Another Island, Another Story:

by PETER BILTON

The paths once worn by Shakespeare source-hunters are becoming faint and overgrown. They lead through footnote graveyards with dismissive headstones. Modern warning signs tell angels where not to tread.
The case of The Tempest is typical.

As long ago as in the New Variorum edition of 1892, Horace Howard Furness saw any search for a source as inevitably ending in 'a blind' (Furness 1964, 307), and the latest Arden editors are equally off-putting: 'When', write Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, 'source-hunting was fashionable, especially during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, frustrated scholars scoured English and continental literature for the play's prototype or, at the very least, for a text that might have inspired its basic structure' (Vaughan 1999, 54).

The Vaughans approvingly quote (Vaughan 1999, 56) the conclusion reached by their Arden predecessor, Frank Kermode: 'Ultimately the source of The Tempest is an ancient motif, of almost universal occurrence, in saga, ballad, fairy tale and folk tale' (Kermode 1954, lxiii). At the other extreme, Kermode also declared that 'The only undisputed source for any part of The Tempest is Montaigne's essay "Of Cannibals"' (Kermode 1954, xxxiv).

If one adds that the play's essential constituents of storm and shipwreck and miraculous rescue, and some of the deeper issues the play raises, have been found in contemporary accounts of a voyage undertaken in 1609 to the Virginia Colony, but temporarily halted off the Bermudas, one more or less exhausts the recognised discoveries.

The significant bearing of the dispatches from the would-be colonists on various aspects of the play has been shown by Philip Brockbank (Brockbank 1966, 1989). However, neither those documents nor the Montaigne essay amount to a narrative source. This essay proposes such a source.

In the search for a story line that Shakespeare might have borrowed, editors and scholars from Furness and earlier, through Kenneth Muir (Muir 1957, 260) and Geoffrey Bullough (Bullough 1975, 245-248) and down to the present, including Kermode and the Vaughans, have weighed the claims of pastoral. Kermode develops his unhesitating assertion that 'The Tempest is a pastoral drama' (Kermode 1954, xxiv), arriving at interesting conclusions concerning Shakespeare's use in his last plays of pastoral romance and 'romantic story ... the mode in which Shakespeare made his last poetic investigation into the supernatural elements in the human soul and in human society' (Kermode 1954, lviii).

In his introductory section on 'Analogous Literature', Kermode accordingly discusses both The Mirror of Knighthood by Diego Ortuñes de Calahorra (1562, translated 1578...1601), and the fourth chapter of the untranslated Noches de Invierno by Antonio de Eslava (1609) (Kermode 1954, lxiv-lxvi), but finds in the first 'not a single feature...that has a unique similarity to The Tempest' (lxv), and remarks of the second that it has 'not even an island to recommend it' (lxvi). Bullough includes two passages from The Mirror of Knighthood as analogues ( Bullough 1975, 300-310), while the Vaughans admit it as 'no more than a tangential source' (Vaughan 1999, 55).

There is, or so I believe, a pastoral tale more relative than these, in Gaspar Gil Polo's The Enamoured Diana. Admittedly, it has not even a Prospero or Ariel or Caliban to recommend it, but it does have an island, and enough other points of similarity to The Tempest for it to merit inclusion among Shakespeare's sources. This is how the story goes:
The hero Marcelius and his twin sister, of good Vandalian birth but orphans, are raised in childhood by their aunt, an abbess. (Did she qualify in Ephesus, in The Comedy of Errors?) Later the boy is sent to the King of Portugal's court, where he grows into such favour that the King gives him command of a fleet and the garrison at Ceuta. He falls in love with the governor of Ceuta's daughter, Alcida. After some love's delays, the governor agrees to the match, and arrangements are made to hold the wedding in Lisbon, with the King's blessing.

Sailing from Ceuta to Lisbon, carrying the bridal couple, the governor, and the governor's son and other daughter, the ship runs into a terrible tempest, which drives it instead through the Straits of Gibraltar and far into the Mediterranean. At a crisis in the storm, Marcelius leaps with Alcida in his arms into the 'skiff', having first fatefully divested himself of his rapier so it won't get in the way - though his sister-in-law-elect, who joins them, does bring her bow and arrows. The pilot and another mariner also leap in, preventing the governor and his son from leaving the battered ship, which is soon lost sight of from the 'cockboat'. The latter finally reaches 'Formenteria' (Formentera), southern and westernmost of the Balearics. The experienced mariners 'marvelled in the end not much at the preposterous course of our navigation'.

When Marcelius decides they need food, the pilot, who has begun to lust for Alcida's sister, declares that whereas the present island is deserted, the one nearby is full of game, and that 'There also dwelleth a certain Hermite, whose celle is never without bread, oyle and meale'. The idea is for the two seamen to sail across with the sister, an expert with her bow and arrows, leaving Marcelius to watch over his fiancée, who has fallen asleep on the beach. The sister wisely refuses unless Marcelius goes with them. He does so, assured that Alcida will remain asleep until they return with provisions, but since he is unarmed the two ruffians attack him and tie him up. While Alcida awakes alone on her island, and becomes convinced that she has been abandoned in favour of her sister, the mariners cast Marcelius away (tied to an anchor) on the 'Iland of Yvica' (today's Ibiza), before sailing off with the damsel in distress.

Yvica houses friendlier mariners, who release and feed Marcelius and man a 'Fregantine' to row back to Formenteria, where Alcida alas is no longer to be found, but has left a message carved in a rock to the effect that she hates her fiancé. The despairing lover is prevented from using one of the mariners' swords on himself, and having comforted him they undertake for pay to sail with him to 'Gayeta in the Kingdome of Naples' (Gaeta).

'At the last,' says Marcelius, 'by certaine Shepherds which came thither in a ship of Spaine, I heard some newes of her': these nautical pastors had picked his lost lamb up, and she had disguised herself as a shepherdess. So, obviously, he pretends to be a shepherd, and travels up and down Italy in search of her, 'untill a long time after I understoode that she knew that I had notice of her, which made her flie the farther from me, and to pass into Spayne in a shippe of Genua'. Following his beloved to Spain, he wanders about in pastoral settings, until he comes into the company of a shepherdess who has met Alcida, but has also promised not to reveal her whereabouts. His new companion undertakes to bring Marcelius 'towardes the Temple of chaste Diana, where the sage Lady Felicia makes her abode, whose secret wisdome will minister remedies to our painfull passions'.

En route to Lady Felicia, whom should they meet but Alcida's brother and sister. We learn that the tempest-tossed ship carrying the father and brother had survived to reach Valencia, where fishermen had helped them ashore, having previously also rescued the still inviolate sister and the two mariners, putting the latter in prison. The party proceed together to the temple, where they find Alcida and her father the governor, and undeceive them concerning Marcelius. The latter also finds there the twin sister from whom he has been separated since childhood. Our lovers are among several couples who get married under Felicia's auspices and thanks to her prescient benevolence. The hero's long-lost sister, however, will have to wait for the completion of her story.

Felicia, who has countless nymphs at her beck and call and brews magic potions, puts on a splendid wedding feast, followed by an entertainment on a river, in which nymphs are carried in little ships rowed by 'Savages', who joust, tipping each other into the water - at which at least one savage loses his temper. (This is not too unlike the entertainment on the Thames provided by King James for the wedding of his daughter Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine, in which 'English' and 'Turkish' fleets did battle against a backdrop of a model of Algiers. The Tempest was also on the program.)
More meanders than forthrights. What and where have they brought us? A tempest, in which a party sailing from North Africa to Europe for a high society wedding is broken up; a brother and father separated by the storm from two sisters/daughters and the potential bridegroom; the latter, like Prospero and Miranda, in dire straits in a small boat; a Mediterranean island (Formentera) where the heroine falls asleep on the beach; another island nearby reputed to house a hermit in a cave; two scapegrace members of the ship's complement whose lustful intent is frustrated and punished; a sword the use of which is prevented; a voyage to Naples and Genoa before the scene shifts back to pastoral Iberia; miraculous rescues and family reunions in which misunderstandings are dispelled; and a wise magician whose name Felicia seems a feminine parallel to that of Prospero (we hear nothing further in our pastoral of the hermit in the cave).

Felicia shares Prospero's interest in chastity (we are at Diana's temple) and his ability to provide food and entertainment in a twinkling. She employs nymphs in her masque, as he does in his. Like him, though more single-mindedly and disinterestedly, she uses her foreknowledge and magical powers to bring stories to happy endings. At one point she wields a magic book. Earlier I mentioned that this story offered no Caliban or Ariel, but we do have all Felicia's nymphs, and the savages who propel the boats and joust in her waterborne 'masque', one of whom in particular builds up a grudge.

This strand of yarn has, as mentioned, been unwound from the skein known as The Enamoured Diana by Gaspar Gil Polo (1564), a sequel designed to complete Jorge de Montemayor's unfinished Diana (c.1559). The hero's long-lost twin sister is the Felismena known to Shakespeareans as the heroine of the 'Felix and Felismena' story in Diana, an acknowledged source of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In the anthology he edited of English pastoral poetry, Frank Kermode noted that Sannazaro 'was probably very well known in England. So was Montemayor, who provided Shakespeare with at least one, and probably two, plot-ideas' (Kermode 1972, 31 n).

Gil Polo's work was also very popular, winning high praise in its own time and maintaining its reputation since, though it has attracted much less modern attention than Diana. This critical neglect of the sequel in England may be partly explained by some enduring confusion over the separate identities, dates, and authorships of the two works, which Judith M.Kennedy attributes to factual errors in G. Ticknor's 1849 History of Spanish Literature (Kennedy 1968, xvii n1). The present essay is heavily indebted to Kennedy's edition of Bartholomew Yong's translation of Diana and The Enamoured Diana.

Yong completed his translation of the 'three Partes' (Montemayor's and Gil Polo's and the inferior intervening Segunda Parte by Alonso Perez) in May 1583, but it remained unpublished until 1598.

My point is not primarily to insist on the Balearics as a complement to the Bermudas: Shakespeare specified neither. Claims for other Mediterranean islands were being staked in Prospero's name many years ago. Furness records Joseph Hunter's arguments, published in 1839, in favour of Lampedusa, including that it possessed a hermit's cell, and Theodor Elze's article 'Die Insel der Sycorax' of 1880, in which Elze prefers Pantelleria (Furness 1964, 1-3). What I do maintain is that The Enamoured Diana, and specifically its story of Marcelius and Alcida, should be numbered among Shakespeare's sources for The Tempest.
Apart from the occasionally canvassed alternative of a lost play of Felix and Philiomena as Shakespeare's immediate source, critics have been satisfied that the close similarities between episodes in Diana and effective scenes in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (the letter, the proxy wooing, the overhearing of the singing outside the inn) sufficiently attest the source and the borrowing.

The link with the Felix and Felismena story and thus to The Two Gentlemen of Verona (of uncertain date, but probably not later than 1594) increases the likelihood that Shakespeare had read the tale just summarised. Since Yong's translation had not yet been published, to regard the former story as the source of scenes in The Two Gentlemen of Verona one has to assume - and it is generally assumed - that Shakespeare saw it in manuscript, in which state Yong said it had lain for upwards of sixteen years. An earlier French translation is an alternative which has found little favour.

In the case of The Tempest, this particular problem of the play's dating and the pastoral's availability does not arise. Yong's translations were immediate hits, makers of fashion in England as the originals had been on the continent. England's Helicon, published in 1600, paid Yong the compliment of including twenty-five of his translations of Montemayor's and Gil Polo's inserted poems. Thomas Wilson also translated Montemayor, in 1596, dedicating his work to the Earl of Southampton, but only a manuscript of the first book survives, given by Wilson to Fulke Greville. Wilson promises more, 'for that I know yow will well esteeme of them, because that your most noble and never enough honored frend Sr Phillipp Siddney did very much affect and imitate the excellent Author there of'. (Kennedy 1968, xxxi-ii). Yong dedicated his translation to Sidney's 'Stella', Lady Rich. There was a copy in Ben Jonson's library.

In 'The Argument of the first Seven Bookes', Montemayor's readers are told that 'they shall finde divers histories of accidents, that have truly happened, though they goe muffled under pastorall names and style' (Kennedy 1968, 10). This amounts to an invitation, more gratifying and easier to accept then than now, to identify the concealed characters and sniff out the gossip. That has been attempted. Some of the characters are true shepherds and shepherdesses, while others are gentry in pastoral disguise. In so far as they represent historical persons - and Montemayor moved in the highest and most interesting circles - the single or double layer of camouflage presumably made little difference to the possibilities of identification. In addition, both Diana and The Enamoured Diana contain numerous songs in praise of prominent Spanish men and women whose names are given, and whose merits and achievements are defined.

The presence of so many real persons, whether in allegorical disguise or as themselves, lends the pastorals an attractive contemporary and matter-of-fact air.
Similarly, time and place are treated with remarkable realism. Idyllic though the settings may be with all their crystal springs and shady groves, we know where they are, what season we are in and what time of day it is, and what a shepherd's routine entails in addition to being lovelorn and indulging in music (Montemayor's profession: Portuguese and Spanish pastures are full of noises). That 'Vandalia' may stand for Andalucia, and 'Soldina' for Sevilla, are exceptions to the rule that regions, rivers and towns are named. From Valencia (Gil Polo's birthplace), it is only a short distance, we are told, to Felicia's palace, which thus acquires substance and a local habitation.

This painstaking orientation and naming of names provides a context which adds authenticity to the mentions of Ceuta, Formentera, Ibiza, and Valencia in the Marcelius and Alcida story. We are - at times - in a real world, served by much Mediterranean traffic, where we may be more surprised to find seafaring shepherds than to read of Marcelius's very briefly narrated and not clearly motivated voyage to Italy. Viewing the pastoral novels in this perspective brings to mind the topicality, in Shakespeare's day as in Montemayor's and Gil Polo's, of Spanish dominion across the western Mediterranean to Italy, and of Portuguese possessions on the North African coast, in competition with or as obstacles to England's trading and colonising interests.

Frequent attempts have been made to trace Prospero's dynastic quarrel with his brother and the King of Naples back to the real vicissitudes of Milan - sometimes Spanish/Austrian, sometimes French, sometimes its own duchy. None seem to have carried entire conviction, though some think William Thomas came close to the mark in his Historie of Italie (1549). Kermode quotes a passage and discusses Thomas's relevance (Kermode 1954, lxix-lxx). Although Naples and Genoa are only mentioned in passing in Gil Polo, they could have caught Shakespeare's eye, especially if there was a contemporary political context that interested him sufficiently to influence his choice of geography. England had strategic, religious, dynastic and economic reasons enough for keeping a watchful eye on northern Italy, and for seeing that her alliances there remained flexible. Alcida, we note, sails back to Spain in a ship of Genoa, which at times served as a Milanese port.

Granted that Diana and The Enamoured Diana were popular and accessible, and that Shakespeare had read them when working on The Two Gentlemen of Verona, what was there about them that attracted him back, some fifteen years later, in connection with The Tempest?

For one thing, Shakespeare must have gone on consulting Yong's text in the interim. Judith M. Kennedy argues for the addition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night to the list of Shakespeare comedies in which the influence of Diana and The Enamoured Diana can be seen: in the plot complications of pairs of lovers at cross purposes; in the themes of constancy and inconstancy; in the use of magic to complicate and resolve plots; in Viola's disguised embassies to Olivia, who falls in love with the messenger (a re-take from Two Gentlemen); in Hymen as a minor parallel to Felicia (Kennedy 1968, xliv-liii). To my mind, the As You Like It canon performed by shepherd Silvius in love with shepherdess Phoebe in love with disguised sheepcote-owner 'Ganymede' in love with 'no woman', in addition to being Shakespeare's most explicitly pastoral scene, comes as close as any to a precursor in Diana: the Selvagia-Alanius-Ismenia-Montanus-Selvagia tangle, in Selvagia's story in Book I, which Judith M. Kennedy for her part links with the Dream plot (Kennedy 1968, xlvii).

In her discussion of Montemayor's influence on the comedies she mentions, Kennedy observes that, in Diana as in Shakespeare, '(and this is by no means generally true of the pastoral convention) we are considerably more interested in the heroines than in the heroes' (Kennedy 1968, lii). This is true not only of Julia but also of Rosalind and Viola. If we look ahead, we find Imogen, Marina and Perdita to be of similar mettle; and Miranda, despite paternal restrictions, is by no means entirely submissive. In the Gil Polo story we are concerned with, Alcida certainly shows spirit.

Apart from this emphasis placed on heroines, and whatever influence it may have had on Shakespeare's characterisation, the material Shakespeare found and put to use in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the mature comedies consisted basically of scénes à faire and plot mechanisms. By the time he moved on to his last romances, Shakespeare was probing and pondering his medium and his themes more deeply. The road from Hymen's nuptial functions - or Portia's magical redemption of Antonio's argosies - to Prospero's well-nigh providential powers may have gone by way of Felicia's palace.

Shakespeare is likely as a fellow craftsman to have registered interesting symmetries of structure and complex narrative techniques in Montemayor and Gil Polo, but such artistic features could not have been what first drew him to them. Rather, it was probably the 'new demand for romantic comedy' which Kermode mentions (Kermode 1954, lix), and not least what Shakespeare now felt eager and able to express through the genre, that provided his most important motive for re-opening the Dianas when brooding over The Tempest. Which comes first, the source or the idea? Kermode links the fashion to the literary debate stimulated or provoked by Guarini's discussion of pastoral and tragi-comedy, in which Guarini claimed, among many other things, that 'pastoral was a moral and socially valuable genre' (Kermode 1954, lx n1).

I quoted Frank Kermode earlier on 'Shakespeare's last poetic investigation'; another of his formulations is that The Tempest is 'deeply concerned with difficult ideas, and with the philosophic genres of masque and pastoral' (Kermode 1954, lxxxviii). In a vigorous account of the spiritual earnestness of Diana, Bruno M. Damiani writes that 'Morality and didacticism are deeply-rooted aspects of Montemayor's entire literary production', and notes that Rodrigo de Mendoza called Montemayor 'el gran poeta christiano' in a sonnet in Montemayor's Segundo cancienero spiritual (Damiani 1983, 4 and n15). Damiani's readings of the pastoral symbolism reveal journeys to Felicia to be pilgrimages. Gil Polo's sequel attaches itself very firmly to Diana and should be seen in the same light.

This fundamental seriousness of purpose is well brought out by Judith M. Kennedy: 'As Miss Lascelles points out, in pastoral romance, and notably in Diana, the benevolent oracle becomes the symbol of the second chance. What notion could be more appealing to mortals constantly regretting past mistakes and ever incapable of undoing past actions?' (Kennedy 1968 xxvii and n1).

The comment could aptly be extended to The Enamoured Diana - and how applicable it is to The Tempest. Let Judith M. Kennedy wind up this stage of my argument: 'Shakespeare's later romances, pastoral though they are, seem to me so far to transcend the genre that close comparisons are difficult. However, reading Diana is perhaps one of the most pleasurable ways of gaining an understanding of the form which Shakespeare was transfiguring' (Kennedy 1968, liii n2). Read, I suggest yet again, The Enamoured Diana too.

Bartholomew Yong acquired his Spanish when he spent two years (1578-80) in Spain, during which his activities, allegedly on behalf of his imprisoned Catholic uncle Dr. John Yong, formerly (under Queen Mary) Master of Pembroke and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, brought him into contact with Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria. One purpose of the visit was thought to have been to proceed from Spain on an errand to Italy, but Sir Henry Cobham reported from Paris to the ever-watchful Thomas Walsingham that Yong and his half-brother Richard Parker had 'gone by Rouen into England'. Jane Dormer was reputed to lend a helping hand to (Catholic) countrymen who sought her assistance with people in high place in England. Her grandfather, Sir William Sidney, was tutor and governor to Prince Edward, who was Jane's age and very fond of her. She served Queen Mary, and only married the Duke of Feria after the Queen's death, but while he was still Philip's resident ambassador.

Yong was admitted to the Middle Temple only two years after his return from Spain. The friend, Richard Banister, whom he made at the Temple, and to whom he attributed the idea of translating the Dianas as well as the gift of the book, was a recusant.

Bruno M. Damiani believes that Montemayor 'remains very much within the confines of Catholic orthodoxy' (Damiani 1983, 60). He does not go on to consider The Enamoured Diana or its author, but Gil Polo, like Montemayor, achieved high office and the King's favour. There are a few indications that Yong toned religious elements down: at the end of The Enamoured Diana, for instance, he omits a 'God willing' (Gil Polo hoping for early publication) and a Laus Deo.

A young man with religiously questionable antecedents and contacts, who had been to Spain and been reported to Walsingham, who was establishing himself as a Templar, who had received from a known recusant an implicitly Catholic allegorical work to translate in which the praises are sung of many past and present Spanish grandees and great ladies, may have seen reasons in the 1580s for being circumspect, whatever his personal religious persuasion. Perhaps there is an additional reason here for his long delay in publishing the work, said to be diffidence at its quality as originally a language exercise, or indeed for his claim that it was new to him when Banister drew his attention to it: he had not, he writes, seen it in Spain. Even in 1598 the prominent and socially well-established publisher George Bishop had, for unknown reasons, to accept the proviso in the Stationers' Register entry 'that if at any tyme hereafter the said booke shall come in question the said Mr Bushopp to answer it'. (In 1599 Bishop began serving the first of five terms as Master of the Company of Stationers, of which he had previously been Warden, so presumably no trouble had ensued.) Let us add that, in addition to dedicating his translations to Lady Rich, Yong replaced 30 lines of Spanish verse in The Enamoured Diana, in praise of the original dedicatee Doña Hieronyma de Castro y Bolea, with 66 lines in praise of Queen Elizabeth. At what stage he made the switch we do not know: the Queen was 66 in 1599.

According to Judith M. Kennedy, Bartholomew Yong led an uneventful life, and when it ended (in 1612, not as some have guessed in 1621), his funeral took place at a London parish church. That he may have handled his literary output so as to help to ensure the lack of event is pure speculation.

Even if these hints, based on information in Judith M. Kennedy's introduction, did add up to a suspicion that Yong trod a wary path in respect of his pastoral translations, what would that have to do with Shakespeare and The Tempest? Little if anything, and if anything only indirectly. As already noted, what Shakespeare took from Yong's versions of pastoral for The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night, even for As You Like It, before or just after the turn of the century, was basically striking scenes or, in the case of Dream, the plot devices of the lovers at cross purposes. There is nothing there that, even if seen to have derived from Yong, might reflect unfavourably on Shakespeare. Where pastoral appears in its most recognisable guise, in As You Like It, Shakespeare is laughing with or at the mode, distancing himself from it. Ten or twelve years later, the national and international scene has changed. With James shifting the emphasis of foreign policy towards peace with Catholic neighbours, that particular religious concern, though ever-present, is less urgent. Pastoral romance and tragi-comedy have taken the stage, and in Shakespeare's final comedies the genre is exploited to the full. When he returned to Gil Polo, Shakespeare knew what he was looking for and that he could safely use it, even to entertain King James.

Its claim as a narrative source of The Tempest might in itself be enough to attract attention to Gil Polo's story of Marcelius and Alcida in The Enamoured Diana. But we can also ask what, in both senses, Shakespeare made of it. Like the reports from Bermuda, it contains theatrically exciting elements which he knew his company could stage, and which might please a monarch with a taste for masques and an interest in magic. The story's voyage from Ceuta to Lisbon by way of the Balearics becomes a return from Tunis to Italy by way of an unnamed island, a course more consistent with the choice of Milan, for whatever reason, as the original point of physical and spiritual departure. (Perhaps Milan was simply recalled from The Two Gentlemen of Verona while Shakespeare was busy with the common source.) Where themes and ideas are concerned, the fundamental seriousness of pastoral, and of Shakespeare's handling of it in his last plays and specifically in The Tempest, is as we have seen well attested. In this respect, there is at least one major difference between the story and the play which deserves emphasis: unlike Felicia, Prospero does not achieve complete reconciliation and final harmony. His dream of perfection has to be abandoned. With charges of false play even in a game of chess between the lovers he has brought together and sought to discipline, what wrangling must we not continue to expect for kingdoms? Other things of darkness besides Caliban remain to test his ability to forgo revenge and to forgive. Finally, Prospero renounces his magic powers. Whereas Marcelius's return to Valencia and the Spain of his birth is not only virtually a full circle but also an ascent to the higher spiritual level associated with Felicia, Prospero's return to Milan and descent to mundane affairs will be the reverse of a pilgrimage. In Milan, his government and self-government will be exercised within human limits. Comparison with the Gil Polo pastoral story shows Shakespeare, here as elsewhere, moving beyond what he found.