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Th e Tempest 207
long known to the English, partly from popular superstition,
and partly from the old French romance of Th eon and Auberon.
Th e legend of the love potion is also ancient. Chaucer’s Knight’s
Tale and his Tysbe of Babylone, or Golding’s translation of Ovid’s
Pyramus and Th isbe have therefore probably been regarded
as the sources of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Compare
Halliwell: An Introduction to S.’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.
London, 1841, p. xi. f. xxiii. f.) And yet what these sources
off ered could at most act as suggestions; they in reality do
not at all contain the substance and invention of the play. Of
Th e Tempest also, most commentators have assumed that the
substance was Shakspeare’s own invention. And certainly no
safe source has yet been discovered from which he might have
drawn his materials. For Tieck’s conjecture (Deutsches Th eatre, s.
xxii.) that it is remodelled from an old English Play, is a mere
conjecture; there is no trace of any such piece, and J. Ayrer’s
play Die schöne Sidea, which exhibits some similarities with
Th e Tempest, is no adequate support for Tieck’s supposition.
Nevertheless it is very doubtful whether Shakspeare did not
draw from the old ballad (discovered by Collier), or from an
earlier source (common to him and to the author of the ballad,
perhaps also of Ayrer, the Nürenberg poet), it may be from an
old Spanish novel. It is true that no such novel has yet been
discovered, in spite of zealous investigations; but after reading
the ballad (in Collier’s Farther Particulars regarding the Life and
Works of S., and printed herefrom in the Quarterly Review, No.
cxxx., 1840, p. 478), it must be admitted that the substance
in the simpler form in which it is there given, has quite the
character of one of those novels of which Shakspeare made
such various use, by dramatising them in his own fashion,
that is, not only by furnishing them with new characters, and
placing these in diff erent circumstances, but also by giving a
deeper signifi cance to the ideal substance of the action, as well
as to the various characters. At all events, it is inconceivable
why the ballad-poet (if he drew from Shakspeare) should have
so curtailed the matter, and entirely omitted many signifi cant
incidents. Moreover he had no conceivable reason for changing
the dramatic personages from Italians into Spaniards, whereas
Shakspeare, owing to the political relations between England