Of the other characters, Prince Florizel, Perdita's lover, is that rarest of all dramatic heroes, a young prince with real nobility of soul. Lord Camillo and Lady Paulina are well-drawn types of loyalty and devotion. Leontes alone, the jealous husband, is unreasoning in the violence of his jealousy. As the study of a mind overborne by an obsession, it is a strong yet repulsive picture.
Date.—Simon Forman narrates in his diary how he saw the play at the Globe Theater, May 16, 1611. It was probably written about this time. Jonson's Masque of Oberon, produced January 1, 1611, contains an antimasque of satyrs which may bear some relation to the similar dance in IV, iv, 331 ff. The First Folio contains the earliest print of the play.
Source.—The romance, to which reference has been made above, as the source of The Winter's Tale, was Robert Greene's Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, sometimes called by its later title, The History of Dorastus and Fawnia. Fourteen editions followed one another from its appearance in 1588. Greene made the jealous Pandosto king in Bohemia, and Egistus (Polixenes in the play) king of Sicily. In The Winter's Tale two kingdoms are interchanged. Nevertheless the "seacoast of Bohemia," so often ridiculed as Shakespeare's stage direction, is found in Greene's story. Three alterations by Shakespeare are of vital importance in improving the plot: the slandered queen is kept alive, instead of dying in grief for her son's death, to be restored again in the famous but theatrical statue scene; Autolycus is created and is given, with Camillo, an important share in the restoration of Perdita; and the complications of Dorastus's (Florizel's) destiny as the prospective husband of a princess of Denmark, and Pandosto's (Leontes's) falling in love with his own daughter and his suicide on learning of her true birth, are wisely omitted. The characters of Paulina, the Clown, and some minor persons are Shakespeare's own invention.
According to Professor Neilson, Autolycus and his song in IV iii, 1 ff., may have been partly based on the character of Tom Beggar in Robert Wilson's Three Ladies of London (1584).
The Tempest, probably the last complete drama from Shakespeare's pen, differs from the other "romances" in possessing a singular unity. It comes, indeed closer than any play, save the Comedy of Errors, to fulfilling the demands of unity of action, time, and place. This may be due to the fact that the poet is here making up his own plot, not, as in other cases, dramatizing a novel of extended adventure.
The central theme of The Tempest is, like that of the other romances, restoration of those exiled and reconciliation of those at enmity; but the treatment of the story could not be more different. Where the chance of fortune has hitherto brought about the happy ending, here magic and the supernatural in control of man are the means employed. Those who had plotted or connived at the expulsion of Prospero, Duke of Milan, and his being set adrift in an open boat, with his infant daughter and his books for company, are wrecked through his art upon the island of which he has become the master. Ariel, the spirit who serves Prospero, a mysterious, ever changing form, now fire, now a Nymph, now an invisible musician, now a Harpy, striking guilt into the conscience (and yet apparently not interested in either vice or virtue, but longing only for free idleness), guides all to Prospero's cave, and receives freedom for his toil. His spirit pervades every scene, whether we view the king's son Ferdinand loving innocent Miranda, or the silent king mourning his son's loss, or the guilty conspirators plotting the king's death, or the drunken steward and jester plotting with the servant monster Caliban the overthrow of Prospero. All of them are led, by the wisdom of Prospero acting through Ariel, away from their own wrong impulses, and into reconcilement and peace. How much of The Tempest Shakespeare meant as a symbol can never be told; but here, perhaps, as much as anywhere the temptation to read the philosophy of the poet into the story of the dramatist comes strongly upon the reader.
There are two speeches of Prospero, in particular, where the reader is inclined to believe he is listening to Shakespeare's own voice. In one, Prospero puts a sudden end to his pageant of the spirits, and compares life itself to the transitory play. In the other, Prospero bids farewell to his magic art. These are often interpreted as Shakespeare's own farewell to the stage and to his art,—with what justification every reader must decide for himself.
In this last play there is, it should be said, not the slightest hint of a weakening of the poetic or the dramatic faculty. The falling in love of Miranda, the wonderful and wondering child of purity and nature; the tempting of Sebastian by the crafty Antonio; and the creation of Caliban, half-man, half-devil, with his elemental knowledge of nature, and his dull cunning, and his stunted faculties,—all these are the work of a genius still in the full pride of power. Shakespeare's dramatic work ends suddenly, "like a bright exhalation in the evening."
Date.—Edmund Malone's word, unsupported by other evidence, puts the play as already in existence in the autumn of 1611. The play certainly is later than the wreck of Somers's ship, in 1609. It was acted during the marriage festivities of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613, when other plays were revived.
Sources.—Two accounts by Sylvester Jourdan and William Strachey told, soon after the event, of the casting away upon the Bermuda Islands of a ship belonging to the Virginia expedition of Somers in 1609. From these Shakespeare drew for many details. His island, however, is clearly not Bermuda, nor, indeed, any known land. Other details have been traced from various sources. Ariel is a name of a spirit in mediaeval literature of cabalistic secrets. Montaigne's Essays, translated by Florio (1603), furnished the hint of Gonzalo's imaginary commonwealth (II, i, 147 ff.). Setebos has been found as a devil-god of the Patagonians in Eden's History of Travaile (1577). The rest of the story, which is nine-tenths of the whole, is probably Shakespeare's own, though the central theme of an exiled prince, whose daughter marries his enemy, who has an attendant spirit, and who through magic compels the captive prince to carry logs, may come from some old folk tale; since a German play, Die Schöne Sidea, by Jakob Ayrer of Nuremberg (died 1605), possesses all these details. The relations, if any, between the two plays are remote.