his 'Endymion.' Dryden and Pope depreciated the Winter's Tale; and no doubt this violation of the unity of time was one of the causes which blinded them to its exquisite beauties. But Dr. Johnson, without any special notice of the case before us, has made a triumphant defence, against the French critics, of Shakspere's general disregard of the unities of time and place:

By supposition, as place is introduced, time may be extended; the time required by the fable elapses for the most part between the acts; for, of so much of the action as is represented, the real and poetical duration is the same. If, in the first act, preparations for war against Mithridates are represented to be made in Rome, the event of the war may, without absurdity, be represented in the catastrophe as happening in Pontus. We know that there is neither war nor preparation for war; we know that we are neither in Rome nor Pontus,-that neither Mithridates nor Lucullus are before us. The drama exhibits successive imitations of successive actions, and why may not the second imitation represent an action that happened years after the first, if it be so connected with it that nothing but time can be supposed to intervene ! Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination; a lapse of years is as easily conceived as a passage of hours. In contemplation we easily contract the time of real actions, and therefore willingly permit it to be contracted when we only see their imitation."*

Shakspere has exhibited his consummate art in opening the fourth act with Polixenes and Camillo, of whom we have lost sight since the end of the first. Had it been otherwise,—had he brought Autolycus, and Florizel, and Perdita, at once upon the scene,-the continuity of action would have been destroyed; and the commencement of the fourth act would have appeared as the commencement of a new play. Shakspere made the difficulties of his plot bend to his art; instead of wanting art, as Ben Jonson says. Autolycus and the Clown prepare us for Perdita; and when the third scene opens, what a beautiful vision lights upon this earth! There perhaps never was such a union of perfect simplicity and perfect grace as in the character of Perdita. What an exquisite idea of her mere personal appearance is presented in Florizel's rapturous exclamation,—

"When you do dance, I wish you

A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that!"

Greene, in describing the beauties of his shepherdess, deals only in generalities:

"It happened not long after this that there was a meeting of all the farmers' daughters in Sicilia, whither Fawnia was also bidden as the mistress of the feast, who, having attired herself in her best garments, went among the rest of her companions to the merry meeting, there spending the day in such homely pastimes as shepherds use. As the evening grew on and their sports ceased, each taking their leave at other, Fawnia, desiring one of her companions to bear her company, went home by the flock to see if they were well folded; and, as they returned, it fortuned that Dorastus (who all that day had been hawking, and killed store of game) encountered by the way these two maids, and, casting his eye suddenly on Fawnia, he was half afraid, fearing that with Acteon he had seen Diana, for he thought such exquisite perfection could not be found in any mortal creature. As thus he stood in amaze, one of his pages told him that the maid with the garland on her head was Fawnia, the fair shepherd whose beauty was so much talked of in the court. Dorastus, desirous to see if nature had adorned her mind with any inward quali ties, as she had decked her body with outward shape, began to question with her whose daughter she was, of what age, and how she had been trained up? who answered him with such modest reverence and sharpness of wit, that Dorastus thought her outward beauty was but a counterfeit to darken her inward qualities, wondering how so courtly behaviour could be found in so simple a cottage, and cursing fortune that had shadowed wit and beauty with such hard fortune."

But Greene was unequal to conceive the grace of mind which distinguishes Perdita :

*Preface to his edition of 1765.