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90 task the nursery-rhyme behest of "Five, six, pick up sticks; seven, eight, lay them straight.

To assert that there is no known source for The Tempest is not to say that Shakespeare's imagination was uninfluenced by certain books in composing this play. It is fairly certain that his interest had been stimulated by accounts of the shipwreck of the Sea Adventure off the Bermudas, in July, 1609. Accounts of this were given to the world the next year in the following works, A Discovery of the Barmudas, otherwise called the Ile of Divels, by Silvester Jourdan; and A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia, an anonymous pamphlet by the 'Council of Virginia.' William Strachey wrote A True Repertory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight, upon, and from the Ilands of the Bermudas. The first two of these, and perhaps also the third, may have been known to Shakespeare. A comparison of them with The Tempest is not without reward.

An interesting parallel to the main plot of The Tempest is found in the fourth section of Antonio de Esclava's Las Noches de Invierno (The Winter Nights), which appeared in the year 1609. Here we have (1) a king, who is also a magician, living in exile with his daughter; (2) a magic palace in the sea, in which various spirits appear; (3) the luring of the son of the usurping monarch to the magic retreat; and (4) the wreck of the imperial fleet. This is, of course, a significant series of incidents. It has been shown, in turn, that the source of this material is to be found in a colossal romance, The Mirrour of Knighthood—an English translation of a Spanish original—which appeared in 1578. This, too, has been claimed as the 'probable source' of The Tempest; but those who argue for Shakespeare's indebtedness to such work do not seem to take sufficient account of the vast mass of unrelated incident by which the