“Poets are always entitled to a royalty on whatever we find in their works.” James Russell Lowell, himself a poet of sorts, was perhaps not entirely disinterested in making this observation. But a host of critics and students have accepted it at face value and have busied themselves in a hunt for the treasures which Shakespeare buried in The Tempest. The tools with which they work are mysterious and inexact; so, often, are their findings. Nothing daunted, they have advanced beyond the field of mere facts and sources in a search for treasures of another class—those which can be dug out of The Tempest, and which are of a metal and minting that Shakespeare himself might scarcely recognize.