In this account and these extracts there are several points which clearly connect with certain things in the play.  To mark those points, or to trace out that connection, seems hardly worth the while.  It may be well to add that the Poet’s still-vexed Bermoothes seems to link his work in some way with Jourdan’s narrative.  So that 1610 is as early a date as can well be assigned for the writing of The Tempest.  The supernatural in the play was no doubt the Poet’s own creation; but it would have been in accordance with his usual method to avail himself of whatever interest might spring from the popular notions touching the Bermudas.  In his marvellous creations the people would see nothing but the distant marvels with which their fancies were prepossessed.

Concurrent with all this is the internal evidence of the play itself.  The style, language, and general cast of thought, the union of richness and severity, the grave, austere beauty of character which pervades it, and the organic compactness of the whole structure, all go to mark it as an issue of the Poet’s ripest years.  Coleridge regarded it as “certainly one of Shakespeare’s latest works, judging from the language only.”  Campbell the poet considers it his very latest. “The Tempest,” says he, “has a sort of sacredness as the last work of a mighty workman.  Shakespeare, as if conscious that it would be his last, and as if inspired to typify himself, has made his hero a natural, a dignified, and benevolent magician, who could conjure up ‘spirits from the vasty deep,’ and command supernatural agency by the most seemingly-natural and simple means.  Shakespeare himself is Prospero, or rather the superior genius who commands both Prospero and Ariel.  But the time was approaching when the potent sorcerer was to break his staff, and bury it fathoms in the ocean ‘deeper than did ever plummet sound.’  That staff has never been and will never be recovered.”  But I suspect there is more of poetry than of truth in this; at least I can find no warrant for it:  on the contrary, we have fair ground for believing that at least Coriolanus, King Henry the Eighth, and perhaps The Winter’s Tale were written after The Tempest.  Mr. Verplanck, rather than give up the notion so well put by Campbell, suggests that the Poet may have revised The Tempest after all his other plays were written, and inserted the passage where Prospero abjures his “rough magic,” and buries his staff, and drowns his book.  But I can hardly think that Shakespeare had any reference to himself in that passage:  for, besides that he did not use to put his own feelings and purposes into the mouth of his characters, the doing so in this case would infer such a degree of self-exultation as, it seems to me, his native and habitual modesty would scarce permit.

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No play or novel has been discovered to which Shakespeare could have been at all indebted for the plot or matter of The Tempest.  There is indeed an old ballad called The Inchanted Island, which was once thought to have contributed something towards the play:  but it is now generally held to be more modern than the play, and probably founded upon it; the names and some of the incidents being varied, as if on purpose to disguise its connection with a work that was popular on the stage.