SOURCE: Bryant, Jerry H. “The Winter's Tale and the Pastoral Tradition.” Shakespeare Quarterly 14, no. 4 (autumn 1963): 387-98.

[In the following essay, Bryant comments on parallels between The Winter's Tale and a number of pastoral poems and plays that preceded it, emphasizing Shakespeare's modifications of traditional pastoral motifs and conventions. In particular, the critic addresses Shakespeare's treatment of the themes of love, faithfulness, and appearance versus reality.]

It is curious that no appraiser or appreciator seems to have puzzled over the kinship of The Winter's Tale with the pastoral tradition. Most commentators tacitly assume the connection, then abandon it to court other features. Some explain the drama as tragicomedy, some as one of the “last plays”. Others see it against the background of Elizabethan thought. Still others, lately, have examined the grammar, the vocabulary, and the reverberations of the imagery. All these approaches are good, cogent, helpful; but the pastoral element has gone begging for an analyst. For that matter, Sir Walter Greg once went so far as to say that “it is characteristic of the shepherd scenes in that play, written in the full maturity of Shakespeare's genius, that, in spite of their origins in Greene's romance of Pandosto, they owe nothing of their treatment to pastoral tradition, nothing to convention, nothing to aught save life. …”¹ This persistent neglect of an important historical precedent deserves correction. I should like, therefore, first to try to show that Shakespeare is in fact very much a part of the pastoral tradition and that The Winter's Tale can be seen as an example of the English pastoral drama, which has roots in classical, Italian, and English literature. Then I should like to go on to a consideration of the freshness and vitality which Shakespeare brings to the tradition, showing how he transforms the hackneyed conventions of the pastoral into an involved and subtle commentary on appearance and reality.

The most indirect influence upon the English pastoral drama and hence upon The Winter's Tale is the classical one. First of all there was the pastoral eclogue, given most of its forms and themes by Theocritus. His shepherds were isolated in the hills of Sicily where they were safe from the fever of the city and court. They piped to their flocks, contested in song with their companions, wooed their nymphs, complained of unrequited love. They spoke of milk-white lambs, pretty shepherdesses, and gifts of red apples. Theocritus' pastoral world was also a place where gods and goddesses rubbed shoulders with human Sicilians. But even the mythological deities were drawn with an exactness and a benign humor which have given the Theocritan idyls their hallmark of refreshing and delightful realism.

The Greek pastoral idyl was extended into the Roman world by Virgil, who imitated Theocritus. In the exchange, something of the original freshness was lost. Virgil's mind was largely upon either his own problems or those of the world, and he used the eclogue to disguise contemporary allusion or direct satire upon the shortcomings of the civilized world.² Thus, though the complaints, the singing contests, the talk of love remained, they were included for something more than the simple delight they in themselves could bring. And so we get a noble prophecy of Astrea's return, some waspish complaining about the politics which caused Virgil trouble with his farm, and Silenus' philosophical song describing the progress of earth's creation.

The other aspect of the classical influence upon the English pastoral drama is the Greek romance. The long prose tales of Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, in particular, received enthusiastic audience during the Renaissance for the endless adventuring to exotic shores contained in them. Unlike the stories of chivalry, which spotlighted the activities of a single knight, the Greek romance focused upon two protagonists, a boy and a girl. The typical tale begins with their falling in love. But before the two youths are able to consummate their passion, the gods send down on their heads every conceivable kind of adversity. They are kidnapped, singly or in pair; they are captured by pirates, separated, sold into slavery; re-united, they are cast adrift in a violent storm. The reader follows these exciting characters from one end of the world to the other. Other things keep the lovers apart. In the Æthiopica of Heliodorus, the hero cannot marry the heroine because of her inferior origins. But after the two have been tossed about the world's seas, she is discovered to be the daughter of the Ethiopian king. The disparity resolved, the two marry amidst much rejoicing.

The eclogue and the Greek romance went pretty much underground during the period of the Middle Ages. But they both reappeared in the Renaissance with considerable force. Virgil's pastoralism was adopted by Boccaccio, Petrarch, Mantuan, Tasso, Marot, and Spenser. Latin and vernacular eclogues sprang abundantly from these writers' pens. The artificiality which was incipient in Virgil's pastorals became the identifying trait of the Renaissance ecloguists' work. The pastoral scene is used to disguise hyperbolic praise of patrons or monarchs, to mask satire upon the sham and hypocrisy of contemporary society, to cover up discussions of religious and political issues. Since the aim of these writers was not to recreate an accurate picture of the shepherd's life, the scene became idealized and stereotyped, a quality which we always associate today with the pastoral as a form, ignoring the realistic beginnings of the tradition. Nevertheless, this genre was extremely popular and it is important to the pastoral drama.

The first direct influence upon the English stage which I want to examine is the Italian pastoral drama. It is Greg's thesis that this drama grew out of the pastoral eclogues discussed above, which were read with enthusiasm at the court of Ferrara.³ The plays which came to be written to meet the demand for more drama than the mere eclogue provided contained echoes of the Greek romance. The best examples of the Italian pastoral drama are Tasso's Aminta, first acted at Ferrara in 1573 and translated into English in 1591, and Guarini's Il Pastor Fido, performed at Ferrara in 1585 and translated in 1602. Aminta, in Tasso's play, is unsuccessful in his suit to the huntress Silvia. When Aminta rescues his love from the clutches of a rude satyr who has bound her to a tree, Silvia, with rather questionable modesty, runs away into the forest. Later it is thought that she has been devoured by a wild beast. In despair Aminta leaps off a cliff. But Silvia has not been killed and she returns from the forest. Upon being informed of the results of her hard-heartedness and Aminta's great love and fidelity, she goes to recover his body. Luckily, Aminta was not killed when he jumped, and the two join their loves.⁴

Il Pastor Fido is longer and more complicated than the Aminta and has more resemblances to the Greek romance. Mirtillo, the faithful shepherd, cannot marry his Amarillis because of his low birth. The oracle has assured the country that it will not be delivered from a certain curse until

                    two of heavens issue love unite
And for the auncient fault of that false wight,
A faithful Shepherds pittie make amends.(5)

Mirtillo, doggedly faithful throughout, turns out to be the shepherd spoken of in the prophecy, for his fidelity “makes amends”. And at the auspicious moment, he is also found to be of “heavens issue”, i.e. of royal shepherd birth. These brief synopses show that the dominating interest in the Italian pastoral drama is the youthful love affair, as it was in the Greek romance. They also show that fidelity and honor can overcome any impediment to the realization of love. What they do not reveal are the rich appendages to the main action: the lustful satyrs, the wanton shepherds and shepherdesses, the disguise, the mistaken identities—in short, any of the dramatic devices which provide conflict by threatening the chastity, honor, and fidelity of the hero or heroine. The more obstacles to overcome the better, but fidelity always wins out; maidenheads are retained; chaste Jack gets his chaste Jill.

The other direct influence upon the English pastoral drama is the pastoral prose romance. Sidney's Arcadia, Greene's Menaphon and Pandosto, Lodge's Rosalynde—all eventually were acted, in one form or another, upon the stage. Like the Italian pastoral drama, the romance has roots in classical literature, that is, the Greek romance; all three genres, in fact, share several features. All are preoccupied with the honor of the heroine, an honor kept intact so long as she remains a virgin. All produce conflict by throwing up obstacles in the course of true love. And the theme of fidelity in love is central in all three forms. Finally, all rely extensively upon mistaken identity or disguise. In the pastoral romance a maiden of royal birth is for various reasons, usually parental dissatisfaction, sent into the wilds where she is raised by shepherds. Variations have the abandoned person a child, either male or female. Then, the banished character's lineage unknown, he woos a princess (who might be disguised as a shepherd); or she is wooed by a prince.⁶ The disguise motif is carried out in a variety of ways—change of clothing, magical transformation, or confusions surrounding the birth of the hero or heroine. These disguises, however, are no match for the protagonists' powerful love. The heroes' passion sweeps away appearances; a prince's love will be drawn to a princess in spite of the fact that she is dressed in shepherd's weeds. All of this suggests a further contribution of the pastoral romance: the court element, for the pastoral episode usually is presented within a frame of action which begins and ends in the court. With the ejection of one or more characters from court the action is set in motion, and the resolution is made when those characters are accepted back into the active life after finding the necessary answers in a pastoral setting.

Examples of the English pastoral drama show a wide range of borrowing from all of these traditions. George Peele's The Arraignment of Paris, an odd, masque-like little play, is very much like a pastoral eclogue. On the other hand, Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess begins a large debt to the Italian pastoral drama with its title. A composite of the Greek romance, the Italian pastoral drama, and the pastoral romance occurs in The Maydes Metamorphosis, which contains the court frame, features dancing and singing, and peoples itself with mythological deities, shepherds, nymphs, princes, and princesses. It also uses the oracle. Love and fidelity, impeded by the forces of disguise and lust, form the main plot motives. A companion piece to The Maydes Metamorphosis is The Thracian Wonder, an incredibly complicated dramatization of Greene's incredibly complicated romance Menaphon.⁷ This play deals not only with several sets of lovers, but several generations of them.

The debt of The Winter's Tale to the pastoral tradition which I have sketched can be made clear through some specific citations. For instance, the humor and realism in the fourth act have been cited as examples of Shakespeare's freedom from the pastoral tradition. The fact is that the tradition began in a humorous spirit with Theocritus. In Idyl IV⁸ two herdsmen gossip about the state of local herds and flocks, a neighbor's journey to the Olympics, the death of Amaryllis, and the fact that their cows are grazing in the wrong place. Battus gets a thorn in his foot. The talk turns to the pursuit of a young girl by an old man, who is apparently successful. In the next Idyl a goatherd and a shepherd hotly accuse each other of robbery. They resolve their argument through a singing contest. Thievery, thorns in a shepherd's foot, cows grazing in the wrong place—Theocritus is amusingly frank and quite realistic.

Perhaps the humor which was potential in the pastoral was smothered by the serious purposes of Virgil and his imitators, but clearly Theocritus' impulse was valid. The low characters which the poet must treat make the form ripe for comedy. Even Guarini sees the comic possibilities. In Act I, Scene v, of Il Pastor Fido, a satyr embarks upon an amusing discourse concerning the artifice of women in decorating their faces with make-up and plucking their eyebrows. There is also a pretty scene in which Dorinda, a determined shepherdess in pursuit of the young bachelor hunter Silvio, withholds the boy's hunting dog until he gives her a kiss.

Comic realism abounds in much of the English pastoral drama. The Maydes Metamorphosis contains three comic characters who are the ancestors of Autolycus. Joculo, Mopso, and Frisco are a spry lot, rogues and singers. In one of the longest acts of the play the three comics enter upon the stage singing, as Autolycus does when we first see him. Joculo, the page of the hero Ascanio, is recognized by the rustic Mopso: “Yes, if you be the Joculo I take you for, we have heard of your exployts / For cosoning of some seven and thirtie alewives in the villages here about.”⁹ Neither thievery nor humor is new to the pastoral tradition, and Perdita's foster brother, as attested here by Mopso, can take some comfort in the fact that he was not the only innocent cozened by a rogue who once served a nobleman. Autolycus, too, is a thief and rogue, adept at changing his roles and his clothes. Even more, he has an irrepressible bent for song, and that, of course, is the indispensable requirement of the pastoral character.

There are other links between The Winter's Tale and the pastoral tradition. It has already been said that the pastoral eclogue became in the Renaissance an instrument for satire and commentary on present-day events. By the sixteenth century the conventional object of the satire had become the courtier, pompous and artificial, mouthing deep emotions but not feeling them. Guarini pays lip service to the convention. The ideal life of the country invokes unfavorable criticism of the city and the court, for in the country the swains are not bothered with “vaine and most immoderate hope”, as Uranio says in Il Pastor Fido. Not to be outdone by Uranio's praise of the rural scene, Carino levels a few acid remarks at the court, where he found

People in name and wordes right and curtuous
But in good deedes most scarse, and Pitties foes:
People in face, gentle and pleasant still;
But fiercer then th'outragious swelling sea:
.....The greater showes they make, the less troth they mean.(10)

The lively pages of The Maydes Metamorphosis use less invective and more fun. Joculo has told Frisco that he has never heard his master Ascanio swear “six round oaths”. Frisco, snorting, says, “I will stand too't hee's neither brave Courtier, bouncing Cavalier, nor boone Companion if he swear not some time; for they will sweare, forsweare, and sweare.” “How sweare, forsweare, and sweare?” asks Joculo. Why, retorts Frisco, “They'll swear at dyce, forsweare their debts, and swear when they lose their labour in love.”¹¹ Autolycus is the kinsman of these characters, but he is a better satirist. After he has put on Florizel's clothing, Autolycus meets the Clown and the Old Shepherd. The latter, fooled by the clothes, asks him if he is a courtier. Autolycus in his answer captures the superficiality of the courtier's vain affectations:

Seest thou not the air of the court in these enfoldings? Hath not my gait in it the measure of the court? Receives not thy nose court-odour from me? Reflect I not on thy baseness court-contempt? Think'st thou, for that I insinuate, or touse from thee thy business, I am therefore no courtier? I am courtier cap-a-pie.

(IV. iv. 754 ff.)

The parallels continue to accumulate. One of the principal characters in The Arraignment of Paris was Flora. As goddess of flowers, she bestows her blooms upon Juno, Pallas, and Venus, according to their degree. For her perfection in this she receives great praise from Venus. The first words addressed to Perdita are, “These your unusual weeds to each part of you / Do give a life; no shepherdess, but Flora, / Peering in April's front” (IV. iv. 1-3). Perdita carries out Flora's activities, distributing flowers, as part of her office, according to the age of her visitors. The exactness of her floral knowledge moves Polixenes to utter his famous speech on Nature and Art. The common tradition which the two plays share is even more emphasized when we compare the discussion between Perdita and Polixenes with the pronouncement of the chorus in Peele's play concerning Flora's activity:

What living wight shall chance to see
These goddesses, each placed in her degree,
Portrayed by Flora's workmanship alone,
Must say that art & nature met in one.(12)

At the end of the flower episode Camillo, as Venus did Flora, praises Perdita: “I should leave grazing, were I of your flock, / And only live by gazing.” Shakespeare, given a pastoral situation, turns to the broad outline presented by tradition.

Shakespeare's use of what seems to be a conventional sequence occurs again. The two lovers of The Thracian Wonder, disguised and unknown to each other and living in pastoral seclusion, take part in a celebration similar to the sheep-shearing festival in The Winter's Tale. The high point of the celebration comes with a dance, and the disguised lovers, Radagon and Ariadne, find themselves partners. So clearly superior are they to the others and so suited are they to each other that they win the garland. Following the dance, Tityrus, another of Autolycus' ancestors, appears as Janus. In this guise he entertains the guests. Then the stage is cleared except for the Clown. He climbs a tree when he sees the love-sick Palemon enter. Palemon mistakes him for his loved one and threatens to climb up the tree in pursuit. The Clown descends, braving the misguided ardor of Palemon in the hope of getting at the banquet left on the tables. But Palemon, the complete lover, feels it is dangerous to eat. The Clown, however, takes the realistic approach: “Let's fill our bellies and we shall purge the better.”¹³ Shakespeare's feast is more polished but the same actions occur in like order. After the guests have gathered, Florizel claims the hand of Perdita for “our dance”. The stage-directions call for “a dance of Shepherds and the Shepherdesses” to follow. The appropriate comments are made about the grace of Perdita, fit partner for the princely Florizel. Then the attention is turned, as in The Thracian Wonder, to the comic characters. Autolycus enters, again singing, and the Clown becomes the willing purchaser of some bawdy ballads for Mopsa and Dorcas. The correspondences go even to the satiric handling of love in both plays at the same point in the action.

The last scene of Act III, in which Antigonus deposits Perdita in the wilds of Bohemia, has crowded into it several conventions. The storm which sinks the ship is the same storm which cast the lovers adrift in more than one Greek and pastoral romance. Here it covers up the origins of the abandoned child. The famous bear that eats up poor Antigonus has its counterparts in both the romance and the pastoral drama. In Tasso's Aminta, as we have seen, the heroine is seen pursuing a wolf. Later she is thought to have been devoured by the animal. And the princely cousins of Sidney's Arcadia display their courage by saving their princesses from a ravening beast. Where, however, in Shakespeare's forerunners the animal usually came off worst, here we get a vivid description of the bear's triumph over Antigonus. This does serve to cut the last strand of Perdita's connection with her origins. But so horrible are the accounts of the killing that it seems likely Shakespeare was spoofing the clichés of storms and wild animals, in spite of G. Wilson Knight's solemn assurance that “We must take the bear seriously, as suggesting man's insecurity in the face of untamed nature.”¹⁴

Chasing parallels is a pointless game which I do not want to play for itself alone. I wish only to establish that the presence in The Winter's Tale of the conventions I have referred to indicates that Shakespeare wrote within a well-defined tradition and that the material he used was chosen consciously from that tradition. But at the most important points, Shakespeare becomes unconventional, and the departure from his models shows us the playwright in control, modifying the conventions considerably because they do not offer a vessel capacious enough for his meaning. His treatment of the most important theme in the pastoral, fidelity in love, illustrates such modification clearly.

Fidelity and disguise go together. In The Maydes Metamorphosis, Eurymine, a lady of “obscure birth”, is banished from the court because Ascanio, the Duke's son, is in love with her. She is conducted to the forest and cast into the wilderness. Her beauty attracts several lovers, one of them the god Apollo. To remain true to her Ascanio she must escape the god's advances; so she tricks him into transforming her into a boy. When Ascanio arrives in the forest looking for Eurymine, he is understandably nonplussed by his feelings for the “boy” he finds there. He remains faithful, however, and is rewarded. Eurymine returns to girldom, her noble birth is discovered, and the two children are happily accepted back into the court fold. Chastity is maintained through disguise; fidelity wipes away the disguise.

The romantic ethic based on a fidelity which is either impeded or assisted by disguise is set out clearly by Fletcher in The Faithful Shepherdess. Clorin, the faithful shepherdess, is drawn as the epitome of fidelity. Remaining true to her dead shepherd, Clorin has retired into a little glade to make her hut near a life-giving fountain, a pleasant little retreat full of symbolism and similar to the fountain of Diana in Daphnis and Chloe. She has learned much forest lore and in the course of the play she uses herbs to cure the wounds of various shepherds and shepherdesses. These latter characters stand for all degrees of faithfulness, from the lustful, calculating Chloe to the innocent Amoret. Chloe indiscriminately tries to seduce every man who happens along. Amoret, however, has vowed her love to Perigot, who returns her passion as long as she is chaste. But Amarillis also wants Perigot and sets out to win him. By magic Amarillis changes her appearance into that of Amoret and in this disguise offers herself to Perigot. Since Perigot's love for Amoret goes only as far as her virginity, her overture revolts him. In a fit of anger he wounds the disguised Amarillis and runs off into the woods. There are many variations upon this incident in the play, but in the end the good and the evil are rewarded in correspondence to the magnitude of their sins and virtues. Chloe is ejected from the forest; Amoret and Perigot, both wounded, are reunited; Amarillis is forgiven; the rest get their just due. Presiding over all and curing those worthy of being cured is Clorin, who, chaste and faithful above all human powers, wields, in the name of fidelity, the regenerative services.¹⁵

As most other pastoral playwrights and romancers, Fletcher has given a shallow treatment of a noble virtue, even though he explores more than one face of the motif. The interest is in chastity, the refraining from sexual intercourse. Love goes no further. Within this limited frame there is no lack of stereotyped characters representing degrees of good and bad. Real human feelings are hardly given a chance. Moreover, the truth behind the disguises is a very narrow truth. Reality and right are seen only in the cramped sphere dominated by a shallow concept of love. Further implications of this attitude are explained by Greg, who, in speaking of Tasso's Aminta, says that there is present “a degeneration of sexual feeling … [that is] primarily of an animal nature, and this in a sense other than that in which physical love may be said to form an element in all natural relations between men and women.”¹⁶ The same holds for almost all of the precursors of The Winter's Tale, since the romancers and the playwrights seem more interested in arousing excitement in their audience than honestly exploring human feelings.

Greene, in Pandosto,¹⁷ paid fealty to the convention of fidelity. A brief glance at the main action of the book will show this. Pandosto (Leontes) in fact does lose his wife Bellaria (Hermione). She dies after Pandosto, in a jealous rage, has caused the death of their son, sent away Egistus (Polixenes), and set adrift Fawnia (Perdita). This story comprises about a third of the narrative. The remaining two-thirds of the book focus upon Dorastus (Florizel) and Fawnia. Unguided, Fawnia lands upon the shores of Sicily, is found by a shepherd, and is raised by him and his wife. In time she meets Dorastus and, as is traditional in the romance, the two youngsters fall in love at first sight. Greene spends a good deal of time lingering over the sensibilities aroused during the courtship, capitalizing upon his opportunity with the usual long monologues. Finally, after some courtly fencing, the two declare their mutual passions and Dorastus spirits his shepherdess away to Bohemia, where his ship is blown by a storm. They try to disguise themselves by taking false names, but Pandosto does not believe their stories and imprisons Dorastus. Then he attempts the chastity of Fawnia, whom, of course, he does not recognize. Egistus, discovering the whereabouts of his son and his son's paramour, requests Pandosto to execute them. At the last moment, however, Fawnia's foster father appears and reveals her true identity. The shock is so great for Pandosto that he commits suicide. Dorastus and Fawnia are left occupying the stage, prototypes of pastoral romantic lovers. The goal of the book is the happiness of Dorastus and Fawnia, and it is achieved through a stereotyped fidelity.

Shakespeare makes many changes, but the most significant one is the departure from the usual handling of the fidelity theme. Instead of making the inviolable love between Florizel and Perdita the center of the action, he uses it for the examination of a larger problem—the nature of truth. The fact that Hermione remains alive and steals the last scene from her daughter throws the dramatic weight upon the story of herself and Leontes. Greene exploits the conventional courtly romance between Dorastus and Fawnia, playing upon their falling in love, and the obstacles to consummating that love, for the sake of sentimental chills. Shakespeare is not interested in that. By shifting the focus, he anatomizes an infected king whose disease is an inability to see the truth. Leontes' disease is developed through contrast with other examples of the apprehension of truth and reality. Shakespeare, in submitting to certain superficial aspects of the pastoral tradition, transforms them into devices for commenting seriously upon the theme of reality and experience and its importance to the conduct of a king.

The serious commentary begins with Leontes' misapprehension of actuality. Suddenly, without warning, he is seized by an unreasoning, unfounded certainty of his wife's infidelity. His infected mind “[does] make possible things not so held” (I. ii. 139). He deludes himself into believing the raging fancies of his own dreams, fancies derived from the most tenuous appearances. Camillo shows that nothing is going on between Hermione and Leontes' childhood friend Polixenes by having to ask whom Leontes suspects Hermione of being unfaithful with (I. ii. 307). Both chastity and fidelity are issues here, as the conventions demand, but they are not the main issues. The main one is the awfulness of Leontes' burning mind, fabricating at will: “Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip?” (I. ii. 284-286). To this Camillo replies, “Good my lord, be cur'd.” Camillo cannot verify Leontes' suspicions because there is nothing to be verified. Fearing for his own life and unable any longer to support Leontes' imaginings, Camillo defects to Polixenes with the information about Leontes' plot upon the life of the Bohemian king. Hard upon this, Leontes' Sicilian courtiers, for whom we have no reason to feel anything other than respect and trust, deny Leontes' accusations against Hermione and Polixenes. Finally, divinely pointing up the phantoms of Leontes' mind, the oracle clears Hermione in every eye but Leontes'.

This jealousy, this humour, brings Leontes near to madness—“Dost think I am so muddy, so unsettled, / To appoint myself in this vexation …” (I. ii. 325-326). Paulina declares that she is “no less honest than you are mad” (II. iii. 70-71), and “These dangerous unsafe lunes I' th' King, beshrew them” (II. ii. 30). In this humour Leontes betrays the obligations of a good king. He becomes cruel and peremptory. He refuses the counsel of his nobles. He commits himself, without moderation, to his own passion. The results of this are serious. He loses a friend, a son, a daughter, and a wife. But the consequences are not confined to the personal sphere. A ruler who treats the truth as something of his own making must eventually unhinge his state. The repercussions of his irresponsible suspicions, so firm in his mind that they create a world which he actually sees and feels (II. i. 152), are potentially cataclysmic. An apprehension of what is and what should be are principal requirements for the good ruler; Leontes attempts to shape reality to his own fantasies.

The psychological implications of Leontes' anger are a good deal deeper than those present in similar situations in other examples of the pastoral drama. In part this derives from Greene. But Pandosto's jealousy is brought about gradually; he at least makes a feint at examining what might be only appearances. Shakespeare treats the situation with more daring. Because he provides no real motives for Leontes' jealousy, the irrationality of his fancies is dramatically emphasized. In The Maydes Metamorphosis the Duke banishes Eurymine because his son loves her. He does not, however, merely imagine that that love exists; he has it from his son's own testimony. He is legitimately angered because he does not and cannot know Eurymine's birth, and so attempts to save his son from an inferior match. Radagon, in The Thracian Wonder, disguises himself to woo Ariadne, the daughter of the Thracian king. She submits and when she becomes pregnant, unmistakably by Radagon, her father sends the two lovers and the child to sea in little boats. The actions of these two rulers might not have been “right”, but the men knew what they saw. The only disguises in these plays were physical disguises which really did mask the identity of those involved. But the disguise in the first three acts of The Winter's Tale is of Leontes' own making and is intimately connected with psychological truth and observable reality. Some ten years after the production of The Winter's Tale Bacon, speaking in another context, will state a generality which embraces Leontes' problem: “… everyone … has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolours the light of nature. …”¹⁸

Shakespeare cures Leontes' infected mind through the pastoral, and, as we have seen, that episode contains almost all of the conventions of the genre. The devices of disguise and mistaken identity are again put to the task of exploring the reality and appearance theme. But more than that, Shakespeare uses them to point up Leontes' shortcomings. In contrast to his distortion of reality according to his own “den”, the characters in Act IV are confronted with tangible costume disguises and mistaken identities which make their inability to see the truth quite justifiable. Polixenes, in other words, like the Duke in The Maydes Metamorphosis, cannot be blamed too severely for not wanting his royal son to marry what appears to be a mere shepherd girl. The reprehensibility of Leontes' unjustifiable delusions, however, is most effectively emphasized by Florizel and Autolycus.

Florizel is the fairy prince who does not concern himself with the mere appearance of outward trappings. Through infalliable intuition and the highest integrity he pierces externals to discover the emotional truth of Perdita's real quality. The clarity of his vision, which sees through the physical disguise, throws into relief the blindness of Leontes, who had no such impediment to overcome. Indeed, the truth was clear to all but him. In Act IV the truth is clear only to the faithful Florizel. Shakespeare heightens the effectiveness of this contrast by ennobling the relationship between Florizel and Perdita, another example of his transformation of hackneyed conventions into living situations. In former pastorals, love was a matter of sex and it was expressed through chastity. Shakespeare does not avoid or reject the virtue; he simply does not use it as the foundation of real love. Perdita is too charming for chastity even to be an issue. Without the priggishness of her pastoral forebears, she declares her heart with disarming candor. She is like her mother and Florizel discerns her worth under her apparent identity. This innocent love, in other pastorals valuable only in itself, becomes the means of restoring a civic body to health.

The other main contrast to Leontes' behavior comes in Autolycus. He suffers from no delusions. He may be a thief, a cozener, a sharp salesman, but he is thoroughly truthful with himself, and he has taken full measure of the reality about him. The most interesting comments on the nature of truth and appearance and reality are made through Autolycus. First of all, his constant changing of costumes reflects truth—it is first one thing and then another. Secondly, the word truth is bandied about during the ballad-selling, and Autolycus, knowing the truth, is several jumps ahead of his coneys. Mopsa, in her country innocence, says, “I love a ballad in print o' life, for then we are sure they are true” (IV.iv.263). How slenderly people go about learning the truth, as though print could create it. The silly shepherds, mouths hanging open in awe, take the pedlar's word for truth that a usurer's wife actually bore “twenty money-bags at a burden”, and that a fish high above the water sang a “ballad against the sad hearts of maids”. The truth is disguised under many robes, but Mopsa's gullibility is no more grotesque and certainly less consequential than Leontes', who believed something worse upon less provocation.

Later, when Autolycus switches clothes with Florizel, his shrewd eye detects “a piece of iniquity” in the prince's actions. But instead of performing his duty to his sovereign like a good subject, he decides to conceal his knowledge about Florizel's actions because such concealment is the “more knavery”. Under different circumstances such a commitment to knavery would seem sinister, as it does with Richard III. But Shakespeare's use of irony saves Autolycus for comedy and strengthens his effectiveness as a foil to Leontes. It is ironical that Autolycus should use such a clear grasp of reality to achieve knavery, while a king, lacking that grasp, threatened a whole realm. But, to enrich the irony, dramatically it is not knavery at all for it works a better end, since it allows Florizel's escape and sets up the happy conclusion. The escape of the lovers is served by a knave, when two kings almost destroyed the youngsters through varying degrees of blindness.

The final comment upon Leontes' inability to distinguish between reality and appearance comes in Act V. The Clown and the Old Shepherd, now known to be the foster relatives of Perdita, confront Autolycus with their new-made fineries. The Clown forces from him the acknowledgment that the two shepherds are “gentlemen born”. It is characteristic of Autolycus' astute acceptance of circumstances that he meekly, without the old loquacity, surrenders: “I know you are now, sir, a gentleman born” (V.ii.146). The Clown will never know the difference between the truth and mere appearances. Autolycus has always known, and has laughed. The Clown is a generous fellow and when Autolycus declares that he is going to mend his ways, the Clown insists that he “will swear to the Prince thou art as honest a true fellow as any in Bohemia” (168). This swearing disturbs the Old Shepherd, who asks, “How if it be false, son?” The Clown replies, “If it be ne'er so false, a true gentleman may swear it in the behalf of his friend” (176). A gentleman, in short, may swear the truth into existence; just as a ballad in print, for Mopsa, might declare absurdities true; and just as Leontes' fancies might “make possible things not so held”. These distortions of truth are all of the same class. Leontes' delusions, serious as they are, are made ridiculous when they are paralleled with those of Mopsa and the Clown.

The Clown gets in the last word with Autolycus, and as though to emphasize the pertinence of his remarks to the Leontes episode, he opens the curtains for the final scene when he announces the entrance of the royal entourage on its way to see the “Queen's picture”. And so the action shifts and we are shown the final prodigy. Hermione, appearing to be a statue, returns to life. Appearances are swept away and reality is restored. Theodore Spencer has said that in the last plays appearance is evil and reality is good.¹⁹ In The Winter's Tale, the evil lies not in appearance itself but in the royal mind which insists that appearance is reality. To explore this premise, Shakespeare converts the stereotyped conventions of the pastoral drama into highly original instruments which combine to form one of the best of his last plays.

Notes

1. W. W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Drama (London, 1906), p. 411.

2. Greg, p. 7.

3. Greg, p. 169.

4. All references are to Torquato Tasso, Aminta, ed. Louis E. Lord (London, 1931).

5. Giovanni Baptista Guarini, Il Pastor Fido, printed for Simon Waterford, 1602, sig. C2.

6. For an extensive list of plot conventions see Edwin Greenlaw, “Shakespeare's Pastorals”, SP [Studies in Philology], XII (1916), 123.

7. Cf. J. Q. Adams, “Menaphon and The Thracian Wonder,” MP [Modern Philology], III (1906), 317-318.

8. All references to the Idyls are from Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, ed. A. Lang (London, 1918).

9. The Maydes Metamorphosis, in Old Plays, ed. A. H. Bullen (London, 1882), p. 136.

10. Il Pastor Fido, sig. N4.

11. The Maydes Metamorphosis, p. 138.

12. George Peele, The Arraignment of Paris, eds. Charles Read Baskervill, Virgil B. Heltzel, and Arthur H. Nethercot (New York, 1934), p. 211.

13. John Webster, The Thracian Wonder, printed by Tho. Johnson, 1661.

14. G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (New York, 1947), p. 98.

15. John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess in Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. J. St. Loe Strachey, vol. II (New York, 1950).

16. Greg, p. 190.

17. Robert Greene, Pandosto, ed. P. G. Thomas (London, 1907).

18. Sir Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, in Selected Writings, ed. Hugh G. Dick (New York, 1955), p. 470.

19. Theodore Spencer, “Appearance and Reality in Shakespeare's Last Plays”, MP, XXXIX (1942), 269.