INTRODUCTION BY F. J. FURNIVALL, M.A., Ph.D., D.Litt. ASSISTED BY JOHN MUNRO THE TEMPEST.-The Tempest was written in Shakspere's Fourth Period, the period of reconciliation and forgiveness, and the play which preceded it chronologically was Pericles. Here then we turn from the southern to the northern shore of the Mediterranean, from Tyre, where Pericles was Prince, to Naples, where Alonso was King, to Milan, of which Prospero was Duke. We change from Ephesus, where cruel Dionyza plotted her friend's child's death, to the fair island in the Mediterranean, the creation of Shakspere's brain,1 where Prospero saved his foe's child's life. But though the scene is changed, the Fourth-Period spirit of the Poet is the same. Volumnia's 66 Think'st thou it honourable for a noble man still to remember wrongs?" 2 is still the burden of the play; the reunion of separated members of a family, 1 Hunter offered many ingenious reasons for the identification of Campedusa with Prospero's isle; but it seems safer to assume that, whatever the sources may be from which Shakspere derived suggestions, the enchanted island existed nowhere but in his own all-comprehending imagination.-M. Coriolanus, V. iii. p. 191. the reconciliation of foes, are still its subject, and forgiveness, not revenge, its lesson: "The rarer action is In virtue, than in vengeance: they, being penitent, Surely we may with justice stretch Gonzalo's sentiment that we have found "all of us ourselves " further than perhaps Shakspere's use of the words will bear, and thus claim that the truth utterd in them is "when we are not our own alone, when we are emptied of self, when we are most helpful to others, then alone do we find our (true) selves." No play brings out more clearly than The Tempest the Fourth-Period spirit; and Miranda evidently belongs to that time, she and her fellow, Perdita, being idealisations of the sweet country maidens whom Shakspere would see about him in his renewd family life at Stratford. Of them what better can be said than my friend Mr. Phillpots has said of Miranda, in his Rugby school edition of The Tempest. Differ tho' they do, each is a phantom of delight, the realisation of Wordsworth's lines: "Hers shall be the breathing balm, Of mute insensate things. "The floating clouds their state shall lend Nor shall she fail to see, E'en in the motions of the storm, Grace that shall mould the maiden's form By silent sympathy. |