SOURCE: “The Winter's Tale and the Pastoral Tradition,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 4, Autumn 1963, pp. 537-98.
In the following essay, Bryant notes the indebtedness of William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale to the classical European and English pastoral traditions and argues that with this subtle dramatized commentary on appearance and reality Shakespeare brought freshness to the pastoral mode and transformed its hackneyed conventions.
