Variations Within A Source: From Isaiah XXIX To ‘The Tempest’

Summary

And whom among the learned do ye deceive? Reckoning up those - forty is it? - your plays you've misbegot, there's not six which have not plots as common as Moorditch.

Ye're out, Ben. There's not one. My Loves Labour (how I came to write it, I know not) is nearest to lawfull issue. My Tempest (how I came to write that, I know) is, in some part, my own stuff.

Rudyard Kipling, Proofs of Holy Writ

The words Kipling gave to his Shakespeare were true. The Tempest interweaves a variety of details from the Bermuda pamphlets with fragmentary echoes of Vergil; one speech draws on Montaigne, and another on Golding's Ovid, but no origin has been found for its central theme. Yet by an odd coincidence Kipling almost stumbled against a hitherto neglected source for the play, in the jeu d'esprit from which the quotation above is taken. For here he imagined Shakespeare in his Stratford orchard, whiling away a summer afternoon with Ben Jonson, translating some verses of the Bible, which had been surreptitiously entrusted to him by a neighbouring Oxford divine in difficulties with his part of the translation for the new, Authorised Version. And the verses Kipling happened to choose, for their Shakespearian splendour of phrase, come from the book of Isaiah. 'How I came to write that, I know', Shakespeare says mysteriously of The Tempest, mocking the author who made him speak: one of the sources for The Tempest is, very probably, Isaiah xxix.