William Shakespeare

“ After Shakespeare's death the play, despite its beauty, was unpopular and almost unnoticed for over a century, more so than many of the author's other works. Certain fantastic qualities in it—the seacoast of Bohemia, a country which for centuries had no seacoast, and the sixteen-year interval between the third and fourth acts—jarred on the new age, an age which was more fastidious in such matters than the imaginative Elizabethans had been. ”

“ As is almost inevitable when changing a novel into a play, the action is made more rapid. For example, in the second scene of Act First events which in Greene's novel covered several weeks are made to happen in a single hour. The greatest change, however, and the greatest improvement, is in the conception of character, which throughout is more noble and subtle in Shakespeare than in his forerunner. ”

“ By interchanging throughout the parts of Bohemia and Sicily he probably meant to veil the extent of his debt to a book that was still popular, although he may have believed that the suddenness of Leontes' jealousy would seem truer to life in a hot-blooded Sicilian than in a native of Central Europe. ”