A WINTER'S TALE. WITH NOTES CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY. Adapted for Scholastic or Private Study, and for those qualifying for BY THE REV. JOHN HUNTER, M.A. One of the National Society's Examiners of Middle-Class Schools; INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. No earlier edition of A Winter's Tale is known than that of the folio, 1623. But the piece was performed in 1611, as we learn from the manuscript diary of Dr. Simon Forman, the astrologer, who used to frequent the theatres, and to make notes of the plot and incidents of the performance. His diary refers to the chief details of Shakspeare's Winter's Tale, as presented at the Globe Theatre, on May 15, 1611; and the play was probably composed about the beginning of that year. The source of the plot is Robert Greene's novel of Pandosto: the Triumph of Time,' being 'the History of Dorastus and Fawnia.' In that story the chief incidents of A Winter's Tale are found; but Shakspeare, while he has changed the names REMARKS OF VARIOUS AUTHORS ON SHAKSPEARE'S 'WINTER'S TALE' 'The Winter's Tale is as appropriately named as the Midmmer Night's Dream. It is one of those tales which are eculiarly calculated to beguile the reary leisure of a long inter evening. The calculation of probabilities has nothing o do with such wonderful and fleeting adventures, when all ad at last in universal joy: and, accordingly, Shakspeare has ere taken the greatest license of anachronisms and geographil errors; not to mention other incongruities, he opens a free vigation between Sicily and Bohemia, and makes Giulio omano the contemporary of the Delphic oracle. The piece vides itself in some degree into two plays. Leontes becomes ddenly jealous of his royal bosom-friend Polixenes, who is à a visit to his court; makes an attempt on his life, from hich Polixenes only saves himself by a clandestine flight;— ermione, suspected of infidelity, is thrown into prison, and e daughter which she there brings into the world is exposed a remote coast;-the accused queen, declared innocent by e oracle, on learning that her infant son has pined to death her account, falls down in a swoon, and is mourned as dead her husband, who becomes sensible, when too late, of his cor; all this makes up the first three acts. The last two are parated from these by a chasm of sixteen years; but the a |