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Shakspere's Use of the Voyagers in the Tempest

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert Ralston Cawley
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Extract

These studies represent an attempt to determine Shakspere's debt to the voyagers in The Tempest. No article or book, to my knowledge, has set out to examine the subject as a whole; and my aim to supply such an article has forced me to review much material published heretofore. Broadly speaking, one-third of my studies contains material substantially as it has appeared elsewhere; one-third presents old material from a new point of view; and one-third presents material completely new. I wish to return the fullest possible acknowledgment to the excellent work of Morton Luce and Charles M. Gayley, on whose studies I have based my own.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , September 1926 , pp. 688 - 726
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1926

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References

1 Fairly complete lists of these will be found in the (large) Arden Tempest, London, 1902 (revised in 1919), pp. 152-61, and C. M. Gayley's Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America, New York, 1917, pp. 225-29. I will allude to accounts such as The Historie of T,availe (part of it finished by 1612) and Hamor's True Discourse (1615), which post-date The Tempest; but in these cases not as possible sources but only to illustrate the general spirit of the times. If the play was revised for presentation at the betrothal or marriage (1613) of Princess Elizabeth, as some believe (latest expression by H. D. Gray, S. in p. XVIII, 129-40), the poet may even have used some of these.

2 Op. cit., esp. pp. 8-80.

3 A True Reportory of the Wracke, and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight by William Strachey. Printed by Samuel Purchas in His Pilgrimes, XIX, 5-67. Unless otherwise specified, all allusions will be to the MacLebose edition, 20 vol., Glasgow, 1905-7. Purchas was the first to print A True Reportory, in 1625; it occupies pp. 1734-56 of vol. IV of His Pilgrimes. Gayley (Shakespeare, esp. pp. 75-76 and 226) has shown that the document was brought to England by Gates in the summer of 1610, and that it was handed around to members of the Virginia Council, several of whom were probably personal friends of the poet.

4 Philadelphia, 1897.

5 Storms and wrecks occur in the Spanish stories often given as sources for The Tempest. For a review of these, see “The Sources of the Tempest,” by H. D. Gray, M. L. N., XXXV, esp. pp. 321-22, and Luce's revised edition of the play, p. 176. Mr. Gray himself advances the theory that Shakspere used commtldiar dell'arte scenarios which appeared later in a ms. of Locatelli dated 1622. The parallels which he gives, mostly concerning the magic element, are highly interesting and some of them quite close. But the weakness of his position consists in the lack of evidence (p. 323) that these scenarios were either produced in England or existed in written or printed form by 1611. A far closer study than has hitherto been made of Elizabethan demonology in its connection with The Tempest must be undertaken before we can agree with Mr. Gray, who is “unable to doubt that we have in the scenarios the immediate source of The Tempest.” (p.329).

J. D. Rea in “A Source for the Storm in The Tempest” (Mod. Phil., XVII, 279-86) argues for one of Erasmus' Colloquia. What seem to me serious and valid objections to this hypothesis are advanced in the Shakespeare J ahrbuch, LVII, 122-23.

See also the playas edited by C. Porter and H. Clarke, New York, 1908, esp. pp. x-xxiv and 85-93. Sir Sidney Lee (The Tempest, Cleveland, 1911, p. xxi) strangely says, “In neither German play nor Spanish fiction is there any storm at sea.” But there is an important one in Eslava's Noches de Invierno. Cf. the translation in Porter's and Clarke's edition of the play, pp. 89-90.