a fleet of eight ships, with people to supply and make strong the colony in Virginia; Sir Thomas Gates being general, in a ship of 300 tons in this ship was also Sir George Sommers, who was admiral, and Captain Newport, vice-admiral, and with them about 160 persons. This ship was 'Admiral,' and kept company with the rest of the fleet to the height of 30 degrees; and being then assembled to consult touching divers matters, they were surprised with a most extreme violent storın, which scattered the whole fleet, yet all the rest of the fleet bent their course for Virginia, where, by God's special favour, they arrived safely; but this great ship, though new, and far stronger than any of the rest, fell into a great leak, so as mariners and passengers were forced, for three days' space, to do their utmost to save themselves from sudden sinking: but notwithstanding their incessant pumping, and casting out of water by buckets and all other means, yet the water covered all the goods within the hold, and all men were utterly tired, and spent in strength, and overcome with labour; and hopeless of any succour, most of them were gone to sleep, yielding themselves to the mercy of the sea, being all very desirous to die upon any shore wheresoever. Sir George Sommers, sitting at the stern, seeing the ship desperate of relief, looking every minute when the ship would sink, he espied land, which, according to his and Captain Newport's opinion, they judged it should ⚫ be that dreadful coast of the Bermudas, which islands were, of all nations, said and supposed to be enchanted, and inhabited with witches and devils, which grew by reason of accustomed monstrous thunder-storm and tempest near unto those islands; also for that the whole coast is so wonderous dangerous of rocks that few can approach them but with unspeakable hazard of shipwreck. Sir George Sommers, Sir Thomas Gates, Captain Newport, and the rest, suddenly agreed of two evils to choose the least, and so, in a kind of desperate resolution, directed the ship mainly for these islands, which, by God's divine providence, at a high water ran right between two strong rocks, where it stuck fast without breaking, which gave leisure and good opportunity for them to hoist out their boat, and to land all their people, as well sailors as soldiers and others, in good safety; and being come ashore they were soon refreshed and cheered, the soil and air being most sweet and delicate."

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Here we have a storm, a wreck, the Bermudas, and an enchanted island; and, in other descriptions of the same event, we have mention of a sea-monster. 'Nothing can be more conclusive then," says Malone, "that the date of the play is fixed, with uncommon precision, between the end of the year 1610 and the autumn of 1611." No, says Chalmers, the shipwreck of Sir George Sommers did suggest the incidents; but Malone himself had admitted that there was a great tempest at home in 1612;-"the author availed himself of a circumstance then fresh in the minds of his audience, by affixing a title to it which was more likely to excite curiosity than any other that he could have chosen, while, at the same time, it was sufficiently justified by the subject of the drama." "Now this tempest," says Chalmers, "happened at Christmas 1612; and so the play could not have been written in the summer of 1612." Surely all this is admirable fooling, which it is scarcely necessary to say is put an end to by the certainty that the play existed in 1611. In such minute inquiries, all assuming that poetry is to be dealt with by the same laws as chronology, or geography, or any

6

other exact branch of knowledge, there can be nothing but perpetual mistake, and contradiction, and false inference. Chalmers, in some respects acute enough, has, through the indulgence of these propensities for making poetry literal, fallen into the mistake of imagining that Bermuda was the scene of 'The Tempest.' Mr. Hunter says, "No editor of Shakspeare has ever gone so far as to represent the island of Bermuda as actually the scene of this play;" but he adds, "Chalmers has given some encouragement to this very prevalent mistake." Encouragement? He says, in his Apology,' and repeats the passage in his rare tract,* * “Our maker showed great judgment in causing, by enchantment, the king's ship to be wrecked on the still-vex'd Bermoothes." Again, "Stephano became king of the still-vex'd Bermoothes." Lastly, in the 'Another Account,'—" If it be asked what circumstance it was which induced our dramatist to think of Bermudas, in 1613, as the scene of his comedy, the answer must be that the Bermudas, which had been considered, ever since the publication, in 1596, of Sir Walter Raleigh's description of Guiana, as a 'hellish sea for thunder, lightning, and storms,' was first planted, in 1612, by a ship called the Plough, from the Thames, which carried out a colony of a hundred and sixty persons." The nonsense of this notion is self-evident. If the Bermudas were the scene, Ariel must have outdone himself to convey "the rest of the fleet" over the Atlantic, to place them "upon the Mediterranean flote;" and, on the contrary, he would have been a mere human carrier if he had been called

66

from one up deep nook" of the island to fetch dew" from some other part. This will not quite fit. And so we must resort to another geographical system. Mr. Hunter has discovered "another island," which he thus introduces :-"I must do the old critics the justice to say that, till this discovery (such I may call it), no island, as far as I know, had a better claim to be regarded as the island of Prospero than Bermuda." That island is Lampedusa. "Did we not know," he continues, "how much still remains to be done in the criticism of these plays, it would be scarcely credible that no one seems to have thought of tracing the line of Alonso's track, or of speculating, with the map before him, on the island on which Prospero and Miranda may be supposed to have been cast." Lampedusa is the island: "It lies midway between Malta and the African coast;". "in its dimensions Lampedusa is what we may imagine Prospero's island to have been; in circuit thirteen miles and a half;"—it is "situated in a stormy sea ;"-it is "a deserted island;" it has the

*Another Account of the Incidents,' &c., 1815.

reputation of "being enchanted." being enchanted." Can anything be more decisive? "What I contend for is the absolute claim of Lampedusa to have been the island in the poet's mind when he drew the scenes of this drama." The matter, according to Mr. Hunter, is beyond all doubt. "In the rocks of Lampedusa there are hollows;"-Caliban is stied in the "hard rock:" in Lampedusa there was a hermit's cell—" this cell is surely the origin of the cell of Prospero :" Caliban's employment was collecting firewood;-"Malta is supplied with firewood from Lampedusa." Mr. Hunter asks his friend

"whether you would think me presumptuous in requiring that in future editions of these plays there should be, in the accustomed place, at the foot of the dramatis personæ, the words

We have not so determined the scene. We believe that the poet had no locality whatever in his mind, just as he had no notion of any particular storm. Tempests and enchanted islands are of the oldest materials of poetry. Mr. Hunter says Shakspere had Ariosto's description of a storm in his mind. Who, we may ask, suggested to Ariosto his description? Has any one fixed the date of Ariosto's storm? Has not the poet described the poet's office?

"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.'

Franz Horn asks whether Prospero left Caliban to govern the island? We believe the island sunk into the sea, and was no more seen, after Prospero broke his staff and drowned his book.

SUPPOSED SOURCE OF THE PLOT.

THERE is a very curious story told by Warton, of poor Collins informing him, during his mental aberration, that he had seen a romance which contained the story of 'The Tempest.'

"I was informed by the late Mr. Collins, of Chichester, that Shakspeare's 'Tempest,' for which no origin is yet assigned, was founded on a romance called 'Amelia and Isabella,' printed in Italian, Spanish, French, and English, in 1588. But though this information has not proved true on examination, a useful conclusion may be drawn from it, that Shakspeare's story is somewhere to be found in an Italian novel; at least, that the story preceded Shakspeare. Mr. Collins had searched this subject with no less fidelity than judgment and industry; but his memory failing in his last calamitous indisposition, he probably gave me the name of one novel for

another. I remember he added a circumstance which may lead to a discovery, that the principal character of the romance answering to Shakspeare's 'Prospero' ` was a chemical necromancer, who had bound a spirit like Ariel to obey his call and perform his services."

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Mr. Thoms, in a very interesting paper on the Early English and German Dramas,** has given, from Tieck, an account of certain early productions of English dramatists which were translated into German about the year 1600. We cannot here enter into the very curious question whether an English company performed English plays in Germany at that period; but it is quite certain that some of our earliest dramas were either translated or adapted for the German stage at this early period. Jacob Ayrer, a notary of Nuremburg, was the author of thirty dramas, in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Some are clearly derived from English models; and Mr. Thoms thinks that an old play, on which Shakspere founded The Tempest,' is translated in Ayrer's works, published in 1618.

"The origin of the plot of "The Tempest" is for the present a Shakspearian mystery,' are the words of our friend Mr. Hunter, in his learned and interesting dissertation upon that play. That mystery, however, I consider as solved,-Tieck appears to entertain no doubt upon the subject,—and I hope to bring the matter before you in such a manner as will satisfy you of the correctness of Tieck's views in this respect. But to the point. Shakspeare unquestionably derived his idea of 'The Tempest' from an earlier drama, now not known to exist, but of which a German version is preserved in Ayrer's play, entitled 'Die Schöne Sidea' (The Beautiful Sidea); and the proof of this fact is to be found in the points of resemblance between the two plays, which are far too striking and peculiar to be the result of accident.

"It is true that the scene in which Ayrer's play is laid, and the names of the personages, differ from those of The Tempest;' but the main incidents of the two plays are all but identically the same. For instance, in the German drama, Prince Ludolph and Prince Leudegast supply the places of Prospero and Alonso. Ludolph, like Prospero, is a magician, and like him has an only daughter, Sidea-the Miranda of 'The Tempest-and an attendant spirit, Runcifal, who, though not strictly resembling either Ariel or Caliban, may well be considered as the primary type which suggested to the nimble fancy of our great dramatist those strongly yet admirably contrasted beings. Shortly after the commencement of the play, Ludolph, having been vanquished by his rival, and with his daughter Sidea driven into a forest, rebukes her for complaining of their change of fortune, and then summons his spirit Runcifal to learn from him their future destiny, and prospects of revenge. Runcifal, who is, like Ariel, somewhat moody,' announces to Ludolph that the son of his enemy will shortly become his prisoner. After a comic episode, most probably introduced by the German, we see Prince Leudegast, with his son Engelbrecht -the Ferdinand of 'The Tempest'-and the councillors, hunting in the same forest; when Engelbrecht and his companion Famulus, having separated from their associates, are suddenly encountered by Ludolph and his daughter. He commands

*New Monthly Magazine, January 1, 1841.

them to yield themselves prisoners-they refuse, and try to draw their swords, when, as Prospero tells Ferdinand,

'I can here disarm thee with this stick,
And make thy weapon drop,'

so Ludolph, with his wand, keeps their swords in their scabbards, paralyses Engelbrecht, and makes him confess his

'Nerves are in their infancy again,

And have no vigour in them,'

and, when he has done so, gives him over as a slave to Sidea, to carry logs for her. "The resemblance between this scene and the parallel scene in 'The Tempest' is rendered still more striking in a late part of the play, when Sidea, moved by pity for the labours of Engelbrecht, in carrying logs, declares to him,

'I am your wife, if you will marry me,'

an event which, in the end, is happily brought about, and leads to the reconciliation of their parents, the rival princes."

This is a subject so curious in itself that we shall have to investigate it fully on some future occasion. In the mean time it appears not the least extraordinary circumstance in this extraordinary question of literary history, that Ayrer did not translate some of Shakspere's own works, particularly those which existed in printed copies. Shakspere, according to Eschenburg, was not known in Germany, as far as can be collected from any mention in books, till nearly the close of the 17th century.—

"The first German author who has given a thought to Shakspere is perhaps Morhof, whose 'Instructions in the German Language' was first printed in 1682. Towards the end of the fourth chapter, 'On the Poetry of the English,' he is merely named, and Morhof acknowledges that he had himself seen nothing of his, or of Beaumont and Fletcher's. Not very long afterwards, Benthem, our poet, mentions him in his 'State of the English Schools and Churches,' in chap. xix., among the leading literary characters of England. But all he says of him, and that perhaps only for the first time, in the second edition, is the following, which is droll enough: 'William Shakspeare was born at Stratford in Warwickshire; his learning was very little, and therefore it is the more a matter of wonder that he should be a very excellent poet. He had an ingenious and witty mind, full of fun; and was so successful both in tragedy and comedy, that he could move a Heraclitus to laughter, and a Democritus to tears.'"*

COSTUME.

THE action of this play gives us no hint as to a period in which it may be imagined to have occurred. The King of Naples and a tributary Duke of Milan are returning from Tunis, whither they have been to celebrate a marriage between "the (Neapolitan) king's fair daughter Claribel" and the King of Tunis. They are

* Johan Joachim Eschenburg, über W. Shakspeare, new edit., Zürich, 1806, p. 497.