mers had been shipwrecked a year or two before the play was written. It seems very probable that Shakespeare had read an account of the matter and taken a hint or two from it. But if we are to try to give a real situation to the island, it would seem from Act I. sc. ii. 1. 229 as if it might be anywhere in the world except one of the Bermudas. Why should Prospero, if he lived in a cell on one of the Bermudas, call the swift Ariel from a deep nook, also in one of the Bermudas, to fetch dew from the Bermudas? The whole point of that line seems to be that the nook where the king's ship was hidden, and whence Prospero once called Ariel to go an errand for him, was far from the Bermudas. Else why send Ariel? If the question were one of actual history or geography, we might further ask how ships bound from Tunis to Naples should be cast away on the Bermudas? But of course the whole matter is of the very slightest importance. One may believe that the enchanted isle was one of the Bermudas and enjoy the play quite as much as one may enjoy Robinson Crusoe with the idea (equally erroneous) that his delightful sojourn was upon the island of Juan Fernandez, which, as all the world knows, is (or is not) near the mouth of the great river Orinoco. And even if one have the correct idea that the island was in the Mediterranean it help us to know what scamels are? what of it? Does These matters and various others are interesting to the Shakespearean student. When one loves a poet and his poetry, one likes an excuse for having something to do with One likes to enrich one's knowledge; it generally deepens one's appreciation. But after all the poetry itself is the thing. It might have been written in any year, it might have all sorts of interesting obsolete words, it might have the most perfect plot in the world, the scene might be laid among the Fortunate Isles, and the play would not be for us what it is, if it did not have the poetry that it does have. Of the purest poetry The Tempest has much. In another place will be shown how it was that the play of Shakespeare's day was apt to be more poetical, even when written in prose, than a play of our own time. Let us now try to get a poetic standpoint and read the play as poetry, with as little regard as possible (for the moment) to literary facts and theories. Is that such a hard thing to do, one may ask, that you have to tell us how to do it? Is it a sort of exercise, that we need to practice at it before we can do it satisfactorily? Can it be done by rule, rightly or wrongly? All such questions may be answered in the negative. I read Shakespeare as a boy, sitting in the old apple-trees that surrounded my father's house. The edition I chose was that of Verplanck, because it had pictures, very strange ones, I thought. It was in three big volumes, far too big for me to carry as I climbed from branch to branch, so I used to tie a rope around the particular volume and hoist it up after me to a good seat near the top of the tree. In such an eyrie I read The Tempest for the first time, and in a manner quite untroubled by the notion that it was anything in particular. It is nice to read anything so, without bothering as to whether it is poetry, or what is the nature of one's enjoyment, or what is the main thought, or anything else. Still, even that sort of reading, though it has freshness and is spontaneous and full of delight and absorbs one entirely, that sort of reading does not always open to one the full springs of pleasure that a poem like The Tempest will have. This is a thing one should do and not necessarily leave other things undone. Really poetic enjoyment differs from other enjoyment of poetry in quality rather than in object. A person who has poetic appreciation will often like the same things that another person does, but he will enjoy them in a keener, more vital way; they will arouse him more, and make him feel more alive. Read a stirring poem or a good story to an appreciative child, and you may see him clench his fists, pound his knees, and bounce up and down in his chair. Grown people rarely do such things, because they do not express themselves naturally; yet those to whom poetry makes a strong appeal are as much stirred. Shelley ran shrieking from the room when he first heard Christabel read aloud; Keats shouted aloud as he read Chapman's Homer for the first time. Such keenness of feeling we, who are not poets, rarely have; still, we have all cried over a sad poem, and laughed at a funny one, and perhaps really felt shivers as we read a good ghost story. And as we feel more and more the really poetic character of anything, we shall have keener feelings at things which are not sad or funny or mysteriously awful. The kind of enjoyment is the thing, and that is something that cannot well be taught. Bodily exercises we can learn by imitating what we see, or by doing as we are told. But the teacher of poetry cannot say: "Do it in this way." Enjoyment, pleasure, delight must come when it will. Still, we can do something even merely by knowing what to enjoy. If we know what it is that appeals to the lovers of poetry, perhaps it will appeal to us as it would not if our attention were not called to it. "What do you wish me to see?" said a great astronomer, when he was about to test some new discoveries. He had often looked at Mars and had not observed the matters in question; but if the one who had observed them would point them out, he would be able to see them, too, if they were really there. Keats read The Tempest with great pleasure. In some respects its subject was really more congenial to him than most of the other plays. He had an immense admiration for Shakespeare, sometimes even thought of him as a presiding genius. Of his plays he said in youth, "I shall never read any other book much." Shakespeare he read much, however, and different things kept appealing to him. "For instance," he writes, "the following from The Tempest never struck me so forcibly as at present: 'Urchins Shall, for that vast of night that they may work, How can I help bringing to your mind the line,— 'In the dark backward and abysm of time."" How interesting, then, to see the volume of Shakespeare that Keats owned and read. The first copy he had seems to have been a folio; in it he wrote notes, sometimes, on a blank leaf, a poem. But he also had a smaller edition in seven volumes duodecimo, and this he marked all over with his preferences.1 The Tempest is full of underlinings and marks, so that we may see what became real to him ("things real," he says somewhere, "such as existences of sun, moon, and stars, and passages of Shakespeare"), and what it was that he felt was finest where all was so fine. In a general way it is clear that Keats loved those longer passages, full of that imaginative feeling for nature that is so characteristic of this poem. Such passages are I. ii. 195-206; I. ii. 332-344; II. ii. 162, 163, 171-176; III. ii. 75 and 146-152; IV. i. 60–71; V. i. 33-48. When we read all these passages together, we cannot but feel one of the special poetic characteristics of the play. It is that which Keats himself had in mind when Leigh Hunt said that some things in Endymion were unnatural. “He must first prove Caliban's poetry is unnatural," was Keats's comment. This, too, is one of the things that appealed to another great poet, as any one can see who will read Browning's Caliban upon Setebos. One might talk about and around it for a long time, but a better thing is to read such passages together and feel their quality. Of course there are many other passages marked besides these passages of natural magic, such as the description of the rotten boat, I. ii. 146-151; Prospero's threat to Ariel, I. ii. 294-296; Caliban's grumblings, I. ii. 321-324; Ferdinand's swimming, II. i. 114-121; Caliban again, when jocund, III. ii. 124-126; Alonso's horror, III. iii. 96-102, 1 The books were given to Severn in 1817, and are now in the library of Mr. G. A. Armour, of Allison House, Princeton, who has most kindly allowed me to make the best use of them that I could. and many more. good; to tell the These we can recognize instinctively as truth, they all have the romantic quality dear to Keats, even if we do not stop to define them to ourselves. Another thing that Keats liked was the Shakespearean phrase - such phrases as these: "What cares these roarers for the name of king?" I. i. 16. "In the dark backward and abysm of time." I. ii. 50. ... But felt a fever of the mad and play'd ... IV. i. 206. That has such people in 't." V. i. 183. Now, however hard it may be to define the quality of these passages, those who know Shakespeare will recognize them as being typically his. That is the way he wrote, and that way appealed to Keats; the expressions touched just the sensibilities that were ready to tingle at a good phrase for itself,1 at true poetic expression. We must notice such things, for they are Shakespearean. But it was not merely poetic phrase and poetic description that Keats recognized; character he also felt. Ariel was undoubtedly his favorite. Almost every mention of Ariel, even the name in stage directions, is underscored. Keats evidently delighted in Ariel as in a beautiful and free spirit, though bound to service for a time. Such phrases as "my brave spirit," I. ii. 206; "spirit, fine spirit,” I. ii. 418; "my tricksy spirit," V. i. 226, these appealed to him. 1 As Cowden Clarke remarks of Keats's first reading Spenser, when "the force and felicity of an epithet (such, for instance, as 'the seashouldering whale') would light up his countenance with extasy." |