"For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou lett'st fall
From Dis's wagon! daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares ..."
And Florizel, wondering at her with his young admiring eyes, answers in the same strain:
"When you speak, sweet,
I'd have you do it ever; when you sing,
I'd have you buy and sell so; so give alms;
Pray so; and, for the ordering your affairs,
To sing them too: when you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that."
Very different is the old shepherd's tone; though kindly, it is quite conformable to his estate and situation:
"Fie, daughter! when my old wife lived, upon
This day she was both pantler, butler, cook,
Both dame and servant; welcomed all, served all,
Would sing her song, and dance her turn; now here,
At upper end o' the table, now i' the middle;
On his shoulder and his; her face o' fire
With labour, and the thing she took to quench it,
She would to each one sip. You are retired,
As if you were a feasted one, and not
The hostess of the meeting."
Never has the language of country people been better transferred to literature; their manners, tone, and language in Shakespeare have remained true to nature even to the present day, so much so that it is difficult, while writing, not to think of harvest and vintage scenes, which every year brings round again in our French valleys, and the sort of kindly talk very similar to the old shepherd's that many of us remember, as well as I do, to have heard in the country, from peasant associates in early days. This unsurpassed fidelity to nature is the more remarkable as it dates from the Arcadian times of English literature, days that were to last long, even down to the time of Pope and of Thomson himself, to stop at Burns, when at last a deeper, if not truer, note was to be struck.
But with regard to mere facts, Shakespeare was in no way more careful than Greene, and he seems to have known, and it was in fact visible enough, the greediness of his public to be such that, ostrich like, they would swallow anything. He, therefore, changed very little. In Greene, ships "sail into Bohemia," a feat that cannot be repeated to-day; the Queen is tried by a jury "panelled" for that purpose; the nobles go "to the isle of Delphos, there to enquire of the oracle of Apollo whether she had committed adultery." Very much the same things happen in Shakespeare. The survival of Hermione is his own invention; in Greene she dies for good at the beginning of the novel, when she hears of the death of her son. With the same aptitude to die for no other cause than to improve a story, Pandosto dies also in Greene's tale: he remembered his faults and "fell in a melancholie fit, and to close up the comedie with a tragicall stratageme he slewe himselfe." Merry and tragical! But otherwise Dorastus and Fawnia would have had to wait before becoming king and queen, and such a waiting was against the taste of the time and the rules of novel writing.
Such as it is, Greene's tale had an extraordinary success. While Shakespeare's drama was not printed, either in authentic or pirated shape, before the appearance of the 1623 folio, the prose story had a number of editions throughout the seventeenth century and even, under one shape or another, throughout the eighteenth. It was printed as a chap-book during this last period, and in this costume began a new life. It was turned into verse in 1672, under the title, "Fortune's tennis ball: or the most excellent history of Dorastus and Fawnia, rendred into delightful english verse";[138] it begins with this "delightful" invocation:
"Inspire me gentle love and jealousie,
Give me thy passion and thy extasie,
While to a pleasant ayr I strik the strings
Singing the fates of lovers and of kings."
But the highest and most extraordinary compliment to Greene's performance was its translation into French, not only once, as has been said, but twice. The first time was at a moment when the English language and literature were practically unknown and as good as non-extant to French readers. It appeared in 1615, and was dedicated to "très haute and très illustre princesse, Madame Christine Sœur du Roy."[139] The second translation, that has never yet been noticed, was made at a time when France had a novel literature of its own well worth reading, and when Boileau had utterly routed and discomfited the writers of romantic and improbable tales. Nevertheless, it was thought that a public would be found in Paris for Greene's novel, and it was printed accordingly in French in 1722, this time adorned with engravings.[140] They show "Doraste" dressed as a marquis of Louis XV.'s time; while "Pandolphe" wears a flowing wig under his cocked hat, and sits on a throne in rococo style. A copy of the book was purchased for the royal library, and is still to be seen at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, with the crown and cipher of his Most Christian Majesty on the cover.