INTRODUCTION

TO

THE TEMPEST.

1. The Tempest was written in the year 1610, or in 1611, when Shakespeare was about forty-seven years of age. It was first published in 1623; and it occupies the first place in the Folio Edition.

2. The play is said to be based upon an account of a shipwreck on the Bermudas, written by Silvester Jourdan. The fleet of Sir George Somers was wrecked on one of these islands in December, 1609, and the admiral's ship was driven on shore. The title of Jourdan's tract is 'A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Isle of Divels, etc.' The speech of Gonzalo in the first scene of Act Second is an almost word-for-word transcription of a passage from Florio's translation of Montaigne, which was published in 1603. The well-known passage in the first scene of Act Fourth is also said to be based on a stanza in the Earl of Sterlin's (Stirling's) Tragedie of Darius, which appeared in Edinburgh in 1603, and was republished in London in 1604. There is, besides, a German play, Die schöne Sidea (The Fair Sidea), written by Jacob Ayrer, who died in 1605, with similar personages and the

ΤΟ

same plot-a play which Shakespeare may have seen acted or heard some account of.

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3. As to the actual scene of The Tempest,' says Mr. White, that is in the realms of fancy. Mr. Hunter has contended that Lampedusa, an island in the Mediterranean, lying not far out of a ship's course passing from Tunis to Naples, and which is uninhabited, and supposed by sailors to be enchanted, was Prospero's place of exile. It may have been; though, if it were, we would a little rather not believe so. When the great magician at whose beck it rose from the waters broke his staff, the island sank, and carried Caliban down with it.'

From that day forth the Ile has beene

By wandering sailors never seene:

Some say 'tis buried deepe

Beneath the sea, which breakes and rores

Above its savage rockie shores,

Nor ere is known to sleepe.

Professor Lowell also says In The Tempest the scene is laid nowhere, or certainly in no country laid down on any map. Nowhere, then ? At once nowhere and anywhere; for it is in the soul of man, that still-vexed island hung between the upper and the nether world, and liable to incur sions from both.'

4. Both the internal and the external evidence show that this was one of Shakespeare's latest plays. The whole tone of the play-the mild tolerance, the desire to forgive and to be forgiven, the strong interest in the young and in their prospects, the fine, mellow, political wisdom, the closing abjuration of magical power-all go to show that this was one of the latest efforts of Shakespeare's genius,

and that it probably marks the period when he left the stage, and went down to Stratford-upon Avon to begin a new kind of life as an English country gentleman. The thoughtful reader will find in the compact simplicity of its structure, and in the chastened grandeur of its diction and the lofty severity of its tone of thought, tempered although the one is with Shakespeare's own enchanting sweetness, and the other with that most human tenderness which is the peculiar trait of his mind, sufficient evidence that this play is the fruit of his genius in its full maturity.' The internal evidence is also very strong. The later plays are characterized by several peculiarities. They have very few rhyming lines; they have many lines with a weak ending, such as and, for, but, that, etc.; and they have also lines which contain eleven syllables. Mr. Philpotts, a most thoughtful and sympathetic critic, points out that in Love's Labor Lost-a very early play-there are more than a thousand rhyming lines, while in The Tempest there are only two; that there are only four lines of eleven syllables in the former play, while there are thirty-three in the latter; and that, while the early play generally has its sense stopping with the end of the line, in The Tempest one in every three lines has no stop of the sense at its close. The effect of the weak ending and of the additional syllable in the line is to enable the poet to enrich his verse with all kinds of native conversational rhythms, to bring it nearer to the talk of real persons, to deliver it from the mechanical bondage of measurement and number, and to do away with its monotony.

5. The plot is perfectly simple, and, in fact, almost childish. It is nearly as childish as that in the Merchant