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THE TEMPEST

The Tempest is the first play in the First Folio of 1623; and this, for aught anybody knows indeed almost certainly was its first appearance in print. The Folio, at any rate, supplies our only text. Chronologically it is almost the last, if not the very last, that Shakespeare wrote. The Folio editors, Heminge and Condell, old friends of his and fellow-actors, may have given it pride of place for this pious reason, or possibly because it had won a striking success at Court when presented there in the winter of 1612-13, among many entertainments that graced the betrothal and nuptials of the Princess Elizabeth with the Prince Palatine Elector. John Heminge, as foreman of Shakespeare's old Company, was paid by Lord Harrington, Treasurer of the Chamber of King James I, 'upon the councells warrant, dated at Whitehall xxo die Mai, 1613' his bill for producing 'foureteene severall playes' in the course of these festivities which were numerous and so costly as to embarrass His Majesty's exchequer. The entry (Vertue. MSS) specifies these plays, and The Tempest comes sixth on the list1.

1 In 1842 Peter Cunningham, a clerk in the Audit Office, discovered (or professed to discover) in the cellars of Somerset House two Account Books of the Revels Office, for 1604-5 and 1611-12, and in the latter an entry that The Tempest was presented at Whitehall before the King on Hallowmas night 1611. The document, subsequently impounded by the British Museum and long suspected for a forgery, has been well vindicated by Mr Ernest Law (Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries, 1911), though we understand that a few scholars yet doubt its authenticity. Authentic or not, the entry leaves us free to believe that, at, as we have it, The Tempest was designed for the winter festivities of 161213. That there is good reason to suppose its existence in previous form (or forms) we attempt to show on pp. 79-85 of this volume.

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It is pleasant and certainly not impossible to believe that, as Heminge and Condell have preserved it for us, this play was written-up expressly for the betrothal -and presented on Dec. 27, 1612, the betrothal nightof the incomparable Queen of Hearts whose name in story is Elizabeth of Bohemia,

design'd

Th' eclipse and glory of her kind.

For 'beauty vanishes, beauty passes,' but the charm of this woman still fascinates the imagination almost as in her life-time it won and compelled the souls of men to champion her sorrowful fortunes. That it did this that it laid on the nobler spirits of her time a spell potent to extravagance and yet so finely apportioned as almost to serve us now for a test and gauge of their nobility-no reader of early seventeenth century biography will deny. The evidence is no less frequent than startling. It would almost seem that no 'gentleman' could come within the aura but he knelt to Elizabeth of Bohemia, her sworn knight: that either he followed thenceforth to the last extremity, proud only to serve, or, called away, he departed as one who had looked upon a vision which changed all the values of life, who had beheld a kingdom of the soul in which self and this world were well lost for a dream. We may see this strange conversion in Wotton; we may trace it in the careers of Donne, of Dudley Carleton and (with a postscript of morose disillusion) Lord Herbert of Cherbury. We may read it, youthfully and romantically expressed in this wellauthenticated story:

A company of young men of the Middle Temple met together for supper; and when the wine went round the first man rose, and holding a cup in one hand and a sword in the other, pledged the health of the distressed Princess, the Lady Elizabeth; and having drunk, he kissed the sword, and laying hand upon it, took a solemn oath to live and die in her service. His ardour kindled the whole company. They all rose, and from one to another the cup and sword went round till each had taken the pledge.

We may see this exuberance carried into steady practice by Lord Craven, a Lord Mayor's son, who having poured blood and money in her service, laid his last wealth at her feet to provide her a stately refuge and a home. Through all the story she-grand-daughter of Mary of Scotland, mother of Rupert of the Rhine-rides reckless, feckless, spendthrift, somehow ineffably great; conquering all hearts near her, that

-Enamour'd do wish so they might
But enjoy such a sight,
That they still were to run by her side
Thoro' swords, thoro' seas, whither she would ride,

lifting all those gallant hearts to ride with her, for a desperate cause, despising low ends, ignoble gain; to ride with her down and nobly over the last lost edge of the world.

We may take it almost for a certainty that-in whatever previous form or forms presented this play as we have it was the play enacted at Court to grace the Princess Elizabeth's betrothal. No argument from internal evidence conflicts with this. Gonzalo's description of his ideal Commonwealth (2. 1. 146 sqq.) comes out of Florio's translation of Montaigne, first published in 16031; and the name 'Caliban' suggests the essay 'Of the Canniballes' from which Gonzalo derived his wisdom. Ben Jonson most likely has a side thrust at The Tempest (and at The Winter's Tale) in his Introduction to Bartholomew Fair (acted in October, 1614): 'If there be never a Servant-monster i' the Fayre, who can help it, he sayes; nor a nest of Antiques? Hee is loth to make nature afraid in his Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries.' Further, we can easily allow the play to contain many passages suggested by the misadventure of the Virginian voyage of 1609, when a fleet of nine ships and five hundred colonists under command of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers was dispersed by a gale and the flagship, the Sea-Adventure, went ashore on the coast of Bermudas, her crew wonderfully escaping. That Shakespeare used at least one or two out of several pamphlets dealing with this wreck (by Silvester Jourdain, by William Strachey, and by 'advise and direction of the Councell of Virginia' to mention no others) stands above question. But nothing of this is inconsistent either with the play's having been presented by the King's Players on Hallowmas, 1611, or with its having been recast and 'revived' for the festivities of the Princess Elizabeth's betrothal.

1 The British Museum once supposed itself to.contain Shakespeare's own copy of this book, but found the autograph to be a forgery.

Nothing forbids our imagination to repeople the Banqueting House and recall this bride, this paragon, to seat her in the front rank of the ghostly audience: to watch her, a moment before the curtain opens, a little reclined, her jewelled wrists, like Cassiopeia's, laid along the arms of her chair; or still to watch her as the play proceeds and she-affianced and, by admission, in love with her bridegroom-leans forward with parted lips to follow the loves of Ferdinand and Miranda.

Those who must always be searching for a 'source'

invent nothing!) will be disappointed in The Tempest. Thomas Warton (or rather, Warton misunderstood by Malone) started one false hare by a note in his History of English Poetry, vol. III. (1781), that he had been 'informed by the late Mr Collins of Chichester'that is, Collins the poet-that Shakespeare's Tempest

Lurce of every plot of Shakespeare's (as though he could

was formed on a 'favourite romance, Aurelio and Isabella, printed in 1586 (one volume) in Italian, French and English, and again in 1588 in Italian, Spanish, French and English; the Spanish of Flores being the original. But Collins' mind was darkening towards madness at the time: and Aurelio, when found, contained nothing in common with The Tempest. Others have followed the clue of a German play, Die Schöne Sidea, written by one Jacob Ayrer, a notary of Nuremberg, who died in 1605. There is a magician in this drama who is also a prince-Prince Ludolph: he has a demon or familiar spirit: he has an only daughter too. The son of Ludolph's enemy becomes his prisoner, his sword being held in sheath by the magician's art. Later, the young man is forced to bear logs for Ludolph's daughter. She falls in love with him, and all ends happily. The resemblances to The Tempest are obvious: and that there was some actual thread of connexion appears the likelier when we note that 'mountain' and 'silver,' two names of the spirit hounds which 1 Prospero and Ariel set upon the 'foul conspiracy' (4. 1. 256), occur in an invocation of Prince Ludolph's in the German play. It may be that Shakespeare used

Ayrer's play; for the English Comedians were at Nurem-1+

berg in 1604, where they may have seen Die Schöne Sidea, to bring home the story. But it is just as likely that Ayrer's is a version of one they took from England to Germany. And, after all, what fairy-tale or folk-tale is commoner, the world over, than that which combines a witch, or wizard, an only daughter, an adventurous prince caught and bound to carry logs, etc., with pity and confederate love to counteract the spell and bring all right in the end?

we

When we turn to Shakespeare's handling of this story, first admire that which all must admire, the enchant

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