akespeare's
marvellous powers, and indeed some of the Shakespearean scholars believe
it to be the last work that fell from his hand. Human life, as depicted
in _A Winter's Tale_, shows itself like what it always seems to be in
the eyes of patient, tolerant, magnanimous experience--the eyes "that
have kept watch o'er man's mortality"--for it is a scene of inexplicable
contrasts and vicissitudes, seemingly the chaos of caprice and chance,
yet always, in fact, beneficently overruled and guided to good ends.
Human beings are shown in it as full of weakness; often as the puppets
of laws that they do not understand and of universal propensities and
impulses into which they never pause to inquire; almost always as
objects of benignant pity. The woful tangle of human existence is here
viewed with half-cheerful, half-sad tolerance, yet with the hope and
belief that all will come right at last. The mood of the comedy is
pensive but radically sweet. The poet is like the forest in Emerson's
subtle vision of the inherent exultation of nature:--

"Sober, on a fund of joy,
The woods at heart are glad."

Mary Anderson doubled the characters of Hermione and Perdita. This had
not been conspicuously done until it was done by her, and her
innovation, in that respect, was met with grave disapproval. The moment
the subject is examined, however, objection to that method of procedure
is dispelled. Hermione, as a dramatic person, disappears in the middle
of the third act of Shakespeare's comedy and comes no more until the end
of the piece, when she emerges as a statue. Her character has been
entirely expressed and her part in the action of the drama has been
substantially fulfilled before she disappears. There is no intermediate
passion to be wrought to a climax, nor is there any intermediate mood,
dramatically speaking, to be sustained. The dramatic environment, the
dramatic necessities, are vastly unlike, for example, those of Lady
Macbeth--one of the hardest of all parts to play well, because exhibited
intermittently, at long intervals, yet steadily constrained by the
necessity of cumulative excitement. The representative of Lady Macbeth
must be identified with that character, whether on the stage or off,
from the beginning of it to the end. Hermione, on the contrary, is at
rest from the moment when she faints upon receiving information of the
death of her boy. A lapse of sixteen years is assumed, and then,
standing forth as a stat