The Winter's Tale: Introduction

11Sources and Cultural Context

Robert Greene's Pandosto

Pandosto's characters	The Winter's Tale characters
Pandosto	Leontes
Bellaria	Hermione
Garinter	Mamillius
Fawnia	Perdita
Franion	Camillo
Egistus	Polixenes
Dorastus	Florizel
Capnio	Autolycus
No correspondence	Antigonus, Paulina, Emilia, Clown, Dorcas, Mopsa

Major characters

12While Robert Greene's 1588 Pandosto. The Triumph of Time provides us with the basic characters (see chart above), essential pastoral and romance elements and narrative structure for The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's adoption and manipulation of the narrative elements reveal his ingenuity in choosing sources and synthesizing those sources with the vast storehouse of personal readings and dramatic influences that were available to him. Greene's novel–with different names for its major characters and a reversal of kingdoms, Bohemia for Pandosto and Sicilia for Egisthus—outlines King Pandosto's emerging jealousy over his wife Bellaria's presumed trysts with his lifelong friend, Egisthus [TLN 360ff]. As in The Winter's Tale, Pandosto's jealousy leads to both the death of Bellaria (Hermione) [TLN 1388ff]—in this instance an actual death-- and their son, Garinter (Mamillius) [TLN 1326ff]. Like The Winter's Tale's Camillo, the cupbearer Franion spirits away Egithus to his home in Sicilia –not Bohemia, which Pandosto rules in Greene's prose narrative. Pandosto's wrath, once the king discovers Egisthus and Franion's departure [TLN 643], is now trained on Bellaria, whom Pandosto conjectures committed her adultery with Franion's assistance. Bellaria, like Hermione, is imprisoned and discovers her nascent pregnancy only after she has endured time in prison [TLN 724]. The birth of Perdita—in Greene named Fawnia—similarly engenders Pandosto's enraged jealousy and suspicion that the child is not his, and after pledging to have the girl burned to death, retreats in his anger thanks to his advisors' intercession. Despite this reprieve, Pandosto still orders that the daughter be set adrift on the ocean and left subject to Fortune's whimsical treatment [TLN 1105ff].

13Greene's narrative also provided Shakespeare with the public trial of Bellaria's guilt and the embassy sent to Delphos to receive Apollo's oracle—which Pandosto agrees to after Bellaria's suggestion [TLN 803ff]. The prophecy is duplicated almost verbatim in The Winter's Tale: "Suspition is no proofe: Iealousie is an vnequall Iudge: Bellaria is chast: Egistus blamelesse: Franion a true subject: Pandosto treacherous: his Babe an innocent, and the King shal liue without an heire: if that which is lost be not founde" (C2^r ). Unlike the audience of The Winter's Tale, the readers of Pandosto are given this oracle account before the trial scene and are thus deprived of dramatic tension. The trial scene merely repeats the reading of the oracle. Given this short reprieve, Bellaria is allowed a moment of joy, Pandosto a period of self-recrimination, self loathing, and public plea for forgiveness before the announcement comes that their young son Garinter has died [TLN 1326ff]. Garinter's death leads to the subsequent tragedy: "as Bellaria heard, surcharged before with extreame ioy, and now suppressed with heauie sorrowe, her vitall spirites were so stopped, that she fell downe presently dead, and could neuer be reuived" (C3^r) Pandosto's self-loathing is similar to that found in Leontes:

14my innocent Babe I haue drowned in the Seas: my louing wife I haue slaine with slaunderous suspition: my trusty friend I haue sought to betray, and yet the Gods are slacke to plague such offences. Ah vniust Apollo, Pandosto is the man that hath committed the faulte: why should Garinter, seely childe, abide the paine: Well, sith the Gods meane to prolong my dayes, to increase my dolour, I will offer my guiltie bloud a sacrifice to those sacklesse soules, whose lives are lost by my rigorous folly (C3^v).

15Despite the desire to commit suicide—which he fulfills by the end of the narrative—Pandosto persists, as does Leontes.

16Greene, like Shakespeare, transports the narrative across the sea, where the infant Fawnia floats ashore in Sicilia and is discovered by a shepherd, Porrus, who raises her, not without a contentious debate, with his wife Mopsa [TLN 1501ff]. As with Perdita, Fawnia matures in her beauty and wit with tremendous modesty, qualities that ultimately draw to her side at a chance encounter the young prince, Dorastus, son of Egisthus. Greene meditates on the pangs of love felt by Dorastus and Fawnia: Dorastus loves beneath his social station while his father is attempting to arrange a royal marriage: Fawnia falls for someone well above her peasant status. Greene's attention to these star-crossed lovers is so extensive that in its 1635 printing, Pandosto was retitled The Pleasant History of Dorastus and Fawnia.

17Greene's melodramatic recounting of the burgeoning love and Dorastus's peasant disguise—drawn from Apollo's lascivious dissembling in Ovid's Metamorphoses —allows the two young lovers to plan their departure by ship, aided by Capnio, a trickster figure who pulls an oblivious Porrus into the plot [TLN 2496ff]. Dorastus's departure from court propels his father into a melancholic state; Greene's narrative glowers at Dorastus's indifference to his father, yet he delivers the crew to Bohemia's safe shores following a tempest. The melodrama becomes heightened as Pandosto re-enters the narrative: using spies, he abducts Dorastus and Fawnia, to whom Pandosto finds himself physically drawn. Attempting to hide his identity as the son of Egisthus, Dorastus identifies himself as a Trapolonian named Meleagrus and Fawnia as his Paduan betrothed [TLN 2831]. Pandosto rejects Dorastus's story and has him imprisoned while he furthers his attempts to seduce Fawnia during Dorastus's imprisonment: "Hauing thus hardly handled the supposed Trapalonians: Pandosto contrarie to his aged yeares began to bee somewhat tickled with the beauty of Fawnia, insomuch that hee could take no rest, but cast in his old head a thousand new devises: at last he fell into these thoughtes" (F4^v).

18While Shakespeare brings Polixenes and Leontes together in Sicilia for their emotional reunion, Egisthus sends a message to Pandosto asking that his son be released and Fawnia executed; Pandosto agrees to this request, supplementing the death warrant with the names of Porrus and Capnio. Porrus, however, provides the denouement by revealing Fawnia's orphan past:

19For so it hapned that I being a poore sheepherd in Sycilia, living by keeping other mens flockes: one of my sheepe straying downe to the sea side, as I went to seeke her, I saw a little boate driven vpon the shoare, wherein I found a babe of sixe daies old, wrapped in a mantle of scarlet, hauing about the necke this chaine: I pittying the child, and desirous of the treasure, carried it home to my wife, who with great care nursed it vp, and set it to keepe sheep. Here is the chaine and the iewels, and this Fawnia is the child whom I found in the boat. What she is, or of what parentage, I know not, but this I am assured of that she is none of mine (G3^v).

20This reversal overturns the potential tragedy that has been building: Pandosto apologizes for his lust, knights the peasant Porrus, and sails with Dorastus, Fawnia, and Porrus to Sicilia to rejoin his friend Egisthus. Overwhelmed by grief for his suspicious treatment of Egisthus, for his role in bringing on Bellaria's death, and for his incestuous feelings towards his daughter, Pandosto commits suicide and is returned posthumously by Dorastus and Fawnia.