their own wrong impulses, and into
reconcilement and peace. How much of _The Tempest_ Shakespeare meant
as a symbol can never be told; but here, perhaps, as much as anywhere
the temptation to read the philosophy of the poet into the story of the
dramatist comes strongly upon the reader.

There are two speeches of Prospero, in particular, where the reader is
inclined to believe he is listening to Shakespeare's own voice. In
one, Prospero puts a sudden end to his pageant of the spirits, and
compares life itself to the transitory play. In the other, Prospero
bids farewell to his magic art. These are often interpreted as
Shakespeare's own farewell to the stage and to his art,--with what
justification every reader must decide for himself.

In this last play there is, it should be said, not the slightest hint
of a weakening of the poetic or the dramatic faculty. The falling in
love of Miranda, the wonderful and wondering child of purity and
nature; the tempting of Sebastian by the crafty Antonio; and the
creation of Caliban, half-man, half-devil, with his elemental knowledge
of nature, and his dull cunning, and his stunted faculties,--all these
are the work of {207} a genius still in the full pride of power.
Shakespeare's dramatic work ends suddenly, "like a bright exhalation in
the evening."

+Date+.--Edmund Malone's word, unsupported by other evidence, puts the
play as already in existence in the autumn of 1611. The play certainly
is later than the wreck of Somers's ship, in 1609. It was acted during
the marriage festivities of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613, when other
plays were revived.

+Sources+.--Two accounts by Sylvester Jourdan and William Strachey
told, soon after the event, of the casting away upon the Bermuda
Islands of a ship belonging to the Virginia expedition of Somers in
1609. From these Shakespeare drew for many details. His island,
however, is clearly not Bermuda, nor, indeed, any known land. Other
details have been traced from various sources. Ariel is a name of a
spirit in mediaeval literature of cabalistic secrets. Montaigne's
_Essays_, translated by Florio (1603), furnished the hint of Gonzalo's
imaginary commonwealth (II, i, 147 ff.). Setebos has been found as a
devil-god of the Patagonians in Eden's _History of Travaile_ (1577).
The rest of the story, which is nine-tenths of the whole, is probably
Shakespeare's own, though the central theme of an exiled prince, whose
daughter marr