Book contents
- Frontmatter
- The Problem Plays, 1920–1970: A Retrospect
- ‘Sons and Daughters of the Game’: An Essay on Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’
- The Options of the Audience: Theory and Practice in Peter Brook’s ‘Measure for Measure’
- Man’s Need and God’s Plan in ‘Measure for Measure’ and Mark iv
- The Design of ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’
- Directing Problem Plays: John Barton Talks to Gareth Lloyd Evans
- The Queen Mab Speech in ‘Romeo and Juliet’
- ‘Time’s Deformed Hand’: Sequence, Consequence, and Inconsequence in ‘The Comedy of Errors’
- Faith and Fashion in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’
- ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ as a Hallowe’en Play
- ‘The Tempest’ at the Turn of the Century: Cross-Currents in Production
- Variations Within A Source: From Isaiah XXIX To ‘The Tempest’
- The Life of George Wilkins
- A Neurotic Portia
- Of an Age and for All Time: Shakespeare at Stratford
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Textual Studies
- Index
- Plate section
Variations Within A Source: From Isaiah XXIX To ‘The Tempest’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- The Problem Plays, 1920–1970: A Retrospect
- ‘Sons and Daughters of the Game’: An Essay on Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’
- The Options of the Audience: Theory and Practice in Peter Brook’s ‘Measure for Measure’
- Man’s Need and God’s Plan in ‘Measure for Measure’ and Mark iv
- The Design of ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’
- Directing Problem Plays: John Barton Talks to Gareth Lloyd Evans
- The Queen Mab Speech in ‘Romeo and Juliet’
- ‘Time’s Deformed Hand’: Sequence, Consequence, and Inconsequence in ‘The Comedy of Errors’
- Faith and Fashion in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’
- ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ as a Hallowe’en Play
- ‘The Tempest’ at the Turn of the Century: Cross-Currents in Production
- Variations Within A Source: From Isaiah XXIX To ‘The Tempest’
- The Life of George Wilkins
- A Neurotic Portia
- Of an Age and for All Time: Shakespeare at Stratford
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Textual Studies
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
And whom among the learned do ye deceive? Reckoning up those - forty is it? - your plays you've misbegot, there's not six which have not plots as common as Moorditch.
Ye're out, Ben. There's not one. My Loves Labour (how I came to write it, I know not) is nearest to lawfull issue. My Tempest (how I came to write that, I know) is, in some part, my own stuff.
Rudyard Kipling, Proofs of Holy WritThe words Kipling gave to his Shakespeare were true. The Tempest interweaves a variety of details from the Bermuda pamphlets with fragmentary echoes of Vergil; one speech draws on Montaigne, and another on Golding's Ovid, but no origin has been found for its central theme. Yet by an odd coincidence Kipling almost stumbled against a hitherto neglected source for the play, in the jeu d'esprit from which the quotation above is taken. For here he imagined Shakespeare in his Stratford orchard, whiling away a summer afternoon with Ben Jonson, translating some verses of the Bible, which had been surreptitiously entrusted to him by a neighbouring Oxford divine in difficulties with his part of the translation for the new, Authorised Version. And the verses Kipling happened to choose, for their Shakespearian splendour of phrase, come from the book of Isaiah. 'How I came to write that, I know', Shakespeare says mysteriously of The Tempest, mocking the author who made him speak: one of the sources for The Tempest is, very probably, Isaiah xxix.
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- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 125 - 136Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1972
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