Shakespeare had adapted Lodge's Rosalynde in his earlier pastoral play, As You Like It, very soon after its publication in 1590. It is significant that this other tale, with its peculiar blending of the pathetic and idyllic, should only now, though it must have long been familiar to him, strike him as suitable for dramatic treatment. Karl Elze's theory that Shakespeare had adapted the story in some earlier work, which Greene had in his mind when he wrote his famous and violent accusation of plagiarism, cannot be considered as more than a random conjecture. Greene's attack was sufficiently accounted for by that remodelling and adaptation of older works which was practised by the young poet from the very first, and it clearly aimed at Henry VI.
Shakespeare, who could not, of course, use Greene's title, called his play A Winters Tale; a title which would convey an impression, at that time, of a serious and touching or exciting story, and he plainly strove for a dream-like and fantastic effect in his work. Mamillius says, when he begins his little story (Act ii. sc. I), "A sad tale's best for winter," and in three different places the romantic impossibility of the plot is impressed upon the audience. In the description of the discovery of Perdita we are warned that "this news, which is called true, is so like an old tale, that the verity of it is in strong suspicion" (Act v. sc. 2).
The geographical extravagances are those of the romance; it was Greene who surrounded Bohemia with the sea and transferred the Oracle of Delphi to the Island of Delphos. But Shakespeare contributed the anachronisms; it was he who made the oracle exist contemporaneously with Russia as an empire, who made Hermione a daughter of a Russian Emperor and caused her statue to be executed by Giulio Romano. The religion of the play is decidedly vague, the very characters themselves seem to forget at times what they are, one moment figuring as Christians, and the next worshipping Jupiter and Proserpina. In the same play in which a pilgrimage is made to Delphi to obtain an oracle, a shepherd lad says there is "but one puritan amongst them, and he sings songs to hornpipes" (Act iv. sc. 2). All this is unintentional, no doubt, but it greatly adds to the general fairy tale effect.
We do not know why Shakespeare transposed the localities. In Greene's book the tragedy of the play occurs in Bohemia, and the idyllic part in Sicily; in the drama the situations are reversed. It might be that Bohemia seemed to him a more suitable country for the exposure of an infant than the better known and more thickly populated island of the Mediterranean.
All the main features of the play are drawn from Greene, first and foremost the king's unreasonable jealousy because his wife, at his own urgent request, invites Polixenes to prolong his stay and speaks to him in friendly fashion. Among the grounds of jealousy enumerated by Greene was the naïve and dramatically unsuitable one that Bellaria, in her desire to please and obey her husband by showing every attention to his guest, frequently entered his bed-chamber to ascertain if anything was needed there.[1] Greene's queen really dies when she is cast off by the king in his jealous madness, but this tragic episode, which would have deprived him of his reconciliation scene, was not adopted by Shakespeare. He did, however, include and amplify the death of Mamillius, their little son, who pines away from sorrow for the king's harsh treatment of his mother. Mamillius is one of the gems of the play; a finer sketch of a gifted, large-hearted child could not be. We can but feel that Shakespeare, in drawing this picture of the young boy and his early death, must once again have had his own little son in his mind, and that it was of him he was thinking when he makes Polixenes say of his young prince (Act i. sc. 2):
"If at home, sir,
He's all my exercise, my mirth, my matter;
Now my sworn friend, and then mine enemy;
My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all:
He makes a July's day short as December;
And with his varying childness, cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood."
Leontes. So stands this squire
Offic'd with me."
The father's tone towards little Mamillius is at first a jesting one.
"Mamillius, art thou my boy?"
Mamillius. Ay, my good lord.
Leontes. Why, that's my bawcock. What, hast smutch'd
thy nose?
They say it is a copy out of mine."
Later, when jealousy grows upon him, he cries:
"Come, sir page,
Look on me with your welkin eye: sweet villain!
Most dear'st! my collop!—Can thy dam?—may'st be?"