In this last play there is, it should be said, not the slightest hint of a weakening of the poetic or the dramatic faculty. The falling in love of Miranda, the wonderful and wondering child of purity and nature; the tempting of Sebastian by the crafty Antonio; and the creation of Caliban, half-man, half-devil, with his elemental knowledge of nature, and his dull cunning, and his stunted faculties,--all these are the work of {207} a genius still in the full pride of power. Shakespeare's dramatic work ends suddenly, "like a bright exhalation in the evening." +Date+.--Edmund Malone's word, unsupported by other evidence, puts the play as already in existence in the autumn of 1611. The play certainly is later than the wreck of Somers's ship, in 1609. It was acted during the marriage festivities of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613, when other plays were revived. +Sources+.--Two accounts by Sylvester Jourdan and William Strachey told, soon after the event, of the casting away upon the Bermuda Islands of a ship belonging to the Virginia expedition of Somers in 1609. From these Shakespeare drew for many details. His island, however, is clearly not Bermuda, nor, indeed, any known land. Other details have been traced from various sources. Ariel is a name of a spirit in mediaeval literature of cabalistic secrets. Montaigne's _Essays_, translated by Florio (1603), furnished the hint of Gonzalo's imaginary commonwealth (II, i, 147 ff.). Setebos has been found as a devil-god of the Patagonians in Eden's _History of Travaile_ (1577). The rest of the story, which is nine-tenths of the whole, is probably Shakespeare's own, though the central theme of an exiled prince, whose daughter marries his enemy, who has an attendant spirit, and who through magic compels the captive prince to carry logs, may come from some old folk tale; since a German play, _Die Schöne Sidea_, by Jakob Ayrer of Nuremberg (died 1605), possesses all these details. The relations, if any, between the two plays are remote. +The Life of Henry the Eighth+, the last of the historical plays, in date of composition as in the history it pictures, suffers from the very fact that it boasts in its second title, _All is True_. The play might have been built around any one of the half-dozen persons which in turn claim our chief interest,--Buckingham, Queen Katherine, Anne Bullen; the King, Wolsey, or {208} Cranmer; but fidelity to history, while it did not hinder some slight alteration of incident and time, required that each of these should in turn be distinguished, if a complete picture of the times of Henry VIII were to be given. The result was a complete abandonment of anything like unity of theme.