The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest
May 25, 2009
In this well-written and expertly paced work of popular scholarship, Woodward, an associate editor of the Adams papers, tells the story of William Strachey, an aspiring poet whose chronicle of a disastrous sea voyage and its aftermath had a profound influence on Shakespeare's The Tempest
. Strachey is a fine figure for historical resurrection—he was good friends with John Donne and a passenger on pioneering journeys to the New World, which eventually brought him, aboard the Sea Venture
, to Bermuda and the infant Jamestown colony in Virginia. Woodward draws heavily on Strachey's written narrative, often to marvelous effect. This is particularly true of the dramatic storm scenes, in which the entire crew of the Sea Venture
nearly perished. Through Strachey, Woodward tells of the conflicts that divided the crew after making landfall in Bermuda and the hardships of replenishing a starving Jamestown's supplies. The heart of the book is Woodward's recreation of Strachey's viewing of The Tempest
, which affords the author the opportunity to catalogue the narrative and linguistic parallels between the Sea Venture'
s travails and the play—fascinating fodder for the committed Shakespearean source hunter. Maps.
Starred review from May 15, 2009
The exquisitely detailed story of the 17th-century ship that helped inspire Shakespeare's The Tempest.
In his debut, Woodward, the associate editor of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, recounts the tale of the beleaguered Sea Venture, which set out from England in 1609 for the colony of Jamestown in the New World. One of the passengers was William Strachey, a writer with literary ambitions who kept a detailed account of the trip. Nearly two months into the voyage, a hurricane struck and a massive wave crippled the ship. Unable to continue to Jamestown, the Sea Venture limped to the island of Bermuda. The crew stayed there for several months, subsisting on the sweet waters of the island's ponds and the meat of birds, wild hogs and giant sea turtles. Some voyagers wished to remain on Bermuda, causing an open revolt. When the remaining crew members were finally able to continue to Jamestown, they found it decimated by starvation. Strachey wrote home about his ordeal, and the story became well-known in England—and served as one of the inspirations for The Tempest, which Strachey had the opportunity to see when he returned home. Woodward extracts a striking richness of imagery from 400-year-old sources—life on Bermuda comes across as strange and beautiful; Jamestown, a hell on earth. The author's acute sensitivity to the hardships of the settlers will help readers gain a new appreciation for their exceedingly difficult lives.
A skillfully written history of the trials of some the earliest American colonists.
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June 1, 2009
The 1609 wreck of the "Sea Venture", bound for Jamestown, is a well-known tale of disappointment and triumph, considered by many scholars to be the source of Shakespeare's "The Tempest". Blown off course by a hurricane, the ship managed a fortuitous landing on the island of Bermuda. Using the account kept by William Strachey, a gentleman of letters with pretentions of being a poet, Woodward tells of challenges met by the accidental islanders, who mustered every scrap of resourcefulness to create a rudimentary civilization on a deserted island paradise and finally to press on to their original destination. Woodward devotes the second half of his book to a detailed explication of the parallels between Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and the trials of the "Sea Venture". His imagined scenes of Strachey watching Shakespeare's play serve to make him a pitiable figure, craving success yet knowing that his efforts have only bolstered the career of another. VERDICT Although the "Sea Venture"'s link to "The Tempest" has been previously explored, Woodward deepens our understanding while extracting a vivid and all-too-human drama from 17th-century texts. Anyone interested in either early America or Shakespeare will want.Michael F. Russo, Louisiana State Univ. Libs., Baton Rouge
Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
June 1, 2009
Bardolaters know that The Tempest alludes to a 1609 shipwreck on Bermuda, and colonial history buffs may recall from the Jamestown oeuvre how the survivors eventually got from Bermuda to that struggling English North American settlement. The play and its factual substrate converge in Woodwards depiction of how one written resource affected Shakespeares imagination. A biography of its author, S. G. Cullifords William Strachey, 15721621 (1965), confirms that he was an obscure figure in the London theater scene who dreamed of bigger literary things. He seized the opportunity to be chronicler of a supply convoy to Jamestown and got more adventure, perhaps, than he had anticipated. Woodward acquits himself well with Stracheys survival-at-sea drama and the year Strachey lived in Jamestown, and he unleashes his own creativity in imagining Strachey attending the performance of a play that sounded uncannily close to his own reports of events in Bermuda and Virginia. Thanks to Woodwards fruitful combination of literature and history, fans of Prospero and John Smith can (at last?) read something together.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)