[1] Scarcely any poet has been more followed in modern times than Shakespeare. We have already drawn attention to the by no means accidental resemblances in Voltaire, Goethe, and Schiller, and we have further instances. Schiller's D. Jungfrau von Orleans is markedly indebted to the first part of Henry VI. The scene between the maid and the Duke of Burgundy (ii. 10) is fashioned after the corresponding scene in Shakespeare (iii. 3), and that between the maid and her father in Schiller (iv. II) answers to Shakespeare's (v. 4). The apothecary in Oehlenschläger's Aladdin is borrowed from the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet. In Björnstjerne Björnson's Maria Stuart (ii. 2) Ruthven rises from a sick bed to totter into the conspirators with Knox, and take the more eager share in the plot to murder Rizzio, as the sick Ligarius makes his way to Brutus (Julius Cæsar, ii. I) to join the conspiracy to murder Cæsar.
[2] It is somewhat remarkable that Guiderius and Arviragus should know anything about chimney-sweepers.
[XIX]
WINTER'S TALE—AN EPIC TURN—CHILDLIKE FORMS—THE PLAY AS A MUSICAL STUDY—SHAKESPEARE'S ÆSTHETIC CONFESSION OF FAITH
We are now about to see Shakespeare enthralled and reinspired by the glamour of fairy tale and romance.
The Winter s Tale was first printed in the Folio of 1623, but, as we have already mentioned, an entry in Dr. Simon Forman's diary informs us that he saw it played at the Globe Theatre on the 15th of May 1611. A notice in the official diary of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, goes to prove that at that date the play was quite new. "For the king's players. An olde playe called Winter's Tale, formerly allowed of by Sir George Bucke, and likewyse by mee on Mr. Hemmings his word that nothing profane was added or reformed, though the allowed book was missinge; and therefore I returned itt without fee this 19th of August 1623." The Sir George Bucke mentioned here did not receive his official appointment as censor until August 1610. Therefore it was probably one of the first performances of the Winters Tale at which Forman was present in the spring of 1611.
We have already drawn attention to Ben Jonson's little fling at the play in the introduction to his Bartholomew's Fair in 1614.
The play was founded on a romance of Robert Greene's, published in 1588 under the title of "Pandosto, the Triumph of Time," and was re-named half-a-century later "The Historie of Dorastus and Fawnia." So popular was it, that it was printed again and again. We know of at least seventeen editions, and in all likelihood there were more.