Thomas E. Mussio
Bandello’s “Timbreo and Fenicia” and The Winter’s Tale
Volume 34.2, Summer 2000

Several Critics have noticed the similarities in theme, character, and setting between Much Ado About Nothing and The Winter’s Tale,¹ and since Bandello’s novella of Timbreo and Fenicia (I, 22) has been accepted as one of the sources of Much Ado, they have intimated a link between this same novella and The Winter’s Tale. Yet not until Martin Mueller’s recent study has Bandello’s tale been clearly signaled as the imaginative tissue binding the two plays together. Focusing his analysis on the theme of the persecuted and “resurrected” heroine, Mueller argues that Shakespeare’s contact with the Bandellian text was decisive, as it triggered an interest that was reiterated throughout the playwright’s career, for “Bandello’s Fenicia turns up as Hero, Desdemona, Cordelia, and Hermione.”² He concludes that these repetitions show that Shakespeare was involved in a “process of imaginative and economic revision” of earlier themes and that The Winter’s Tale “results from Shakespeare’s reading Greene’s Pandosto with a strong sense of unfinished business in Bandello’s story.”³ Mueller gives a general account of several of the striking parallels between the Bandello story and The Winter’s Tale: the prominent image of the accused woman as statue in both, the prominence of the theme of time felt both in Hermione’s aging and Fenicia’s development, and the cathartic and confessional actions of the penitent Leontes and Timbreo. Yet because he is primarily interested in tracing the trajectory of Shakespeare’s career, Mueller only nods to these parallels, barely spending three pages on their implications. My purpose is to show with more specificity and depth the nature of Shakespeare’s “return” to Bandello in writing The Winter’s Tale. In order to do this, I examine The Winter’s Tale in comparison with its four primary source texts: Bandello’s Timbreo-Fenicia tale (1554), Belleforest’s translation of Bandello’s tale (1571), Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588), and Much Ado About Nothing (1598-1600).⁴ This comparison reveals that, in re-exploring the situation of Much Ado, Shakespeare draws from Bandello’s treatment of important themes in The Winter’s Tale like rivalry, honor, repentance, regeneration, and forgiveness more often than from Bandello’s or Greene’s handling of these themes. It also suggests the ways in which Shakespeare forged new ideas on these themes through a complex process of imitation and innovation.

Notes

¹ Geoffrey Bullough has noted in passing the similarities between Much Ado and The Winter’s Tale and that the later play may be a revision of the earlier one: “Years before, in Much Ado, he had restored Hero to the repentant Claudio by introducing him to a ‘cousin.’… He now invents a variant of this, the ‘living statue’ of the desire woman” [Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare: Romances: Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, vol. 8 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) 132, 147]. David Cook also writes, “In the rediscovery of the finale of Hero, there is again a faint foreshadowing of the finale of A Winter’s Tale” (David Cook, “‘The Very Temple of Delight:’ The Twin Plots of Much Ado About Nothing” in Poetry and Drama 1570–1700: Essays in Honour of Harold F. Brooks, ed. Antony Coleman and Antony Hammond (Methuan: New York and London, 1981), 45.

² Martin Mueller, “Shakespeare’s Sleeping Beauties: The Sources of Much Ado and the Play of Their Repetitions,” Modern Philology 91:3 (1994), 292.

³ Ibid. 300, 311.

⁴ These dates are based on dates of earliest publication of the novellas and the presumed date of composition of Much Ado (Bevington edition). Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques was actually a continuation of the French translation of Bandello begun by Boaistuau. In 1559 Boaistuau published a translation of six of Bandello’s tales, including that from which Romeo and Juliet is derived. By 1571 Belleforest had added the translation of 121 of Bandello’s 215 tales in his later editions. There were at least five editions of the translation available before 1588, when Greene composed his Pandosto. This fact leaves open the possibility that Greene, as well as Shakespeare, could have consulted the French text as well as the Italian one. See The National Union Catalogue: Pre-1956 Imprints, vol. 33 (Mansell: Baltimore, 1968), 499–500.

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