INTRODUCTION

IN spite of the great popularity in the early seventeenth century of Robert Greene's Pandosto, the prose romance on which The Winter's Tale is founded, there is no clear evidence of an early Quarto edition of the play. It first appeared in print in the Folio of 1623, where it occupies the last place among the Comedies. Although, owing to the involved character of the diction and the frequent occurrence of elliptical passages in some of the speeches, the play offers considerable textual difficulties, it must be allowed that the work of the printers was, on the whole, well done. In the present edition, therefore, the first Folio has been followed wherever possible, even in matters of punctuation. The later Folios do not differ widely from that of 1623; such differences as occur are recorded in the textual notes of this edition.

The date of composition can probably be determined with [Date of fair exactitude. composition. All critics are now agreed that The Winter's Tale belongs to the closing period of Shakespeare's dramatic career. The chief external points of evidence as to date are as follows: Dr. Simon Forman records in his MS. "Book of Plaies and Notes thereof" (Ashmole MSS. 208) a visit to the Globe Theatre on May 15, 1611, to see a performance of The Winter's Tale. The whole passage reads thus:

Obserue ther howe Lyontes the Kinge of Cicillia was overcom wt Ielosy of his wife with the Kinge of Bohemia his frind that came to se him. And howe he contriued his death and wold haue had his cup berer to haue poisoned. Who gaue the King of bohemia warning therof & fled with him to bohemia Remeber also howe he sent to the Orakell of

1 Halliwell explains g as Wednesday.

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appollo & the Aunswer of appollo. that she was giltles, and that the king was Ielouse &c. and howe Except the child was found Agane that was loste the Kinge should die without yssue. for the child was caried into bohemia & ther laid in a forrest & brought vp by a sheppard. And the Kinge of bohemia his sonn maried that wentch & howe they fled into Cicillia to Leontes and the sheppard hauing showed the letter of the nobleman by whom Leontes sent a [sic] was that child and the Iewells found about her. She was knowen to bee Leontes daughter and was then 16 yers old. Remember also the Rog that cam in all tottered like coll pixci / and howe he feyned him sicke & to haue bin robbed of all that he had and howe he cosoned the por man of all his money, and after cam to the shep sher with a pedlers packe & ther cosoned them Again of all their money. And howe he changed apparrell wt the Kinge of bomia his sonn. and then howe he turned Courtiar &c. beware of the trustinge feined beggars or fawninge fellouse."

A second piece of evidence is the record in Peter Cunningham's Extracts from the Revels' Accounts of a performance of "A play called ye winters nighte Tayle" on November 5, 1611. The original MS. from which Cunningham drew this information has been pronounced a forgery, but it is the opinion of Sir Sidney Lee and others that, though the entries are fictitious, the facts which they record may be more or less true.1

The most interesting piece of evidence, and that which defines the date of composition most exactly, is that furnished by Professor Thorndike in his monograph, The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher upon Shakespeare. The writer argues that the introduction of the dance of satyrs in Act IV. Scene iv. was directly suggested by Ben Jonson's Masque of Oberon, acted at Court on January 1, 1611, in which a dance of ten (or twelve) satyrs occupies a prominent position in the masque, and was of the nature of an innovation in stage-craft. Professor Thorndike considers either that "Jonson must have borrowed from the public stage [i.e. from The Winter's Tale] the idea of an antic dance of satyrs for the court masque, or Shakespeare must have borrowed from the court masque this

1 See Sir S. Lee's Life of Shakespeare, p. 254 n. [Mr. Ernest Law, in Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries, 1911, has probably satisfied most scholars of the genuineness of the MS.-GENERAL ED.] Pp. 32-34.

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"The

new and popular stage device for his Winter's Tale." second alternative," continues the writer, "is far more probable, because of the great importance of the court masques and the desire for novelty in them, and because the public may naturally be supposed to have been anxious to see a reproduction of a popular anti-masque. It gains additional probability from the fact that actors from the theatres performed in these anti-masques, and from the reference to the three who had already danced before the king. It is still more probable because an anti-masque in Beaumont's Masque of the Inner Temple is obviously made use of in a similar way in the Two Noble Kinsmen. Finally, we may note that the dance is an integral part of the Masque of Oberon, while it is a pure addition to the play."

Professor Thorndike's argument seems to be fairly convincing. It is true that Jonson had introduced the satyr as a leading character into his "Entertainment " entitled The Satyr as early as 1603, but the appearance there of a single satyr in company with Queen Mab and her attendant fairies is undoubtedly a different thing from an anti-masque dance of ten or twelve satyrs such as we meet with in The Masque of Oberon and The Winter's Tale. If, therefore, we accept Professor Thorndike's views, we are entitled to draw the conclusion that our play was composed between January 1, 1611, when The Masque of Oberon was performed at Court, and May 15, 1611, the date on which Simon Forman saw The Winter's Tale acted at the Globe.

It may be added that the evidence of diction and verse is in harmony with this date. The involved and elliptical structure of many of the speeches, and the complete absence of rhyming verses, except in the speech of Time as Chorus at the beginning of Act IV., are sure indications that The Winter's Tale is one of Shakespeare's latest plays; while the high percentage of light and weak endings, and of speeches which begin and end in the middle of a verse, tell the same tale.3

1 Servant. One three of them, by their own report, sir, hath danced before the king; and not the worst of the three but jumps twelve foot and a half by the squier (Winter's Tale, Iv. iv. 336-40).

2 Estimated by Professor Ingram at 5'48 per cent. (Cymbeline, 483, Tempest, 4'59 pèr cent.).

3 This is König's so-called "speech-ending test"; he gives 87.6 as the pre

[Greene's Pandosto.]

In connection with the date of composition and early stage history of the play, one or two more facts may be mentioned. On the occasion of the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine in 1613, The Winter's Tale was one of the plays acted at Court. Fourteen plays were acted in all, and of these no less than five were by Shakespeare.1 Again, in the Induction to Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614), the author declares that "he is loth to make nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget tales, tempests, and such like drolleries, to mix his head with other men's heels," and the probability is that, in this contemptuous reference to "tales, tempests, and such like drolleries," Ben Jonson had The Winter's Tale and The Tempest in mind. The play was reacted at Court in 1623 and 1633, and the fun which is made by Jonson in his "Conversations with Drummond," and by Taylor the Water-poet in his Travels to Prague and Bohemia (1630), over the sea-coast of Bohemia is an indication that the play occupied men's thoughts long after its first performance.

It was known already to Rowe and Gildon at the beginning of the eighteenth century that Shakespeare had founded the plot of his Winter's Tale upon Robert Greene's prose romance, Pandosto: The Triumph of Time." This romance, which was first published in 1588, was re-published in 1607 under the title Dorastus and Fawnia, and continued to be widely read throughout the seventeenth century. Indeed, at a time when The Winter's Tale was scarcely known out of England, Greene's story was winning for itself a continental reputation. It was translated into French in 1615, and again in 1626-the latter version being by Du Bail. About the same time the French dramatist Alexandre Hardy dramatised the story, and in 1631 Puget de la Serre published his Pandoste, ou La Princesse Malheureuse: tragédie en prose*; six years later a Dutch dramatic version of the story appeared, entitled Dorastus en

3

centage of speeches ending with an incomplete line in Winter's Tale, 84·5 per cent. in The Tempest, 85 per cent. in Cymbeline (Der Vers in Shakespeare's Dramen). 1 See New Shakespeare Society Transactions, 1875, p. 419.

2 Re-edited, with modernised spelling, by P. G. Thomas in the "Shakespeare Library," 1907.

3 This play has been lost.

4 Republished as an Appendix to P. G. Thomas's edition of Greene's Pandosto, 1907.

Fauniaas, the author of which was Voskuyl.1 Greene's romance is in many ways a remarkable piece of work, and it is therefore worth our while to follow the outline of its plot, if only in order that Shakespeare's indebtedness to, and deviations from, the older story may be more easily recognised.

Pandosto, king of Bohemia, marries Bellaria, and to them is born a son Garinter. Egistus, king of Sicily, who in his youth had been brought up with Pandosto, pays a visit to the Bohemian court and is royally entertained by Pandosto and his queen. Bellaria, in her desire to show how deep is her love for her husband, treats her husband's friend with great courtesy and familiarity, walking with him in the garden, and "oftentimes coming herself into his bed-chamber to see that nothing should be amiss to mislike him." In course of time Pandosto begins to grow suspicious of his wife's intimacy with Egistus, till at last "a flaming jealousy" torments him: then, with the help of his cup-bearer, Franion, he plots Egistus's murder by means of poison, and resolves to get rid of his faithless queen in the same way. Franion, loath to poison Egistus, informs him of the plot, and both escape secretly from Bohemia and make their way to Sicily. Meanwhile Pandosto gives orders to his guard to fling Bellaria into prison, and proclaims throughout the realm that she has committed adultery with Egistus and conspired her husband's death; while in prison awaiting her trial, she gives birth to a daughter, Fawnia. Pandosto declares that the child is a bastard, and issues orders that it shall be put into an open boat alone, “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 cruel order is reluctantly carried out by the king's servants and Fawnia is cast adrift.

The trial of Bellaria follows, in which she pleads her innocence against her accuser. The jury find her guiltless, but Pandosto declares that he will dispense with law and take matters into his own hands. As a last request Bellaria begs that the king shall send six trusty noblemen to the "Isle of Delphos" to inquire of the oracle of Apollo whether she is innocent or guilty. Bellaria obtains her request, and the

1 See Bolte, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, xxvi. 90.