5 - “A sad tale’s best for winter,” but for spring a comedy is better: Time, Turn, and Genre(s) in The Winter’s Tale

Summary

We are not likely ever to know why Shakespeare turned to the work of Robert Greene sometime in the year preceding 15 May 1611, when Simon Forman noted that he saw The Winter's Tale at the Globe. But turn he did and, as we saw in Chapter 1, not just to Greene's oft-published prose tale Pandosto, but also to The Second Part and The Third and Last Part of Conny-Catching, and to Mamillia for the name of Leontes’ son, as perhaps also for the name of her friend Florion, for his own Florizel. The result of this bodging is a bifurcated play whose tragic and comic components stand in far stronger contrast to one another than in any of the other late plays or even the mid-career “problem plays,” and is a distinctively shaped hybrid in a canon that often reflects the author's taste for serio-comic mingling. While Shakespeare's adaptation of Greene has been much commented on, studying the three elements in the subtitle of this chapter can guide us toward a deeper understanding of what he may have had in mind when he decided so drastically to transfigure Greene in his own image.

What might initially have caught Shakespeare's eye was the description and sales pitch printed in centered lines on the title page of the 1588 edition: “Pandosto. / The Triumph / of Time. // Wherein is discovered by a pleasant Historie, / that although by meanes of sinister fortune, Truth may be concea- / led, yet by Time in spight of fortune it / is most manifestly revealed. // Pleasant for age to avoyde drowsie thoughtes, / profitable for youth to eschue other wanton / pastimes, and bringing to both a / desired content. // Temporis filia veritas. // By Robert Greene, Maister of Artes / in Cambridge. // Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci.”

Following a letter to the Gentlemen Readers and a dedication to George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, the prose narrative begins with a new title: “The Historie of / Dorastus and / Fawnia.” As John Pitcher observes, the two titles reflect the overlapping plots of both Pandosto and The Winter's Tale; but they also may have suggested to Shakespeare that the contiguous stories could be fashioned into two quite different plays, a tragedy and a comedy—a generic distinction that Greene seems only nominally interested in pursuing.