The events of the story take place among kings and shepherds: "In the countrey of Bohemia there raygned a king called Pandosto." This is the usual beginning of novels of the time; hundreds of them commence in this manner;[137] the very first lines transport the reader to an unknown country, and place him before an unknown king, and if, after reading only those few words, he is surprised to find himself entangled in extraordinary, inexplicable adventures, he must be of a very naive disposition. But in Elizabethan times adventures were liked for their own sake; probability was only a very secondary motive of enjoyment. "Pandosto," in any case, deserves our attention, for, if it commenced like many other novels of the time, it led, as we have said, to "Winter's Tale," to which it is worth while to go. When the two are read together and compared, it seems as if Shakespeare had chosen on purpose one of the worst of Greene's tales, to show by way of an answer to the accusations of the dead writer, that he was able to form something out of nothing. Greene had, in truth, only modelled the clay; Shakespeare used it, adding the soul. Greene simply states his facts and takes little trouble about explaining them; the reader must rest satisfied with the author's bare word. There is no attempt at the study of passions; his heroes change their minds all of a sudden, with the stiff, sharp, improbable action of puppets in a show. Pandosto (Leontes) loves and hates, and becomes jealous, and repents always in the same brusque wire-and-wood manner; the warmth of his passions, so great and terrible in Shakespeare, is here simply absent; when he begins to suspect his friend Egistus (Polixenes) of feeling an unlawful love for Bellaria (Hermione), we are barely informed that the Bohemian king "concluded at last to poyson him." When Dorastus and Fawnia (Florizel and Perdita) seek refuge in Pandosto's kingdom, Pandosto at once falls in love with his own daughter, Fawnia, whom he does not know; then on the receipt of a letter from Egistus, "having his former love turned to a disdainful hate," he wishes to have her killed. Very differently is the couple received by Shakespeare's Leontes: "Were I but twenty-one, Your father's image is so hit in you, His very air, that I should call you brother, As I did him; and speak of something wildly By us performed before. Most dearly welcome! And you, fair princess, goddess!--O, alas, I lost a couple, that 'twixt heaven and earth Might thus have stood, begetting wonder as You gracious couple do."