ne's suggestion connecting the play with the casting away
of Sir George Somers on the island of Bermuda in 1609; and further may I
be allowed to say how it seems to me possible that the vision was woven
from the most prosaic material--from nothing more promising in fact,
than the chatter of a half-tipsy sailor at a theater? Thus:

A stage-manager, who writes and vamps plays, moving among his audience,
overhears a mariner discoursing to his neighbor of a grievous wreck,
and of the behavior of the passengers, for whom all sailors have ever
entertained a natural contempt. He describes, with the wealth of detail
peculiar to sailors, measures taken to claw the ship off a lee-shore,
how helm and sails were workt, what the passengers did and what he said.
One pungent phrase--to be rendered later into:

'What care these brawlers for the name of King?'

--strikes the manager's ear, and he stands behind the talkers. Perhaps
only one-tenth of the earnestly delivered, hand-on-shoulder sea talk was
actually used of all that was automatically and unconsciously stored by
the island man who knew all inland arts and crafts. Nor is it too
fanciful to imagine a half-turn to the second listener as the mariner,
banning his luck as mariners will, says there are those who would not
give a doit to a poor man while they will lay out ten to see a
raree-show,--a dead Indian. Were he in foreign parts, as he now is in
England, he could show people something in the way of strange fish. Is
it to consider too curiously to see a drink ensue on this hint (the
manager dealt but little in his plays with the sea at first hand, and
his instinct for new words would have been waked by what he had already
caught), and with the drink a sailor's minute description of how he went
across the reefs to the island of his calamity,--or islands rather, for
there were many? Some you could almost carry away in your pocket. They
were sown broadcast like--like the nut-shells on the stage there.

"Many islands, in truth," says the manager patiently, and afterwards his
Sebastian says to Antonio:

I think he will carry the island home in his pocket and give it to his
son for an apple.

To which Antonio answers:

And sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands.

"But what was the island like?" says the manager. The sailor tries to
explain. "It was green, with yellow in it; a tawny-colored country"--the
color, that is to say, of the coral-beached, ce