THE SOURCE-MATERIAL of The Winter’s Tale forms a great contrast to that of Cymbeline. Instead of going to six different works Shakespeare relied very largely on Greene’s romance, Pandosto, published in 1588.1
Greene devotes some pages to an explanation of Pandosto’s jealousy. His wife, Bellaria, often went into Egistus’ bed-chamber
to see that nothing should be amis to mislike him. This honest familiarity increased dayly more and more betwixt them: for Bellaria, noting in Egistus a princely and bountifull minde, adorned with sundrie and excellent qualities, and Egistus finding in her a vertuous and curteous disposition, there grew such a secret vniting of their affections, that the one could not well be without the company of the other.
Pandosto, not unnaturally, became jealous. Shakespeare gives Leontes no such excuse. The scene can be played with Leontes jealous from the start, or becoming jealous at l. 108 on the words ‘Too hot, too hot!’ The latter way, with its sudden destruction of love and friendship, is the one that Shakespeare probably intended; but we should remember that Hermione is visibly pregnant, that Polixenes’ first line mentions a nine-month stay in Sicilia, and that at this point the audience ‘cannot fail to wonder whether the man so amicably addressing this expectant mother may not be the father of her child’.2 It has been well said that Leontes is his own Iago3 and it was this that made Shaw regard the depiction of jealousy in this play as more realistic than that in Othello.4
Shakespeare follows the earlier part of his source fairly closely. Greene describes how when the guard was sent to arrest Bellaria, ‘they found her playing with her yong sonne’. On this hint Shakespeare constructed the scene in which Mamillius begins his interrupted tale; but Leontes himself, not merely the guard, comes in to order Hermione’s arrest.
In the novel it is Bellaria who appeals to the oracle; the contents, already known to the reader, are read out at the trial; Pandosto immediately recognizes its truth and forthwith repents; word is brought of the death of his son; and Bellaria is killed by the news. This order of events is quite satisfactory in a prose narrative, but it lacks dramatic tension. Shakespeare must have realized that it would spoil the trial-scene, in which Hermione appeals to the oracle, if she were allowed to make the appeal in a previous scene; so he makes Leontes himself decide to send a deputation to Apollo’s temple at Delphos, not to confirm his suspicions, but rather to satisfy other people. The substance of the oracle is not known to anyone, nor revealed to the audience, till it is read out at the trial. The King, instead of accepting it, declares that it is false. News is then brought that Mamillius has died, and we assume, as Leontes himself does, that this is a punishment for his blasphemy against Apollo. Hermione faints, and Paulina brings word that she is dead. Bellaria has indeed died; but Hermione, unknown to Leontes, or to the audience, recovers. This is almost the only occasion when Shakespeare conceals from the audience an essential fact. Paulina swears that Hermione is dead; Leontes says later that he viewed the bodies of wife and son; and Antigonus’ dream, in which it appears that the spirit of Hermione chooses a name for her daughter, and prophesies the death of Antigonus, all these things reinforce the conviction that Hermione has died. For the audience to share in Leontes’ feelings in the last scene of the play, it was necessary for Shakespeare to indulge in unprecedented obfuscation.
The only substantial borrowing of the actual words of Greene’s novel is of Bellaria’s speech at her trial:
If the deuine powers be priuy to humane actions (as no doubt they are) I hope my patience shall make fortune blushe, and my vnspotted life shall staine spightfull discredit. For although lying Report hath sought to appeach mine honor, and Suspition hath intended to soyle my credit with infamie: yet where Vertue keepeth the Forte, Report and suspition may assayle, but neuer sack: how I haue led my life before Egistus comming, I appeale Pandosto to the Gods, and to thy conscience. What haue passed betwixt him and me, the Gods onely know, and I hope will presently reueale: that I loued Egistus I can not denie, that I honored him I shame not to confesse: to the one I was forced by his vertues: to the other for his dignities. But as touching lasciuious lust, I say Egistus is honest, and hope my selfe to be found without spot: for Franion, I can neither accuse him, nor excuse him: for I was not priuie to his departure, and that this is true which I haue heere rehearsed, I referre my selfe to the deuine Oracle.
(Bullough, VIII. 170–1)
Shakespeare uses nearly all this speech, though he breaks it up with interruptions by Leontes:
Her. Since what I am to say must be but that
Which contradicts my accusation, and
The testimony on my part no other
But what comes from myself, it shall scarce boot me
To say ‘Not guilty’. Mine integrity
Being counted falsehood shall, as I express it,
Be so receiv’d. But thus – if pow’rs divine
Behold our human actions, as they do,
I doubt not then but innocence shall make
False accusation blush, and tyranny
Tremble at patience. You, my lord, best know –
Who least will seem to do so – my past life
Hath been as continent, as chaste, as true,
As I am now unhappy; which is more
Than history can pattern, though devis’d
And play’d to take spectators; for behold me –
A fellow of the royal bed, which owe
A moiety of the throne, a great king’s daughter,
The mother to a hopeful prince – here standing
To prate and talk for life and honour ’fore
Who please to come and hear. For life, I prize it
As I weigh grief, which I would spare; for honour,
’Tis a derivative from me to mine,
And only that I stand for. I appeal
To your own conscience, sir, before Polixenes
Came to your court, how I was in your grace,
How merited to be so; since he came,
With what encounter so uncurrent I
Have strain’d t’appear thus; if one jot beyond
The bound of honour, or in act or will
That way inclining, hard’ned be the hearts
Of all that hear me, and my near’st of kin
Cry fie upon my grave!
Leon. I ne’er heard yet
That any of these bolder vices wanted
Less impudence to gainsay what they did
Than to perform it first.
Her. That’s true enough;
Though ’tis a saying, sir, not due to me.
Leon. You will not own it.
Her. More than mistress of
Which comes to me in name of fault, I must not
At all acknowledge. For Polixenes,
With whom I am accus’d, I do confess
I lov’d him as in honour he requir’d;
With such a kind of love as might become
A lady like me; with a love even such
So and no other, as yourself commanded;
Which not to have done, I think had been in me
Both disobedience and ingratitude
To you and toward your friend; whose love had spoke
Even since it could speak, from an infant, freely,
That it was yours. Now for conspiracy;
I know not how it tastes, though it be dish’d
For me to try how; all I know of it
Is that Camillo was an honest man;
And why he left your court, the gods themselves,
Wotting no more than I, are ignorant.
Leon. You knew of his departure, as you know
What you have underta’en to do in’s absence.
Her. Sir,
You speak a language that I understand not.
My life stands in the level of your dreams,
Which I’ll lay down.
Leon. Your actions are my dreams.
You had a bastard by Polixenes,
And I but dream’d it. As you were past all shame –
Those of your fact are so – so past all truth;
Which to deny concerns more than avails; for as
Thy brat hath been cast out, like to itself,
No father owning it – which is indeed
More criminal in thee than it – so thou
Shalt feel our justice; in whose easiest passage
Look for no less than death.
Her. Sir, spare your threats.
The bug which you would fright me with I seek.
To me can life be no commodity.
The crown and comfort of my life, your favour,
I do give lost, for I do feel it gone,
But know not how it went; my second joy
And first fruits of my body, from his presence
I am barr’d, like one infectious; my third comfort,
Starr’d most unluckily, is from my breast –
The innocent milk in it most innocent mouth –
Hal’d out to murder; myself on every post
Proclaim’d a strumpet; with immodest hatred
The child-bed privilege denied, which ’longs
To women of all fashion; lastly, hurried
Here to this place, i’th’open air, before
I have got strength of limit. Now, my liege,
Tell me what blessings I have here alive
That I should fear to die. Therefore proceed.
But yet hear this – mistake me not: no life,
I prize it not a straw, but for mine honour
Which I would free – if I shall be condemn’d
Upon surmises, all proofs sleeping else
But what your jealousies awake, I tell you
’Tis rigour, and not law. Your honours all,
I do refer me to the oracle:
Apollo be my judge!
(III. ii. 20–114)
Into the framework of Bellaria’s speech Shakespeare has inserted points from other pages of Greene’s novel. Hermione’s claim that her past life had been continent, chaste, and true, her statement that to condemn her without proof was rigour and not law, her complaint that she had been proclaimed a strumpet, are all taken from previous pages of Pandosto.5 So, too, is Leontes’ statement that those guilty of certain vices have impudence enough to deny them. Hermione’s statement that she was the daughter of the Emperor of Russia was suggested by Greene’s mention of the fact that Egistus had married the Emperor of Russia’s daughter.
In Greene’s story the baby, Fawnia, is turned adrift in a boat:
He caused a little cock-boate to be prouided, wherein he meant to put the babe, and then send it to the mercie of the seas, and the destinies…. The gard … carried the child to the King, who, quite deuoide of pity, commanded that without delay it should bee put in the boat, hauing neither saile nor rudder to guid it, and so to bee carried into the midst of the sea, and there left to the wind and waue as the destinies please to appoint.
(Bullough, VIII. 166–7)
The baby is carried alone to the coast of Sicily, but Shakespeare, making Leontes King of Sicilia, causes Antigonus to take Perdita to some remote and desert place – in fact, as it turns out, on the coast of Bohemia of which country Polixenes is king. Shakespeare must have felt that it would be hard for an audience to credit that a newly-born infant would survive under such circumstances; but he remembered the passage about the little cock-boat when he described in The Tempest the vessel which carried Prospero and his infant daughter to the enchanted island:
A rotten carcass of a butt, not rigg’d,
Nor tackle, sail, nor mast.
Not that Shakespeare was unaware of the absurdities of his plot; but he prepared his audience for them by laughing at them himself. The disposal of Antigonus, devoured by a bear, is described in absurd terms by the Clown. As S. L. Bethell pointed out, Shakespeare was deliberately using an antiquated technique.6 The antiquity of the story is ‘pressed home by the employment of out-moded technique’. By the use of exaggerated conventions and by continual reminders that the play is a play – ‘like an old tale’, as we are told more than once – Shakespeare forbids absorption in the action so that we can ‘observe the subtle interplay of a whole world of interrelated ideas’. Bethell also suggested that the antiquated technique is ‘not only a means of commanding a special sort of attention, but is also in itself a statement about the nature of reality’. However that may be, we are not meant to be particularly perturbed by the fatal exit of Antigonus. ‘Gentlemen usually dine upon animals’, Bethell remarked, ‘but now the bear will dine upon the gentleman’.7 The description of the bear’s dinner, interspersed with ludicrous references to the shipwreck, marks the point in the play where tragedy is metamorphosed into comedy: it is the hinge dividing the two panels of a diptych.8
Bethell also suggested that Shakespeare was fully aware that Bohemia lacked a coastline, for there were contemporary jokes on the subject and at this very time Princess Elizabeth was marrying its ruler. Sterne’s famous chapter in Tristram Shandy should prevent us from considering the matter too curiously,9 but it may be worth mentioning that in Emmanuel Forde’s Famous and Pleasant History of Parismus, the valiant and renowned Prince ofBohemia (1597), the coast of Bohemia is mentioned; and Part 2, entitled Parismenos (1599), opens with an attack by a bear on the heroine, Violetta.10 It has been suggested, too,11 that Shakespeare may have located the first part of the play in Sicily because Ceres, like Hermione, was queen of that island, and he wished to reinforce the Perdita-Persephone parallel implicit throughout the play.
Greene describes the finding of Fawnia in words closely echoed by Shakespeare:12
It fortuned a poore mercenary Sheepheard … missed one of his sheepe, and thinking it had strayed into the couert, that was hard by, sought very diligently to find that which he could not see, fearing either that the Wolues, or Eagles had vndone him … wandered downe toward the Sea cliffes, to see if perchaunce the sheepe was browsing on the sea Iuy, whereon they greatly doe feede.
(Bullough, VII. 173)
They have scared away two of my best sheep, which I fear the wolf will sooner find than the master: if anywhere I have them, ’tis by the sea-side, browsing of ivy.
(III. iii. 66–70)
Greene mentions a proposal to wed Dorastus (Florizel) to the daughter of the King of Denmark.13 Shakespeare omits this as irrelevant to his purpose. The sheep-shearing feast, of which Fawnia is the mistress, is mentioned in Pandosto, but it takes place before her meeting with Dorastus. By presenting the lovers at the feast, by introducing Polixenes and Camillo in disguise, and by confronting Florizel with his father, Shakespeare greatly increases the dramatic effectiveness of the story. Here he may have taken a hint from John Day’s Humour Out of Breath in which there is a disguised father interrupting the wedding of his sons.14
In Pandosto the cup-bearer who had helped Egistus to escape has faded from the story, and Dorastus and Fawnia reach Bohemia by another accident. In the play, Camillo’s desire to return to his native land provides a plausible motive for his help of the lovers. In Pandosto the old shepherd, going to the palace to inform the King of the circumstances of his discovery of Fawnia, is kidnapped and taken to Bohemia with the lovers: in the play, the shepherd and his son are lured to the ship by Autolycus, and Camillo informs the King of the lovers’ escape.
In the novel, the fugitives are arrested as spies; and Pandosto, falling in love with his own daughter, promises to free Dorastus if she will yield to him. In the play, on the other hand, Leontes receives the lovers with courtesy and affection and promises to be their advocate with Polixenes. Shakespeare would probably have avoided the incest motive in any case,15 but nothing could better show his obsession with forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration than the way in which he transforms the ending of the story. Pandosto commits suicide; Leontes is reunited with Hermione.
It has been suggested that Hermione’s resurrection may have been derived at some remove from the story of Alcestis or from that of Pygmalion. Both are given in Pettie’s Palace of Pleasure; Marston had given a somewhat pornographic version of the Pygmalion story; and it is to be found in the Metamorphoses. There are other possibilities. The statue-scene may have been influenced by Amadis de Gaule in which there are living statues and characters called Florisel and Perdida;16 and in The Tryall of Chevalry (1605), Ferdinand, supposed dead, poses as his own statue.17 Possibly the ‘resurrection’ is a blending of one of these with some variant of the Sleeping Beauty. Professor Glynne Wickham has shown that, as the scene was staged, Hermione would resemble a painted effigy on an Elizabethan tomb.18
A number of critics have shown how greatly Shakespeare improved on the loose texture of Greene’s novel.19 By his alterations he was able to bring together all the main characters in the last scene of the play. Polixenes’ pursuit of the lovers enables him to be reconciled with Leontes, and Leontes with Hermione, and Perdita to be restored to her parents. In the novel, much more clumsily, after Pandosto’s recognition of Fawnia, they all have to embark to pay Egistus a visit. Some critics, indeed, from Johnson onwards, have reproached Shakespeare for not showing on the stage the recognition of Perdita by her father; but Shakespeare, having recently dramatized a similar scene in Pericles, decided rightly that our interest ought to be concentrated on the reunion of Hermione and Leontes.20 Moreover, as Nevill Coghill maintained, the report of the recognition of Perdita is invariably successful in the theatre.21 Other critics have complained of the theatricality and unreality of the statue-scene; but it has always been successful on the stage, whether played by Mrs Siddons, Helen Faucit, Lillah McCarthy, or Diana Wynyard.22
Apart from those passages in the play which could only have been written by Shakespeare with Pandosto open on his desk, there are others where he seems to have echoed Greene unconsciously, for the echoes occur in quite different contexts. When, for example, Paulina attacks the courtiers for being yes-men23 –
’Tis such as you,
That creep like shadows by him, and do sigh
At each his needless heavings – such as you
Nourish the cause of his awaking –
(II. iii. 33–6)
Shakespeare borrowed a phrase from a description of the effect of Bellaria’s death on the common people: ‘They went like shadowes, not men’. And when Leontes decides that it is impossible to keep women chaste –
Be it concluded,
No barricado for a belly. Know’t,
It will let in and out the enemy
With bag and baggage –
(I. ii. 203–6)
he takes a phrase which describes the sudden flight of Egistus:24
For Egistus fearing that delay might breede daunger … taking bagge and baggage, with the helpe of Franion, conueied himself and his men out of a posterne gate of the Citie.
There is one interesting example of a fusion of two sources. Dorastus soliloquizes in Pandosto:25
And yet Dorastus shame not at thy shepheards weeds: the heauenly Godes haue sometime earthly thoughtes: Neptune became a Ram, Iupiter a Bul, Apollo a shepheard: they Gods, and yet in loue: and thou a man appointed to loue.
The corresponding speech in Francis Sabie’s poem, The Fisshermans Tale (1595), based on Pandosto, runs as follows:26
Loue conquers all things: it hath conquered
Apollo once, it made him be a swaine.
Yea mightie Mars in armes inuincible,
It forced hath to lay aside his speare,
Loue made the sea-god take a Wesils shape,
Yea mightie Ioue, whose rage makes earth to shake,
Loue made to take the snow-white shape of Bull.
The two versions coalesced in Shakespeare’s lines:
The gods themselves,
Humbling their deities to love, have taken
The shapes of beasts upon them: Jupiter
Became a bull, and bellow’d; the green Neptune
A ram, and bleated; and the fire-rob’d god,
Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain,
As I seem now.
(IV. iv. 25–31)
The words are spoken not in soliloquy, but to Perdita; and they are made much more vivid than either of the sources by the epithets (‘green’, ‘fire-robed’, ‘golden’) and still more by the realism of the verbs (‘bellowed’ and ‘bleated’). Florizel, unlike Dorastus, is humorous rather than condescending.
The scenes in Bohemia are prevented from being pastorally sentimental by the invention of Autolycus, ‘the snapper up of unconsidered trifles’, who might have stepped out of one of the pamphlets of Harman, Greene, or Dekker, exposing the iniquities of the criminal underworld. Several of his tricks do in fact come from Greene’s coney-catching pamphlets, written nearly twenty years previously. Greene mentions that the singing of ballads
is nothing els but a sly fetch to draw many togeather, who listning vnto a harmelesse dittie, after warde walke home to their houses with heauie hearts.
He gives an example of how two rogues27
got vpon a stal singing of balets which belike was some prety toy, for very many gathered about to heare it, and diuers buying, as their affections serued, drew to their purses and paid the singers for them… Counterfeit warning was sundrie times giuen by the rogue and his associate, to beware of the cut pursse, and looke to their pursses, which made them often feel where their pursses were, either in sleeue, hose, or at girdle, to know whether they were safe or no. Thus the craftie copesmates were acquainted with what they most desired, and as they were scattered, by shouldring, thrusting, feigning to let fall something, and other wilie tricks fit for their purpose: heere one lost his purse, there another had his pocket pickt…
Another of the pamphlets describes two more of Autolycus’ tricks – the stealing of linen28 and the robbing of the shepherd’s son.29 In this episode Shakespeare may have remembered the parable of the Good Samaritan.30 Greene’s account of the qualities necessary for the successful pickpocket seem to be echoed by Shakespeare’s rogue.31 The one moral Forman extracted from the play was ‘Beware of trustinge feined beggars or fawninge fellouss’.
It has been suggested32 that Autolycus was intended to play some part in the discovery of Perdita’s parentage; but, as the play stands, his presence in Act V is unnecessary to the plot. Despite Forman’s omission of any mention of the statue-scene, it is fairly certain that this was in Shakespeare’s mind from the start.
The discussion about grafting, which introduces Perdita’s catalogue of flowers, is, as Professor Knight has shown,33 a microcosm of the whole play, a discussion on ‘great creating Nature’. The cultivated flowers are contrasted with the natural flowers of the countryside, just as Perdita’s world is contrasted with that of the Court, and just as Sicilia is contrasted with Bohemia. Polixenes, in arguing the case for grafting, is unconsciously justifying the marriage of his son to the supposed country maiden:
You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentle scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend nature – change it rather; but
The art itself is nature.
(IV. iv. 92–7)
The discussion of the relative importance of art and nature is often found in Elizabethan literature. It has been argued34 that Shakespeare had a more profound conception that Bacon. But in any case, as H. S. Wilson pointed out,35 the poet seems to be echoing a discussion by Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie on the relative importance of nature and art in the composition of poetry. Puttenham argues that in some cases art is an ‘ayde and coadiutor to nature’ or ‘a meane to supply her wants, by renforcing the causes wherein shee is impotent and defectiue’. He goes on to compare the artist or poet with the gardener:36
In another respect arte is not only an aide and coadiutor to nature in all her actions, but an alterer of them, and in some sort a surmounter of her skill, so as by meanes of it her owne effects shall appeare more beautifull or straunge and miraculous, as in both cases before remembred… And the Gardiner by his arte will not onely make an herbe, or flowr, or fruite, come forth in his season without impediment, but also will embellish the same in vertue, shape, odour and taste, that nature of her selfe woulde neuer haue done: as to make the single gillifloure, or marigold, or daisie, double: and the white rose, redde, yellow, or carnation; a bitter mellon sweete, a sweete apple, soure; a plumme or cherrie without a stone; a peare without core or kernell, a goord or coucumber like to a horne, or any other figure he will: any of which things nature could not doe without mans help and arte. These actions also are most singular, when they be most artificiall.
Puttenham goes on to justify that which
A Poet makes by arte and precepts rather then by naturall instinct: and that which he doth by long meditation rather then by a suddaine inspiration.
One further borrowing may be mentioned. It is generally accepted that Perdita’s speech about flowers was derived from Golding’s translation of Ovid:37
While in this garden Proserpine was taking her pastime,
In gathering eyther violets blew, or lillies white as lime …
Dis spide her; lou’d her: caught her vp…
The ladie with a wailing voyce afright did often call …
And as she from the vpper part her garment would haue rent,
By chance she let hir lap slip downe, and out the flowers went.
Perdita mentions the gathering of violets and lilies and the dropping of the flowers by the frightened girl, but she adds daffodils, primroses, oxlips, and other flowers not mentioned by Ovid:
O Proserpina,
For the flowers now that, frighted, thou let’st fall
From Dis’s waggon! – daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses,
That die unmarried ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength – a malady
Most incident to maids; bold oxlips, and
The crown-imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The flow’r-de-luce being one. O, these I lack
To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend
To strew him o’er and o’er!
(IV. iv. 116–29)
The association of Perdita with Proserpine, Flora, and Whitsun Pastorals, and Leontes’ greeting to her as ‘goddess’, ‘welcome as is the spring to the earth’, have led critics to regard the play as a myth of the seasons. Certainly Shakespeare’s neighbour, Leonard Digges, published a few years later a translation of Claudian’s The Rape of Proserpine (1617) prefixed with an interpretation of the allegory. Shakespeare was doubtless aware of the intermittent allegorical undertones in his play; but it would surely be wrong to interpret the whole play allegorically, or to regard it as a myth of resurrection. Professor Inga-Stina Ewbank has shown how Shakespeare took a hint from the alternative title of Pandosto – The Triumph of Time – and that by the restoration of Hermione to Leontes,38
time has at last in its triumph brought about its own defeat. This does not efface the human suffering that has gone before, however, and that weighs so heavily on the play right till the very end. Rather than a myth of immortality, then, this play is a probing into the human condition, and – as a whole as well as in details – it looks at what time means and does to man.