a further approximation to its date. The fleet, under the command of Sir George Somers, was overtaken by a tempest, and the admiral-ship, the 'Sea-venture,' was wrecked off the Bermudas. The crew landed on July 28, 1609, and were given up for lost; but having built themselves two vessels of cedar, they set sail from the Bermudas on May 10, 1610, landed on the coast of Virginia on May 24, and ultimately embarked for England on June 8 in the same year. An account of the wreck was written by Silvester Jourdan, one of the survivors, with the title, 'A discovery of the Barmudas, otherwise called the Ile of Divels: by Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Sommers, and Captayne Newport, with diuers others.' The date of the dedication 'is October 13, 1610. The tract is reprinted in the fifth volume of Hakluyt's Voyages (ed. 1812), pp. 551-558. Another account, by William Strachey, is given in Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1734, &c. For some months after the news of the disaster reached England the fate of the admiralship and of those on board was still a matter of uncertainty; and a pamphlet was issued by the Council of Virginia in December 1609, or January 1610, for the purpose of counteracting the gloomy impression produced by the calamity. It is evident from this fact that the subject was one which deeply, affected the minds of the people, and although it is quite possible that Shakespeare might have raised a storm at his pleasure, there is no a priori improbability in the supposition that his thoughts may have been influenced by what must have been the topic of common conversation; and the reference to the 'still-vext Bermoothes' would be more natural while the memory of such an event was fresh. Malone, after quoting the account of the storm given by Ariel in Act i. Scene 2, sums up the points of resemblance to the passage in the pamphlet of Jourdan and another which was subsequently issued by the Council of Virginia, apparently from materials supplied by Sir Thomas Gates. 'It is obvious, that we have here a covert allusion to several circumstances minutely described in the papers quoted in the preceding pages; to the

circumstance of the Admiral-ship being separated from the rest of Somers's fleet, and, after a tremendous tempest, being jammed between two of the Bermuda rocks, and "fast lodged and lock'd," as Jourdan expresses it, "for further budging"; to the disaster happening very near the shore, and not a single person having perished; to the mariners having fallen asleep from excessive fatigue; to the dispersion of the other ships; to the greater part of them meeting again, as the Council of the Virginian Company have it, “in consort "; and to all those who were thus dispersed and thus met again, being "bound sadly" for Virginia, supposing that the vessel which carried their governor was lost, and that his “great person had perished." In various other passages in the second Act,-where the preservation of Alonzo and his companions is termed "miraculous"; where Stephano asks, "have we devils here?"—where the same person makes a very free use of his bottle, and liberally imparts it to Caliban and Trinculo;-where it is said, "though this island seem to be desert, uninhabitable, and almost inaccessible, it must needs be of subtle, tender, and delicate temperance"; that "the air breathes most sweetly," and that "there is everything advantageous to life," we find evident allusions to the extraordinary escape of Somers and his associates, and to Jourdan's and Gates's descriptions of Bermuda; as in the first scene of the play, the circumstances of the sailors and passengers taking leave of each other, and bidding farewell to their wives and children, was manifestly suggested by the earlier of those narratives.' It is of course possible to make too much of coincidences of this kind; but, in the absence of positive proof, there appears to be reasonable ground for the conclusion that The Tempest was written about the end of 1610 or the beginning of 1611. Apart from the storm, the only mark of time which occurs in the play is to be found in Act ii. Scene 2, where Trinculo says, 'When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.' But it is impossible from this to draw any conclusion with regard to the date; for Frobisher, in 1576, had

brought home from his voyage to Cataya some 'strange kinde of people,' one of whom had died after his arrival in England. Again, in 1605, Captain George Waymouth brought home five Indians from Virginia; and in 1608 Captain Harlow returned from Cape Cod with five others; one of whom, says Malone, 'was named Epinew, or Epinow, a man of extraordinary stature and strength, who was exhibited for money in various parts of London.' Some of these may have died in England and been made a show of, but the reference is too vague to enable us to restrict it to any particular event.

The late Mr. Hunter, in his 'Disquisition on the scene, origin, date, &c. &c., of Shakespeare's Tempest,' argued for a much earlier date. He conjectures that the play is mentioned by Meres in 1598, in the well-known passage of his Palladis Tamia, under the title of 'Love Labours Won,' and that it is satirically alluded to in Ben Jonson's 'Every Man in his Humour,' which he says was acted as early as November 1596. This last statement is founded on an entry in Henslowe's diary, under the date Nov. 25, 1596, where the play called 'the Umers' is supposed, though without sufficient reason, to be the same with 'Every Man in his Humour.' The latter was certainly acted at the Globe Theatre by the Lord Chamberlain's servants in 1598, and Shakespeare himself played in it. The prologue does not appear in the quarto edition of 1601, and was not printed till the folio edition of Jonson's works was published in 1616. It is scarcely probable that Jonson would have satirised Shakespeare in the prologue to a play in which he was one of the actors, and therefore we must conclude either that no reference to Shakespeare is intended or that the prologue was written later. In either case no conclusion can be drawn with regard to the date of The Tempest. The following are the lines in which Shakespeare's play is supposed to be alluded to:—

'Nor creaking throne comes downe, the boyes to please:
Nor nimble squibbe is seene to make afear'd

The gentlewomen; nor roul'd bullet heard

To say, it thunders; nor tempestuous drumme

Rumbles, to tell you when the storme doth come.'

'Who but Caliban,' says Mr. Hunter, 'can be intended in the line,

"You, that have so graced monsters, may like men?"

To what, in the dramatic representations of the time, can the line,

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"Nor creaking throne comes down, the boys to please,"

be referred with more probability than to the descent of Juno in the Masque?' With reference to Mr. Hunter's argument, it must be observed that there is no evidence of the existence of the prologue to Every Man in his Humour, before 1616. The fact that it does not appear in the quarto of 1601 makes it probable that it was written subsequently, and if so, it may even have been added after the later date which may more properly be assigned to The Tempest. This of course presumes that the latter play is the subject of allusion in the prologue, which is by no means free from doubt. Mr. Hunter further supports his theory of the early date (1596), by maintaining that the return of Sir Walter Ralegh from his expedition to Guiana is distinctly alluded to in the play; and that Shakespeare intended to cast ridicule upon the travellers' stories which Ralegh told in a pamphlet published in 1596, giving an account of his adventures. But, taking into consideration the internal evidence derived from the style and metre of the play, these alone would lead us to assign it to a late rather than to an early period in Shakespeare's dramatic career, and therefore we can only regard Mr. Hunter's speculations as extremely ingenious and interesting conjectures, but still as conjectures merely, based upon very large assumptions. He assumes, for instance, that the Tempest is mentioned by Meres in 1598 as Love Labours Won. He assumes that it is satirised in the prologue to Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour; that this play is the same with 'The Umers' of Henslowe's Diary; that it was therefore acted in 1596; that the prologue was written

1

at the same time; and finally that Shakespeare intended to cast ridicule upon Sir Walter Ralegh's narrative of his expedition to Guiana, which was published in the same year. All these assumptions appear to be based upon the very slightest foundations. It is curious that the same play of Ben Jonson's is appealed to by Farmer in proof that The Tempest is later in date; for in the original Every Man in his Humour, in which Shakespeare acted in 1598, were two characters, Prospero and Stephano. 'Here,' says Farmer, ' Ben Jonson taught him the pronunciation of the latter word, which is always right in The Tempest,

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"Is not this Stephăno my drunken butler?"

and always wrong in his earlier play, The Merchant of Venice, which had been on the stage at least two or three years before its publication in 1600,

"My friend Stephāno, signify, I pray you," &c.'

To make the history of conjecture with regard to the date of The Tempest complete, it may be as well to add the remarks of Douce, to which reference has already been made. After mentioning the narrative of Silvester Jourdan and Strachey's Proceedings of the English colonie in Virginia, 1612, 4to., he says: 'From these accounts it appears that the Bermudas had never been inhabited, but regarded as under the influence of inchantment; though an addition to a subsequent edition of Jourdan's work gravely states that they are not inchanted; that Sommers's ship had been split between two rocks; that during his stay on the island several conspiracies had taken place; and that a sea-monster in shape like a man, had been seen, who had been so called after the monstrous tempests that often happened at Bermuda' (Illustrations of Shakespeare, ed. 1839, p. 4). As an additional point of resemblance between the incidents of the wreck in the play and those of the storm encountered by the Virginian fleet in 1609, it is worth while to quote the following from Strachey's ac