SOURCE: "The Tempest," in Two Concepts of Allegory: A Study of Shakespeare's The Tempest and the Logic of Allegorical Expression, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967, pp. 136-60.

In the following essay, Nuttall provides an analysis of allegorical elements in The Tempest, arguing that the suggestiveness of the play is "metaphysical in tendency," since it conceives of love as a supernatural force.

One of the reasons why The Tempest is hard to classify lies in its parentage. It has two sets of sources, first a body of romantic, fairy-tale literature and second a collection of travellers' reports. If its mother was a mermaid, its father was a sailor. It must be acknowledged that on the fairy side there is no story which we can point to as a direct influence on Shakespeare, but Iakob Ayrer's Die Schöne Sidea (published posthumously in his Opus Theatricum) and the story of Dardano and...