Shakespeare's The tempest and Virgil's Aeneid : Gonzalo on Claribel and 'Widow Dido'

Abstract

It was just more than fifty years ago, in the spring of 1961, that I began and then set aside this essay. I was an Instructor in English at Columbia University, teaching in the Humanities A sequence in the College, in which I had had my first encounters at the business end of a podium with each of these texts. In the intervening years I have spent considerable time with other authors, primarily Dante and Boccaccio. Indeed, it is only recently that I found myself working once more with British writers, publishing articles in 2011 on Milton's responses to Dante in Paradise Lost (in Milton Quarterly) and on Chaucer and his significant references both to Boccaccio and to Dante in the concluding stanzas of the Troilus (in the Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies). Last April I came upon my copy of Frank Kermode's Arden edition of The Tempest (Harvard, 1958) and, folded inside it, in an examination 'blue book' from Collegiate School in Manhattan, where I had taught Latin and English between September 1955 and June 1957, several pages of jottings toward this essay. As part of my dissertation at Columbia I was compiling an assemblage of materials toward a variorum edition of the poems of Edwin Muir (1887-1959). Finishing that dissertation, in 1962, obviously had higher priority than returning to my thoughts about Shakespeare.