Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices
That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak’d,
I cried to dream again.
The enchanted island owes still more to preceding voyagers in the great seas of romance. Shakspere had made many earlier voyages thither, but he was not the first Columbus to search out the undiscovered lands of illusions and enchantments. Fortunately for us he lived in the period of imaginative adventure and steered his crafts on the oceans whence many predecessors had returned treasure-laden. This is no place to relate the various circumstances that placed the men of the sixteenth century in a fortunate position for Romance, or to indicate the long development of romantic-comedy in which Shakspere played so great a part. But surely the interview between the dramatist and the sailor would have had very different results if the Elizabethan theater had not been accustomed to the union of the laughable and the romantic, the comic and the marvellous. Such a union is not a common one. There are no romantic-comedies in the literature of antiquity, and very few in modern literature since Shakspere’s death. He found a stage that was already the home of romance, used to fantasy and medley, and used also to fill out a three hours entertainment with sentiment and fun, music and monsters, idealized heroines and puns.
Romance had found its readiest entrance to the stage thru the shows and spectacles which delighted the courts of the Tudors. Venus and Diana, or Loyalty and Sedition, or Red Cross Knight and Fairy Princess, or whoever else, if sumptuously arrayed and bejeweled and sufficiently attended, might be wheeled in on a huge car representing castle or garden or island, decorated with flowers and spangles, begin with a tableau and end with a dance. Along with all this splendor, it would not be thought inappropriate to have a clown dance a jig or mimic the antics of a drunken man. Such spectacles soon became the joy of the public as well as of the court, and were imitated by many a rustic Holofernes or Bottom. Nymphs and fairies, the Nine Worthies, or the Golden Age might find representation by almost any village pedagog and his school children.
Out of such entertainments there soon developt a kind of comedy, at first the peculiar property of the children of the royal choirs who performed at court, but soon adapting itself to the adult companies and public theaters. This comedy availed itself of any stories that might come to hand, so they were strange, unusual, marvelous, impossible enough, and accompanied them with music, dancing, and spectacle, and with lively jests in the mouth of the smallest boys, dressed as pages.
Endymion in love with the moon, the judgment of Paris, Pandora and her varied actions under the seven planets, the rival magic of Friars Bacon and Bungay, Jack the Giant Killer, Alexander the Great in love with Campaspe who preferred Apelles – these are some of the themes. Astrologers, Amazons, fairies, sirens, witches, ghosts, are some of the personages who appear along with the singing pages and Olympian deities. Of course, these persons and these marvels are impossible on any stage, most of all by daylight in the roofless public theaters of Shakspere’s London. But neither audience nor dramatist thought of impossibility. They tried everything on their stage, even their wonderlands.
When Shakspere began to write plays, the stage was well used to romance. It was the comedies of Lyly and Greene, with their beautiful and unselfish maidens, their wonders and shows, their witty dialogs and jesters, their lovers’ crosses and final happiness, their Utopias and fairies, which prepared the way for Shakspere’s ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ and ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost,’ and for his great series of romantic plays from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ to ‘Twelfth Night.’ But by 1600, both dramatists and audiences had become somewhat sophisticated and tired of romance, and the theaters turned to plays of a different fashion, to tragedies that searched the ways of crime and punishment, and to comedies that treated contemporary folly and vice with realism and satire. From the date of ‘Twelfth Night,’ 1601, to that of ‘Cymbeline,’ 1609, it is difficult to find a romantic-comedy on the London stage. There are no more marvels and magic, no charming princesses disguised as pages, no moonlit forests and terraces, no rescues and reconciliations, not much sentiment and no fun except what may be found on the seamy side of reality. Shakspere seems to have had little taste for satire and he wrote no satirical and realistic plays of the sort temporarily in fashion. But during these eight years, his comedies, like ‘Measure for Measure,’ have no romantic charm, and his energies are given to tragedy. He is occupied with the pomp and majesty of human hope and with the inevitable waste and failure of human achievement; but for his Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus and the rest, there were no forests of Arden and no enchanted islands. Like his associates, he seems to have forsaken romance.
What turned his imagination from tragedy back to romance? In my opinion it was the success of two brilliant young dramatists, Beaumont and Fletcher, who, in a series of remarkable dramas made romance again popular on the London stage. Their romantic plays employ many of the old incidents and personages, but in general character differ strikingly from the plays of a decade or two earlier. They are hardly comedies at all, tho they have their humorous passages, but tragedies and tragi-comedies dealing with more thrilling circumstances and less naive wonderments than the earlier plays. Instead of a combination of romance and comedy, they aim at a contrast of the tragic and idyllic. They oppose a story of sexual passion with one of idealized sentiment, and delight in a succession of thrills as by clever stagecraft they hurry us from one suspense into another surprise. Until the very end you can scarcely guess whether it will be tragic or happy. Their land of romance is somewhat artificial and theatrical; but yet it has as of old its adventures, dangers, escapes, rescues, jealousies, suspicions, reconciliations and re-unions. And it has its idyls of forests, and fountains of love-lorn maidens and enraptured princes. It is a land of thrills and surprises, but also of idealization and poetry. For in all that choir of poets who wrote for the London theaters there was no one except Shakspere who could excel these young dramatists in their power to turn the affairs and emotions of mankind into copious verse, now tumultuous, now placid, but always bubbling with fancy and flowing melodiously.