Ellen Terry as Hermione in The Winter's Tale, V.iii.

Terry's costume suggests an attempt by Irving's production to recreate the elaborate draperies of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum, and it is true that the first two acts of The Winter's Tale have the characters and plot of a Euripidean tragedy. Sicily was originally part of Greater Greece and much classical Greek art originated there such as the pastorals of Theocritus, to which tradition the play's fourth act belongs, while the remainder of the play is a tragicomedy of the kind advocated by Shakespeare's contemporary Spanish playwright Lope de Vega (see essays appended to the two bibliographies listed under During Shakespeare's Lifetime). It is illustrative of the highly composite nature of the play that the figure of Autolycus is borrowed from Homer's Odyssey: Odysseus's maternal grandfather is the thief Autolycus, son of Hermes and Chione. Shakespeare has little desire to create an authetic or even sympthetic recreation of classical Greece. Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia).