NOTES
THE FIRST PART OF NERO
This play was not intended for the stage, as the rest of my plays are. It was written as an exercise in dramatic qualities other than scenic; and had its publication been contemplated, I should have been more careful not to deserve censure in one or two places: these however I have not thought it worth while to erase or correct. Owing to its inordinate length I have found it necessary, so that the volumes of this series might be of uniform size, to couple with it the shortest of the other plays. Hence
ACHILLES IN SCYROS
is here out of order. Instead of standing second it should come fifth, that is after The Christian Captives. The following note is taken from the first edition.
Note to Achilles in Scyros.—After I had begun this play I came by chance on Calderon’s play on the same subject, El Monstruo de los Jardines. The monster is Achilles; the gardens the same. Excepting an expression or two I found nothing that it suited me to use, and I should not have recorded the circumstance, if it were not that Calderon’s play seemed to me to contain strong evidence that he had read The Tempest. This observation cannot be new, but I have never met with it; so I offer it to my readers, thinking it will interest them as it did me.
El Monstruo de los Jardines opens with a storm at sea, and shipwreck of royal persons, similar as it is inferior to Shakespeare’s (but compare also the Devil’s shipwreck in the second act of El magicio prodigioso, which may be read in Shelley’s translation). Stephano has his counterpart,
and the whole play is then on a supposed desert island, which turns out to be strangely peopled. There is the monster Achilles, who in many respects remembers Caliban, and is even addressed as Señor monstruo: ’Monsieur Monster.’ There is Thetis, who is to her nymphs as Prospero to his spirits; with musical enchantments, and voices in the air, and even a fantastico bajél. Calderon has moreover hit upon the same device of imitative fancy as tempted Dryden in like sad case, and pictured a man who had never seen a woman. The island is wandered on by the prince and his suite, and one of them says of it Republica es entera, &c. A curious reader might find more than I have here noticed: but Calderon is as far from sympathy with Shakespeare, as he is from the Greek story, with his drums and trumpets and El gran Sofí.
There is a passage in my Achilles (l. 518 and foll.) which is copied from Calderon: but this is after Muley’s well-known speech in the Principe Constante (see note to The Christian Captives); which is quoted in most books on Calderon. In my short play, which runs on without change of scene or necessary pause, I have had the act and scene divisions indicated by greater and lesser spaces in the printing.[A]