Hi. I'm Richard Belzer. Tonight on Crime Stories, we examine one William Shakespeare...

It is believed that The Tempest is one of a remarkably small number of Shakespeare plays for which no narrative or dramatic source has been identified.

But, Shakespeare was inspired by some things:

*Shakespeare made extensive use of Elizabethan travel writing. In particular, he used William Strachey's account, written in 1610 and published in 1625, of the shipwreck  of Sir Thomas Gates in the Bermudas. Gates was wrecked in a terrible storm on an island that was so pleasant and so full of food that some of his crew conspired to stop Gate's attempt to leave the island and head toward Jamestown, Virginia. (Jamestown was settled as a colony of America in 1607) Even though Shakespeare owes some of the realist detail of the storm in I.1 to Strachey's letter, he took the island in the letter, described to be "as habitable and commodious as most countries of the same climate and situation," and turned it into and island with "no habitation for men but rather given over to devils and wicked spirits" for his play.

*Shakespeare may have been even further inspired by the idea of the United States of America. The fact that Ariel is sent by Prospero "to fetch dew from the still vexed Bermuda's" (I.2.228-9), taken with the influence of William Strachey's letter and the play's evident interest in the problem of colonization, can lead one to assume that the play is set close to America.

*The play also makes careful use of its deliberately placed echoes of classical narratives:              *Prospero describing his frightening magical powers (V.1.33-50) is a remarkably               close use of Medea's invocation in Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book 7).

           *Gonzalo's promise to rule his ideal commonwealth so well as "T' excel the golden              age" (II.1.168) is reminding its audience of the perfect world, the ideal detailed by              Ovid in the first book of Metamorphoses.

          *Gonzalo's vision of a utopic state comes almost word for word from John Florio's             1603 translation of Michael de Montaigne's essay "Of the Cannibals" (Book 1,             Chapter 30, of his Essays).

*Shakespeare takes the name 'Ariel' from Heywood's Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels.

*Shakespeare collaborated on The Tempest with writers Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Beaumont and Fletcher were writers of tragicomedies and romances and helped to popularize these genres of dram on London stages. At the time of the writing of this play, Beaumont and Fletcher had a faithful following and were setting the pace for other dramatists. While The Tempest does not read like an exact imitation of other Beaumont and Fletcher works, it nevertheless reflects the fashion these two writers exemplified.