Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

He was in a shipwreck. He was at Jamestown. He was on the Mayflower. And maybe, just maybe, he’s in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Documentary filmmaker Andrew Buckley’s ancestor, Stephen Hopkins, was the only passenger on the Mayflower who had previously been to the Americas. Eleven years before the Mayflower landed in what is now Massachusetts, Hopkins sailed aboard the Sea Venture, a ship bound for Jamestown that was blown off-course by a hurricane and wrecked in Bermuda. Among Hopkins’s fellow passengers on the Sea Venture was William Strachey, a poet and playwright whose account of the ill-fated voyage may have inspired Shakespeare’s "The Tempest." Buckley’s new documentary, "Stephano: The True Story of Shakespeare’s Shipwreck," traces Hopkins’s travels in England and the Americas and links him to The Tempest’s drunken, mutinous butler, Stephano. We talk to Buckley about the documentary, walking in his great-grandfather’s footsteps, and what the story reveals about the early colonization of North America.