a Nuremberg
dramatist, named Jacob Ayrer.

3rd. From the tracts relating to the discovery of the Bermuda
Islands in 1609. Of the known tracts, _A Discovery of the Bermuda
Islands_, by Sylvester Jourdain, gave Shakespeare the most hints.

Several other books may have suggested lines and passages.

_The Fable._ Prospero, Duke of Milan, having been driven from his
dukedom by Antonio his brother, flies to sea with his daughter
Miranda, lands on an island, and there lives, served by two
creatures, one an airy spirit, the other a loutish monster.

By art magic, he brings to the island his usurping brother and the
king and heir of Naples. Miranda falls in love with the heir of
Naples. Prospero dismisses his spirits, reconciles himself with his
brother, and plans to sail at once for Milan.

In this play, as in the two other original romantic plays, Shakespeare
follows the workings of a treacherous act from its performance to the
repentance of the sinner and the granting of the victim's forgiveness.
In the great plays the victim dies and the sinner does not repent.
Presently the wheel comes full circle, and a justice from outside life
smites him dead. In these plays the betrayed live to forgive the
traitors--

"Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet, with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury
Do I take part. The rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further."

In this play, as in the other two and in _Pericles_, much is made of the
chances and accidents of life, and of the sudden changes of worldly
circumstance due to them. In this play, for the first and last time,
Shakespeare treats of the power of the resolved imagination to command
the brutish, the base, the noble and the spiritual for wise human ends.

It is easy to interpret the play as allegory. Youth in this country has
reason to regard allegory as a clumsy man's way of introducing Sunday on
a weekday. It is so seldom successful that it may be called the literary
method of creative minds below the first rank. Shakespeare's method was
never allegorical. The _Tempest_ is perhaps no more allegorical than
any other good romance. But the thought of it is so clear that the first
impression given is that it is thin. It is the study of a man of
intellect, who has been forced from