How Shakspere Came to Write the Tempest

by Rudyard Kipling

And when Prospero says they are spirits summoned by his art, Ferdinand exclaims

Let me live here ever;
So rare a wond’red father and a wise
Makes this place Paradise.

It is not Miranda now, but the machine and costumes used in court-spectacles that turn the platform into a land of romance.

Then enter Nymphs, “Naiads of the winding brooks with sedg’d crowns,” and Sun burnt Reapers, “with rye-straw hats.” These are the main masquers and join in a graceful dance, until upon Prospero’s sudden start—“to a strange, hollow, and confused noise, they heavily vanish.” More ingenious is Shakspere’s use of the anti-masques—i.e. dances by professional performers drest in fantastic costumes as animals, satyrs, statues, witches, etc. Such are the several strange shapes of III.3, who first bring in the banquet and again enter “and dance with mocks and mows and carrying out the table”; and in IV.1, the divers spirits who “in shape of dogs and hounds” hunt about the drunken conspirators while Prospero and Ariel set them on.

For a stage, then, that had long been used to romance, Shakspere planned a new wonderment. For it he revived some of his old creations from Illyria and Arden, and Fairyland, all transformed by

a sea change
Into something rich and strange.

And he added some excitements and novelties to keep pace with the thrilling tragi-comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher. And just as years before, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ he had drawn hints from the court entertainments by children, so now he conceived a spectacle that—so far as was possible—might rival the great shows of the Jacobean court. He did not need to go beyond the drama to find abundant suggestions for his new venture.

But this was to be a play as well as a show, and must have some kind of plot. Perhaps he found an Italian novella with the story. No one has been able to find it since then. But stories somewhat similar to that of the ‘Tempest’ occur in a Spanish tale and in a German play. There was indeed a real Alfonso, king of Naples, and a duke of Milan who was dispossesst, and another named Prospero. But whatever story Shakspere found, it is my notion that he forgot most of it. The palace intrigues, the rivalries of the banisht and usurping dukes, set at naught by the love at first sight of their children, the perilous adventures, and the dénouement brought about by magic, were commonplaces of fiction. Shakspere wanted to weld them into a more surprising fable.

Perhaps it was at the very moment when he was most intent on this problem that the sailor from the fleet of Sir Thomas Gates hove into view. Even the mariner’s ballast of facts did not quite suffice. As Shakspere wrote he recalled some lines from his old favorite Ovid to fill out one of Prospero’s descriptions; and he used the newly-read Montaigne for Gonzalo’s account of a Utopian commonwealth. And some fine lines from Sir William Alexander’s tragedy of ‘Darius’ seem to have lingered in his recollection when he wrote of the great globe which is like a pageant and life that is like a dream. As he wrote of Prospero he thought too of his own career, of his own so potent art, of his promised retirement, and the fading pageants of both life and art.

Perhaps, too, he may have thought of some of his battles of wit with Ben Jonson in the Mermaid Tavern. Ben was a great stickler for the rules, though he lamented that the Unity of Time was very difficult to secure on the English stage. He thought masques should be kept distinct from comedies, and he had no liking for fantastic medleys. Indeed, a few years later he indulged in a scoff at Shakspere’s “servant-monster” and at “those who beget tales, tempests, and such like drolleries.” Shakspere, recalling some such discussion may have said to himself, “Well, here is a play as fantastic as possible, and just to show Benjamin what can be done, I will keep it in strict accord with his classical Unities of Time and Place.” For this or some other propose he was for once at great pains to keep all the action within the time of the stage-performance, tho in doing so he makes his one nautical error by forgetting that the seaman’s measure of time was a half-hour glass. When Prospero first consults Ariel we are precisely told that it is two o’clock in the afternoon, and just before the end of the drama we are told that three hours have elapst.