The Greening of Will Shakespeare
Abstract
In The Winter's Tale (1611), those presumed dead repeatedly return to new life. At the end of the play, the "statue" of Hermione moves through an old stage trick. Similarly, a moldy tale, a genre, and an old enmity are all revived. As Hermione descends from her pedestal, in her movements hoping to move us, so does Shakespeare implicitly extend the same treatment to Pandosto and its author, Robert Greene. The statue trick almost seems to be a metaphor for the larger contrivance that is the play itself: the necromantic way Shakespeare has with an old text like Greene's as he coaxes it to move and breathe through the lively art of theater. The play as a whole bears a resemblance to the cony-catching tricks described in rogue pamphlets by Greene and others, with Greene cast alternately as Shakespeare's partner in a con game to catch the more literate part of the play's audience and as a forced lender to the borrower Shakespeare, who once again beautifies himself with the feathers of the rival who had famously accused him of intellectual property theft.