SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

230 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
northern sea route to Russia in the 1580s,35 and the
diplomatic activity which involved embassies in both
directions between the English and Muscovite courts,
together with the proposed marriage of the Czar to Lady
Mary Hastings, led to an increased interest in the northern
Russian ports, and so in the Lapps. Shakespeare
responded to a fashionable interest in Russia with the
Muscovite masque of Love's Labour's Lost. 3 6 Perhaps the
"Lapland sorcerers" of The Comedy of Errors reflect the
same interest.
The immediate source of Shakespeare's phrase is
probably Eden. It is well known that, at some time or
other, Shakespeare read either The Decades of the N ewe
Worlde or The History of Trauayle, for, when late in his
working life he wrote The Tempest, he used Eden's
material. Eden recounts the story of Magellan's voyage
down the American coast to the straits which now bear
his name. He captured two giant natives by a trick,
and "when they sawe how they were deceaued they
rored lyke bulles and cryed vppon theyr greate deuyll
Setebos to helpe them" If, as is usually assumed,
Shakespeare took Setebos from Eden, and used it as the
name of Caliban's dam's god who is powerless against
Prospero's art.P? he may also have used Eden's account of
Lapp magic for the earlier play.
Finally, two excursions into the Lapland of the 1590s.
Commentators have worried over Marlowe's "Lapland
Gyants". The phrase "is curious, considering the
diminutive size of the Lapps", and Marlowe is writing
"contrary to fact" 38 Yet it was a commonplace that in
as WiJIan, op, cit., 157 ff.
ae R. David, Love's Labour's Lost (fifth edition, 1956), xxx-xxxi,
37 Richard Farmer was the first to point this out. Malone printed Farmer's
note in his first edition of Shakespeare's works, and in his second (published
posthumously) added the observation that several of the names of characters
in The Tempest may derive from Eden's book. The passage in question is
Eden, Decades, fo, 219V.
" E. G. Sugden, A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and
his Fellow Dramatists (1925), 299; F. S. Boas, The Tragical History of Doctor
Faustus (1932), 64.