All things in common Nature should produce
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. . Nature should bring forth Of It owne kinde, all foyzen, ail abundance To feed my innocent people . . . I would with such perfection goueme SirT Txcell the Golden Age. Now this view is satirized by the others as he develops it, and Gon-zalo concedes he spoke mockingly. But this is a respectable, or distin-guished rather, sixteenth-century European view of primitive socialorganization— the dramatist lifted half of it indeed, almost uniquelyfor him, word for word nearly, from Montaigne’s essay on cannibals.Gonzalo, too, is linked with Prospero, not only as the one notablygood man among the Court party, but as Prosperous saviour at thetime of the usurpation; the Masque of Ceres aims also at the GoldenAge when “Spring came to you at the farthest / In the very end ofharvest”— that is, a wmterle^ age; and beyond some superficial re-semblance between Gonzalo’s ironic description and Prospero’s actual 73
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