(zo THe EDrrox oF THE ' spectator.")
Str,—Your article on "Landscape ant Literature" in the Spectator of June 18th has the following, among other suggestive passages:—'* But whence came the vision of the enchanted island in The Tempest It had no existence in Shakespeare's world,: but was woven out of such, stuff as drees re made of."
May I cite Mulone's suggestion connecting the play with the casting away of Si George Bosers on the island of Bermuda in 1609; "ud further may I be allowed to say how it seems to me possible that the vision was woven from the most. prosaic material,—from nothing more promising, in fact than the chatter of a half-tipsy sailor at a theatre?.'Thus 'A stage-maneyer, who writes and vamps plays, moving among his audience, overhears a mariner discoursing to his neighbour ofa grievous wreck, and of the behaviour of the passengers, for whom all sailors have ever entertained a natural contempt. He describes, with the wealth of detail peculiar to sailors, measures taken'to claw the ship off a lee-shore, how helm and sails were worked, what the passengers did.and what he said. One pungent phrase—to be rendered Inter into: ' What care these brawlers for the name of King?"—strikes the manager's ear, and he stands behind the talkers.. Perhaps only one-tenth -of the earnestly delivered,—_hand-on-shoulder sea-talk. was actually used of all that was automatically and unconsciously stored by the inland man who knew all inland arts and crafts. Nor ix it too fanciful to imagine a half-turn to the second listener as the mariner, banning his luck as mariners ill, says-there are those who would not a dead Indian, - Were he in foreign parts, as now he is in England, he could show people. something in the' way of strange fish. Is it to consider too curiously to.see drink ensue on this hint (the manager dealt but little in his plays with the sen at first hand, and his instinct for new words would have been waked by what he had already caught), and with the drink a sailor's minute description of how he went across through the reefs to the island of his calamity,—or islands rather, for there were many?" Some you could almost carry away in your pocket. They were sown broadcast like—like the nutshells on the stage there.
"Many islands, in truth," says the manager patiently, and afterwards his Sebastian says to Antonio: "I think he will carry the island home in his pocket and give it io answers: " And sowing the kernels of is son for an Apple. To which Antoit in.the sea, bring forth more islands.
"But what was the land like says the manager. The sailor tries to explain "Te was green,.with yellow in it; a tawny.
coloured country"—the colour, that is to say, of the -coral-beached, cedar-covered Bermuda of to-day—'and the air made one sleepy, and the place was full of noise:
the muttering and roaring of the sea among the islands and between the reefs—'* and there was a south-west wind that blistered one all over." The Elizabethan mariner would not distinguish finely between blisters and prickly heat; but the Ber-median of to-day will tell you that the south-west, or Lighthouse, wind in summer brings that plague and general discomfort. That the coral rock, battered by the sea, rings hollow with strange sounds, answered by the winds in the Tittle cramped valleys, is a matter of common knowledge.
The man, refreshed with more drink, then describes the geography of his landing {ergreos spot where Trinculo makes his rst appearance. He insists and reinsists on details which to him at one time meant life or death, and the manager follows attentively. He can give his audience no more than a few hayyings and a placard for scenery, but that his lines shall lift them beyond that bare show to the place he would have them, the manager needs for himself the clearest possible understanding,—the most ample detail. He must see the scene in the round—solid—ere he peoples it. Much, doubtless, he discarded, but so closely did he keep to his original informations that those who go to-day to a certain beach some two set for Act LI, Scene 2, of The Tempest, miles from Hamilton will find the stage—a bare beach, with the wind sighing through the scrub at the land's edge, a gap in the reefs wide enough the 0 of Stephano's butt of sack, and (these eyes have seen it) a cave in the coral within easy reach of the tide, whereto such a butt might be conveniently rolled ('My cellar is in a rock by the seaside where my wine is hid"), There is no other cave for some two miles, "'Here's neither bush nor shrub one is exposed to the wrath of "'yond' same black cloud," and here the currents strand wreckage. It was so well done that, after three hundred years, a stray tripper, and no Shakespeare scholar, recognised in a flash that old first set of all.
So far so good. Up to.this' point. the manager hax gained little except some suggestions for an opening scene, and some notion of.an uncanny island. The mariner (one cannot believe that Shakespeare was mean in these little things) is dipping to a deeper drunkenness. Suddenly he launches into a preposterous tale of himself and his fellows, flung ashore, separated from their officers, horribly afraid of the devilhaunted beach of noises, with their heads full of the fumes of broached liquor. One: castaway was found hiding under the ribs of a deadiwhale which smelt abominably. They hauled him out by the legs—he mistook them for imps—and gave him drink. And now, discipline being melted, they would strike out for themselves, defy their officers, and take possession of the island. The narrator's mates in this enterprise were probably described as fools. He was the only sober man in the company.
So they went inland,. faring badly as they staggered up and down this pestilent country. They were pricked with palmettoes, and the cedar branches rasped their faces. Then they found and stole some of their officers' clothes which were
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.