Among Shakespeare's additions in the first part of the play we find the characters of the noble and resolute Paulina and her weakly good-natured husband. Paulina, who has been overlooked by both Mrs. Jameson and Heine in their descriptions of Shakespeare's feminine characters, is one of the most admirable and original figures he has put upon the stage. She has more courage than ten men, and possesses that natural eloquence and power of pathos which determined honesty and sound common sense can bestow upon a woman. She would go through fire and water for the queen whom she loves and trusts. She is untouched by sentimentality; there is as little of the erotic as there is of repugnance in her attitude towards her husband. Her treatment of the king's jealous frenzy reminds us of Emilia in Othello, but the resemblance ends there. In Paulina there is a vein of that rare metal which we only find in excellent women of this not essentially feminine type. We meet it again in the nineteenth century in the character of Christiana Oehlenschläger as we see it in Hauch's beautiful commemorative poem.
The rustic fête in the second part of the play, with the conversations between Florizel and Perdita, is entirely Shakespeare's work; above all is the diverting figure of Autolycus his own peculiar property.
In Greene's tale the king falls violently in love with his daughter when she is restored to him a grown woman, and he kills himself in despair when she is wedded to her lover. Shakespeare rejected this stupid and ugly feature; his ending is all pure harmony.
Here, as in Cymbeline, we see the poet compelled by the nature of his theme to dwell upon the disastrous effects of jealousy. This is the third time he treats of such suspicions driving to madness. Othello was the first great example, then Posthumus, and now Leontes.
The case of Leontes is so far unique that no one has suggested causes of jealousy, nor slandered Hermione to him. His own coarse and foolish imaginings alone are to blame. This variation of the vice was evidently intended to darken the background against which womanly high-mindedness and blamelessness were to shine forth.
Mrs. Jameson has charmingly said that Hermione combines such rare virtues as "dignity without pride, love without passion, and tenderness without weakness." As queen, wife, and mother, there is a majestic lovableness about her, a grand and gracious simplicity, a natural self-control, the proverb, "Still waters run deep," being eminently applicable to her. Her gentle dignity contrasts well with Paulina's enthusiastic intrepidity, and her noble reticence with Paulina's free outspokenness. Her attitude and language during the trial scene are superb, far outshining Queen Katherine's on a similar occasion. Her nature, the ideal Englishwoman's nature, all meekness and submissiveness, rises in dignified protest. She is brief in her self-defence; life has no value for her since she has lost her husband's love, since her little son has been removed from her as though she were plague-stricken, and her new-born daughter "from her breast, the innocent milk in its most innocent mouth, haled out to murder." Her only desire is to vindicate her honour, yet the first words of this cruelly accused and shamefully treated woman are full of pity for the remorse which Leontes will some day suffer. Her language is that of innocent fortitude. When about to be taken to prison she says:
"There's some ill planet reigns:
I must be patient till the heavens look
With an aspect more favourable. Good my lords,
I am not prone to weeping, as our sex
Commonly are; the want of which vain dew
Perchance shall dry your pities: but I have
That honourable grief lodged here which burns
Worse than tears drown."
She bids her women not weep until she has deserved imprisonment; then indeed their tears will have cause to flow.
In the second half of the Winters Tale we are surrounded by a fresh and charming country, and shown a picture of rustic happiness and well-being. No one was less influenced by the sentimental vagaries of the fantastic pastorals of the day than Shakespeare. He had drawn in Corin and Phebe, in As You Like It, an extremely natural, and therefore not particularly poetical, shepherd and shepherdess; and the herdsmen in the Winters Tale are no beautiful languishing souls. They do not write sonnets and madrigals, but drink ale and eat pies and dance. The hostess serves her guests with a face that is "o' fire with labour and the thing she took to quench it." The clowns' heads are full of the prices of wool; they have no thought for roses and nightingales, and their simplicity is rather comical than touching. They are more than overmatched by the light-fingered Autolycus, who educates them by means of ballads, and eases them of their purses at the same time. He is a Jack-of-all-trades, has travelled the country with a monkey, been a process-server, bailiff, and servant to Prince Florizel; he has gone about with a puppet-show playing the Prodigal Son; finally, he marries a tinker's wife and settles down as a confirmed rogue. He is the clown of the piece—roguish, genial, witty, and always master of the situation. In spite of the fact that Shakespeare seized every opportunity to flout the lower classes, that he always gave a satirical and repellent picture of them as a mass, yet their natural wit, good sense, and kind-heartedness are always portrayed in his clowns with a sympathetic touch. Before his time, the buffoon was never an inherent part of the play; he came on and danced his jig without any connection with the plot, and was, in fact, merely intended to amuse the uneducated portion of the audience and make them laugh. Shakespeare was the first to incorporate him into the plot, and to endow him, not merely with the jester's wit, but with the higher faculties and feelings of the Fool in Lear, or the gay humour of the vagabond pedlar, Autolycus.
The clown in the Winter's Tale is the drollest and sharpest of knaves, and is employed to unravel the knot in the story. He it is who transports the old shepherd and his son from Bohemia to the court of King Leontes in Sicily.