Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/387

 In ‘Cymbeline’ he freely adapted a fragment of British history taken from Holinshed, interweaving with it a story from Boccaccio's ‘Decameron’ (Novel ix. Day 2). The Ginevra of the Italian novel corresponds to Shakespeare's Imogen. Her story is also told in a tract called ‘Westward for Smelts,’ no edition of which earlier than 1620 is now known, although Steevens and Malone doubtfully assume that it was first published in 1603, and that it had been already laid under contribution by Shakespeare in the ‘Merry Wives.’ Dr. Forman saw ‘Cymbeline’ acted either in 1610 or 1611. On Imogen Shakespeare lavished all the fascination of his genius. The play contains the splendid lyric ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’ (act iv. sc. ii. 258 seq.). The poor verse of the vision of Posthumus (act v. sc. iv. lines 30 seq.) must have been supplied by another hand.

‘A Winter's Tale’ was seen by Dr. Forman at the Globe on 15 May 1611. It is based upon Greene's popular romance which was called ‘Pandosto’ in the first edition of 1588, and subsequently ‘Dorastus and Fawnia.’ Shakespeare followed Greene in allotting a seashore to Bohemia—an error over which Ben Jonson, like many later critics, made merry (Conversations with Drummond, p. 16). But Shakespeare created the thievish pedlar Autolycus and the high-spirited Paulina, and invented the reconciliation of Leontes with Hermione. In Perdita, Florizel, and the boy Mamilius, he depicted youth in its most attractive guise. The freshness of the pastoral incident, too, surpasses that of all his presentations of country life.

‘The Tempest’ was probably the latest drama that he completed. In the summer of 1609, when a fleet, under the command of Sir George Somers [q. v.], had been overtaken by a storm off the West Indies, the admiral's ship, the ‘Sea-Venture,’ was driven on the Bermuda coast. The crew, escaping in two boats of cedar to Virginia, reached England in 1610. An account of the wreck, entitled ‘A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Ile of Divels,’ was written by Sylvester Jourdain or Jourdan [q. v.], one of the survivors, and published in October 1610. Shakespeare, who mentions the ‘still vexed Bermoothes’ (act i. sc. i. l. 229), incorporated in ‘The Tempest’ many hints from Jourdain. No source for the complete plot has been discovered, but the German writer, Jacob Ayrer, who died in 1605, dramatised a somewhat similar story in ‘Die schöne Sidea,’ where the adventures of Prospero, Ferdinand, Ariel, and Miranda are roughly anticipated (printed in ). English actors were performing at Nuremberg, where Ayrer lived, in 1604 and 1606, and may have brought reports of the piece to Shakespeare. Or perhaps both English and German plays had a common origin in some novel that has not yet been traced. Gonzalo's description of an ideal commonwealth is derived from Florio's translation of Montaigne's essays (1603). A highly ingenious theory represents ‘The Tempest’ (which, excepting ‘Macbeth’ and the ‘Two Gentlemen,’ is the shortest of Shakespeare's plays) as a masque written to celebrate the marriage of Princess Elizabeth (like Miranda, an island-princess) with the Elector Frederick. This marriage took place on 14 Feb. 1612–13, a very late date to which to assign the composition of the piece. The plot, which revolves about the forcible expulsion of a ruler from his dominions, and his daughter's wooing by the son of the usurper's chief ally, is hardly one that a shrewd playwright would have chosen as the setting of an official epithalamium in honour of the daughter of a monarch so sensitive about his title to the crown as James I (cf. Universal Review, April 1889, by Dr. R. Garnett).

Although Shakespeare gives as free a rein to his imagination in the ‘Tempest’ as in ‘Midsummer Night's Dream,’ and magical or supernatural agencies are the mainsprings of the plot, the tone is so solemn and impressive that critics may be forgiven if they detect in it something more than the irresponsible play of poetic fancy. Many of the characters seem the outcome of speculation respecting the least soluble problems of human existence. Ariel appears to suggest the capabilities of human intellect when detached from physical attributes. Caliban seems to typify human nature before the evolution of moral sentiment (cf., Caliban, or the Missing Link; , Caliban: a Drama; , Caliban upon Setebos). In Prospero, the guiding providence of the romance, who resigns his magic power in the closing scene, traces have been sought without much reason of the lineaments of the dramatist himself, who in this play probably bade farewell to the enchanted work of his life.

But if in 1611 Shakespeare finally abandoned dramatic composition, there seems little doubt that he left with the manager of his company unfinished drafts of more than one play which others were summoned at a later date to complete. His place at the head of the active dramatists was at once filled by John Fletcher (1579–1625) [q. v.], and