Alexander Kino
Mrs. Scheidegger
English 9H
25 May 2018
Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Wreck of the Sea Venture
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” – Charles Caleb Colton (Charles). And imitate is exactly what William Shakespeare did. In his final drama The Tempest, Shakespeare draws heavy inspiration from the wreck of the Virginia Company’s Sea Venture in the Bermudas to craft his own storm and shipwreck. He had many incentives to write this play and in doing so included many details from the Sea Venture’s story, which significantly impacted the plot.
The best available source of information about the 1609 shipwreck comes from William Strachey in his “True Repertory of the Wreck.” Strachey, born on April 4, 1572 in Essex, England, grew up on his grandfather’s estate. He was the eldest of four sons born to his father, also William Strachey. In 1588, when he was 16, he began studies at the University of Cambridge’s Emmanuel College. Seven years later he married Frances Forster, with whom he had two sons. In 1604, Strachey wrote a poem to be included in the production of a play which was originally performed at the Globe a year prior. In 1606, Strachey became secretary to Sir Thomas Glover, the English ambassador to Constantinople in the then Ottoman Empire. However, just over a year later, he had a falling out with Glover and was fired. Unemployed, he went to Venice, ending up fruitless in search of a job and returning to England. He spent the final years of his life in London, impoverished. On June 21, 1621, William Strachey was buried in a borough of London, dead from an unknown cause (Zacek).
Strachey was aboard the Sea Venture during her journey to the Jamestown Colony when a hurricane damaged the ship, and it started taking in water. On Monday, July 24, the storm picked up and and increased in intensity over time, with the ship sustaining a leak. The hurricane was so severe that “There was not a moment in which the sudden splitting… of the ship was not expected” (Strachey 2) among the passengers. By Friday, the ship was flooded ten feet deep, and the determination to ground it was made. The ship was run aground about three quarters of a mile offshore, and the survivors swam to land. Shortly after news of this event reached England, “Shakespeare produced The Tempest” (Morrison 46), which was written from 1610-1611, within two years or less of the shipwreck.
Evidently the wreck acted as inspiration for The Tempest, but there were other factors as to why the Bard might have produced the play. Several of Shakespeare’s acquaintances, including his patron, the Earl of Southhampton, Thomas Russel, the overseer of his will, and Sir Dudley Digges, whose brother contributed to the First Folio, were key Virginia Company investors. On top of this, William Strachey himself was a fellow poet of Shakespeare’s back in London (Doherty 150). Furthermore, “some say the bard knew Admiral Somers” (D’Alto), referring to George Somers, the admiral of the 1609 expedition who rode aboard the Sea Venture. (Glover) These connections evince that Shakespeare wrote The Tempest in part due to his acquaintances’ investments as well as his connections with those involved with the expedition, most notably the penman himself of the best account of the Sea Venture’s misfortune.
In the play’s shipwreck, there are found many striking similarities to the Sea Venture’s. In Strachey’s “True Repertory,” he notes that the superstitious mariners tried to make out what the “sea fire” they saw was. He likens it to what is called “St. Elmo’s fire” in Spain, a phenomenon where glowing plasma is discharged from the tips of a pointed object due to a significant imbalance in electrical charge in the atmosphere, like such created by a thunderstorm. This can look like fire when generated from a sharply pointed object such as a mast (Layton). In The Tempest, Ariel, at the request of Prospero, “flam'd amazement,” (Shakespeare 1.2.198) burning “in many places… the topmast” (1.2.199). This is Shakespeare referencing St. Elmo’s fire from Strachey’s account. In addition, Shakespeare makes a subtle reference to the Bermudas. The Sea Venture, on its way to North America, wrecked on a Bermudan island (Glover). To allude to this, Ariel reports to Prospero that the nobles’ ship is safely docked in harbor in a nook where he once ordered him to “fetch dew from the still-vex’d Bermoothes—” (1.2.229) the “Bermoothes" being archaic English for the Bermudas. There would be no other purpose for mentioning Bermuda, other than once again referencing the Sea Venture. A third similarity lies in the fact that everyone on board both the Sea Venture and Shakespeare’s boat in The Tempest survive. According to Strachey, there were 150 people onboard, miraculously all of whom survive. In The Tempest, all the nobles live through their encounter as well, albeit not known at the time. Finally, the cause of both wrecks was a storm. In the fittingly named The Tempest, Ariel brews up a storm at the request of Prospero in order to trap the nobles onboard on the island he’s been exiled to. This causes them to jump overboard in hopes of surviving. In the case of the Sea Venture, Strachey describes a terrible storm, a hurricane, which damages the ship to the point of no return.
Shakespeare, while including some details of the real life wreck in crafting his own, did not include others. For example, in The Tempest, the nobles’ ship does not actually get destroyed by the storm they encounter. Instead, the passengers jump ship, and the boat is returned safely to harbor with the crew in tact. Obviously, this was not the case with the Sea Venture. She was purposely run aground after being heavily damaged, with the crew and passengers swimming to safety. The ship did not magically return to port safely, but rather actually wrecked. Because the ship in the The Tempest did not actually wreck, the crew remained on board. But all the Sea Venture’s crew, along with the passengers, escaped from the beached ship. Another difference lies in the location of the shipwrecks. In The Tempest, the nobles were traveling from Tunis to Naples from a wedding, so it can be inferred that the island they end up on is in the Mediterranean Sea. Obviously, this is stark contrast from Bermuda in the Atlantic Ocean. These examples are a few differences between Shakespeare’s adaptation and the real wreck of the Venture.
The storm, causing the “shipwreck” in The Tempest, serves an integral part in the plot. Ariel, after getting the nobles to jump in the ocean from their boat, spreads them out across the island into three main groups. Ferdinand, by himself, finds Miranda and Prospero. Gonzalo, Antonio, Alonso, and Sebastian are all washed ashore together, and separately Stephano and Trinculo find Caliban. Without this split of the passengers, Antonio and Sebastian wouldn’t have attempted to murder Alonso in order to claim the throne, believing Ferdinand, the inheritor, was dead. Ferdinand, believing he is the only survivor, falls in love with Miranda, Prospero’s daughter, setting up another key plot point. Yet another assassination is planned, this time against Prospero because of Stephano and Trinculo’s isolation and finding of Caliban, who wishes revenge against his master. These three groups all contribute to the plot in a major way.
In his final drama The Tempest, Shakespeare draws heavy inspiration from the wreck of the Virginia Company’s Sea Venture in the Bermudas to craft his own. He had financial and acquaintanceship-oriented reasons to write the play, he borrowed many parts of the real wreck for his own, and it served an integral part in the plot. Without William Strachey’s account of the wreck of the Sea Venture in the “True Repertory,” then Shakespeare’s last play might have been completely different.