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 dying in grief for her son's death, to be restored again in the famous but theatrical statue scene; Autolycus is created and is given, with Camillo, an important share in the restoration of Perdita; and the complications of {205} Dorastus's (Florizel's) destiny as the prospective husband of a princess of Denmark, and Pandosto's (Leontes's) falling in love with his own daughter and his suicide on learning of her true birth, are wisely omitted. The characters of Paulina, the Clown, and some minor persons are Shakespeare's own invention. According to Professor Neilson, Autolycus and his song in IV iii, 1 ff., may have been partly based on the character of Tom Beggar in Robert Wilson's _Three Ladies of London_ (1584).