outlines of the story (considered as a 'source' for our play) are, to the general reader, hopelessly obscured.
In Thomas's History of Italy (1561) occur the names of Prospero, Duke of Milan, and Alonzo and Ferdinando, successively kings of Naples. Shakespeare may well have known this book. Gonzalo's fanciful account of an ideal commonwealth (II. i. 154–174) is derived from Montaigne's Essays, which Shakespeare knew in Florio's English translation (1603), a copy of which, owned by the poet, is now in the British Museum. In the absence of any source from which to quote, it may be well to reproduce a portion of Montaigne's account of the Cannibals and their ideal commonwealth. It is found in chapter 30 of the first book of Florio's Montaigne (p. 102). Montaigne is speaking of the superiority of this ideal commonwealth to that described by Plato:
'It is a nation, would I answere Plato, that hath no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no vse of service, of riches, or of poverty; no contracts, no successions, no dividences, no occupation but idle; no respect of kinred, but common, no apparrell but naturall, no manuring of lands, no vse of wine, corne, or mettle. The very words that import lying, falshood, treason, dissimulation, covetousnes, envie, detraction, and pardon, were never heard-of amongst-them.'
The whole chapter should be read for the light that it throws on the contemporary interest in man in his primitive state, as well as for the obvious comparison that it suggests between two men of genius dealing with the same subject in various ways.
