1The Early Years

Seventeenth and eighteenth-century criticism

Simon Forman's May 1611 account may be considered the first critical reception of the play. Forman treats the play as a cautionary tale against roving peddlers like Autolycus; the transformative restoration of Leontes's family fails to provoke any comment. Taking into account classical principles of play production, Ben Jonson and eighteenth-century neoclassicists after him dismissed The Winter's Tale as rife with "mouldy tales" and plot absurdities. For John Dryden (1672) The Winter's Tale reflected a poetry that lacked "vigor and maturity" and displayed a "lameness" of plot. He dismissed it, along with Love's Labour Lost and Measure for Measure, as "either grounded on impossibilities, or at least, so meanly written, that the Comedy neither caus'd your mirth, nor the serious part your concernment." Alexander Pope chose to deny Shakespeare's hand in the creation of the play in order to dissociate Shakespeare's genius from a "meanly" written play. The sensibility underlying these sentiments can be found in the eighteenth-century productions like Macnamara Morgan's The Sheep-Shearing; Or, Florizel and Perdita, produced in 1754, or David Garrick's Florizel and Perdita, a Dramatic Pastoral in 1756. While Garrick retains in abbreviated form both Leontes and Hermione, including Hermione's truncated resurrection as a statue, both plays excise the problems highlighted by Samuel Johnson, Pope, and Dryden:

Both Morgan and Garrick solved the eighteenth-century problem of the play's purportedly inchoate form by excising the first half of The Winter's Tale, the Sicilian scenes of Leontes' jealous rapture, Camillo's and Polixenes' flight, Hermione's trial, Paulina's intercession, the casting out of the babe, Antigonus's death on the seacoast of Bohemia, and Time the Chorus narration of the passage of sixteen years. (Hunt, Critical Essays 6)

The discordant halves of the story, Antigonus's dispatching by a mischievous bear, and the restoration of family through the Pygmalion-like animation of Hermione all elements that captivate a modern audience, are subjugated to the pastoral romance of two lovers from apparently disparate social classes and the denouement that provides for the comic nuptials. Until John Philip Kemble's 1802 production at Drury Lane, which restored the tragic jealousy and brooding ambience that resonates in the play's first three acts, the The Winter's Tale remained a truncated pastoral shell of Shakespeare's original play.

Nineteenth-century criticism

2Nineteenth-century Romantic critics found their inspiration in productions that restored the tragic dimensions of Leontes and Hermione's story. John Philip Kemble's 1802 production influenced criticism of the early Romantic period. Kemble's 1802 production influenced criticism of the early Romantic period. Moved by both Kemble's portrayal of Leontes and Sarah Siddon's riveting realization of Hermione, William Hazlitt rehabilitated Shakespeare's play as a drama worthy of consideration: "These slips or blemishes [i.e. the choric role of Time, the leaping forward over sixteen years, and the mythical sea-coast of Bohemia] however do not prove it not to be Shakespear's; for he was as likely to fall into them as any body; but do not know any body but himself who could produce the beauties" (qtd. in Hunt, Critical Essays65). Hazlitt singles out the "stuff" of the tragic dimensions contained within the play: the "romantic sweetness, the comic humour" are demonstrably Shakespeare's work, and Leontes's "crabbed and tortuous style" betrays the "thorny" labyrinthine depths of an unreasonable tragedy. Leontes's psychopathology and Hermione's sainted patience persuade Hazlitt that this play is indubitably Shakespeare's work.

3Similarly, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's regard for the play derived from Leontes's impassioned conviction of Hermione's infidelity, a trait that for Coleridge is given its tragic force in Othello: "an excitability by the most inadequate causes, and an eagerness to snatch at proofs; secondly, a grossness of conception, and a disposition to degrade the object of the passion by sensual fancies and images; thirdly, a sense of shame of his own feelings exhibited in a solitary moodiness of humor, and yet from the violence of the passion forced to utter itself . . . " (qtd in Hunt, Critical Essays 72). Despite the Romantic attention to Leontes and his incipient jealousy, the play failed to generate more than the passing theatrical criticism prompted by performance.