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The Tempest has the happy distinction among Shakespeare's plays of having no source. Diligent search has thus far failed to discover any work which can be proved to have been used by the dramatist for any major portion of his work. If an 'original' is ever discovered, it will probably contain merely the outlines of the story of Prospero, his daughter, his enemies, and his familiar spirit. The comic element in the play bears all the familiar marks of independent Shakespearean origin.

German critics, with characteristic ineptitude, have insisted upon Shakespeare's indebtedness to a play entitled, Die Schöne Sidea, by one Jakob Ayrer, of Nuremberg, who died in 1605; but a perusal of this piece of antiquated dulness (printed in Furness's Variorum edition of The Tempest) serves chiefly to convince the reader of the utter independence of Shakespeare's comedy. Dr. Furness remarks: 'In the course of the former story [Die Schöne Sidea] the captive prince is forced under blows and ill-treatment (and at the hands of the heroine, forsooth!) to split and pile up some wood, and, at the time of his capture, when he attempts to draw his sword, he finds it fast in its scabbard by the spell of the wicked magician. These are the two incidents which are supposed to be identical with Ferdinand's log-bearing, and with his disarming by Prospero; and these it is, which have been urged as an all-sufficient justification of the belief in a close kinship between The Tempest and The Fair Sidea. If once we adopt such fragmentary, insignificant incidents as the source of The Tempest, we might as well extend the scope and admit as one of the originals of Ferdinand’'s log-bearing