Kathman refutation - The Oxford Authorship Site

FALSE PARALLELS IN DAVID KATHMAN’S ‘DATING THE TEMPEST’ 16
________________________________________________________________________
David Kathman appears never to have considered this point: how could Shakespeare have
used accounts by Strachey and Jourdain in which a ship does not split as sources for a
play in which a ship does split? The very idea is an absurdity.
David Kathman's false parallel can thus be analyzed as follows:
A ship splits on a rock and is ‘dashed all to pieces’.
True for The Tempest.
Not true for the Strachey letter.
Ergo: a false parallel.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
(7) David Kathman writes:
Strachey says that "who was most armed, and best prepared, was not a little shaken" (6)
Prospero asks, "Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil / Would not infect his
reason?" (1.2.207-08).
Here is a fuller quotation from Strachey:
We had followed this course so long as now we were within seven or eight days at the
most, by Captain Newport's reckoning, of making Cape Henry upon the coast of Virginia,
when on St. James his day, July 24, being Monday (preparing for no less all the black
night before), the clouds gathering thick upon us and the winds singing and whistling
most unusually (which made us to cast off our pinnace, towing the same until then
astern), a dreadful storm and hideous began to blow from out the northeast, which,
swelling and roaring as it were by fits, some hours with more violence than others, at
length did beat all light from Heaven; which like an hell of darkness, turned black upon
us, so much the more fuller of horrors as in such cases horror and fear use to overrun the
troubled and overmastered senses of all, which taken up with amazement, the ears lay so
sensible to the terrible cries and murmurs of the winds and distraction of our company as
who was most armed and best prepared was not a little shaken. (Wright, p. 4)
Here's a fuller quotation from The Tempest:
ARIEL All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curl'd clouds, to thy strong bidding task
Ariel and all his quality.
© 2005 Nina Green All Rights Reserved
http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/