t appeal
of the mother's love when the lost daughter kneels in joy before her.

In Perdita, Shakespeare, with incredible skill, depicted the true
daughter of such a mother. Although her nature at first seems all
innocence, beauty, youth, and joy, yet when trial comes to her in the
knowledge that she, a shepherdess, has loved a king's son, and that his
father has discovered it, her courage rises with the danger, and her
words echo her mother's resolution:--

"I think affliction may subdue the cheek,
But not take in the mind."

In the pastoral scenes, the poet gives us an English sheepshearing,
with its merrymaking, a pair of honest English country fellows in the
old shepherd and his son, the Clown, and the greatest of all beloved
vagabonds {204} in the rogue Autolycus, whose vices, like Falstaff's,
are more lovable than other people's virtues. Fortune, which will not
suffer him to be honest, makes his thieveries, in her extremity of
whim, to be but benefits for others.

Of the other characters, Prince Florizel, Perdita's lover, is that
rarest of all dramatic heroes, a young prince with real nobility of
soul. Lord Camillo and Lady Paulina are well-drawn types of loyalty
and devotion. Leontes alone, the jealous husband, is unreasoning in
the violence of his jealousy. As the study of a mind overborne by an
obsession, it is a strong yet repulsive picture.

+Date+.--Simon Forman narrates in his diary how he saw the play at the
Globe Theater, May 16, 1611. It was probably written about this time.
Jonson's _Masque of Oberon_, produced January 1, 1611, contains an
antimasque of satyrs which may bear some relation to the similar dance
in IV, iv, 331 ff. The First Folio contains the earliest print of the
play.

+Source+.--The romance, to which reference has been made above, as the
source of _The Winter's Tale_, was Robert Greene's _Pandosto: The
Triumph of Time_, sometimes called by its later title, _The History of
Dorastus and Fawnia_. Fourteen editions followed one another from its
appearance in 1588. Greene made the jealous Pandosto king in Bohemia,
and Egistus (Polixenes in the play) king of Sicily. In _The Winter's
Tale_ two kingdoms are interchanged. Nevertheless the "seacoast of
Bohemia," so often ridiculed as Shakespeare's stage direction, is found
in Greene's story. Three alterations by Shakespeare are of vital
importance in improving the plot: the slandered queen is kept alive,
instead of dyin