Traditional approaches to The Winter's Tale have regarded Greene's Pandosto as its main source, and no doubt this is true in terms of plot and narrative. But, as I have tried to show, the changes Shakespeare makes are related to culture and politics. That the plays of Shakespeare use their main sources as mere frames within which to incorporate contemporary discourses is now generally accepted. This development in critical practice indicates a welcome and long overdue departure from the too simplistic notion held by many that Ben Jonson was the more widely read and intellectually superior author, while Shakespeare, lacking a university education, used his dramatic instinct to produce plays that were theatrically successful. Fortunately, this kind of patronizing concession to Shakespeare is no longer fashionable. That he must have known the works of Montaigne, Machiavelli, and other well-known Renaissance philosophers is of course well established, but it is equally likely that he knew the work of the French writer Jean Bodin (1530-96), one of the most influential geographers of the time.

Since in this century England entered the nautical age on a wide scale, geography was the science of the future, the equivalent of computer science today. In the preface to his History of Travel Richard Willes commented:

There was a time whan the arte of grammar was so muche esteemed. . . . Than was it honourable to be a Poet . . . that tyme is paste. There was a tyme whan Logike and Astrology weeried the heades of young schollers . . . that tyme is past. Not long since happy was he that had any skil in the Greke language. [However, now] all Christians, Iewes, Turkes, Moores, Infidels and Barbares be this day in loue with Geographie.¹⁴

Bodin's immensely popular Methodus aimed at establishing a correlation of culture with climate and topography, these studies including politics and ethnography as well.

Between 1566 and 1650 the Methodus was issued in thirteen Latin editions, the République translated into four languages and published frequently in abridged form. That the proud position of history was to be short-lived and that the Cartesians were to denounce it as unreliable—a collection of myths, and a conglomeration of errors—is relevant only on the Continent, where historical pyrrhonism rose to its highest level and where Bodin's name was seldom mentioned. In England the reception of his work was different. There, from 1580 to the end of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the French scholar enjoyed a reputation for brilliance and high originality. He not only was known to all serious English students of history and geography but was admired, quoted, and imitated. William Harrison, the author of the Description of England in 1577, mentioned him, as did Holinshed, Sidney, Nash, Spenser, Bolton, Hobbes, Wheare, Heylyn, Burton, Carpenter, and Hakewill. "You cannot stepp into a schollar's studye," said Gabriel Harvey, "but (ten to one) you shall litely [sic] finde open either Bodin de Republica or Le Royes Exposition. . . . " Robert Burton, at one time a teacher of geography, referred to him many times in the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).¹⁵

Here is one such reference by Burton, in which, quoting Bodin, he contrasts the freedom between the sexes practiced by the northern Europeans with the restraints imposed on them by Italian culture, this difference having a geographical cause: "Bodine . . . ascribes a great cause to the country or clime, and discourseth largely there of this subject, saying, that southern men are more hot, lascivious, and jealous than such as live in the north; they can hardly contain themselves in those hotter climes, but are most subject to prodigious lust. . . . Germany hath not so many drunkards, England tobacconists, France dancers, Holland mariners, as Italy alone hath jealous husbands."¹⁶ Today the "correct" response is to dismiss such generalizations as conventional stereotypes, but perhaps all that has happened is that we push our feelings underground. Earlier centuries were more outspoken, as can be seen in Shakespeare's creation of characters like Shylock and Don Armado, the "fantastical Spaniard" of Love's Labor's Lost.

One of Bodin's intents was to explain the cultural diversity which, he believed, was originally non-existent, for mankind began as a homogeneous unit. Basing his conclusions on observation and on a vast assemblage of documentation, Bodin points out that the people of the south are "of a contrarie humour and disposition to them of the North: these are great and strong, they are little and weake; they of the north, hot and moyst, the others cold and dry; the one hath a big voyce and greene eyes, the other hath a weake voyce and black eyes; the one hath a flaxen haire and a faire skin, the other hath both haire and skin black; the one feareth cold, the other heate."¹⁷ As Terence Hawkes has drily remarked, "All nations execrate their enemies, and the discourse of denigration has a long and monotonous history in Europe, on all sides, and towards all cultural groups."¹⁸

But Bodin does not quite conform to this kind of a predictable pattern: he is original and interesting because he often refuses to adopt the expected stance. Thus he speaks frequently and approvingly of the good effects of the mingling of races and cultures—"The fusion of peoples changes the customs and nature of men not a little"¹⁹—and this, he says, gives rise to new states and new cities.

Like Bodin, The Winter's Tale is much occupied with genetic fusion. Perdita, herself a product of the union of Sicily and Russia—though she is unaware of this—is critical of cross-breeding and has to listen to Polixenes' celebrated speech in which he extols the ingenuity of genetic engineering in improving the breed:

You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend Nature—change it rather—but
The art itself is Nature.

(IV.iv.92-97)

Polixenes' later repudiation of his own philosophy, as seen in his vicious denunciation of Perdita, prompted by the fear of plebeian blood contaminating that of his royal family, would seem to suggest that the play satirizes the belief in the purity of blood. But it must also be noted that the play is not a complete overturning of conventional beliefs, for Perdita, we know, is actually not a plebeian at all, and her union with Florizel is not the same as King Cophetua's choice of a beggar-maid, a story that Shakespeare knew very well (see Love's Labor's Lost IV.i.65-66, 2 Henry IV V.iii.102, and Romeo and Juliet II.i.14). Thus, though it challenges notions of class and blood superiority, The Winter's Tale does not totally repudiate them, and even the challenge is couched in terms that are muted, not strident. After all, Shakespeare by this time was writing for a chiefly aristocratic audience.