Out of the background emerges the character of Alcott’s Ariel, to whom the author prophetically gave the surname March. And out of the background arise many of the plot developments: Ariel’s life on the island; her love of the hero Philip Southesk, himself “as changeable as the ocean” he loves so well; the revelation of their true identities; their thwarted romance; and finally their happy reunion.

 

[24.] Louisa May Alcott to Amos Bronson Alcott, 28 November [1855J, The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott.

[25.] "Ariel. A Legend of the Lighthouse," Frank Leslie's Chimucy Corner 14 and 15 July 1865), 81-83, 99-101.

 

            If the author based her background upon scenes near Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she camped out on Norman’s Woe,[26] she found much else in Shakespeare’s Tempest. Throughout this “Legend of the Lighthouse” there are overt and covert allusions to Shakespeare’s play. In much of the conversation and characterization, the source is obvious. Philip, for example, comments to Ariel: “It only needs a Miranda to make a modern version of the Tempest,” and she replies: “Perhaps I am to lead you to her as the real Ariel led Ferdinand to Miranda. ...” When Philip asks Ariel what she knows of Shakespeare, she answers: “I know and love Shakespeare better than any of my other books, and can sing every song he wrote.” Indeed, she frequently sings “Oh, come unto the yellow sands,” an appropriate lyric for one who is “a spirit singing to itself between sea and sky.” Philip’s gift to his beloved Ariel is “a beautiful volume of Shakespeare, daintily bound, richly illustrated,” and as he sketches, she reads. Gazing at “a fine illustration of the Tempest,” she remarks: “Here we all are! Prospero is not unlike my father, but Ferdinand is much plainer than you. Here’s Ariel swinging in a vine, as I’ve often done, and Caliban watching her. ...” Alcott’s narrative adaptation is complete to its Caliban, the lighthouse keeper’s humpbacked companion, whose massive head is set upon a stunted body and who loves Ariel and wreaks much evil.

            On the nineteenth-century American stage, theatergoers could w atch a winged Ariel fly in and out of the scenes of The Tempest on “visible ropes.”[27] In Frank Leslies Chimney Corner, readers of sensation stories could enjoy a ryiodern version of that play ingeniously contrived bv the future author of Little Women.

 

[26.] See Louisa May Alcott, unpublished journals (by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University), August 1864, and Cheney, p. 159, for the fortnight in Gloucester. For scenes similar to those described in "Ariel. A Legend of the Lighthouse," see Charles Boardman Hawes, Gloucester by Land and Sea: The Story of a New England Seacoast Town (Boston: Little, Brown, 1923); Edward Rowe Snow, Famous New England Lighthouses (Boston: Yankee Publishing Company, 1945); John S. Webber, Jr., In and Around Cape Ann (Gloucester: Cape Ann Advertiser Office, 1885), p. 36 md passim.

[27.] Charles H. Shattuck, Shakespeare on the American Stage from the Hallams to Edwin Booth (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976), p. 114.

 

            The great British actor David Garrick succeeded in reducing Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew to a three-act farce called Katharine and Petruchio, which was performed from time to time at the Boston Theatre.[28] Since the author of “The Rival Prima Donnas” had a pass to the Boston, she might well have enjoyed Garrick’s adaptation of Shakespeare upon several occasions and been moved to write her own modern version. This she did in “d arning a Tartar,” the “wild Russian story” she contributed to Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. Her Russian melodrama is a well-paced, neatly plotted story of the power struggle between the defiant, fearless, freedom- loving Sybil Varna and the Slavic autocrat Prince Alexis Demidoff, whose Tartar blood has made him a tyrant. Step by step, in bout after bout, her Petruchio succumbs to her Katharine, feminism rises victorious, and where William Shakespeare tamed a shrew, Miss Alcott tames a Tartar.

            It is, however, in the story Louisa Alcott contributed to the first issue of Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner that her devotion to the theater and her preoccupation with Shakespeare are crystallized. “A Double Tragedy” is precisely what its subtitle indicates: “An Actor’s Story.”[29] Phis, the shortest of the narratives in A Double Life, is quintessential^ a story of the stage. It opens with a performance by the tw o protagonists — loyers in life as well as on the stage — in “a Spanish play” whose cast includes a lover disguised as a monk, a Grand Inquisitor, and a stern old duke and whose plot involves a state secret, a duel, and long immurement in a dungeon. What Spanish play had Alcott in mind? Her Spanish play seems to have derived more from her own early dramatic effort performed in the Concord barn and entitled “The Captive of Castile” than from any extant professional drama. During the nightmares that accompanied her illness after serving at the Union Hotel Hospital, Alcott had had visions of a “stout, handsome Spaniard” who pursued her, “appearing out of closets, in at windows, or threatening me dreadfully all night long.”[30] Perhaps the shade of that Spaniard was upon her.

 

[28.] Ibid., p. xi. See also, for the performances of the time and Alcott s addiction to the theater, Cheney, p. 65; Madeleine B. Stern, "Louisa Alcott, Trouper," New England Quarterly 16:2 (June 1943): 188; Stern, Louisa May Alcott, p. 78; Eugene Tompkins, The History of the Boston Theatre 1834-1901 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908).

[29.] "A Double Tragedy. An Actors Story," Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner 3 June 1865), 1-3.

[30.] Louisa May Alcott, unpublished journals (by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University), [January] 1863, and Cheney, pp. 146-147.

 

            Whatever sources may have contributed to the Spanish play that opens “A Double Tragedy,” there is no doubt about the play that shaped its architecture. The sudden reappearance of her husband, St.