(From J. Surtees Phillpott's Rugby Edition, 1876.) Another poet had depicted a magical tempest with a shipwrecked prince cast upon an enchanted island, and there relieved and tended by a king's daughter. The pictures are both beautiful, but they are not the same, and their difference is as marked a feature in their beauty as their likeness. — If an uneducated person wished to understand the meaning of a poetical creation, or, in other words, to see in what the essential unity of a poem consisted, he could hardly do better than exchange the details in Homer's canvas (Od. vi, 244, 275, 310), piece by piece, for those in Shakespeare. There is a real resemblance, on the other hand, between the characters of Nausicaa and Miranda. Each stands before us as an ideal of maidenhood, while the depths of tenderness in each are half revealed to us by their expressions of pity and sympathy. . . . Yet for all its unrivalled simplicity, Miranda's character marks the growth in the conception of woman's relation to society since the epic times. Nausicaa is no free agent: she may have preferences, but she does not choose; with a Quaker-like simplicity we see her preparing for her wedding with the suitor of her father's choice. Shakespeare required for his Miranda an amount of self-assertion which to Nausicaa would have seemed indecorous. (From Edward R. Russell in Theological Review, October 1876.) We have in Prospero a being capable of calling forth spirits, of causing storms and shipwrecks, miraculous escapes and supernatural restorations, and indeed of doing everything very much as the Deity can, according to the received theory of special providences. To him, in the seemingly cruel exercise of his power, his daughter Miranda makes appeal in the celebrated passage, spoken in sight of the shipwreck, beginning: "If by your art, my dearest father, you have put the wild waters in this roar, allay them." May we not consider the rest of the play an answer, as this passage is an echo, to the weary doubts of ages in the presence of calamities caused by Omnipotence, which seems malevolent in not having prevented them? (From Furnivall's Leopold Shakespeare Introduction, 1877.) No play brings out more clearly than The Tempest the Fourth-Period spirit (i.e. of Reunion, of Reconciliation, and Forgiveness), and Miranda evidently belongs to that time; she and her fellow, Perdita, being idealizations of the sweet country maidens whom Shakespeare would see about him in his renewed family life at Stratford. Turn back to the First-Period Midsummer Night's Dream, and com pare with its Stratford girls, stained with the tempers and vulgarities of their day, these Fourth-Period creations of pure beauty and refinement, all earth's loveliness filled with all angels' grace, and recognize what Shakespeare's growth has been. The general consent of critics and readers identifiés Shakespeare, in the ripeness of his art and power, more with Prospero than with any other of his characters; just as the like consent identifies him, in his restless and unsettled state, in his style of less perfect art, with Hamlet.-When we compare Prospero's "We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep," with all the questionings and fears about the future life which perplexed and terrified Hamlet and Claudio, we may see what progress Shakespeare has himself made in soul. Contrast, too, for a moment, Oberon's care for the lovers in the Dream, with the beautiful, tender feeling of Prospero for Miranda and Ferdinand here. He stands above them almost as a god, yet sharing their feelings and blessing them. Note, too, how his tenderness for Miranda revives in his words, "The fringed curtains of thine eyes advance," the lovely fancy of his youth, her "two blue windows faintly she upheaveth" (Ven. and Ad. 482). He has seized in Miranda, as in Perdita, on a new type of sweet country-girl unspoilt by town devices, and glorified it into a being fit for an angel's world. And as he links earth to heaven with Miranda, so he links earth to hell with Caliban. (From Hudson's Introduction to the Play, 1879.) The Tempest is on all hands regarded as one of Shakespeare's perfectest works. Some of his plays, I should say, have beams in their eyes; but this has hardly so much as a mote; or, if it have any motes, my own eyes are not clear enough to discern them. I dare not pronounce the work faultless, for this is too much to affirm of any human workmanship; but I venture to think that whatever faults it may have are such as criticism is hardly competent to specify. In the characters of Ariel, Miranda, and Caliban, we have three of the most unique and original conceptions that ever sprang from the wit of man. We can scarce imagine how the Ideal could be pushed further beyond Nature; yet we here find it clothed with all the truth and life of Nature. And the whole texture of incident and circumstance is framed in keeping with that Ideal; so that all the parts and particulars cohere together, mutually supporting and supported. (From Mrs. F. A. Kemble's Notes, etc., 1882.) It is not a little edifying to reflect how different Prospero's treatment of these young people's case would have been if, instead of only the most extraordinary of conjurers, he had been the most commonplace of scheming matrons of the present day. He, poor man, alarmed at the sudden conquest Ferdinand makes of his child, and perceiving that he must "this swift business uneasy make, lest too light winning make the prize light," can bethink himself of no better expedient than reducing the poor young prince into a sort of supplementary Caliban, a hewer of wood and drawer of water: now, a modern chaperon would merely have had to intimate to a well-trained modern young lady, that it would be as well not to give the young gentleman too much encouragement till his pretensions to the throne of Naples could really be made out (his straying about without any Duke of Newcastle, and very wet, was a good deal like a mere advent. urer, you know); and I am pretty certain that the judicious mamma, or female guardian of Miss Penelope Smith, the fair British Islander who became Princess of Capua, pursued no other system of provocation by repression. An expert matrimonial schemer of the present day, I say, would have devised by these means a species of trial by torture for poor Ferdinand, to which his "sweating labour" pero's patient log man would have been luxurious idleness. as Pros (From Richard Grant White's Studies in Shakespeare, 1886.) Nothing is clearer to me, the more I read and reflect upon his works, than that, after Shakespeare's first three or four years' experience as a poet and dramatist, he was entirely without even any art-purpose or aim whatever, and used his materials just as they came to his hand. ... The Tempest conforms to the unities of time and place merely because the story made it convenient for the writer to observe them; The Winter's Tale defies them because its story made the observance of them very troublesome, and indeed almost, if not quite, impossible. There has been a great deal of ingenious speculation about Shakespeare's system of dramatic art. It is all unfounded, vague, and worthless. Shakespeare had no system of dramatic art. (From Dr. Garnett's Irving Shakespeare, 1890.) The Tempest is not one of those plays whose interest consists in strong dramatic situations. The course of the action is revealed from the first. Prospero is too manifestly the controlling spirit to arouse much concern for his fortunes. Ferdinand and Miranda are soon put out of their pain, and Ariel lies beyond the limits of humanity. The action is simple and uniform, and all occurrences are seen converging slowly towards their destined point. No play, perhaps, more perfectly combines intellectual satisfaction with imaginative pleasure. Above and behind the fascination of the plot and the poetry we behold Power and Right evenly paired and working together, and the justification of Providence producing that sentiment of repose and acquiescence which is the object and test of every true work of art. (From Dr. Horace Howard Furness's Preface to Variorum With the exception of Hamlet and Julius Cæsar no play has been more liberally annotated than The Tempest. Unquestionably, a large portion of this attention from editors and critics must be owing to the enduring charm of the Play itself, dominated as it is by two such characters as Prospero and Ariel, whose names have become almost the symbols of an overruling, forgiving wisdom, and of an "embodied joy whose race has just begun." There is yet a third character that shares with these two my profound wonder, and, as a work of art, my admiration. It is not Miranda, who, lovely as she is, is but a girl, and has taken no single step in that brave new world just dawning on the fringed curtains of her eyes. "To me," says Lady Martin, in a letter which I am kindly permitted to quote, "Miranda's life is all to come." We know, indeed, that to her latest hour she will be the top of admiration, but, as a present object, the present eye sees in her only the exquisite possibilities of her exquisite nature. In Caliban it is that Shakespeare has risen, I think, to the very height of creative power, and, by making what is absolutely unnatural thoroughly natural and consistent, has accomplished the impossible. Merely as a work of art, Caliban takes precedence, I think, even of Ariel. The student will do well to read Browning's poem, Caliban upon Setebos; or Natural Theology in the Island. "The essence of the poem, says Furness, "lies in its alternative title, which sets forth the vague questionings of a keenly observant, but utterly untutored, mind in regard to the existence of an overruling power, the problem of evil, the mystery of pain, and the evidences of caprice, rather than of law, in the government of the world, such restless longing for a solution of the mysteries of life as rise unbidden to the mind when looking on the ocean, at high noon, amid the full tide of summer life." (From Ass't Prof. Barrett Wendell's William Shakespeare, 1894.) The Tempest is a very great, very beautiful poem. As a poem one can hardly love or admire it too much. As a play, on the other hand, it is neither great nor effective. The reason is not far to seek its motive is not primarily dramatic; the mood it would express is not that : of a playwright, but rather that of an allegorist or philosopher. . . The very complexity and the essential abstractness of the endlessly suggestive, philosophic motive of the Tempest is reason enough why, for all its power and beauty, the play should theatrically fail. Like Cymbeline, though far less obtrusively, it contains too much. Like Cymbeline it reveals itself at last as a colossal experiment, an attempt to achieve an effect which, this time at least, is hopelessly beyond human power. Less palpably than Cymbeline, but just as surely, the Tempest finally seems laborious. The motive of the Tempest we have seen to be philosophic, or allegorical, or at least something other than purely artistic. . . . This quality of deliberation, perhaps, typifies the fatal trouble. Creatively and technically powerful as the Tempest is,-sustained, too, and simplified, and beautiful,— it has throughout a relation to real life which we cannot feel unintentional. In a spontaneous work of art, one feels that the relation of its truth to the truth of life is not intended, but is rather the result of the essential veracity of the artist's observation and expression. In such an effect as that of the Tempest one grows more and more to feel that, for all its power, for all its mastery, for all its beauty, the play is really a tremendous effort. . . . In Cymbeline we found what seemed a deliberate attempt to assert artistic power at a moment when that power was past the spontaneous vigor of maturity. Here, in the Tempest, we find another such effort, more potent still. motive is not really dramatic, nor even purely artistic; it is philosophic, allegorical, consciously and deliberately imaginative. His faculty of creating character, as distinguished from constructing it, is gone. All his power fails to make his great poem spontaneous, easy, inevitable. Like Cymbeline, it remains a Titanic effort; and in an artist like Shakespeare, effort implies creative decadence, the fatal approach of growing age. ... His |