psy sailor
at the theater."

Mr. Kipling writes as one inventor of tales about another. Certainly no
one is better qualified to trace out the processes of the creative
imagination and to discover the very fabrics of its visions. In those
marvelous stories of his, who has not recognized a Shaksperian
catholicity in the quest of fact and a Shaksperian alchemy in its
transformation? He has himself created many enchanted islands and he
knows whereof they are made. The sailor just home from a famous
shipwreck on the Bermudas might have stept out of one of Mr. Kipling's
tales; but he becomes a factor in some very acute criticism, for the
sailor's "profligate abundance of detail at the beginning, when he was
more or less sober, supplied and surely established the earth-basis of
the play in accordance with the great law that a story to be truly
miraculous must be ballasted with facts."

Mr. Kipling's letter has found a place in all subsequent critical
discussions of the play, and has become a contribution to that
historical research which seeks to discover the ways and means by which
literature is made. It may not be unseemly therefore to bring together
as an introduction and commentary some other suggestions that criticism
has advanced in regard to the influences and incentives that directed
Shakspere's art in this play, written at the very close of his career
and at the moment when the Elizabethan drama had reached its highest
development.

Recent investigation has added to our certainty that the play was
written in 1610 or 1611, for Mr. Ernest Law has shown that the
supposedly forged entry of its performance at court on November 1, 1611
is genuine. Various passages in the play indicate that it was not
written before July 1610, when Sir Thomas Gates and his ships sailed up
the Thames with news of the safety of the fleet that had departed from
Plymouth over a year before. This fleet of nine vessels had started for
the new colony in Virginia, had been scattered by a great storm, and the
ship 'Sea Venture' with the leaders aboard, Sir George Somers, Sir
Thomas Gates, and Captain Christopher Newport, had been cast ashore on
one of the Bermudas. But there had been no loss of life; the adventurers
had lived comfortably for many months, had built two pinnaces from the
materials of the wreck, and had rejoined their comrades in Virginia.
Before the arrival of Gates from Virginia, reports of the wreck had
reached London, so his saf