How Shakspere Came to Write the Tempest

The Project Gutenberg EBook of How Shakspere Came to Write the Tempest, by

Rudyard Kipling and Ashley H. Thorndike

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Title: How Shakspere Came to Write the Tempest

Author: Rudyard Kipling

Ashley H. Thorndike

Release Date: June 27, 2010 [EBook #32991]

Language: English

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How Shakspere Came to Write the ‘Tempest’

PUBLICATIONS

of the

Dramatic Museum

of Columbia University

IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK

Third Series

Papers on Playmaking:

PAPERS ON PLAYMAKING

I

How Shakspere Came to

Write the ‘Tempest’

BY

Rudyard Kipling

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Ashley H. Thorndike

Printed for the

Dramatic Museum of Columbia University

in the City of New York

MCMXVI

INTRODUCTION AND NOTES COPYRIGHT 1916 BY

DRAMATIC MUSEUM OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Mr. Kipling’s brilliant reconstruction of the genesis of the ‘Tempest’ may remind us how often that play has excited the creative fancy of its readers. It has given rise to many imitations, adaptations, and sequels. Fletcher copied its storm, its desert island, and its woman who had never seen a man. Suckling borrowed its spirits. Davenant and Dryden added a man who had never seen a woman, a husband for Sycorax, and a sister for Caliban. Mr. Percy Mackaye has used its scene, mythology, and persons for his tercentenary Shaksperian Masque. Its suggestiveness has extended beyond the drama, and aroused moral allegories and disquisitions. Caliban has been elaborated as the Missing Link, and in the philosophical drama of Renan as the spirit of Democracy, and in Browning’s poem as a satire on the anthropomorphic conception of Deity.

But apart from such commentaries by poets and philosophers, the poem has lived these many generations in the imaginations of