[In the following essay, McGovern suggests that the title of The Tempest evokes not only the sense of a violent storm and emotional turmoil but also the sense of time or season. In the critic's judgment, the play deals significantly with the nature of time.]

I

It has been suggested that a more appropriate title for The Tempest would be The Island because the self-contained strangeness of Prospero's isle pervades the play, whereas the storm is limited to its opening scene.¹ Although this suggestion does not take into account the figurative level on which the word tempest can be understood in relation to the inner crises of many of the characters, it does point to a sense that the full significance of the title, like that of the patterns of language and action within the play, remains enigmatic.

For the title of the play Shakespeare could have chosen instead the more common word storm, which descends from Old English. He may have preferred tempest because it is a word of a more literary register and for that reason would draw more conscious attention to itself. It is also possible that the word was felt to have a greater figurative capacity to express specifically inward turmoil in addition to its literal meaning. In Shakespeare's other plays, tempest is collocated with ‘soul’, ‘heart’ and ‘mind’², while storm in its figurative uses applies more to external agitation—‘storm of war’ and ‘storm of fortunes’, for example.³ The choice of tempest for the title may therefore have been made because it would more readily serve two functions: to herald the violent storm which opens the play and at the same time to alert the audience to a potential symbolic relation between the storm and the words and actions that succeed it.⁴ Furthermore, it may be telling that none of the six occurrences of the word storm in the text of the play are figurative in meaning.⁵ In this way the title by the end of the play has served a third function: by carrying undivided the weight of a particular figurative meaning, it has come to epitomize the ‘hell raging in their own souls’ through which Prospero has led his actors⁶ and has already himself been led.

An inquiry into the history of the word tempest may offer another dimension of relation between title and action, however. The earliest recorded uses of the word in English date from the thirteenth century in the sense ‘violent storm’. Transferred and figurative senses follow soon afterwards: ‘a violent commotion or disturbance; a tumult, rush; agitation, perturbation’.⁷ Onions agrees with The Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth OED) in giving the immediate source of the word as Old French rather than Latin.⁸ In Latin, the anterior source, tempestas meant ‘time; season’ as well as ‘weather; storm’. The relation of tempestas to tempus, ‘time’, is clear.

The only uses of tempest which the OED records in its etymological sense come from the fourteenth century. Sense 4 of the word is defined as ‘A time; a period, an occasion’ and is described as ‘A verbalism of translation. Obsolete’. Wyclif's followers in 1382 and Trevisa in 1387, both translating Latin texts into English, rendered tempestate with its English cognate tempest.⁹ Both, in other words, felt that the French loan-word was still capable of bearing this etymological sense and that a substantial number of their readers could be relied upon to recognize it. For Wyclif's followers, translating the Vulgate text of the Bible in an effort to make it more widely accessible, the second consideration would have been especially important. Moreover, the colloquial style of Trevisa's translation does not suggest that his work was exclusively intended for a scholarly audience.

Although there are no other recorded instances of the certain use of tempest in its eytmological sense, it is significant that during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, four short-lived forms of the word were adapted from Latin and used in etymological senses referring to time and season: tempestive (first recorded in 1611), tempestively (1621), tempestivious (1574) and tempestivity (1569).¹⁰ Perhaps by the sixteenth century the older noun-form mediated through French was felt to be less capable of bearing the etymological meaning, and these new Latinate forms were appropriated for that purpose.¹¹ Nonetheless, the relation between the older form and the newer ones would still be recognizable.¹² What is also evident is that the etymological meaning of tempest and its related forms in English persists, however infrequently. The appearance of the new Latinate forms coincides with a period of accelerated borrowing into English of Latin words and a more extensive use of Latin rhetorical models in literary composition. The conscious use of words in their etymological senses became fashionable. Examples of the use of rhetorical devices evoking the supposed etymological meanings of words and names abound in the writings of Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare and others.¹³

The question now arises whether Shakespeare, in choosing tempest for the title of the play, could have been conscious of its etymological meaning. At least two of the four Latinate forms just mentioned—tempestivious and tempestivity—antedate the first performance of The Tempest in 1611, although none of them were used by Shakespeare himself in his works. Even if he had never seen or heard these Latinate forms, however, the internal evidence of both the form and content of his writings indicates a competent knowledge of Latin grammar and rhetoric.¹⁴ The probability of his having had grammar school training in Stratford lacks only a written record to confirm it. In the lower school, study consisted essentially of Latin grammar; portions of Latin writers were translated into English, and English ‘sentences’ were turned into Latin. In the upper school, along with the formal study of rhetoric came the reading of Latin poets and prose writers. Among the Latin poets whom Shakespeare must have studied, Baldwin includes Ovid (Metamorphoses), Virgil (Bucolics, Georgics, The Aeneid) and Horace (Odes, Epistles).¹⁵ The apparent thoroughness of his grammar school training in Latin makes it more than likely that he was familiar with the noun tempestas and its adjective tempestivus in the senses of ‘time; season’—they occur in these senses in both the Metamorphoses and Georgics, for example.¹⁶ By the end of his career, he retained enough knowledge of Latin to adapt a passage from Ovid's Metamorphoses (VII. 197-209) in the original when composing Prospero's parting invocation of the spirits in V.i. 33-50. Although in places there are echoes of Golding's English translation of 1567, it would appear that he was adapting principally from the Latin source.¹⁷ It is therefore probable that Shakespeare was aware of the etymology of the word tempest in English. If he had met any of the Latinate forms such as tempestivious and tempestivity which began a brief currency during his lifetime, his grammar school training would have enabled him to recognize their meaning and affinity with Latin.

It is now necessary to consider whether Shakespeare could have been conscious of the etymology of tempest to the extent that it was one of the factors influencing his choice of the word: whether, in other words, its etymological sense was intended to form a third stratum of meaning beneath the more obvious layers of derived literal and figurative meaning discussed above (‘violent storm’ and ‘inward turmoil’). Evidence from other plays indicates that he did orchestrate words in such a way that rare, etymological senses are evoked, sometimes in addition to the derived meaning or meanings. G. L. Brook asserts that ‘To understand Shakespeare it is necessary to study not only the history of words but also the history of ideas which words describe.’¹⁸ Significantly enough, he has found that most of the words used by Shakespeare in their etymological senses are Latin loan-words, although his examples include some from native and French sources.¹⁹ Among these examples are five words, three of them derived directly from Latin, whose first English use in their etymological senses is attributed by the OED to Shakespeare himself: approbation, atone, capitulate, exhale and seminar.²⁰Atone in its etymological sense of ‘agree’ is classified by the OED as ‘Obsolete except as revived by etymological writers’. When Cleopatra describes her eunuch as ‘unseminar'd’ in Anthony and Cleopatra I.v. 11, she means ‘without seed’ rather than ‘untutored’ because Shakespeare was conscious of the ultimate relation of seminar to Latin semen, ‘seed’. His is the sole use of the word in this sense given by the OED. Another Latin loan-word is singular in its etymological use. In Hamlet I.i. 12-13, ‘rivals’ is potentially misleading in Barnardo's request of Francisco:

If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus,
The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste.

Barnardo means that they are his partners, not his competitors. This use was prompted by a knowledge that rival comes from Latin rivalis, ‘one who uses the same stream with another’, and is so rare that it is not listed in the OED.

Brook also points out that a derived as well as an etymological meaning can sometimes be intended. Touchstone's words to Audrey in As You Like It III.iii. 7-9 illustrate this:

I am here with thee and thy goats as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths.

The primary meaning of capricious here is its derived one: ‘characterized by play of wit or fancy, fantastic’. The previous mention of ‘goats’ also evokes the etymological connotation, however, because capricious was (mistakenly) thought to be derived from Latin capra, ‘goat’. The pun on ‘goats’ and ‘Goths’ is thus given further point.²¹ The subtle play with word and meaning in this passage relies for its full appreciation upon a considerable level of learning and discernment on the part of an audience or reader.

What emerges from this evidence is that Shakespeare was clearly one of the ‘etymological writers’ of the period, that he was willing to initiate the use of Latin words in English in their etymological senses, and that he relied upon his audience for a substantial degree of knowledge and sensitivity to language for the full appreciation of the subtler instances of this. The choice of tempest to denote ‘violent storm’ and ‘inward turmoil’ and at the same time to connote ‘a time; a period, an occasion’ would demand little more acuteness from an audience than the use of capricious in both its derived and etymological senses in As You Like It. This demand would be made from a context already accommodating such a potential within its metaphoric pattern, for sea and tempest were frequent Renaissance symbols of the flux and apparent discord of time.²²

II

The testimony of the play itself reveals that The Tempest, like The Winter's Tale before it, has an integral concern with time, both present time and ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’ (I.ii.50). Unlike The Winter's Tale, however, it observes the unities of time and place.²³ Events of time past relevant to the present are narrated and given ‘present force’ in I.ii, and through this narrative technique the unities are preserved.²⁴ More than this, the narration establishes a crucial correspondence between past and present events: present events are thereby seen to reverse the effects of corresponding situations in the past. Antonio's plot against Alonso fails, where his earlier plot against Prospero had succeeded; Prospero remembers the threat of Caliban's treachery in time, where before his absorption in his studies had blinded him to the threat of Antonio's.²⁵

Because of this crucial correspondence between past and present time, one of the dominant aspects of time in the play is that of particular moments or periods of time which constitute an occasion or opportunity—what is commonly meant when the time is said to be ‘ripe’ or ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.²⁶ It is given strikingly dramatic expression in the opening scene as the mariners struggle to save the ship from what appears to be ‘the mischance of the hour’ (I.i. 25-6). In the course of the second scene, this aspect of time is given a fuller, poetic dimension. The intricate motions of time have become aligned in such a way as to present to Prospero an opportunity to act and to participate significantly in a regenerative pattern of events whose motive force lies beyond time. When Prospero decides that ‘'Tis time’ he informed Miranda of their past, he declares compellingly:

                                                                      The hour's now come,
The very minute bids thee ope thine ear.
Obey, and be attentive.

(I.ii. 36-8)

That the motive force of this opportunity and regenerative pattern of events lies beyond time is suggested in words addressed to Miranda later in the scene:

By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune
(Now my dear Lady) hath mine enemies
Brought to this shore; and by my prescience
I find my zenith doth depend upon
A most auspicious star, whose influence
If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes
Will ever after droop.

(I.ii. 178-84)

In medieval and Renaissance cosmology, the operation of Fortune and the influence of the stars were thought to proceed from a timeless origin. Fortune is ‘Now’ Prospero's ‘dear Lady’ and not a malevolent being because he has achieved harmony with this aspect of time and is alive to its opportunity. Still later in the scene he asks Ariel for the time of day, and they ascertain that it is past two o'clock. Prospero urges:

                                                            The time 'twixt six and now
Must by us both be spent most preciously.

(I.ii. 240-1)

He will not again ask for a statement of the progress of objective time until the opening of Act V. Similarly, when Prospero eventually realizes that Caliban's attempted revenge is imminent, he exclaims that

                                                            The minute of their plot
Is almost come.

(IV.i. 141-2)

Which is soon echoed by Caliban's anxiety that he, Stephano and Trinculo will lose their ‘time’ if they do not act quickly against Prospero (IV.i. 247). The word now is spoken emphatically again and again during the course of the play to express a heightened awareness of the present moment and a sense of crisis.

The perception of this aspect of time serves to delineate character and particularly to distinguish those persons in the play whose designs are essentially malevolent. Antonio and Sebastian are not merely out of harmony with this aspect of time: they can be seen in active opposition to it. When Sebastian has blamed the shipwreck and Ferdinand's loss upon Alonso's decision to marry his daughter to an African, Gonzalo rebukes him:

My Lord Sebastian,
The truth you speak doth lack some gentleness,
And time to speak it in.

(II.i. 137-9)

Antonio lacks this sense of time's ordinance and otherness. The consequence is delusion. In a moment of what to him seems insight, he declares to Sebastian that the opportunity has come for him to usurp the crown of Naples:

                                                                                Th' occasion speaks thee, and
My strong imagination sees a crown
Dropping upon thy head.

(II.i. 207-9)

Time for Antonio is a mechanistic medium subservient to his purposes. Having proposed to Sebastian that they murder both Alonso and Gonzalo, Antonio reassures him that there will be no opposition from the others:

                                                                                                                                  For all the rest,
They'll take suggestion as a cat laps milk;
They'll tell the clock to any business that
We say befits the hour.

(II.i. 287-90)

The metaphor of a clock is significant: it expresses a perception governed by an intellect divorced from feeling and conscience, a vision which crudely reduces what it sees and in that reduction robs it of inner life. In this instance, both time and human nature are seen in ruthlessly determinist terms. Earlier in the same scene, Sebastian applied a similar figure and lifeless perception to Gonzalo's sympathetic attempts to comfort Alonso in his grief:

Look, he's winding up the watch of his wit, by and by it will strike.

(II.i. 12-13)

Gonzalo, by contrast, perceives and praises the inner life of what he sees. He has a vivid and harmonious awareness of time, yet in his vision there are timeless qualities of elemental wonder and freshness. His initial impressions of the island expose the radical difference between his perception and that of the antagonists²⁷:

GON.
Here is every thing advantageous to life.
ANT.
True, save means to live.
SEB.
Of that there's none, or little.
GON.
How lush and lusty the grass looks! How green!
ANT.
The ground indeed is tawny.
SEB.
With an eye of green in't.

(II.i. 50-6)

A second major aspect of time within the play is that of time as an agent of growth or decay, the creator or destroyer. It is implicit in Prospero's words to Ferdinand after his sudden dismissal of the preternatural masque:

You do look, my son, in a mov'd sort,
As if you were dismay'd; be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors
(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind.

(IV.i. 146-56)

Time is here the destroyer, the agent through which the temporal world ‘shall dissolve’. Prospero's advice to ‘be cheerful’ in the face of this truth reveals that he has also become reconciled with the mutability of this aspect of time. The presence of time as agent is only implicit here, however: its active personification must await the opening of Act V.

These two aspects of time were closely related in symbolic and pictorial terms during the Renaissance. Time as agent was personified as Father Time carrying a scythe, as in The Winter's Tale, and often merging with it was the emblematic figure of Occasion portrayed with a forelock of hair which could be seized by someone alive to opportunity.²⁸ Act V opens with Prospero speaking the word ‘Now’ and then announcing that

                                                                                                              … Time
Goes upright with his carriage.

(V.i. 2-3)

The burden of Time has been lightened by Prospero's adequate response to the urgent need for present action, a response which has atoned for his previous failure to find balance between the equal claims of the active and the contemplative life. The two aspects of time as agent (Father Time) and time as opportunity (Occasion) appear to merge, appropriately, in this figure commencing an Act whose dominant themes are harmony and reconciliation. Furthermore, through the implication that a burden has been lightened the personification acquires a more beneficent form: Time the agent is ‘Now’ less of a destroyer and more of a creator, just as Fortune was earlier said to have ‘Now’ become Prospero's ‘dear Lady’. ‘Now’ in both figures signals a stage of transformation. These shifts in personified aspect are an index of the culminating ‘sea-change’ in Prospero's perception, a perception which has gradually been freed from the debilitating effects of time the more he has found harmony with it.

Then for the second time in the play, Prospero asks Ariel to tell him the hour of day. Ariel replies:

On the sixth hour, at which time, my lord,
You said our work should cease.

(V.i. 4-5)

This is Prospero's first request for confirmation of the passage of objective time since he asked Ariel the same question in Act I (ii. 239). At three more points in Act V it is said, twice by Alonso and once by the Boatswain, that the action has been completed within three hours.²⁹ These insistent references to objective time, apart from preserving the unity of dramatic time within the play, signal the moments at which different character groups among the royal party re-enter the realm of time after experiencing its suspension in a state which is variously described as ‘strange’, ‘dream’-like, or ‘mad’. This seeming suspension of time is the medium of ‘sea-change’ and is parallel to a state experienced by those who enter the otherworld in folklore and medieval romance.

We have already seen Prospero's adequate response to time as occasion and his ‘cheerful’ submission to time as an agent through which the world of the senses ‘shall dissolve’. The first is a discipline, the second a limitation. He has come to terms with both. Having initiated the regeneration of inward and outward harmony for the other characters, he then finds this regeneration completed within himself when he reaches the final stage in his acceptance of the nature of time and of existence in the temporal world.³⁰ Prospero is given an insight which had been inaccessible to him while ‘rapt’ in his studies in Milan. After the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda in Naples, he will retire to Milan where, he predicts,

Every third thought shall be my grave.

(V.i. 312)

For Prospero, time will henceforth be less a matter of externally-measured, static units—‘minutes’ or ‘glasses’. Instead it will become a rhythm, part of the very rhythm of his own thought. This ‘third thought’ forms an inward, dynamic counterpoint to the ‘three hours’ felt more externally by other characters in the same Act. It also recalls the traditional Third Age in the life of man allegorically depicted in Renaissance art and literature.³¹ Moreover, a cycle will have been completed in the return to Milan: the place of error will become the place of enlightenment.³²

This final aspect of time, time as inner rhythm, was prefigured during the masque in Act IV in the form of the natural rhythm or cycle of the seasons and generations of human life. Ceres, the corn goddess, blesses Ferdinand and Miranda's union with this wish:

Spring come to you at the farthest
In the very end of harvest!

(IV.i. 114-15)

The lovers are to enter upon a Golden Age; spring will be found without the intervening death of winter. Prospero's spring has been found, more paradoxically, in his endurance of tempest and preparation for death.

III

In view of the evidence thus far examined, it is a distinct possibility that the word tempest was chosen for the title in part to evoke its etymological meaning within the context of the play's integral concern with the nature of time, particularly time in its aspect of occasion or opportunity. In this way, three levels of meaning could be expressed: the literal, ‘violent storm’; the figurative, ‘inward turmoil’; and (to those sufficiently knowledgeable) the etymological, ‘a time; a period, an occasion’. It remains to inquire whether this etymological sense is elicited within the play itself. The first instance of the word is relatively unremarkable: it is used primarily in the sense of ‘violent storm’ in Act I when Prospero asks Ariel if he has ‘Perform'd to point the tempest’ that he commanded (I.ii. 194). The course of events has fostered the growth of the figurative meaning ‘inward turmoil’ by the next occurrence of the word in the pivotal context of the opening of Act V with its multiple references to time. After Prospero has actively personified time and then asked Ariel for an objective measure of its progress, Ariel replies, as we have already seen,

On the sixth hour, at which time, my lord,
You said our work should cease.

(V.i. 4-5)

Prospero agrees:

                                                                                                                        I did say so,
When first I rais'd the tempest.

(V.i. 5-6)

Two words in this context, ‘When’ and ‘first’, are time-specifiers referring to the moment when the tempest, apparently both literal and figurative, began. At its beginning Prospero foresaw the time of its end, three hours later; he accurately predicted the limits of objective time within which it would take place. The word tempest is thus associated with a three-hour time period, although it does not here signify that time period.

The third and final use of the word later in the Act is more complex. Prospero declares to Alonso that he has lost his daughter. Alonso is unaware of the ironic significance of this statement as the exchange proceeds:

ALON.
When did you lose your daughter?
PROS.
In this last tempest.

(V.i. 152-3)

Prospero's enigmatic reply does not refer solely to the violent storm which opened the play, although it acquires ironic point because Alonso assumes that it does and that Miranda is dead. Prospero lost her to Ferdinand as a result of that tempest, but not ‘In’ it. He must also mean that he lost Miranda in the process of the inward turmoil experienced in several forms by those on the island. However, the ‘When’ of Alonso's question asks Prospero to place the loss of his daughter at a point or within certain limits of time. Prospero's use of ‘In’ here means ‘within specified boundaries’—spatial, temporal or circumstantial. Since Alonso has asked ‘When’, it should be assumed that the boundaries denoted by ‘In’ are in this case temporal. Prospero's use of ‘last’ also denotes temporal boundaries and fixes the terminal boundary just before the moment of reply. In other words, Shakespeare has twice placed within temporal boundaries the senses of ‘violent storm’ and ‘inward turmoil’ inherent in his use of the word in this context. By implication, ‘this last tempest’ has also become ‘a time; a period, an occasion’ and a wholly apt response to Alonso's question.

Notes

1. Hallett Smith in an introduction to The Tempest in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974), p. 1606. All quotations from Shakespeare's works follow the spelling and lineation of this edition.

   I am grateful to Mr. Richard Proudfoot of King's College London for initial guidance and for reading a draft of the present article.

2. Martin Spevack, A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare (Hildesheim, 1970), vol. VI.

   • ‘tempest of the soul’ King John, V.ii. 50
   • ‘tempest of my heart’ 3 Henry VI, II.v. 86
   • ‘tempest to my soul’ Richard III, I.iv. 44
   • ‘tempest in my mind’ King Lear, III.iv. 12

   Compare also the metaphor of Pericles' passion:

                                                                                                                                               He bears
   A tempest, which his mortal vessel tears,
   And yet he rides it out.

   (IV.iv. 29-31)

3. King John, V.i. 20 and Othello, I.iii. 249, respectively.

4. Compare Coleridge: ‘It is the bustle of a tempest, from which the real horrors are abstracted; … and is purposely restrained from concentering the interest on itself, but used merely as an induction or tuning for what is to follow.’ ‘The Moved and Sympathetic Imagination’ (1836) in The Tempest, A Casebook edited by D. J. Palmer (London, 1969), p. 62.

5. I.i. 14; II.ii. 19, 37, 41, 110, 112. The first mention of storm comes from the Boatswain and all the others from Trinculo. By contrast, all three instances of tempest are spoken by Prospero. It may be that in this a distinction is implied between those who see the storm only as a physical phenomenon and Prospero, its author, for whom its purpose and meaning are essentially metaphysical.

6. Jan Kott, ‘Prospero's Staff’ in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London, 1965), p. 257.

7. The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘tempest’, sb … 1250 is the date given for the first use of the sense ‘violent storm’ and 1315 for that of the transferred and figurative senses.

8. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford, 1966).

9. The OED cites the Wyclif translation of the Bible at II Chronicles 28:9 but omits two other instances in the same text: I Chronicles 21:29 and Job 36:14. The work by Trevisa cited is his translation of Higden's Polychronicon II. 337.

10. These are typical of a number of sixteenth-century Latinate words which soon became obsolete. For others see Barbara M. H. Strang, A History of English (London, 1970), §80.

    The only one of these forms to survive for more than a century after its first recorded use was tempestive, which occurred as late as 1852.

11. The Geneva Bible of 1560 and the Bishops' Bible of 1568, both known to Shakespeare, broke from the Vulgate tradition by referring to the Hebrew and Greek originals for translation into English and perhaps largely for that reason do not use tempest in its etymological sense in the contexts in which Wyclif's followers did when rendering Latin tempestate nearly two centuries earlier (see footnote 9).

    Oddly enough, however, the English translation of the Vulgate Old Testament by Catholic scholars published in Douai in 1609 renders Job 36:14, ‘Morietur in tempestate anima eorum. …’, as ‘Their soule shal dye in tempest …’. Whether this use of tempest is intended to denote time is not clear.

    Two Latin-English dictionaries of the period give the words ‘time’ and ‘tempest’, apparently in discrete senses, among the meanings of Latin tempestas: Thomas Elyot's Dictionary of 1538 and Thomas Cooper's Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae of 1565, which incorporates material from Elyot's earlier work. An earlier English-Latin dictionary, the Promptorium Parvulorum of 1499, chooses tempestas as the Latin equivalent of English tempest. All three are available in facsimile editions by R. C. Alston in the series English Linguistics 1500-1800 (The Scolar Press, Menston).

12. This relationship was so recognizable, in fact, that as late as 1848 the word tempestive was used erroneously for tempestuous. See OED, s.v. ‘tempestive’, adj., 2. erron …

13. See G. L. Brook, The Language of Shakespeare (London, 1976), pp. 46-53 and Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York, 1947), pp. 162-4.

14. See T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 Vols. (Urbana, 1944) and Virgil K. Whittaker, Shakespeare's Use of Learning: An Inquiry into the Growth of his Mind & Art (San Marino, 1953).

15. Baldwin, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 417-525.

16. Metamorphoses I. 183, V. 500 & XIV. 584; Georgics I. 27, 256, 311 & III. 479.

17. The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (London, 1958), Appendix D, pp. 148-9.

18. op. cit., p. 48.

19. ibid., pp. 47-53.

20. The OED is by no means an infallible or exhaustive guide, of course, but its recorded evidence makes it likely that Shakespeare was the first to use these words in their etymological senses.

21. op. cit., pp. 49-50.

22. See Douglas L. Peterson, Time, Tide and Tempest: A Study of Shakespeare's Romances (San Marino, 1973), especially pp. 44-51.

    The word tide, like tempest, also meant in origin ‘time’, as in the compound Christmastide.

23. One reason for this unity is given by Frederick Turner: ‘In The Tempest there was no need to incorporate the vast stretches of time that occur in Pericles and The Winter's Tale, because the effect of time on human personality had now been taken over by a symbol—that of the sea-change, a mixture of dream, drowning, and enchantment.’ Shakespeare and the Nature of Time (Oxford, 1971), p. 151.

24. Harold F. Brooks, ‘The Tempest: What Sort of Play?’ Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. LXIV, 1978, p. 33.

25. ibid., pp. 33-4.

26. I am indebted to Turner, op. cit., pp. 1-6, for his definitions of the nine major aspects of time found in the Sonnets and in other plays. Except for incidental mention, his study is not concerned with The Tempest.

27. Turner makes an illuminating distinction in Shakespeare's works between true sight, essentially motivated by love or faith, and false sight, which is a product of deterministic reason—the ‘intellect that kills’—applied inappropriately (ibid., pp. 162-74).

    Gonzalo's vision would correspond to the former.

28. ibid., p. 5.

29. V.i. 136, 186, 223.

30. Compare William Blake: ‘Time is the mercy of eternity;’ (Milton 24:72).

31. See Samuel C. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (London, 1962), pp. 153-4.

32. T. S. Eliot developed a similar intuition more explicitly in Little Gidding:

    We shall not cease from exploration
    And the end of all our exploring
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And know the place for the first time.