TEMPEST.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS.

Y friend Mr. Douce, in his Illustrations of Shakspeare, published in 1807, had suggested that the outline of a considerable part of this play was borrowed from the account of Sir George Somers's Voyage and Shipwreck on the Bermudas, in 1609, and had pointed out some passages which seemed to confirm his suggestion. At the same time, it appears, that Mr. Malone was engaged in investigating the relations of this voyage, and he subsequently printed the result in a pamphlet which he distributed among his friends, and which Mr. Boswell reprinted in the 15th volume of his edition of Shakspeare.

At a later period of his life, Mr. Douce met with a print, engraved on wood, inscribed LA MADONNA DI LAMPEDOSA, in which the coast of the Island with its Castle is represented; two vessels are approaching it, above which hover three large birds. The Virgin and child are in the clouds above, to whom an old and a young man, with swords by their sides, are kneeling in the act of adoration. This print was probably given to votaries, who made their offerings at the shrine in the chapel on the Island, by the hermit stationed there to relieve those who might be wrecked, or driven by stress of weather, on the coast. It is known among sailors in the Mediterranean as the Enchanted Island.

The late Mr. Thomas Rodd informed Mr. Hunter that the suggestion, that Lampedosa, from its situation and the traditions respecting it, was most likely to have been the Island intended by Shakspeare as the scene of the Tempest, first occurred to him. self, and that he made Mr. Douce acquainted with it. Be this as it may, I know that Mr. Douce certainly entertained the idea upwards of twenty years since, and has thus recorded it. "The Island of Lampedosa is near the coast of Tunis; and from its description, in Dapper, and the real track of the king of Naples' voyage in Shakspeare's Tempest, will turn out to be the veritable Island where he was shipwrecked, and to which Prospero had

been banished, whenever the Italian novel on which the play was founded shall be discovered." Whether Mr. Douce ever carried his conviction further, I am unable to say, but it is not a little remarkable that the same hint given to Mr. Hunter should have formed the groundwork of his Disquisition "On the Scene, Origin, Date, &c. of Shakspeare's Tempest," first printed in 1839, and since reprinted in his "New Illustrations of Shakspeare," 1845. Mr. Hunter has dwelt at large upon the resemblance of Lampedosa, in every respect, to the Island of the Tempest, and concludes that although the poet may not have obtained his acquaintance with it from any geographical source, he may have found it in a story which had been previously written by another hand, to whom the attributes, physical and metaphysical, of Lampedosa were familiarly known, and that it was most probably an Italian story.

Collins, the poet, told Thomas Warton that the plot was taken from the romance of Aurelio and Isabella, but this was probably a lapse of memory consequent upon his calamitous mental indisposition, for the story has no resemblance to that of the Tempest. A friend of the late James Boswell told him that he had some years ago perused an Italian novel, which answered Collins' description, but his memory, unfortunately, did not enable him to recover it.

Mr. Thoms, in a paper on the early English and German Dramas, published in the New Monthly Magazine for January, 1841, had the merit of first pointing out a dramatic piece by Jacob Ayrer, a notary of Nuremberg, which is given by Tieck, in his Deutsches Theater, under the title of "Comedia von der Schönen Sidea," which Tieck conceived to be a translation from an early English Drama, from which Shakspeare derived his idea of the Tempest. Mr. Thoms thinks this proved by the points of resemblance between the two plays, which he conceives to be far too striking and peculiar to be the result of accident. Ayrer appears to have written his drama, which is in the style of Hans Sachs, at the close of the 16th or beginning of the 17th century, and he has other plays which are derived from old English sources; as "der Schöne Phoenicia," resembling in the plot "Much Ado about Nothing," and "The King of Cyprus and the King of France," resembling "The Dumb Knight" of Lewis Muchin.

It must be confessed, however, that we have hitherto nothing like proof of the origin of the plot of Shakspeare's Magic Creation, and it is but reasonable to hope that at some future period the novel, which has so confidently been said to exist, may be recovered.

The Tempest was first printed in the folio of 1623.

S. W. S.