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( The Tempest)
The Tempest is a comedy written by William Shakespeare. It is generally dated to 1610-11 and accepted as the last play written solely by him,[1] although some scholars have argued for an earlier dating.[2] While listed as a comedy in its initial publication in the First Folio of 1623, many modern editors have relabelled the play a romance. It did not attract a significant amount of attention before the closing of the theatres in 1642, and after the Restoration it attained great popularity only in adapted versions.[3] Theatre productions returned conclusively to the original Shakespearean text in the mid-nineteenth century.[4] In the twentieth century, the play received a sweeping re-appraisal by critics and scholars, to the point that it is now considered one of Shakespeare's greatest works.[5] There is no obvious, single source for the plot of The Tempest. Instead, the play seems to have been created out of an amalgamation of sources.[6] Since source scholarship began in the eighteenth century, researchers have suggested that passages from Erasmus's Naufragium (The Shipwreck) (1523, English translation 1606) and Richard Eden's 1555 translation of Peter Martyr's De orbo novo, or Decades of the New Worlde Or West India (1530), influenced the composition of the play.[7] However, most Shakespearean scholars see parallel imagery in a work by William Strachey, an eyewitness report of the real-life shipwreck of the Sea Venture in 1609 on the islands of Bermuda while sailing toward Virginia. A character in the play makes reference to the still-vexed Bermoothes. Strachey's report was written in 1610; although it was not printed until 1625, it circulated in manuscript and many critics think that Shakespeare may have taken the idea of the shipwreck and some images from it. Another Sea Venture survivor, Sylvester Jordain, also published an account, A Discovery of The Barmudas, so the event would have been widely known. However, literary scholar Kenneth Muir believed that even though "[t]here is little doubt that Shakespeare had read . . . William Strachey's True Reportory of the Wracke" and other accounts, "[t]he extent of the verbal echoes of [the Bermuda] pamphlets has, I think, been exaggerated. There is hardly a shipwreck in history or fiction which does not mention splitting, in which the ship is not lightened of its cargo, in which the passengers do not give themselves up for lost, in which north winds are not sharp, and in which no one gets to shore by clinging to wreckage," and goes on to say that "Strachey's account of the shipwreck is blended with memories of St Paul's–in which too not a hair perished–and with Erasmus' colloquy."[8] The overall form of the play is modelled heavily on traditional Italian commedia dell'arte performances, which sometimes featured a magus and his daughter, their supernatural attendants, and a number of rustics. The commedia often featured a clown-figure known as "Arlecchino" (or his predecessor, "Zanni") and his partner "Brighella," who bear a striking resemblance to Stephano and Trinculo; a lecherous Neapolitan hunch-back named "Pulcinella," who corresponds to Caliban; and the clever and beautiful "Isabella," whose wealthy and manipulative father, "Pantalone," constantly seeks a suitor for her, thus mirroring the relationship between Miranda and Prospero.[9] In addition, one of Gonzalo's speeches is derived from On Cannibals, an essay by Montaigne that praises the society of the Caribbean natives "It is a nation ...that hath no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no use of service of riches, or of poverty; no contracts, no successions, no dividences, no ocupation but idle; no respect of kinred, but common, no apparrell but naturall, no manuring of lands, no use of wine corne, or mettle. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousnes, envie, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them."[10][11] and much of Prospero's renunciative speech is taken word for word from a speech by Medea in Ovid's Metamorphoses.[12]
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