HE story of this play is taken from The Pleasant History of Dorastus and Fawnia, by Robert Greene, which was first printed in 1588. The parts of Antigonus, Paulina, and Autolycus are of the poet's own creation; and many circumstances of the novel are omitted in the play. A booke entitled A Winter's Night's Pastime, entered at Stationers' Hall, in 1594, but which has not come down to us, may have suggested the title, by which Shakespeare thought the romantic and extraordinary incidents of the play well characterized: he several times in the course of the last act makes one of his characters remark its similarity to an old tale. Schlegel has observed that "The Winter's Tale is as appropriately named as the Midsummer Night's Dream. It is one of those tales which are peculiarly calculated to beguile the dreary leisure of a long winter evening, which are even attractive and intelligible to childhood, and which, animated by fervent truth in the delineation of character and passion, invested with the decoration of a poetry lowering itself, as it were, to the simplicity of the subject, transport even manhood back to the golden age of imagination. The calculation of probabilities has nothing to do with such wonderful and fleeting adventures, ending at last in general joy; and accordingly Shakespeare has here taken the greatest liberties with anachronisms and geographical errors: he opens a free navigation between Sicily and Bohemia, makes Julio Romano the contemporary of the Delphic Oracle, not to mention other incongruities."

It is extraordinary that Pope should have thought only some single scenes of this play were from the hand of Shakespeare. It breathes his spirit throughout;-in the serious parts as well as in those of a lighter kind: and who but Shakespeare could have conceived that exquisite pastoral scene in which the loves of Florizel and Perdita are developed? It is indeed a pastoral of the golden age, and Perdita "no Shepherdess, but Flora,

Peering in April's front,"

and breathing flowers, in the spring-tide of youth and beauty. How gracefully she distributes her emblematic favours! What language accompanies them! Well may Florizel exclaim :"When you speak, sweet,

I'd have you do it ever."

-

The reader re-echoes the sentiment of the lover, and is sorry to come to the close. With what modest unconscious dignity are actions accompanied: even Polixenes, who

all her words and

looks on her with no favourable eye, says that there is

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nothing she does or says

But smacks of something greater than herself."

The Shepherds and Shepherdess, with whom she has been brought up, are such as ordinary life affords, and are judicious foils to this delightful couple of lovers.

The arch roguery and mirthful stratagems of Autolycus are very amusing, and his character admirably sustained. "The jealousy of Leontes (says the judicious Schlegel) is not, like that of Othello, developed with all the causes, symptoms, and gradations; it is brought forward at once, and is portrayed as a distempered frenzy. It is a passion which does not produce the catastrophe, but merely ties the knot of the piece." But it has the same intemperate course, is the same soul-goading passion which wrings a noble nature to acts of revengeful cruelty; at which, under happier stars, it would have shuddered, and which are no sooner committed than repented of.

The patient and affecting resignation of the wronged Hermione under circumstances of the deepest anguish; and the zealous and courageous remonstrances of the faithful Paulina, have the stamp of Shakespeare upon them. Indeed I know not what parts of this drama could be attributed to any even of the most skilful of his contemporaries. It was perhaps the discrepancies of the plot (which in fact almost divides it into two plays with an interval of sixteen years between), and the anachronisms, which made Dryden and Pope overlook the beauties of execution in this enchanting play.

* Dryden, in the Essay at the end of the second part of the Conquest of Granada, speaking of the plays of Shakespeare and Fletcher, says:-"Witness the lameness of their plots; many of which, especially those which they wrote first (for even that age refined itself in some measure), were made up of some ridiculous incoherent story, which in one play many times took up the business of an age. I suppose I need not name Pericles, nor the historical plays of Shakespeare; besides many of the rest, as The Winter's Tale, Love's Labour's Lost, Measure for Measure, which were either grounded on impossibilities, or at least so

Malone places the composition of the Winter's Tale in 1611, because it was first licensed for representation by Sir George Buc, Master of the Revels, who did not assume the functions of his office until August, 1610. Since then Mr. Cunningham has shown, from an entry in the "Accounts of the Revels at Court," that it was represented at Whitehall, by the King's players, on the 5th of November, 1611; and Dr. Forman, in his Diary, notes that he saw it played at the Globe Theatre, on the 15th of May in the same year. The mention of the " Puritan singing psalms to hornpipes" also points at this period, as does another passage which is supposed to be a compliment to James on his escape from the Gowrie Conspiracy. Malone had in former instances placed the date much earlier; first in 1594, and then in 1602. The supposition that Ben Jonson intended a sneer at this play and The Tempest, in his Induction to Bartholomew Fair, has been combated by Mr. Gifford ;* but there seems little reason to doubt that the words "Servant monster," "Anticks," 66 Tales," and "Tempests," applied to these then recent productions of Shakespeare. Bartholomew Fair was acted in 1614.

Horace Walpole in his Historic Doubts attempts to show that The Winter's Tale was intended (in compliment to Queen Elizabeth) as an indirect apology for her mother Anne Boleyn; but the ground for his conjecture is so slight as scarcely to deserve attention. Indeed it may be answered that the plot of the play is not the invention of Shakespeare, who therefore cannot be charged with this piece of flattery; if it was intended, it must be attributed to Greene, whose novel was published in 1588. I think with Mr. Boswell that these supposed allusions by Shakespeare to the history of his own time are very much to be doubted.

meanly written, that the comedy neither caused your mirth, nor the serious parts your concernment." Pope, in his Preface to Shakespeare, almost re-echoes this: "I should conjecture (says he) of some of the others, particularly Love's Labour's Lost, The Winter's Tale, Comedy of Errors, and Titus Andronicus, that only some characters or single scenes, or perhaps a few particular passages, are from the hand of Shakespeare."

* Works of Ben Jonson, Vol. iv. p. 371.