THE TEMPEST INTRODUCTION SHAKESPEARE S fellows, Heminge and Condell, who brought forth the first collected edition of his dramas in 1623, did not trouble themselves concerning a chronological arrangement of the plays. In their folio, and in editions which follow it, we meet first with The Tempest, which is certainly one of its author's latest works, and possibly is the very last of all. Yet it serves excellently to introduce us to his realm of imagination, to a great magician and a world of enchantment. The Tempest, which appears for the first time in the Folio, has, in common with what is perhaps Shakespeare's earliest play, Love's Labour's Lost, the peculiarity that we cannot trace it to its source. The poet Collins gave a misleading clue when he spoke of having found the plot, or something resembling it, in a romance named Aurelio and Isabella. The romance is known, but it has nothing in common with The Tempest. It has often been pointed out that some features of the German play Die schöne Sidea, by Jakob Ayrer, correspond with particulars found in this play by Shakespeare; there is, for example, a scene which has some resemblance to that in which Ferdinand toils at his task of log-bearing; English actors may have brought from Germany some record of Ayrer's play, but it can hardly be supposed that the German drama is the chief source of the English drama. Probably some lost romance inspired Shakespeare; and perhaps we have traces of such a romance in a Spanish tale by Antonio de Eslava, which forms part of a collection entitled Las noches de invierno ( Winter Nights') published at Madrid in 1609. Here there is a dispossessed king who is a kindly magician, who raises a palace amid the sea, and who has a daughter, Seraphina, for whom the magician-king provides a royal bridegroom. A tempest assists in the dénouement, and Sirens, Nereids, and Dryads are servants of the good king Dardanus and his daughter. These resemblances to the characters and action of Shakespeare's play have been brought together from a narrative which is in many respects unlike the story of The Tempest. We have no assurance that the Spanish tale has led us on the track to Shakespeare's source. What cannot be doubted is that certain records of Jacobean voyaging, published in the year 1610, supplied suggestions which the dramatist put to use with due discretion. Shakespeare's phrase, the still-vext Bermoothes', suggests that he was not forgetful of the voyage of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers, designed to convey colonists to the new settlement in Virginia, when the vessel of the commanders of the expedition was driven to the Bermudas, and 'fell in between two rockes, where she was fast lodged and locked for further budging'. This voyage was of the year 1609, and in 1610 were published several narratives of the adventure. Readers who would obtain detailed information about these and other pamphlets may find it in Mr. Luce's edition of The Tempest in The Arden Shakespeare. But Shakespeare's enchanted island is not near the Bermudas, and indeed the attempts to fix the locality and identify the island with anything discoverable in a map are idle. The reports brought home by the Virginian adventurers,' as Sir Walter Raleigh has said, 'set Shakespeare's imagination to work,' but his island of enchantment is an undiscovered isle in far-off seas, on which no Elizabethan or Jacobean adventurer ever set foot. It arose from the deep, anywhere or nowhere, at our great magician's fiat. The name of Caliban's dam, Setebos, is evidently formed from that of Settaboth, a divinity of the Patagonians, described by Master Francis Fletcher in an account of Drake's great voyage,' and Caliban is no doubt an easy formation, by transposing the sounds and letters, from Cannibal. Other namesFerdinand, Alonzo, Sebastian, Gonzalo, seem to have been suggested by Eden's History of Travaile, 1577. In Gonzalo's description of his imaginary socialistic commonwealth, Shakespeare makes use of a passage |