The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Israel Gollancz William Shakespeare [3417]
‘A Winter’s Tale.’
‘A Winter’s Tale’ was seen by Dr. Forman at the Globe on May 15, 1611, and it appears to have been acted at court on November 5 following. It is based upon Greene’s popular romance which was called ‘Pandosto’ in the first edition of 1588, and in numerous later editions, but was ultimately in 1648 re-christened ‘Dorastus and Fawnia.’ Shakespeare followed Greene, his early foe, in allotting a seashore to Bohemia—an error over which Ben Jonson and many later critics have made merry. A few lines were obviously drawn from that story of Boccaccio with which Shakespeare had dealt just before in ‘Cymbeline.’ But Shakespeare created the high-spirited Paulina and the thievish pedlar Autolycus, whose seductive roguery has become proverbial, and he invented the reconciliation of Leontes, the irrationally jealous husband, with Hermione, his wife, whose dignified resignation and forbearance lend the story its intense pathos. In the boy Mamilius, the poet depicted childhood in its most attractive guise, while the courtship of Florizel and Perdita is the perfection of gentle romance. The freshness of the pastoral incident surpasses that of all Shakespeare’s presentations of country life.
‘Tempest.’
‘The Tempest’ was probably the latest drama that Shakespeare completed. In the summer of 1609 a fleet bound for Virginia, under the command of Sir George Somers, was overtaken by a storm off the West Indies, and the admiral’s ship, the ‘Sea-Venture,’ was driven on the coast of the hitherto unknown Bermuda Isles. There they remained ten months, pleasurably impressed by the mild beauty of the climate, but sorely tried by the hogs which overran the island and by mysterious noises which led them to imagine that spirits and devils had made the island their home. Somers and his men were given up for lost, but they escaped from Bermuda in two boats of cedar to Virginia in May 1610, and the news of their adventures and of their safety was carried to England by some of the seamen in September 1610. The sailors’ arrival created vast public excitement in London. At least five accounts were soon published of the shipwreck and of the mysterious island, previously uninhabited by man, which had proved the salvation of the expedition. ‘A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Ile of Divels,’ written by Sylvester Jourdain or Jourdan, one of the survivors, appeared as early as October. A second pamphlet describing the disaster was issued by the Council of the Virginia Company in December, and a third by one of the leaders of the expedition, Sir Thomas Gates. Shakespeare, who mentions the ‘still vexed Bermoothes’ (I. i. 229), incorporated in ‘The Tempest’ many hints from Jourdain, Gates, and the other pamphleteers. The references to the gentle climate of the island on which Prospero is cast away, and to the spirits and devils that infested it, seem to render its identification with the newly discovered Bermudas unquestionable. But Shakespeare incorporated the result of study of other books of travel. The name of the god Setebos whom Caliban worships is drawn from Eden’s translation of Magellan’s ‘Voyage to the South Pole’ (in the ‘Historie of Travell,’ 1577), where the giants of Patagonia are described as worshipping a ‘great devil they call Setebos.’ No source for the complete plot has been discovered, but the German writer, Jacob Ayrer, who died in 1605, dramatised a somewhat similar story in ‘Die schöne Sidea,’ where the adventures of Prospero, Ferdinand, Ariel, and Miranda are roughly anticipated. English actors were performing at Nuremberg, where Ayrer lived, in 1604 and 1606, and may have brought reports of the piece to Shakespeare. Or perhaps both English and German plays had a common origin in some novel that has not yet been traced. Gonzalo’s description of an ideal commonwealth