The Tempest (Bloom's Shakespeare Through the Ages)

Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It Hamlet Henry IV (Part I) Julius Caesar King Lear Macbeth The Merchant of Venice A Midsummer Night’s Dream Othello Romeo and Juliet The Sonnets The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Twelfth Night

Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages

T H E T EM P ES T

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University

Volume Editor Neil Heims

Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages: The Tempest Copyright © 2008 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2008 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. The tempest / [William Shakespeare] ; edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom ; volume editor, Neil Heims . p. cm. — (Bloom’s Shakespeare through the ages) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9577-5 (alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Tempest. 2. Fathers and daughter—Drama. 3. Political refugees—Drama. 4. Shipwreck victims—Drama. 5. Magicians—Drama. 6. Islands—Drama. 7. Spirits—Drama. 8. Tragicomedy. I. Heims, Neil. II. Bloom, Harold. III. Shakespeare, William, 1564– 1616. Tempest. IV. Title. PR2833.A2B55 2008 822.3’3—dc22 2007029605 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Series design by Erika K. Arroyo Cover design by Ben Peterson Cover photo © The Granger Collection, New York Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

CONTENTS q

Series Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Introduction by Harold Bloom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Biography of William Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Summary of The Tempest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Key Passages in The Tempest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 List of Characters in The Tempest. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 CRITICISM THROUGH THE AGES t The Tempest in the Seventeenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 1580—Michel de Montaigne. “Of Cannibals,” from The Essays of Michel de Montainge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 1667–1668—Samuel Pepys. From The Diary of Samuel Pepys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 1669—John Dryden. From the Preface to The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 1669—John Dryden. From the Prologue to The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 1669—John Dryden and William Davenant. From The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 1679—John Dryden. From the Preface to Troilus and Cressida . . . . . . 53

t The Tempest in the Eighteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 1709—Nicolas Rowe. From Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 1710—Charles Gildon. From “Remarks on the Plays of Shakespear,” in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. . . . . . . . . 58

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1733—Lewis Theobald. From The Works of Shakespeare, Collated with the Oldest Copies, and Corrected, with Notes, Exemplary and Critical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 1753–1754—Joseph Warton. “Observations on The Tempest of Shakespeare” and “Observations on The Tempest Concluded,” from The Adventurer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 1765—Samuel Johnson. From The Works of Mr. William Shakespear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 1780—Edward Capell. From Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

t The Tempest in the Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 1809—August Wilhelm Schlegel. From Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 1811–1812—Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Lecture IX,” from The Lectures of 1811–1812 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 1817—William Hazlitt. “The Tempest,” from Characters of Shakespear’s Plays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 1822—Charles Lamb. From “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare; with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage-Representation”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 1832—Anna Brownell Jameson. “On Miranda,” from Shakespeare’s Heroines: Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 1857—[unsigned]. Review of The Tempest, from The Athenaeum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 1864—Robert Browning. From “Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 1872—John Ruskin. From Munera Pulveris: Six Essays on the Elements of Political Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 1875—Edward Dowden. From Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 1880—A. C. Swinburne. From A Study of Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 1897—George Bernard Shaw. “Shakespear and Mr. Barrie,” from The Saturday Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

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t The Tempest in the Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 1907—Henry James. “Introduction to The Tempest” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 1938—E. M. W. Tillyard. “The Tragic Pattern: The Tempest,” from Shakespeare’s Last Plays. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 1939—Mark Van Doren. “The Tempest,” from Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . 138 1944—W. H. Auden. From “The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 1947—G. Wilson Knight. “The Shakespearian Superman: A Study of The Tempest,” from The Crown of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 1949—Derek Traversi. From “The Tempest,” in Scrutiny. . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 1951—Harold C. Goddard. “The Tempest,” from The Meaning of Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 1959—Northrop Frye. Introduction to The Tempest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 1964—William Empson. From “Hunt the Symbol,” in Essays on Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 1972—Leslie A. Fiedler. “The New World Savage as Stranger,” from The Stranger in Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196 1987—Harold Bloom. “Introduction,” from The Tempest (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) . . . . . . . 203 1989—Meredith Anne Skura. “The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest,” from Shakespeare Quarterly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 1992—Harold Bloom. “Introduction,” from Caliban (Bloom’s Major Literary Characters) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242

t The Tempest in the Twenty-first Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 2001—Tom McAlindon. “The Discourse of Prayer in The Tempest,” from Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267

SERIES INTRODUCTION q

Shakespeare Through the Ages presents not the most current of Shakespeare criticism, but the best of Shakespeare criticism, from the seventeenth century to today. In the process, each volume also charts the flow over time of critical discussion of a particular play. Other useful and fascinating collections of historical Shakespearean criticism exist, but no collection that we know of contains such a range of commentary on each of Shakespeare’s greatest plays and at the same time emphasizes the greatest critics in our literary tradition: from John Dryden in the seventeenth century, to Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century, to William Hazlitt and Samuel Coleridge in the nineteenth century, to A. C. Bradley and William Empson in the twentieth century, to the most perceptive critics of our own day. This canon of Shakespearean criticism emphasizes aesthetic rather than political or social analysis. Some of the pieces included here are full-length essays; others are excerpts designed to present a key point. Much (but not all) of the earliest criticism consists only of brief mentions of specific plays. In addition to the classics of criticism, some pieces of mainly historical importance have been included, often to provide background for important reactions from future critics. These volumes are intended for students, particularly those just beginning their explorations of Shakespeare. We have therefore also included basic materials designed to provide a solid grounding in each play: a biography of Shakespeare, a synopsis of the play, a list of characters, and an explication of key passages. In addition, each selection of the criticism of a particular century begins with an introductory essay discussing the general nature of that century’s commentary and the particular issues and controversies addressed by critics presented in the volume. Shakespeare was “not of an age, but for all time,” but much Shakespeare criticism is decidedly for its own age, of lasting importance only to the scholar who wrote it. Students today read the criticism most readily available to them, which means essays printed in recent books and journals, especially those journals made available on the Internet. Older criticism is too often buried in out-of-print books on forgotten shelves of libraries or in defunct periodicals. Therefore, many ix

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students, particularly younger students, have no way of knowing that some of the most profound criticism of Shakespeare’s plays was written decades or centuries ago. We hope this series remedies that problem, and more importantly, we hope it infuses students with the enthusiasm of the critics in these volumes for the beauty and power of Shakespeare’s plays.

INTRODUCTION BY HAROLD BLOOM q

The Tempest is Prospero’s play, and not Ariel’s (as the Romantics believed) nor Caliban’s (the Postcolonialists), and Prospero is not Shakespeare the dramatic poet, though he may be Shakespeare the man of the theater. More important is his meaning for poets, brilliantly summarized in a late sonnet by Hart Crane: Through torrid entrances, past icy poles A hand moves on the page! Who shall again Engrave such hazards as thy might controls— Conflicting, purposeful yet outcry vain Of all our days, being pilot,—tempest, too! Sheets that mock lust and thorns that scribble hate Are lifted from torn flesh with human rue, And laughter, burnished brighter than our fate Thou wieldest with such tears that every faction Swears high in Hamlet’s throat, and devils throng Where angels beg for doom in ghast distraction —And fail, both! Yet thine Ariel holds his song: And that serenity that Prospero gains Is justice that has cancelled earthly chains. — “To Shakespeare” Th is is not Hart Crane upon his Emersonian-Whitmanian heights of the American Sublime, as in the visionary epic, The Bridge. Yet it shows his characteristic critical acuity in probing The Tempest for the hidden sources of Prospero’s uncanny serenity. Shakespeare’s Magus, as severe but just father of Miranda (and failed adoptive father of Caliban) is subtly taken as a replacement for Crane’s actual father, Clarence Crane, the unyielding Cleveland candy manufacturer and inventor of the Life Saver. Movingly, Crane is wistful that “Ariel holds his song,” as the alcoholic bard of The Bridge could not. Identification with Ariel’s mastery of song has been attempted by many poets, most fervently by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Wallace Stevens, both of xi

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whom Hart Crane admired and emulated. Add in Robert Browning’s powerful dramatic monologue, “Caliban upon Setebos,” and you can begin to believe that The Tempest has inspired more superb poetry than any other Shakespearean drama, with the probable exception of Hamlet. Since The Tempest was the final play that Shakespeare composed by himself, it is difficult not to identify Prospero with his author. Despite some Christian overtones, The Tempest is anything but a Christian drama. Nor is it a Post-Christian “text,” which a fashionable but fast-fading academic set proclaims. The Tempest is far more baffl ing a work than the critical tradition has confronted. In teaching this strongest of all Shakespearean comedies (it is not a Romance) I tend to begin with Prospero’s name, which only a few scholars comment upon. It is the Italian word for “the favored one,” and so a translation of “Faustus,” the Latin cognomen that the Gnostic charlatan Simon Magus took when he arrived in Rome as a miracle-worker. Christianity from the New Testament on, has handled Simon roughly, and has insisted that this Samarian magician was the founder of the Gnostic “heresy,” a rather unlikely contention concerning a vision always endemic in world religious history, from at least ancient Alexandra through the writings of Kafka and Borges. I surmise that Prospero is the anti-Faustus, Shakespeare’s farewell to Marlowe and to Marlowe’s own Dr. Faustus, even as Hamlet is the antiMachiavel, in regard to Marlow’s Machiavel, Barabas, The Jew of Malta. Mephistopholes is replaced by Ariel, a sprite or minor angel, and there is no Lucifer in The Tempest. If The Tempest is a visionary comedy, one wonders why its overtly happy resolution is so haunted by Prospero’s melancholy. Why will he go back to Milan anyway, taking with him for further education his re-adopted “thing of darkness,” Caliban? Caliban-in-Milan is sublimely wrong, but so is Prosperoin-Milan. The return may represent Prospero’s failure as an educator and his repudiation of more than magic. To accept old age is difficult for all of us, since the shipwreck of aging enhances our sense of guilt, our inability to give or accept love. The greatness of The Tempest is inseparable from its final self-presentation of an inward waning, the audience’s as well as Prospero’s. We do not know why Ben Jonson chose to lead off the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works (1616) with this final comedy. Evidently Jonson highly valued the play, which probably he had just read for the fi rst time. Shakespeare and Jonson had a much larger sense of comedy than is now available to us. Few of my students are willing to see the play as comic, as much of it palpably is. Caliban’s cowardice is very funny, but political correctness pompously demands that we see him as a heroic West Indian freedom-fighter! And poor Prospero, badgered stage-manager (as

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Northrop Frye saw), is now a rapacious colonialist. So badly do we read that few apprehend the rich ironies of Prospero, as time-haunted a Shakespearean protagonist as Prince Hal/Henry V or Macbeth. None of us can triumph over time. As mere humans, we lose every time. In the winter of the body, one recognizes that daily. Each time I reread The Tempest, it seems more beautiful. A nineteenth-century Romantic by temperament, increasingly I find in The Tempest one of the forms of farewell.

BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE q

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was born in Stratford-on-Avon in April 1564 into a family of some prominence. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glover and merchant of leather goods who earned enough to marry Mary Arden, the daughter of his father’s landlord, in 1557. John Shakespeare was a prominent citizen in Stratford, and at one point, he served as an alderman and bailiff. Shakespeare presumably attended the Stratford grammar school, where he would have received an education in Latin, but he did not go on to either Oxford or Cambridge universities. Little is recorded about Shakespeare’s early life; indeed, the first record of his life after his christening is of his marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582 in the church at Temple Grafton, near Stratford. He would have been required to obtain a special license from the bishop as security that there was no impediment to the marriage. Peter Alexander states in his book Shakespeare’s Life and Art that marriage at this time in England required neither a church nor a priest or, for that matter, even a document—only a declaration of the contracting parties in the presence of witnesses. Thus, it was customary, though not mandatory, to follow the marriage with a church ceremony. Little is known about William and Anne Shakespeare’s marriage. Their first child, Susanna, was born in May 1583 and twins, Hamnet and Judith, in 1585. Later on, Susanna married Dr. John Hall, but the younger daughter, Judith, remained unmarried. When Hamnet died in Stratford in 1596, the boy was only 11 years old. We have no record of Shakespeare’s activities for the seven years after the birth of his twins, but by 1592 he was in London working as an actor. He was also apparently well known as a playwright, for reference is made of him by his contemporary Robert Greene in A Groatsworth of Wit, as “an upstart crow.” Several companies of actors were in London at this time. Shakespeare may have had connection with one or more of them before 1592, but we have no record that tells us definitely. However, we do know of his long association with the most famous and successful troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. (When James I came to the throne in 1603, after Elizabeth’s death, the troupe’s name

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changed to the King’s Men.) In 1599 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men provided the financial backing for the construction of their own theater, the Globe. The Globe was begun by a carpenter named James Burbage and finished by his two sons, Cuthbert and Robert. To escape the jurisdiction of the Corporation of London, which was composed of conservative Puritans who opposed the theater’s “licentiousness,” James Burbage built the Globe just outside London, in the Liberty of Holywell, beside Finsbury Fields. This also meant that the Globe was safer from the threats that lurked in London’s crowded streets, like plague and other diseases, as well as rioting mobs. When James Burbage died in 1597, his sons completed the Globe’s construction. Shakespeare played a vital role, financially and otherwise, in the construction of the theater, which was finally occupied sometime before May 16, 1599. Shakespeare not only acted with the Globe’s company of actors; he was also a shareholder and eventually became the troupe’s most important playwright. The company included London’s most famous actors, who inspired the creation of some of Shakespeare’s best-known characters, such as Hamlet and Lear, as well as his clowns and fools. In his early years, however, Shakespeare did not confine himself to the theater. He also composed some mythological-erotic poetry, such as Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both of which were dedicated to the earl of Southampton. Shakespeare was successful enough that in 1597 he was able to purchase his own home in Stratford, which he called New Place. He could even call himself a gentleman, for his father had been granted a coat of arms. By 1598 Shakespeare had written some of his most famous works, Romeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Love’s Labor’s Lost, as well as his historical plays Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, and King John. Somewhere around the turn of the century, Shakespeare wrote his romantic comedies As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Much Ado About Nothing, as well as Henry V, the last of his history plays in the Prince Hal series. During the next 10 years he wrote his great tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. At this time, the theater was burgeoning in London; the public took an avid interest in drama, the audiences were large, the plays demonstrated an enormous range of subjects, and playwrights competed for approval. By 1613, however, the rising tide of Puritanism had changed the theater. With the desertion of the theaters by the middle classes, the acting companies were compelled to depend more on the aristocracy, which also meant that they now had to cater to a more sophisticated audience. Perhaps this change in London’s artistic atmosphere contributed to Shakespeare’s reasons for leaving London after 1612. His retirement from the theater is sometimes thought to be evidence that his artistic skills were waning. During this time, however, he wrote The Tempest and Henry VIII. He also

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wrote the “tragicomedies,” Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale. These were thought to be inspired by Shakespeare’s personal problems and have sometimes been considered proof of his greatly diminished abilities. However, so far as biographical facts indicate, the circumstances of his life at this time do not imply any personal problems. He was in good health and financially secure, and he enjoyed an excellent reputation. Indeed, although he was settled in Stratford at this time, he made frequent visits to London, enjoying and participating in events at the royal court, directing rehearsals, and attending to other business matters. In addition to his brilliant and enormous contributions to the theater, Shakespeare remained a poetic genius throughout the years, publishing a renowned and critically acclaimed sonnet cycle in 1609 (most of the sonnets were written many years earlier). Shakespeare’s contribution to this popular poetic genre are all the more amazing in his break with contemporary notions of subject matter. Shakespeare idealized the beauty of man as an object of praise and devotion (rather than the Petrarchan tradition of the idealized, unattainable woman). In the same spirit of breaking with tradition, Shakespeare also treated themes previously considered off limits—the dark, sexual side of a woman as opposed to the Petrarchan ideal of a chaste and remote love object. He also expanded the sonnet’s emotional range, including such emotions as delight, pride, shame, disgust, sadness, and fear. When Shakespeare died in 1616, no collected edition of his works had ever been published, although some of his plays had been printed in separate unauthorized editions. (Some of these were taken from his manuscripts, some from the actors’ prompt books, and others were reconstructed from memory by actors or spectators.) In 1623 two members of the King’s Men, John Hemings and Henry Condell, published a collection of all the plays they considered to be authentic, the First Folio. Included in the First Folio is a poem by Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson, an outstanding playwright and critic in his own right. Jonson paid tribute to Shakespeare’s genius, proclaiming his superiority to what previously had been held as the models for literary excellence—the Greek and Latin writers. “Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show / To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. / He was not of an age, but for all time!” Jonson was the fi rst to state what has been said so many times since. Having captured what is permanent and universal to all human beings at all times, Shakespeare’s genius continues to inspire us—and the critical debate about his works never ceases.

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SUMMARY OF THE TEMPEST q

Act I In scene 1 of The Tempest, mariners battle a sea storm, and the passengers hamper them in their work, demanding that they work harder. No matter; all is lost. The ship cracks in the storm and goes down. The audience sees the action from the same perspective as the characters on stage. Thus, the audience assumes that a real sea storm is being represented. In fact, what is being shown is only the illusion of a sea storm. Scene 2 shifts the perspective of the audience and of the play itself. Miranda and Prospero have been watching the same scene as the audience, and the audience now sees the shipwreck through Miranda’s description of it. With her first words (“If by your art, my dearest father . . .”), she suggests the possibility that viewers have been watching not a real shipwreck but a spectacular example of Prospero’s power. Prospero’s response confirms his daughter’s suspicion: He assures Miranda that no harm has been done, and everything has been done for her good. The conversation between Miranda and Prospero informs the audience how to understand what they have just seen. As Prospero takes over the task of explanation, the audience must listen to him in the same way Miranda does; her enlightenment is the viewer’s enlightenment. The rest of the play will help the audience judge the reliability of Prospero’s narrative. Certainly, Miranda’s ease in speaking to him and trying to influence him to pity shows her confidence in his goodness. Rather than explain how everything has been done for her good, Prospero asks Miranda if she remembers anything of her infancy. Miranda says she remembers that several serving women cared for her. Prospero confirms the accuracy of her memory and tells her that he had been the duke of Milan until 12 years earlier. He confesses that he had been more devoted to study than to governing his realm; he had given over that responsibility to his brother, Antonio. Rather than serving as an honorable deputy, however, Antonio had desired power for himself and conspired with Alonso, the king of Naples. Antonio promised Alonso tribute where none had been paid before and with his help banished Prospero and took 5

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his place. Prospero and Miranda were cast off in a poor boat and left to drift, and perhaps perish, on the open sea. His honest minister Gonzalo, although powerless to stop Antonio, supplied them with clothing, food, and—significantly—some of Prospero’s books. They did not perish, but were carried by the currents to an uninhabited island. Prospero tells Miranda that now fortune has sent all his enemies to him on the ship she saw wrecked; if he acts carefully, Prospero says, he can bring them both good fortune. Then, like a hypnotist, he tells her she is feeling sleepy, and she sleeps. As Miranda sleeps, Prospero summons Ariel, an air spirit he commands. Prospero asks Ariel if he has staged the illusion of the shipwreck exactly as he has been instructed and if everyone is safe. Ariel reports that all has gone well: Everyone is safe upon the island, although separated into several groups. Consequently, the king of Naples thinks his son, Ferdinand, is drowned, while Ferdinand believes his father has perished. When Prospero says that there is more work to be done, Ariel reminds him of his promise to free Ariel. Prospero retorts that he will, but not “before the time be out.” Angrily and at length, he reminds Ariel of the punishments the spirit had suffered before Prospero’s arrival. An evil witch named Sycorax had confined Ariel in the hollow of a tree after Ariel, then her servant, had righteously refused to obey her evil commands. Then she had died, and Ariel remained imprisoned for 12 years until Prospero arrived and freed him. By this act Prospero reveals his own goodness: He harnesses benevolent spiritual forces and also releases from bondage to evil. If Ariel complains, Prospero threatens, he will “rend an oak and peg” him in it for another 12 years. This threat is not a sign of any malignity on Prospero’s part, but an indication of the care he takes to subdue the passion of self-centered desire. Ariel begs Prospero’s pardon and promises obedience. Prospero again promises Ariel that he will have his freedom once this last work is finished. He commands Ariel to go and transform himself into a sea nymph and return in that shape. Ariel leaves, and Prospero wakes Miranda. Then he summons the ugly and deformed Caliban, son of the witch Sycorax. Caliban is not an airy spirit but a brute creature of the earth, part human, part beast. Prospero employs Caliban for such tasks as carrying firewood. When Prospero and Miranda first arrived upon the island, they treated Caliban well and taught him to speak. He, in turn, showed them secret places on the island where they could get food. But Caliban’s nature is brutish. He tried to rape Miranda and populate the island with his offspring. Prospero prevented him; he then made Caliban his slave rather than his pupil. From then on, Prospero exercised his control over Caliban by using his magic power to cause Caliban intense pain. The enslavement of Caliban is not an indication of Prospero’s malevolence, however. Again, it is an indication of his firm commitment to the suppression of passionate appetites that place self-interest above social concern. Brutish as he is,

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Caliban delivers much of the loveliest and most evocative poetry in The Tempest. This situation implies that sensory appreciation is not a sufficient guide for the exercise of humanity. (Caliban’s later drunkenness, an extreme form of sensual pleasure, similarly subverts rather than brings out any humanity he might have [Act II, scene 2].) After Prospero dismisses Caliban, Ariel returns, magically leading Ferdinand, the shipwrecked son of Alonso, king of Naples, to Prospero and Miranda. Ariel is invisible to Ferdinand, but he hears the songs Ariel sings and follows the music. One song, “Full fathom five thy father lies,” reminds Ferdinand of his father, whom he believes is drowned. When Ferdinand and Miranda see each other, they fall in love immediately. This is what Prospero has planned. But he immediately assumes a forbidding attitude, seems to oppose their love, and accuses Ferdinand of sneaking onto the island in order to steal his daughter and take his place. Prospero does this intentionally, in order to test the strength and virtue of the lovers and to strengthen their love by making its course difficult—thereby making sure that love is not only a matter of individual, sensory desire but a deliberate, intellectual choice. Miranda is distressed and surprised to see her father thus enraged and so unlike himself. She tells him that she loves Ferdinand, but Prospero rebuffs her. When Ferdinand attempts to resist him, Prospero casts a spell that makes Ferdinand’s muscles powerless. Ferdinand confesses that he is not pained to be a prisoner as long as he can see Miranda once a day from his prison window. Miranda tells him not to worry, that her father is of a better nature than what he seems to be. In an aside to Ariel, Prospero rejoices at their love and promises him freedom after his work is completed. The young lovers’ attraction to each other is an assurance that his plans are in harmonious accord with their natures rather than coercive.

Act II Scene 1 opens on another part of the island, where several survivors of the wreck wander about surveying the strange island: Alonso, the shipwrecked king of Naples; his brother Sebastian; Prospero’s brother, Antonio, the usurping Duke of Milan; Gonzalo, the counselor who had been kind to Prospero when he was cast off to sea; and several other courtiers. Gonzalo counsels Alonso not to give way to despair and to be grateful that they have survived the shipwreck. Alonso is overcome with fear that his son, Ferdinand, is drowned, but Francisco, another survivor of the wreck, tells him he saw Ferdinand swimming strongly, and therefore to have hope. Antonio and Sebastian mock Gonzalo as he offers Alonso comfort. The conversation reveals that the castaways were returning from Tunisia, where Alonso has given his daughter, Claribel, in marriage to the king. Claribel had resisted the marriage but finally obeyed her father, betraying

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herself. Unlike Prospero, Alonso’s treatment of his daughter has been coercive rather than in accord with her nature. As they speak, invisible Ariel enters and casts a sleep spell on everyone except for Antonio and Sebastian. While the others slumber, Antonio goads Sebastian to murder Alonso and take his place as king of Naples, just as Antonio had supplanted Prospero. They draw their swords and are about to murder the king when Ariel sets up a buzzing in Gonzalo’s ears. He wakes, sees them with swords drawn, and rouses the king. Sebastian and Antonio say they armed themselves because they heard a noise like a herd of cattle and were ready to defend the king. The others accept their explanation and the party, weapons drawn, move to find a safer spot on the island. Ariel closes the scene, saying he will report to Prospero what has happened so far. In scene 2 Caliban is alone, carrying wood for Prospero. He curses Prospero and describes how the magician’s spirits torment him with cramps and aches for every small act of defiance. When he sees Trinculo, one of the servants of the shipwrecked royal party, approaching, Caliban assumes it is one of Prospero’s agents come to punish him. He lies down, hoping to escape notice. Trinculo, seeing a storm approaching, looks for a place to take shelter. He sees Caliban’s form, mostly hidden under the garment he is wearing, and pokes about. Trinculo believes he has discovered a “monster,” and he reflects that such a creature put on display in England might make his fortune. Then he hears thunder in the distance and slips under Caliban’s garment for protection. Stephano, Alonso’s butler, enters carrying a bottle of wine. He is drunk and singing a bawdy song. Caliban fears that he too is one Prospero’s spirits about to hurt him, and he cries out for mercy. This startles Stephano, who wonders what it is he has come upon. Investigating, Stephano finds Trinculo and Caliban lying together under Caliban’s garment. But he thinks he has found a four-legged monster partly in the shape of a man, partly in a more brutish, perhaps fishlike form. Caliban continues to cry out in fear and Stephano, to calm the strange monster, pours some of his liquor into his mouth. Trinculo recognizes Stephano’s voice and calls out his name, to the amazement of the drunken butler. Stephano drags Trinculo out from under Caliban’s garment. Caliban, now drunk, studies the two men. He judges them “fine things” and concludes that Stephano, bearing the bottle, must be a god. Caliban immediately swears he will serve this “god.” They all drink more, and the two shipwreck survivors tease Caliban: Stephano says he is the man in the moon. When Caliban believes him, they are delighted by his gullibility. Caliban promises to show them all the glories of the island and proclaims his freedom from Prospero.

Act III In front of Prospero’s cell, in scene 1, Ferdinand is doing Caliban’s work carrying logs. Miranda enters. Prospero follows her unseen and, like the audience,

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watches the lovers. Miranda pities Ferdinand’s labor and offers to carry the logs. He asks her name. She tells him and realizes she has violated one of her father’s commands. They proclaim love for each other. Ferdinand says she is finer than any woman for whom he may ever have cared. Miranda says that although she has not seen other men except her father and Caliban to compare him to, she would want no other but him. She calls him “husband.” He calls her “dearest mistress.” They take hands and bind their hearts together. They depart in different directions leaving a delighted Prospero who declares that he cannot be so glad of their love as they are, but that he could not have a greater gladness at anything than he has at their union. When Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo reappear in scene 2, they have gotten even drunker. Caliban proclaims himself Stephano’s slave and “footlicker.” They begin to quarrel, Caliban saying that Trinculo mocks him. Ariel enters invisible and, by throwing his voice, makes it seem that Trinculo is insulting Caliban, adding to their confusion and making them more quarrelsome. Caliban explains to Stephano that the island is ruled by a tyrant and sorcerer who has cheated him out of it. He urges Stephano to seize Prospero’s magic books, burn them, and kill Prospero; then he could become king of the island, marry Miranda, and propagate. Trinculo and Stephano agree to the conspiracy, but Ariel, invisible, makes music sound around them, amazing and frightening them. Caliban explains to them the enchantments of the island; the beauty of his language in this speech seems to temper the brutishness of his character. Unwittingly following Ariel and his attractive music, they leave the stage. Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio, Gonzalo, and their party are on another part of the island in scene 3. They are also being led around blindly by invisible forces until Gonzalo proclaims he is too weary to go any farther. Alonso agrees. He adds that it does not matter to him what they do since he has no hope that his son Ferdinand is alive. Encouraged by his despair, Antonio and Sebastian conspire to make a second attempt on Alonso’s life that evening. Prospero and Ariel enter unseen by the king’s party. As mysterious music plays, Ariel directs a group of spirits to bring in a table with a banquet set for the amazed travelers. Before they can begin to eat, however, the banquet vanishes and Ariel appears in the form of a harpy. Calling Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio “three men of sin,” he tells them that they have been spat up on the island for the wrong they did to Prospero. The men draw their swords, but their weapons are useless against Ariel’s magic. They will suffer, Ariel warns the men, unless they repent their evil from the depths of their hearts. Prospero praises Ariel for his work and announces that he is going to visit Ferdinand and Miranda. Coming out of his trance, Alonso tells Gonzalo that he heard all natural phenomenon pronouncing Prospero’s name and his own guilt.

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Act IV In scene 1, in front of his cell with Ferdinand and Miranda, Prospero reveals himself to them and blesses their union. He adds, however, that his blessing is conditional. Ferdinand must refrain from “breaking Miranda’s virgin knot” before their wedding. It seems to be less a moral injunction than instruction in how to balance the forces of nature harmoniously: If thou dost break her virgin-knot before All sanctimonious ceremonies may With full and holy rite be minister’d, No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall To make this contract grow: but barren hate, Sour-eyed disdain and discord shall bestrew The union of your bed with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it both. . . . This is not a curse but an explanation of how things are and the grand interconnectedness of everything in creation. Ferdinand promises that he willingly obeys. Satisfied, Prospero summons Ariel and commands him to present a masque, a wedding pageant for the lovers. Then follows a little play within the play. Iris, the goddess of the rainbow; Ceres, the goddess of agricultural plenty; Juno, the goddess of heaven; and several nymphs sing, dance, and offer their best wishes of joy and plenty to the couple. The goddesses pointedly note that Venus and Cupid, representatives of erotic and self-referential desire, will be absent from the masque. In the midst of the pageantry, Prospero remembers the plot against him by Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo. In a sudden fit, he breaks off the masque. Ferdinand is surprised by the change in Prospero, but Prospero tells him not to be disturbed. In a famous speech, “Our revels now are ended,” Prospero explains: What they saw were merely shadows, which have vanished as everything will vanish, including themselves, for “we are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” Prospero says he will walk by himself a bit to “still his beating mind.” Ferdinand and Miranda wish him peace and go off by themselves. Alone, Prospero summons Ariel to deal with Caliban and his cohorts. He commands Ariel to hang fancy garments on a clothes line. The drunken conspirators enter, soaking wet and contentious, having been led by Ariel’s music through bogs. Stephano and Trinculo are diverted from their purpose by the allure of the garments. Caliban warns them to ignore the clothes, saying they are only a trap. The drunken shipmen are greedy for the glitter, however. When they reach for the garments, Prospero and Ariel set a pack of fierce dogs upon them.

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Their self-centered desire is a violent passion which turns brutishly against them in the form of vicious dogs.

Act V As scene 1 of the play’s final act begins, Prospero appears wearing his magic robes. He bears his book and magician’s staff, ready to conclude the work he undertook when first he planned the tempest. Ariel reports that Alonso and his party are all prisoners, confined to the lime grove in front of his cell. Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio are “distracted,” that is, apparently insane. The others watch them in grief. Ariel observes that the spectacle would be enough to soften his heart were he human. Prospero agrees with him and explains that he has set reason above fury and not brought his enemies to him for vengeance but for reconciliation. At his command, Ariel goes to bring the king’s party to him. Now alone, Prospero calls upon the elves that haunt hills, brooks, and lakes and whose powers he has commanded. He reviews the supernatural feats he has accomplished, like “bedim[ming] the noontide sun,” causing tempests, and even opening graves to let the sleepers out—perhaps metaphorically alluding to the past, his own and that of his foes, that he has revived and reordered in The Tempest. Saying “this rough magic I here abjure,” Prospero vows to surrender his powers, break his staff, and “drown” his book when his final task is accomplished. Ariel returns leading the king’s party. They stand, captive, within a charmed circle. The king, Antonio, and Sebastian are twitching like madmen while the others watch. Prospero orders “solemn” music. As their troubled spirits are calmed, he addresses each captive, reintroducing himself. He calls Gonzalo “honorable” and “good.” He rebukes Alonso for his role in his overthrow and similarly reprimands Sebastian. Turning to his own brother, he condemns Antonio’s unnatural ambition in usurping his place and denounces his plot to murder Alonso. Then Prospero forgives him. As the king’s party wake from his spell, Prospero changes from his magician’s robe back into court clothing and sends Ariel to the cove where the ship lies safely anchored, instructing him to bring the crew to him. Gonzalo is the first to speak, not realizing what has happened. He offers a prayer that “some heavenly power guide us out of this fearful country!” Prospero interrupts him and introduces himself to the king as “the wronged Duke of Milan.” He embraces Alonso and welcomes him to the island. Dazed, Alonso is not sure if what is happening is illusion and the result of enchantment or if the actual Prospero really stands before him. No matter which, Alonso says, since he has seen Prospero, “Th’ affliction of my mind mends.” He imagines Prospero has “a most strange story” to tell, and without even being asked returns the dukedom of Milan to Prospero and begs his pardon for the wrongs he has done him. Prospero embraces Gonzalo and secretly scolds Sebastian and Antonio for their plot against Alonso, but he promises not to tell him of it, at least not now.

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He reviles Antonio again, whom he cannot call his brother, but forgives him and demands his dukedom back. Throughout the scene Antonio says nothing. It is the job of the director and actor (or the reader) to imagine his response, whether he is gracious and penitent; or resentful, capitulating only because he has no other choice; or whether he shows some complex amalgam of responses. However Antonio responds, the focus is on the fact that Prospero is not beholden to that response but to his own vision of the higher action. Alonso laments that despite this good fortune, his grief is still great since he has lost his son, Ferdinand, in the tempest. Prospero commiserates, saying that he has suffered a similar loss: He has lost his daughter because of the storm. Alonso speaks what must be Prospero’s very thoughts. “O heavens,” he says, “that they were living both in Naples, / The King and Queen there!” After Prospero reassures the company that he is Prospero and shows them the cell in which he lives, he reveals Ferdinand and Miranda inside, playing a game of chess. Ferdinand kneels to his astonished father. Miranda, dazzled by the sight of humanity, cries out: “O, wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in’t.” Prospero checks her delicately, having had experience of mankind, and says, “’Tis new to thee.” The parents all agree upon the marriage. Gonzalo gives voice to the optimism that governs the play and is the result of the triumph of reconciliation over revenge. He tells everyone to “rejoice beyond a common joy,” and asks rhetorically, “Was Milan thrust from Milan that his issue / Should become kings of Naples.” He ends by celebrating how “all of us [found] ourselves / When no man was his own.” Ariel enters with the amazed crew of the ship and leaves again to bring in Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo. Prospero acknowledges his responsibility for Caliban. Caliban vows that he was “a thrice-double ass” to take Stephano for a god, and he promises to be “wise” and to “seek for grace.” Prospero invites the court party into his small cell to rest. He says that in the morning they can all set out for Naples, where the wedding of Ferdinand and Miranda will be celebrated. Then he will go back to Milan, to govern, but “where / Every third thought will be my grave.”

Epilogue The stage is clear except for Prospero. He addresses the audience now as a man like other men, with no magic powers. He is now simply the actor who played Prospero. He has, he says, no strength but the strength of prayer and begs the audience to be motivated by charity as was his character and to set him free from the spell of the island with their applause.

KEY PASSAGES IN THE TEMPEST q Act I, ii, 1–13 Miranda: If by your art, my dearest father, you have Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them. The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch, But that the sea, mounting to the welkin’s cheek, Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffered With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel, Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her, Dash’d all to pieces. O, the cry did knock Against my very heart. Poor souls, they perish’d. Had I been any god of power, I would Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere It should the good ship so have swallow’d and The fraughting souls within her. Images crowd these lines, creating a verbal representation of the storm dramatized in scene 1. In Miranda’s speech Shakespeare reframes the previous scene and reinterprets it. Miranda questions whether the storm the audience has just beheld was “real” or one of Prospero’s feats of magical illusion. Scene 1 seemed to be a representation of an actual shipwreck. But it actually is the representation of a representation of a shipwreck. Here is a signal that it is difficult to determine without context the difference between what seems to be and what is—a theme that has dominated the thought of Shakespeare’s plays from the days of his earliest comedies. In these lines Shakespeare also presents an immediate characterization of Miranda. She is capable of deep feeling; she is generous; and she feels loving concern for creatures whom she does not know. Moreover, Miranda is independent of her father in her thinking and aware of his character.

QQQ 13

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Act I, ii, 13–21 Prospero: Be collected: No more amazement: tell your piteous heart There’s no harm done. Miranda: O, woe the day! Prospero: No harm. I have done nothing but in care of thee, Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who Art ignorant of what thou art, nought knowing Of whence I am, nor that I am more better Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell, And thy no greater father. Prospero calms Miranda’s anxiety about the tempest she has just witnessed before explaining to her their history: He was the Duke of Milan, but his power was usurped by his brother and they came to the island. Prospero’s softness of tone in this speech establishes his underlying tenderness—despite an abrasive manner that surfaces from time to time over the course of the play. The warmth of the repeated vowel sound in the word “heart” echoes throughout, even in the word “harm,” now negated by heartfulness, and in the word “art,” used here as a form of the verb “to be” but recalling the art of magic. Note how the placement of the word “heart” at the end of a line emphasizes the heart’s role as a tender organ. Although Prospero tells Miranda he has done nothing but in care of her and goes on to describe their past (revealing part of the back story of The Tempest), he does not tell her what he has done in care of her. It remains for the action of the play to reveal that. His silence on this matter is important: It assures the freedom of Miranda’s affections when she meets Ferdinand. Uninformed of her father’s plan, she cannot be his puppet.

QQQ Act I, ii, 294–296 Prospero: If thou murmur’st, I will rend an oak And peg thee in his knotty entrails till Thou has howled away twelve winters. Prospero’s pique is directed at Ariel—who, having conjured the apparent storm, has balked at the prospect of more work. Prospero fumes in a second long passage of exposition, in which he describes his life on the island as a magician. Prospero’s display of irritability reveals the powerful duality of his personality: His benign and forgiving intellect is a strong force that he exerts over an equally

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strong passionate nature, which he must struggle to subdue. Prospero’s intellect guides his heart. This stands in contrast to the behavior of the villains of The Tempest, who allow the lusts of their hearts to commandeer their intellects.

QQQ Act I, ii, 345–364 Prospero: Thou most lying slave, Whom stripes may move, not kindness! I have used thee, Filth as thou art, with human care, and lodged thee In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate The honour of my child. Caliban: O ho, O ho! would’t had been done! Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else This isle with Calibans. Miranda: Abhorred slave, Which any print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but would gabble like A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes With word that made them known. But thy vile race, Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures Could not abide to be with. Caliban: You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language! This speech to Caliban (“Abhorred slave . . .”) is Miranda’s in the First Folio (1623). But in his version of the play in the late seventeenth century, John Dryden gave it to Prospero, arguing that Prospero had been previously reprimanding Caliban and that the language is too strong and too intellectual for Miranda. Lewis Theobald followed suit in the eighteenth century. The two editors thereby gave Miranda the frail passivity that later feminist critics would accept and deplore. The slight to Miranda is not from Shakespeare, however, and text elsewhere in the play confirms that Miranda had a hand in Caliban’s education. In this scene, the particular words Caliban uses to describe how he learned to speak indicate her involvement in the process. When he addresses Prospero, Caliban uses the singular “thou.” After Miranda’s speech, he uses the plural “you”: “You taught me language.” Another instance is in Act II (scene 2, line 143). When Stephano

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claims he is the man in the moon, Caliban replies, “My mistress showed me thee.” He is referring to Miranda. Miranda’s remark to Caliban about his ignorance, “thou didst not, savage, / Know thine own meaning,” is true at face value: When he had no language, Caliban could not ask for the things he wanted. But her observation can be understood in a deeper way as well. Miranda is also saying that, unlike a civilized person, the savage Caliban did not know what his true meaning was as a human. In The Tempest, being human is defined as being aware of the humanity of everyone else. Once again the play’s theme of the clash of animal passion and human reason—the elements that mix together to form humanity—is evident.

QQQ Act I, ii, 439–441 Prospero: [Aside] At the first sight They have changed eyes. Delicate Ariel, I’ll set thee free for this. Besides expressing his delight, Prospero’s exclamation serves to assure the audience that the lovers’ enchantment is a result of their effect on each other; it is not the effect of any enchantment Prospero has wrought upon them. These circumstances define Miranda as autonomous, not a subject of her father’s will.

QQQ Act I, ii, 451–463 Prospero: I charge thee That thou attend me: thou dost here usurp The name thou owest not; and hast put thyself Upon this island as a spy, to win it From me, the lord on’t. Ferdinand: No, as I am a man. Miranda: There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple: If the ill spirit have so fair a house, Good things will strive to dwell with’t. Prospero: Follow me. Speak not you for him; he’s a traitor. Come; I’ll manacle thy neck and feet together: Sea-water shalt thou drink; thy food shall be The fresh-brook muscles, wither’d roots and husks Wherein the acorn cradled. Follow.

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Prospero is threatening to turn Ferdinand into Caliban by treating him like Caliban. Prospero’s stratagem is to allow Ferdinand to show that he is not Caliban. Miranda will then see the difference between a man and a brute, a distinction that is especially plain in adversity.

QQQ Act II, i, 118–130 Sebastian: Sir, you may thank yourself for this great loss, That would not bless our Europe with your daughter, But rather lose her to an African; Where she at least is banish’d from your eye, Who hath cause to wet the grief on’t. Alonso: Prithee, peace. Sebastian: You were kneel’d to and importuned otherwise By all of us, and the fair soul herself Weigh’d between loathness and obedience, at Which end o’ the beam should bow. We have lost your son, I fear, for ever: Milan and Naples have More widows in them of this business’ making Than we bring men to comfort them: The fault’s your own. Alonso: So is the dear’st o’ the loss. Sebastian is reproaching Alonso, whom he blames for the shipwreck. The shipwreck took place on the trip back from Tunisia, and Sebastian attributes the disastrous event to Alonso’s stubborn decision to marry his daughter, Claribel, to the king of Tunisia. The salient point is that everyone but Alonso opposed the marriage, especially Claribel, who implored her father against it but surrendered her will to his. The relationship between Alonso and Claribel regarding her choice in marriage stands in contrast to that between Prospero and Miranda. Alonso imposed his will upon his daughter and used her to serve his ends. Prospero, by contrast, is not violating Miranda’s will in his efforts to encourage a marriage with Ferdinand. Through his powers of penetration, Prospero foresaw what his daughter’s will would be, and he provided for her in pursuit of their mutual interests.

QQQ Act II, i, 144–161 Gonzalo: I’ th’ Commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things: For no kind of traffic

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Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Born, bound of land, tilth, vineyard none: No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation, all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure: No sovereignty. . . . All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavor. Treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine Would I not have; but nature should bring forth Of it own kind, all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people. Looking at the island they have been cast upon, Gonzalo daydreams of utopia in this speech. When Sebastian and Antonio mock his vision, he excuses himself by saying he spoke merely to divert Alonso from the pain over his grief for his lost son, Ferdinand. Given the dispositions of men like Antonio and Sebastian, the multiplicity of nature, and the mutability of fortune, Gonzalo’s speech is obviously wishful and not realistic. Nevertheless, it suggests another way of wishing, one contrary to the wishes that motivate Antonio and Sebastian’s attempts against Alonso. Gonzalo’s last words are quite similar to Prospero’s wishes sung by Ceres at the wedding masque in Act V, scene 1. Although wishes themselves are insubstantial, the act of wishing for the good of others is not without value. The expression of such wishes cultivates a generosity of mind and spirit that manifests itself in generous actions—actions quite unlike those of the self-centered Antonio and Sebastian.

QQQ Act II, ii, 137–149 Caliban: I’ll show thee the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries; I’ll fish for thee and get thee wood enough. . . . I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow; And I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts; Show thee a jay’s nest and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmoset; I’ll bring thee To clustering filberts and sometimes I’ll get thee Young scamels from the rock.

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Most of the actual description of the island, like this catalog of promises to Stephano, comes from Caliban. The current speech entails a survey of the island. So does Caliban’s speech in Act I, scene 2, when Caliban resentfully reminds Prospero that he showed him “all the qualities of the isle, / The fresh springs, brine pits, barren places and fertile” (lines 338–339). And again, in Act III, scene 2, Caliban gives the audience a sense of the island in his speech beginning “Be not afeared,” when he explains (lines 126–135) that the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not: Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, That if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I wak’d I cried to dream again. It is striking that Caliban, who is condemned for his brutish disposition—and demonstrates it—also is given these gorgeous and introspective speeches. It seems to indicate that even sensibility and introspection, without a governing virtuous reason, are insufficient.

QQQ Act III, i, 1–15 Ferdinand: There be some sports are painful, and their labour Delight in them sets off: some kinds of baseness Are nobly undergone and most poor matters Point to rich ends. This my mean task Would be as heavy to me as odious, but The mistress which I serve quickens what’s dead And makes my labours pleasures: O, she is Ten times more gentle than her father’s crabbed, And he’s composed of harshness. I must remove Some thousands of these logs and pile them up, Upon a sore injunction: my sweet mistress Weeps when she sees me work, and says, such baseness Had never like executor. I forget: But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labours, Most busy lest, when I do it.

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Ferdinand is serving as Prospero’s drudge, in Caliban’s place. But through his ability to see beyond immediate things, Ferdinand shows that he is, nevertheless, not Caliban. His body is engaged in a grueling and demeaning task, but his mind is focused on a transcendental ideal. A few lines later, when Miranda encourages him to rest, Ferdinand declines: “The sun will set before I shall discharge / What I may strive to do” (lines 22–23). This is not a complaint, but an acknowledgment and acceptance of his duty. Ferdinand is a man who is committed to living up to his ideals.

QQQ Act III, iii, 68–82 Ariel: But remember— For that’s my business to you—that you three From Milan did supplant good Prospero; Exposed unto the sea, which hath requit it, Him and his innocent child: for which foul deed The powers, delaying, not forgetting, have Incensed the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures, Against your peace. Thee of thy son, Alonso, They have bereft; and do pronounce by me: Lingering perdition, worse than any death Can be at once, shall step by step attend You and your ways; whose wraths to guard you from— Which here, in this most desolate isle, else falls Upon your heads—is nothing but heart-sorrow And a clear life ensuing. The invisible Ariel is addressing Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian, who are paralyzed by Prospero’s magic. His eerie voice warns that only repentance stands between them and the just punishment that is their due for having wronged Prospero. Prospero’s magic eschews coercion; like a spiritual judo it turns his foes’ own aggression against themselves. The focus of The Tempest is on Prospero’s ability to command his passions. He is able to overcome his fury at wrong done to him and to forgive those who have wronged him, rather than to avenge his wrong and punish them. At the conclusion of this speech, Ariel presents the problem from the point of view of those who have wronged Prospero: As Prospero properly must forgive, so they must repent. As his heart must let go of resentment and rage, so their hearts must learn to feel sorrow so strongly that they are purged of the inclination toward doing wrong: Their expiation depends on it.

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Act IV, i, 15–22 Prospero: If thou dost break her virgin-knot before All sanctimonious ceremonies may With full and holy rite, be minister’d, No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall To make this contract grow: but barren hate, Sour-eyed disdain, and discord shall bestrew The union of your bed with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it both. Therefore take heed. . . . Prospero issues this warning to Ferdinand regarding Miranda. The impact of this speech on readers or audiences tends to be a function of their attitudes about virginity before marriage. For believers in sexual abstinence until marriage, Prospero’s words need no defense; they represent a common belief. For those who find premarital chastity antithetical to their beliefs, Prospero’s statement may be just another illustration of his tyrannical, cranky, and patriarchal nature. Similarly, the words may be read as Prospero’s curse for disobedience. But Prospero’s speech may also be understood as a timely statement of a fact of life, independent of his will. As William Butler Yeats wrote in his poem “A Prayer for My Daughter,” if custom and ceremony are not honored all endeavors will come to grief. To avoid such sorrow, the lovers must abide by custom.

QQQ Act IV, i, 146–158 Prospero: You do look, my son, in a movèd sort, As if you were dismayed; be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. Prospero addresses this thoughtful valediction for fleeting things to Ferdinand. By saying “we are such stuff as dreams are made on,” Prospero defines humans as vehicles for giving substance to the insubstantial. He characterizes humans

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not as the playthings of superior forces (as Gloucester does, for example, in King Lear) but as the creators of circumstances borne of human imagination—beings who can transform ideas into actualities. Since “our little life is rounded with a sleep,” the only way to preserve the wonders that humans create is by assuring the continuation of the species. Through the generation of progeny, what was impermanent gains substance and becomes enduring. (Shakespeare repeats this idea in several of his first sonnets.) It is significant, therefore, that as he begins this speech, Prospero calls Ferdinand “my son.” By finding a husband for his daughter, he has found a son for himself.

QQQ Act V, i, 17–27 Ariel: Your charm so strongly works ’em That if you now beheld them, your affections Would become tender. Prospero: Dost thou think so, spirit? Ariel: Mine would, sir, were I human. Prospero: And mine shall. Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, One of their kind, that relish all as sharply, Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art? Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick, Yet with my nobler reason ’gaitist my fury Do I take part. Ariel remarks that Prospero’s charm works so strongly upon Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian that if Prospero saw their suffering, he would “become tender,” as Ariel imagines he would if he were human. Prospero agrees: He will be moved to compassion. Prospero’s words do not indicate a sudden softening in response to Ariel’s remarks. Rather, his speech reveals that forgiveness was his intention from the start. Prospero sees himself and his foes as kindred, similar in appetite and passion. That identification itself is reason enough for compassion, despite the fury that his resemblance to them also provokes. To assure the workings of tender compassion, Prospero explains, he serves “nobler reason” (which is what seems to govern Ariel’s spirit), and not baser passion. Once again, in Prospero’s remarks here, Shakespeare analyzes the interplay of passion and reason in the context of what is human.

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Act V, i, 33–57 Prospero: Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves, And ye that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him When he comes back; you demi-puppets that By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make, Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid, Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm’d The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds, And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire and rifted Jove’s stout oak With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck’d up The pine and cedar: graves at my command Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth By my so potent art. But this rough magic I here abjure, and, when I have required Some heavenly music, which even now I do, To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. This speech can be understood literally as a recapitulation of the events that Prospero has accomplished in The Tempest. Metaphorically, for example, he has opened the grave of an apparently dead past to bring back to life all those who had, as Gonzalo later says (at line 212), lost themselves. Alternatively, it can be read outside the context of The Tempest. Prospero’s magic can thus be understood to represent Shakespeare’s art. The feats of magic Prospero enumerates can be read symbolically as reviewing the things Shakespeare did in his plays—dictated the actions of actors, caused storms, and brought the dead to life (such as English kings and Roman generals). Commentators have long, fancifully, identified Prospero with Shakespeare because of these words.

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Act V, i, 172–175 Miranda: Sweet Lord, you play me false. Ferdinand: No my dearest love, I would not for the world. Miranda: Yes, for a score of kingdoms, you should wrangle, And I would call it fair play. This exchange between Miranda and Ferdinand is odd. At this climactic moment, when they and their love are being revealed for the first time to all the Italian travelers, the lovers are engaged in an argument over a game of chess. It is, no doubt, not what audiences and readers who have followed the course of their love would expect to see. Miranda’s accusation, however, could be taken as an allusion to the story of Dido and Aeneas (which was referred to in Act II) because it resonates with it. The story of Dido and Aeneas is essentially the tale of a conflict between love and empire. Fleeing a Troy that has been conquered by the Greeks, Aeneas lands in Carthage, where he and Dido, queen of Carthage, fall in love. But his destiny is to travel on to Italy and become the founder of the Roman Empire. In this context, Miranda could be indicating that she is aware of the nature of men and that imperial desires for power are in conflict with the honesty and loyalty implicit in loving. Unlike Dido, who killed herself out of grief after Aeneas abandoned her, Miranda is not governed solely by passion. That Miranda would call his “wrangling” over a “score of kingdoms” “fair play” indicates she understands and accepts the nature of men. Though passionate in her love, she is not guided by passion in her understanding or her behavior or theirs.

QQQ Act V, i, 181–184 Miranda: O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t! There are at least two possible interpretations of Miranda’s well-known words. The cynical or experienced reading is ironic. Her remarks are contrary to what actually is. The men she sees are not all of them “goodly creatures”; the would-be murderers Antonio and Sebastian are among them. This reading is reinforced by Prospero’s retort, “’Tis new to thee.” There is also a naïve, innocent reading: What Miranda says is true despite everything. She sees beyond what they did to who they might be. The second

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is a less sophisticated, less experienced reading than the first. It has the same visionary possibility, however, as Gonzalo’s utopian fantasy or her father’s wedding blessing.

QQQ Act V, i, 205–213 Gonzalo: Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue Should become Kings of Naples? O rejoice Beyond a common joy, and set it down With gold on lasting pillars. In one voyage Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis, And Ferdinand her brother, found a wife, Where he himself was lost: Prospero, his dukedom In a poor isle; and all of us, ourselves, When no man was his own. Gonzalo suggests that when people do evil, they lose themselves and do not belong to themselves—that they are not their own. This implies a corollary: that people are “their own,” that they belong to themselves or are truly only themselves, when they have been reconciled with one another and live generously and harmoniously. Gonzalo is not always entirely trustworthy in his observations. Despite what he says in this passage, Claribel apparently did not wish to have the husband her father chose for her, if Sebastian’s speech on the topic is to be believed. In Act II, scene 1, Sebastian described how Claribel let her obedience to her father stifle her loathing for her intended husband. Gonzalo’s admonition to Sebastian at the time, “The truth you speak doth lack some gentleness / And time to speak it in,” appears to confirm that Sebastian was speaking accurately. Although Gonzalo clearly has a penchant for sweetening things, his observation reinforces the approach that has governed Prospero: disavowal of revenge and pursuit of reconciliation.

QQQ Act V, Epilogue Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint: now, ’tis true, I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got

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And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands: Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant, And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardon’d be, Let your indulgence set me free. As Ariel was confined in a hollow tree when Prospero first arrived on the island, so at the end of The Tempest, Prospero sees himself confined, imprisoned, on the island. Just as Ariel needed Prospero’s “charms” to release him from his confinement, now Prospero needs the viewer’s “spell” to free him from his confinement. Thus, as the actor who has played Prospero performs the conventional task of asking for the audience’s applause, Prospero transfers his power to the audience. As he could release Ariel, the audience can release him. And in that act of releasing others from the bonds of one’s imagination, he implies, the viewers release themselves from a bondage to resentment. This is the feat he has accomplished by generating the action of The Tempest.

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LIST OF CHARACTERS IN THE TEMPEST q Prospero had been the duke of Milan until 12 years before the opening of The Tempest. More devoted to the study of the liberal arts and the practice of magic than to governing, Prospero had delegated most of his authority to his brother, Antonio. But Antonio overthrew Prospero and set him adrift at sea with his infant daughter, Miranda. Their small boat landed on an island inhabited only by spirits and the evil witch who ruled them, along with her son. Through the power of his magic, Prospero overcame the power of the witch, Sycorax, and assumed command of the spirits and of her son, Caliban. Miranda is Prospero’s daughter. Until those who were shipwrecked appeared on the island, she had never seen another human being but her father. When she sees Ferdinand, she falls in love with him. She persists in loving him despite her father’s first, apparent objections. She is sweet-natured, smart, and dutiful, yet not submissive. Ariel is a spirit who performs magic on Prospero’s behalf. When Prospero arrived on the island, Ariel was confined in a tree because he had refused to perform the wicked commands of the witch Sycorax. Prospero freed Ariel from that prison but did not grant him liberty. Prospero promises to free Ariel after his present enterprise is completed successfully. That Ariel agreed to this servitude attests to the benevolence of Prospero’s magic. Alonso is king of Naples. He is returning from Tunisia, where he has given his daughter, Claribel, in marriage to the king of Tunisia, against her will. Twelve years before the events of the play, he conspired with Prospero’s brother, Antonio, to overthrow Prospero and make Antonio duke of Milan. Sebastian is the brother of Alonso, the king of Naples. Antonio convinces Sebastian to kill Alonso and become king. Ferdinand is the son of Alonso, the king of Naples. He has been cast upon Prospero’s island alone, cut off from his father’s party, and he thinks that his 27

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father has been drowned. When Ferdinand sees Miranda, he falls in love with her. He is virtuous and hardworking. Adrian is a courtier stranded with Alonso’s group. Antonio overthrew his brother, Prospero, and became duke of Milan 12 years before the events of The Tempest. By his orders Prospero and Miranda were set adrift at sea. Now Antonio is among those cast up on Prospero’s island. Gonzalo is a wise and tired old counselor to Antonio. He had helped Prospero at the time of his expulsion from Milan, supplying him with provisions and the most important volumes from his library. On the island he works to keep up Antonio’s cheer. The boatswain is one of the crewmen who battles the storm and must contend with the angry and panicked passengers in the first scene. Caliban is a monster, partially human, partially beast. He is the son of the witch Sycorax and is Prospero’s slave, employed to do his drudgery. Prospero had once tried to tame and teach him, but Caliban remained a brute and attempted to rape Miranda. Prospero controls and punishes Caliban, through his magic, with physical pain. When the shipwrecked crew arrive on the island, Caliban gets drunk with Alonso’s jester and butler, takes the butler for a god, and makes him his new master. Caliban convinces them to murder Prospero and take control of the island. Stephano is Alonso’s butler. On the island, he finds a cask of wine from the ship, and he is drunk throughout the play. When Caliban likewise gets drunk, he thinks Stephano is a god and convinces him to overthrow Prospero, take Miranda for his wife, and rule the island. Trinculo is Alonso’s jester and Stephano’s friend. He participates in Caliban’s drunken plot to kill Prospero. Ceres is the goddess of grain. She appears in the wedding masque Prospero presents to Ferdinand and Miranda to offer fecundity. Iris is the goddess of the rainbow. She appears in Prospero’s wedding masque for Ferdinand and Miranda, representing a bridge between heaven and earth. The goddess Juno appears in Prospero’s wedding masque, bringing heaven’s blessing to the lovers.

CRITICISM THROUGH THE AGES q

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THE TEMPEST IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY q The royal “Revels Account” records that The Tempest was presented before James I and his court at Whitehall on November 1, 1611, by the King’s Men, the acting company to which Shakespeare belonged. Along with a dozen other plays, The Tempest was performed before the court again in February 1613, as part of the celebration of the wedding of the king’s daughter, Elizabeth. In that performance, Prospero’s wedding masque for Ferdinand and Miranda became part of a larger wedding gift to the princess—an entire play. The Tempest was first printed in 1623, when it was given first place in the commemorative Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays (commonly called the First Folio). This edition was issued and introduced by two of his fellow players in the King’s Men, John Hemings and Henry Condell. Among Shakespeare’s plays, whose bad initial editions and poor printing can cause modern editors textual problems, the 1623 Folio edition of The Tempest is a particularly good text. Its source was probably a clean copy made for publication directly from Shakespeare’s own papers by Ralph Crane, the King’s Men’s scrivener, or copyist. Shakespeare did not draw the plot of The Tempest from any previous story, but he did employ conventional literary elements from fairy tales and romances, as well as themes and situations from his own past work. Shakespeare also drew upon current events. In June 1609, a fleet of nine ships with some 500 colonists set out from Plymouth, England, for Jamestown, Virginia. Around Bermuda, the lead ship, Sea Venture, was separated from the rest of the fleet by a storm. The other ships safely reached the port of Jamestown in the summer of 1609, but not the Sea Venture. Its crew and passengers, including the admiral and the governor-to-be of the colony, were presumed dead. Then on May 23, 1610, nearly a year later, the passengers from the wrecked ship arrived in Jamestown. They had managed to survive on the island they had been cast upon and had even built two seaworthy ships. Accounts of their shipwreck, of the island upon which they landed in the Caribbean, and of their subsequent experiences were published in several pamphlets

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printed in London later that year. A Discovery of the Barmudas, otherwise called Ile of Divels, written by Sylvester Jourdain, and The True Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia, issued by the Virginia Company, appeared within a month of each other. (The Virginia Company was the entity that was financing the colonial venture.) Shakespeare knew two of the leaders of the Virginia Company, the earl of Southampton and the earl of Pembroke. Quite likely they had not only shown him the “Bermuda pamphlets” but also discussed the events with him. It is also commonly accepted that Shakespeare had read the essay “Of Cannibals” by Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592). In it, the great French essayist speculated that the “savages” of the New World, despite their primitive ways, might have significant human virtues that the Europeans lacked. “Of Cannibals” was first published in French in 1580 and then published in an English translation by John Florio in 1603. Scholars have noted a few similarities in language between The Tempest and Florio’s text. A court entertainment called a “masque” was quite popular at the time Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, in 1611. Masques were performance extravaganzas with music, dancing, and elaborate stage machinery performed around the central figure of the king, glorifying him and his estate as he watched. Although the English theaters were closed (1642–ca. 1658) under the influence and, later, the rule of the Puritans, masques were again popular when theaters were reopened by Charles II. Sir William Davenant, who had produced lavish masques for the king, brought the same delight in theatricality to the plays he produced in the acting company that he founded in 1660, The Duke of York’s Players. As a youth Davenant had known Shakespeare (he even allowed the rumor that he was Shakespeare’s out-of-wedlock son to go undisputed), and his troupe produced revivals of Shakespeare’s plays. The Tempest was revived in 1667 in an adaptation by Sir William Davenant and John Dryden that was performed as a great spectacle and celebration. Its plot, after all, tells of usurpation thwarted, so it was particularly suited to performance after the restoration of the monarchy. In his famous Diary, Samuel Pepys recorded seeing and enjoying this production. Davenant and Dryden’s version of The Tempest, called The Enchanted Island, added extra characters such as Miranda’s sister, Dorinda; Caliban’s lecherous twin sister, Sycorax (the name of Caliban’s mother in Shakespeare’s play); and a male counterpart to Miranda who has never seen a woman before the events of the play. Davenant also introduced scenery and stage effects, such as thunder and fiery lightning and even aerial wires for Ariel and Milcha, another new character. In fact, until Davenant created it for The Enchanted Island, the proscenium stage—with its arch, missing fourth wall, and moveable scenery painted on sliding screens called flats—did not exist. (The Elizabethan and Jacobean stages for which Shakespeare wrote were open-air theaters descended from the stages

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set up in inn yards where secular plays had first been performed.) This version of The Tempest held the stage much more firmly than Shakespeare’s original did until the nineteenth century—although not exclusively, because The Enchanted Island also served a source for other works. In 1674, Thomas Shadwell transformed it into a successful opera, adding a masque of Neptune and a great deal more spectacle. Also in 1674, Thomas Duffet’s farcical adaptation of The Enchanted Isle, called The Mock Tempest, or The Enchanted Castle, was performed at Drury Lane. This farce portrayed Prospero as the keeper of Bridgewell Prison and his daughters as prostitutes. Dryden’s comments from his preface to The Enchanted Island, as well as the text of his adaptation itself, represent the most important criticism of The Tempest in the seventeenth century. Dryden suggests that, as much as he esteemed the original, there was not enough wonder in it for him; his adaptation itself makes this clear. His comments on the character of Caliban, published elsewhere, are also illuminating.

1580—Michel de Montaigne. “Of Cannibals,” from The Essays of Michel de Montainge (translated by Charles Cotton, 1871) Montaigne was one of the great writers of the European Renaissance and is widely credited with having invented the personal essay. His Essais was translated in 1603 by the English writer John Florio, and became an important influence on English literature, including The Tempest. The following translation is much later than Florio’s and therefore easier for modern readers to understand.

CHAPTER XXX——OF CANNIBALS When King Pyrrhus invaded Italy, having viewed and considered the order of the army the Romans sent out to meet him; “I know not,” said he, “what kind of barbarians” (for so the Greeks called all other nations) “these may be; but the disposition of this army that I see has nothing of barbarism in it.”—[Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus, c. 8.]—As much said the Greeks of that which Flaminius brought into their country; and Philip, beholding from an eminence the order and distribution of the Roman camp formed in his kingdom by Publius Sulpicius Galba, spake to the same effect. By which it appears how cautious men ought to be of taking things upon trust from vulgar opinion, and that we are to judge by the eye of reason, and not from common report. I long had a man in my house that lived ten or twelve years in the New World, discovered in these latter days, and in that part of it where Villegaignon

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landed,—[At Brazil, in 1557]—which he called Antarctic France. This discovery of so vast a country seems to be of very great consideration. I cannot be sure, that hereafter there may not be another, so many wiser men than we having been deceived in this. I am afraid our eyes are bigger than our bellies, and that we have more curiosity than capacity; for we grasp at all, but catch nothing but wind. Plato brings in Solon,—[In Timaeus]—telling a story that he had heard from the priests of Sais in Egypt, that of old, and before the Deluge, there was a great island called Atlantis, situate directly at the mouth of the Straits of Gibraltar, which contained more countries than both Africa and Asia put together; and that the kings of that country, who not only possessed that Isle, but extended their dominion so far into the continent that they had a country of Africa as far as Egypt, and extending in Europe to Tuscany, attempted to encroach even upon Asia, and to subjugate all the nations that border upon the Mediterranean Sea, as far as the Black Sea; and to that effect overran all Spain, the Gauls, and Italy, so far as to penetrate into Greece, where the Athenians stopped them: but that some time after, both the Athenians, and they and their island, were swallowed by the Flood. It is very likely that this extreme irruption and inundation of water made wonderful changes and alterations in the habitations of the earth, as ’tis said that the sea then divided Sicily from Italy:— “Haec loca, vi quondam et vasta convulsa ruina, Dissiluisse ferunt, quum protenus utraque tellus Una foret” [“These lands, they say, formerly with violence and vast desolation convulsed, burst asunder, where erewhile were.”—Æneid, iii. 414.] —Cyprus from Syria, the isle of Negropont from the continent of Boeotia, and elsewhere united lands that were separate before, by filling up the channel betwixt them with sand and mud: “Sterilisque diu palus, aptaque remis, Vicinas urbes alit, et grave sentit aratrum.” [“That which was once a sterile marsh, and bore vessels on its bosom, now feeds neighbouring cities, and admits the plough.” —Horace, De Arte Poetica, v. 65.] But there is no great appearance that this isle was this New World so lately discovered: for that almost touched upon Spain, and it were an incredible effect

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of an inundation, to have tumbled back so prodigious a mass, above twelve hundred leagues: besides that our modern navigators have already almost discovered it to be no island, but terra firma, and continent with the East Indies on the one side, and with the lands under the two poles on the other side; or, if it be separate from them, it is by so narrow a strait and channel, that it none the more deserves the name of an island for that. It should seem, that in this great body, there are two sorts of motions, the one natural and the other febrific, as there are in ours. When I consider the impression that our river of Dordogne has made in my time on the right bank of its descent, and that in twenty years it has gained so much, and undermined the foundations of so many houses, I perceive it to be an extraordinary agitation: for had it always followed this course, or were hereafter to do it, the aspect of the world would be totally changed. But rivers alter their course, sometimes beating against the one side, and sometimes the other, and some times quietly keeping the channel. I do not speak of sudden inundations, the causes of which everybody understands. In Medoc, by the seashore, the Sieur d’Arsac, my brother, sees an estate he had there, buried under the sands which the sea vomits before it: where the tops of some houses are yet to be seen, and where his rents and domains are converted into pitiful barren pasturage. The inhabitants of this place affirm, that of late years the sea has driven so vehemently upon them, that they have lost above four leagues of land. These sands are her harbingers: and we now see great heaps of moving sand, that march half a league before her, and occupy the land. The other testimony from antiquity, to which some would apply this discovery of the New World, is in Aristotle; at least, if that little book of Unheard of Miracles be his. He there tells us, that certain Carthaginians, having crossed the Atlantic Sea without the Straits of Gibraltar, and sailed a very long time, discovered at last a great and fruitful island, all covered over with wood, and watered with several broad and deep rivers, far remote from all terra firma; and that they, and others after them, allured by the goodness and fertility of the soil, went thither with their wives and children, and began to plant a colony. But the senate of Carthage perceiving their people by little and little to diminish, issued out an express prohibition, that none, upon pain of death, should transport themselves thither; and also drove out these new inhabitants; fearing, ’tis said, lest in process of time they should so multiply as to supplant themselves and ruin their state. But this relation of Aristotle no more agrees with our new-found lands than the other. This man that I had was a plain ignorant fellow, and therefore the more likely to tell truth: for your better-bred sort of men are much more curious in their observation, ’tis true, and discover a great deal more; but then they gloss upon it, and to give the greater weight to what they deliver, and allure your belief, they cannot forbear a little to alter the story; they never represent

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things to you simply as they are, but rather as they appeared to them, or as they would have them appear to you, and to gain the reputation of men of judgment, and the better to induce your faith, are willing to help out the business with something more than is really true, of their own invention. Now in this case, we should either have a man of irreproachable veracity, or so simple that he has not wherewithal to contrive, and to give a colour of truth to false relations, and who can have no ends in forging an untruth. Such a one was mine; and besides, he has at divers times brought to me several seamen and merchants who at the same time went the same voyage. I shall therefore content myself with his information, without inquiring what the cosmographers say to the business. We should have topographers to trace out to us the particular places where they have been; but for having had this advantage over us, to have seen the Holy Land, they would have the privilege, forsooth, to tell us stories of all the other parts of the world beside. I would have every one write what he knows, and as much as he knows, but no more; and that not in this only but in all other subjects; for such a person may have some particular knowledge and experience of the nature of such a river, or such a fountain, who, as to other things, knows no more than what everybody does, and yet to give a currency to his little pittance of learning, will undertake to write the whole body of physics: a vice from which great inconveniences derive their original. Now, to return to my subject, I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country. As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the perfect government, there the most exact and accomplished usage of all things. They are savages at the same rate that we say fruits are wild, which nature produces of herself and by her own ordinary progress; whereas, in truth, we ought rather to call those wild whose natures we have changed by our artifice and diverted from the common order. In those, the genuine, most useful, and natural virtues and properties are vigorous and sprightly, which we have helped to degenerate in these, by accommodating them to the pleasure of our own corrupted palate. And yet for all this, our taste confesses a flavour and delicacy excellent even to emulation of the best of ours, in several fruits wherein those countries abound without art or culture. Neither is it reasonable that art should gain the preeminence of our great and powerful mother nature. We have so surcharged her with the additional ornaments and graces we have added to the beauty and riches of her own works by our inventions, that we have almost smothered her; yet in other places, where she shines in her own purity and proper

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lustre, she marvellously baffles and disgraces all our vain and frivolous attempts: “Et veniunt hederae sponte sua melius; Surgit et in solis formosior arbutus antris; Et volucres nulla dulcius arte canunt.” [“The ivy grows best spontaneously, the arbutus best in shady caves; and the wild notes of birds are sweeter than art can teach.” —Propertius, i. 2, 10.] Our utmost endeavours cannot arrive at so much as to imitate the nest of the least of birds, its contexture, beauty, and convenience: not so much as the web of a poor spider. All things, says Plato,—[Laws, 10.]—are produced either by nature, by fortune, or by art; the greatest and most beautiful by the one or the other of the former, the least and the most imperfect by the last. These nations then seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received but very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and consequently to be not much remote from their original simplicity. The laws of nature, however, govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with any mixture of ours: but ’tis in such purity, that I am sometimes troubled we were not sooner acquainted with these people, and that they were not discovered in those better times, when there were men much more able to judge of them than we are. I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato had no knowledge of them; for to my apprehension, what we now see in those nations, does not only surpass all the pictures with which the poets have adorned the golden age, and all their inventions in feigning a happy state of man, but, moreover, the fancy and even the wish and desire of philosophy itself; so native and so pure a simplicity, as we by experience see to be in them, could never enter into their imagination, nor could they ever believe that human society could have been maintained with so little artifice and human patchwork. I should tell Plato that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard of. —[The above is the famous passage which Shakespeare, through Florio’s version, 1603, or ed. 1613, p. 102, employed in the “Tempest,” ii. 1.] How much would he find his imaginary Republic short of his perfection?

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“Viri a diis recentes.” [“Men fresh from the gods.”—Seneca, Ep., 90.] “Hos natura modos primum dedit.” [“These were the manners first taught by nature.” —Virgil, Georgics, ii. 20.] As to the rest, they live in a country very pleasant and temperate, so that, as my witnesses inform me, ’tis rare to hear of a sick person, and they moreover assure me, that they never saw any of the natives, either paralytic, bleareyed, toothless, or crooked with age. The situation of their country is along the sea-shore, enclosed on the other side towards the land, with great and high mountains, having about a hundred leagues in breadth between. They have great store of fish and flesh, that have no resemblance to those of ours: which they eat without any other cookery, than plain boiling, roasting, and broiling. The first that rode a horse thither, though in several other voyages he had contracted an acquaintance and familiarity with them, put them into so terrible a fright, with his centaur appearance, that they killed him with their arrows before they could come to discover who he was. Their buildings are very long, and of capacity to hold two or three hundred people, made of the barks of tall trees, reared with one end upon the ground, and leaning to and supporting one another at the top, like some of our barns, of which the covering hangs down to the very ground, and serves for the side walls. They have wood so hard, that they cut with it, and make their swords of it, and their grills of it to broil their meat. Their beds are of cotton, hung swinging from the roof, like our seamen’s hammocks, every man his own, for the wives lie apart from their husbands. They rise with the sun, and so soon as they are up, eat for all day, for they have no more meals but that; they do not then drink, as Suidas reports of some other people of the East that never drank at their meals; but drink very often all day after, and sometimes to a rousing pitch. Their drink is made of a certain root, and is of the colour of our claret, and they never drink it but lukewarm. It will not keep above two or three days; it has a somewhat sharp, brisk taste, is nothing heady, but very comfortable to the stomach; laxative to strangers, but a very pleasant beverage to such as are accustomed to it. They make use, instead of bread, of a certain white compound, like coriander seeds; I have tasted of it; the taste is sweet and a little flat. The whole day is spent in dancing. Their young men go a-hunting after wild beasts with bows and arrows; one part of their women are employed in preparing their drink the while, which is their chief employment. One of their old men, in the morning before they fall to eating, preaches to the whole family, walking from the one end of the house to the other, and several times repeating the same sentence, till he has finished the round, for their houses are

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at least a hundred yards long. Valour towards their enemies and love towards their wives, are the two heads of his discourse, never failing in the close, to put them in mind, that ’tis their wives who provide them their drink warm and well seasoned. The fashion of their beds, ropes, swords, and of the wooden bracelets they tie about their wrists, when they go to fight, and of the great canes, bored hollow at one end, by the sound of which they keep the cadence of their dances, are to be seen in several places, and amongst others, at my house. They shave all over, and much more neatly than we, without other razor than one of wood or stone. They believe in the immortality of the soul, and that those who have merited well of the gods are lodged in that part of heaven where the sun rises, and the accursed in the west. They have I know not what kind of priests and prophets, who very rarely present themselves to the people, having their abode in the mountains. At their arrival, there is a great feast, and solemn assembly of many villages: each house, as I have described, makes a village, and they are about a French league distant from one another. This prophet declaims to them in public, exhorting them to virtue and their duty: but all their ethics are comprised in these two articles, resolution in war, and affection to their wives. He also prophesies to them events to come, and the issues they are to expect from their enterprises, and prompts them to or diverts them from war: but let him look to’t; for if he fail in his divination, and anything happen otherwise than he has foretold, he is cut into a thousand pieces, if he be caught, and condemned for a false prophet: for that reason, if any of them has been mistaken, he is no more heard of. Divination is a gift of God, and therefore to abuse it, ought to be a punishable imposture. Amongst the Scythians, where their diviners failed in the promised effect, they were laid, bound hand and foot, upon carts loaded with firs and bavins, and drawn by oxen, on which they were burned to death.—[Herodotus, iv. 69.]—Such as only meddle with things subject to the conduct of human capacity, are excusable in doing the best they can: but those other fellows that come to delude us with assurances of an extraordinary faculty, beyond our understanding, ought they not to be punished, when they do not make good the effect of their promise, and for the temerity of their imposture? They have continual war with the nations that live further within the mainland, beyond their mountains, to which they go naked, and without other arms than their bows and wooden swords, fashioned at one end like the head of our javelins. The obstinacy of their battles is wonderful, and they never end without great effusion of blood: for as to running away, they know not what it is. Every one for a trophy brings home the head of an enemy he has killed, which he fixes over the door of his house. After having a long time treated their prisoners very well, and given them all the regales they can think of, he to whom the prisoner belongs, invites a great assembly of his friends. They being come, he ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner, of which, at a distance, out of his reach, he holds the one end himself, and gives to

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the friend he loves best the other arm to hold after the same manner; which being done, they two, in the presence of all the assembly, despatch him with their swords. After that, they roast him, eat him amongst them, and send some chops to their absent friends. They do not do this, as some think, for nourishment, as the Scythians anciently did, but as a representation of an extreme revenge; as will appear by this: that having observed the Portuguese, who were in league with their enemies, to inflict another sort of death upon any of them they took prisoners, which was to set them up to the girdle in the earth, to shoot at the remaining part till it was stuck full of arrows, and then to hang them, they thought those people of the other world (as being men who had sown the knowledge of a great many vices amongst their neighbours, and who were much greater masters in all sorts of mischief than they) did not exercise this sort of revenge without a meaning, and that it must needs be more painful than theirs, they began to leave their old way, and to follow this. I am not sorry that we should here take notice of the barbarous horror of so cruel an action, but that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we should be so blind to our own. I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead; in tearing a body limb from limb by racks and torments, that is yet in perfect sense; in roasting it by degrees; in causing it to be bitten and worried by dogs and swine (as we have not only read, but lately seen, not amongst inveterate and mortal enemies, but among neighbours and fellow-citizens, and, which is worse, under colour of piety and religion), than to roast and eat him after he is dead. Chrysippus and Zeno, the two heads of the Stoic sect, were of opinion that there was no hurt in making use of our dead carcasses, in what way soever for our necessity, and in feeding upon them too;—[Diogenes Laertius, vii. 188.]—as our own ancestors, who being besieged by Caesar in the city Alexia, resolved to sustain the famine of the siege with the bodies of their old men, women, and other persons who were incapable of bearing arms. “Vascones, ut fama est, alimentis talibus usi Produxere animas.” [“’Tis said the Gascons with such meats appeased their hunger.” —Juvenal, Sat., xv. 93.] And the physicians make no bones of employing it to all sorts of use, either to apply it outwardly; or to give it inwardly for the health of the patient. But there never was any opinion so irregular, as to excuse treachery, disloyalty, tyranny, and cruelty, which are our familiar vices. We may then call these people barbarous, in respect to the rules of reason: but not in respect to ourselves, who in all sorts of barbarity exceed them. Their wars are throughout noble and

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generous, and carry as much excuse and fair pretence, as that human malady is capable of; having with them no other foundation than the sole jealousy of valour. Their disputes are not for the conquest of new lands, for these they already possess are so fruitful by nature, as to supply them without labour or concern, with all things necessary, in such abundance that they have no need to enlarge their borders. And they are, moreover, happy in this, that they only covet so much as their natural necessities require: all beyond that is superfluous to them: men of the same age call one another generally brothers, those who are younger, children; and the old men are fathers to all. These leave to their heirs in common the full possession of goods, without any manner of division, or other title than what nature bestows upon her creatures, in bringing them into the world. If their neighbours pass over the mountains to assault them, and obtain a victory, all the victors gain by it is glory only, and the advantage of having proved themselves the better in valour and virtue: for they never meddle with the goods of the conquered, but presently return into their own country, where they have no want of anything necessary, nor of this greatest of all goods, to know happily how to enjoy their condition and to be content. And those in turn do the same; they demand of their prisoners no other ransom, than acknowledgment that they are overcome: but there is not one found in an age, who will not rather choose to die than make such a confession, or either by word or look recede from the entire grandeur of an invincible courage. There is not a man amongst them who had not rather be killed and eaten, than so much as to open his mouth to entreat he may not. They use them with all liberality and freedom, to the end their lives may be so much the dearer to them; but frequently entertain them with menaces of their approaching death, of the torments they are to suffer, of the preparations making in order to it, of the mangling their limbs, and of the feast that is to be made, where their carcass is to be the only dish. All which they do, to no other end, but only to extort some gentle or submissive word from them, or to frighten them so as to make them run away, to obtain this advantage that they were terrified, and that their constancy was shaken; and indeed, if rightly taken, it is in this point only that a true victory consists: “Victoria nulla est, Quam quae confessor animo quoque subjugat hostes.” [“No victory is complete, which the conquered do not admit to be so.”—Claudius, De Sexto Consulatu Honorii, v. 248.] The Hungarians, a very warlike people, never pretend further than to reduce the enemy to their discretion; for having forced this confession from them, they let them go without injury or ransom, excepting, at the most, to make them

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engage their word never to bear arms against them again. We have sufficient advantages over our enemies that are borrowed and not truly our own; it is the quality of a porter, and no effect of virtue, to have stronger arms and legs; it is a dead and corporeal quality to set in array; ’tis a turn of fortune to make our enemy stumble, or to dazzle him with the light of the sun; ’tis a trick of science and art, and that may happen in a mean base fellow, to be a good fencer. The estimate and value of a man consist in the heart and in the will: there his true honour lies. Valour is stability, not of legs and arms, but of the courage and the soul; it does not lie in the goodness of our horse or our arms but in our own. He that falls obstinate in his courage— “Si succiderit, de genu pugnat” [“If his legs fail him, he fights on his knees.” —Seneca, De Providentia, c. 2.] —he who, for any danger of imminent death, abates nothing of his assurance; who, dying, yet darts at his enemy a fierce and disdainful look, is overcome not by us, but by fortune; he is killed, not conquered; the most valiant are sometimes the most unfortunate. There are defeats more triumphant than victories. Never could those four sister victories, the fairest the sun ever be held, of Salamis, Plataea, Mycale, and Sicily, venture to oppose all their united glories, to the single glory of the discomfiture of King Leonidas and his men, at the pass of Thermopylae. Who ever ran with a more glorious desire and greater ambition, to the winning, than Captain Iscolas to the certain loss of a battle?—[Diodorus Siculus, xv. 64.]—Who could have found out a more subtle invention to secure his safety, than he did to assure his destruction? He was set to defend a certain pass of Peloponnesus against the Arcadians, which, considering the nature of the place and the inequality of forces, finding it utterly impossible for him to do, and seeing that all who were presented to the enemy, must certainly be left upon the place; and on the other side, reputing it unworthy of his own virtue and magnanimity and of the Lacedaemonian name to fail in any part of his duty, he chose a mean betwixt these two extremes after this manner; the youngest and most active of his men, he preserved for the service and defence of their country, and sent them back; and with the rest, whose loss would be of less consideration, he resolved to make good the pass, and with the death of them, to make the enemy buy their entry as dear as possibly he could; as it fell out, for being presently environed on all sides by the Arcadians, after having made a great slaughter of the enemy, he and his were all cut in pieces. Is there any trophy dedicated to the conquerors which was not much more due to these who were overcome? The part that true conquering is to play, lies in the encounter, not in the coming off; and the honour of valour consists in fighting, not in subduing.

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But to return to my story: these prisoners are so far from discovering the least weakness, for all the terrors that can be represented to them, that, on the contrary, during the two or three months they are kept, they always appear with a cheerful countenance; importune their masters to make haste to bring them to the test, defy, rail at them, and reproach them with cowardice, and the number of battles they have lost against those of their country. I have a song made by one of these prisoners, wherein he bids them “come all, and dine upon him, and welcome, for they shall withal eat their own fathers and grandfathers, whose flesh has served to feed and nourish him. These muscles,” says he, “this flesh and these veins, are your own: poor silly souls as you are, you little think that the substance of your ancestors’ limbs is here yet; notice what you eat, and you will find in it the taste of your own flesh:” in which song there is to be observed an invention that nothing relishes of the barbarian. Those that paint these people dying after this manner, represent the prisoner spitting in the faces of his executioners and making wry mouths at them. And ’tis most certain, that to the very last gasp, they never cease to brave and defy them both in word and gesture. In plain truth, these men are very savage in comparison of us; of necessity, they must either be absolutely so or else we are savages; for there is a vast difference betwixt their manners and ours. The men there have several wives, and so much the greater number, by how much they have the greater reputation for valour. And it is one very remarkable feature in their marriages, that the same jealousy our wives have to hinder and divert us from the friendship and familiarity of other women, those employ to promote their husbands’ desires, and to procure them many spouses; for being above all things solicitous of their husbands’ honour, ’tis their chiefest care to seek out, and to bring in the most companions they can, forasmuch as it is a testimony of the husband’s virtue. Most of our ladies will cry out, that ’tis monstrous; whereas in truth it is not so, but a truly matrimonial virtue, and of the highest form. In the Bible, Sarah, with Leah and Rachel, the two wives of Jacob, gave the most beautiful of their handmaids to their husbands; Livia preferred the passions of Augustus to her own interest; —[Suetonius, Life of Augustus, c. 71.]—and the wife of King Deiotarus, Stratonice, did not only give up a fair young maid that served her to her husband’s embraces, but moreover carefully brought up the children he had by her, and assisted them in the succession to their father’s crown. And that it may not be supposed, that all this is done by a simple and servile obligation to their common practice, or by any authoritative impression of their ancient custom, without judgment or reasoning, and from having a soul so stupid that it cannot contrive what else to do, I must here give you some touches of their sufficiency in point of understanding. Besides what I repeated to you before, which was one of their songs of war, I have another, a love-song, that begins thus:

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“Stay, adder, stay, that by thy pattern my sister may draw the fashion and work of a rich ribbon, that I may present to my beloved, by which means thy beauty and the excellent order of thy scales shall for ever be preferred before all other serpents.” Wherein the first couplet, “Stay, adder,” &c., makes the burden of the song. Now I have conversed enough with poetry to judge thus much that not only there is nothing barbarous in this invention, but, moreover, that it is perfectly Anacreontic. To which it may be added, that their language is soft, of a pleasing accent, and something bordering upon the Greek termination. Three of these people, not foreseeing how dear their knowledge of the corruptions of this part of the world will one day cost their happiness and repose, and that the effect of this commerce will be their ruin, as I presuppose it is in a very fair way (miserable men to suffer themselves to be deluded with desire of novelty and to have left the serenity of their own heaven to come so far to gaze at ours!), were at Rouen at the time that the late King Charles IX. was there. The king himself talked to them a good while, and they were made to see our fashions, our pomp, and the form of a great city. After which, some one asked their opinion, and would know of them, what of all the things they had seen, they found most to be admired? To which they made answer, three things, of which I have forgotten the third, and am troubled at it, but two I yet remember. They said, that in the first place they thought it very strange that so many tall men, wearing beards, strong, and well armed, who were about the king (’tis like they meant the Swiss of the guard), should submit to obey a child, and that they did not rather choose out one amongst themselves to command. Secondly (they have a way of speaking in their language to call men the half of one another), that they had observed that there were amongst us men full and crammed with all manner of commodities, whilst, in the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors, lean and half-starved with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange that these necessitous halves were able to suffer so great an inequality and injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throats, or set fire to their houses. I talked to one of them a great while together, but I had so ill an interpreter, and one who was so perplexed by his own ignorance to apprehend my meaning, that I could get nothing out of him of any moment: Asking him what advantage he reaped from the superiority he had amongst his own people (for he was a captain, and our mariners called him king), he told me, to march at the head of them to war. Demanding of him further how many men he had to follow him, he showed me a space of ground, to signify as many as could march in such a compass, which might be four or five thousand men; and putting the question to him whether or no his authority expired with the war, he told me this remained: that when he went to visit the villages of his dependence, they planed

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him paths through the thick of their woods, by which he might pass at his ease. All this does not sound very ill, and the last was not at all amiss, for they wear no breeches.

QQQ 1667–1668—Samuel Pepys. From The Diary of Samuel Pepys Samuel Pepys, a naval administrator, is most famous for his detailed and fascinating Diary, one of the most important primary sources we have for life in England in the seventeenth century.

[November 7, 1667] . . . resolved with Sir W. Pen to go see The Tempest, an old play of Shakespeare’s, acted, I hear, the first day . . . the most innocent play that ever I saw; and a curious piece of musique in an echo of half sentences, the echo repeating the former half, while the man goes on to the latter; which is mighty pretty. The play has no great wit, but yet good, above ordinary plays. [February 3, 1668] . . . and thence after dinner to the Duke of York’s house, to the play, The Tempest, which we have often seen, but yet I was pleased again, and shall be again to see it, it is so full of variety, and particularly this day I took pleasure to learn the tune of the seaman’s dance, which I have much desired to be perfect in, and have made myself so.

QQQ 1669—John Dryden. From the Preface to The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island John Dryden (1631–1700), an important poet, dramatist, and critic, was poet laureate and royal historiographer of England under Charles II.

The writing of prefaces to plays was probably invented by some very ambitious poet who never thought he had done enough: perhaps by some ape of the French eloquence, which uses to make a business of a letter of gallantry, an examen of a farce; and, in short, a great pomp and ostentation of words on every trifle. This is certainly the talent of that nation, and ought not to be invaded by any other. They do that out of gaiety which would be an imposition upon us.

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We may satisfy ourselves with surmounting them in the scene, and safely leave them those trappings of writing and flourishes of the pen with which they adorn the borders of their plays, and which are indeed no more than good landskips to a very indifferent picture. I must proceed no farther in this argument, lest I run myself beyond my excuse for writing this. Give me leave therefore to tell you, Reader, that I do it not to set a value on any thing I have written in this play, but out of gratitude to the memory of Sir William Davenant, who did me the honour to join me with him in the alteration of it. It was originally Shakespeare’s: a poet for whom he had particularly a high veneration, and whom he first taught me to admire. The play itself had formerly been acted with success in the Blackfriars; and our excellent Fletcher had so great a value for it that he thought fit to make use of the same design, not much varied, a second time. Those who have seen his Sea-Voyage may easily discern that it was a copy of Shakespeare’s Tempest: the storm, the desert island, and the woman who had never seen a man, are all sufficient testimonies of it. But Fletcher was not the only poet who made use of Shakespeare’s plot: Sir John Suckling, a professed admirer of our author, has followed his footsteps in his Goblins, his Reginella being an open imitation of Shakespeare’s Miranda; and his spirits, though counterfeit, yet are copied from Ariel. But Sir William Davenant, as he was a man of quick and piercing imagination, soon found that somewhat might be added to the design of Shakespeare of which neither Fletcher nor Suckling had ever thought: and therefore to put the last hand to it, he designed the counterpart to Shakespeare’s plot, namely that of a man who had never seen a woman, that by this means those two characters of innocence and love might the more illustrate and commend each other. This excellent contrivance he was pleased to communicate to me, and to desire my assistance in it. I confess that from the very first moment it so pleased me that I never writ anything with more delight. I must likewise do him that justice to acknowledge that my writing received daily his amendments, and that is the reason why it is not so faulty as the rest, which I have done without the help or correction of so judicious a friend. The comical parts of the sailors were also his invention and for the most part his writing, as you will easily discover by the style. In the time I writ with him, I had the opportunity to observe somewhat more nearly of him than I had formerly done when I had only a bare acquaintance with him: I found him then of so quick a fancy that nothing was proposed to him on which he could not suddenly produce a thought extremely pleasant and surprising; and those first thoughts of his, contrary to the old Latin proverb, were not always the least happy. And as his fancy was quick, so likewise were the products of it remote and new. He borrowed not of any other; and his imaginations were such as could not easily enter into any other man. His corrections were sober and judicious: and he corrected his own writings much more severely than those of another man, bestowing twice the time and labour in polishing which he used in invention. It

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had perhaps been easy enough for me to have arrogated more to myself than was my due in the writing of this play, and to have passed by his name with silence in the publication of it, with the same ingratitude which others have used to him, whose writings he hath not only corrected, as he has done this, but has had a greater inspection over them, and sometimes added whole scenes together, which may as easily be distinguished from the rest as true gold from counterfeit by the weight. But besides the unworthiness of the action which deterred me from it (there being nothing so base as to rob the dead of his reputation) I am satisfied I could never have received so much honour in being thought the author of any poem, how excellent soever, as I shall be from the joining my imperfections with the merit and name of Shakespeare and Sir William Davenant.

QQQ 1669—John Dryden. From the Prologue to The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island As when a Tree’s cut down the secret root Lives under ground, and thence new Branches shoot; So, from old Shakespear’s honour’d dust, this day Springs up and buds a new reviving Play. Shakespear, who (taught by none) did first impart To Fletcher Wit, to labouring Johnson Art. He Monarch-like gave those his subjects law, And is that Nature which they paint and draw. Fletcher reach’d that which on his heights did grow, Whilst Johnson crept and gather’d all below. This did his Love, and this his Mirth digest: One imitates him most, the other best. If they have since out-writ all other men, ’Tis with the drops which fell from Shakespear’s Pen. The Storm which vanish’d on the Neighb’ring shore, Was taught by Shakespear’s Tempest first to roar. That innocence and beauty which did smile In Fletcher, grew on this Enchanted Isle. But Shakespear’s Magick could not copy’d be, Within that Circle none durst walk but he. I must confess ’twas bold, nor would you now, That liberty to vulgar Wits allow, Which works by Magick supernatural things: But Shakespear’s pow’r is sacred as a King’s.

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Those Legends from old Priest-hood were receiv’d, And he then writ, as people then believ’d. But, if for Shakespear we your grace implore, We for our Theatre shall want it more: Who by our dearth of Youths are forc’d t’ employ One of our Women to present a Boy. And that’s a transformation you will say Exceeding all the Magick in the Play. Let none expect in the last Act to find, Her Sex transform’d from man to Woman-kind. What e’re she was before the Play began, All you shall see of her is perfect man. Or if your fancy will be farther led, To find her Woman, it must be abed.

QQQ 1669—John Dryden and William Davenant. From The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island The career of Sir William Davenant (1606–1668), a poet, playwright, and theater manager, spanned the seventeenth century. He was active in the theater before and after the English Civil War and was appointed England’s poet laureate in 1638. William Shakespeare sometimes stopped in his father’s inn, and Davenant seemed to encourage rumors that he was Shakespeare’s illegitimate son.

[From Act I. Enter Prospero and Miranda.] Prospero: Miranda! where’s your Sister? Miranda: I left her looking from the pointed Rock, at the walk end, on the huge beat of Waters. Prospero: It is a dreadful object. Miranda: If by your Art, my dearest Father, you have put them in this roar, allay ’em quickly. Had I been any God of power, I would have sunk the Sea into the Earth, before it should the Vessel so have swallowed. Prospero: Collect your self, and tell your piteous heart, There’s no harm done. Miranda: O woe the day! Prospero: There is no harm: I have done nothing but in care of thee,

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My Daughter, and thy pretty Sister: You both are ignorant of what you are, Not knowing whence I am, nor that I’m more Than Prospero, Master of a narrow Cell, And thy unhappy Father. Miranda: I ne’re indeavour’d to know more than you were pleas’d to tell me. Prospero: I should inform thee farther: wipe thou thine Eyes, have comfort; the direful spectacle of the wrack, which touch’d the very virtue of compassion in thee, I have with such a pity safely order’d, that not one creature in the Ship is lost. Miranda: You often, Sir, began to tell me what I am, But then you stopt. Prospero: The hour’s now come; Obey, and be attentive, Canst thou remember a time before we came into this Cell? I do not think thou canst, for then thou wert not full three years old. Miranda: Certainly I can, Sir. Prospero: Tell me the image then of any thing which thou dost keep in thy remembrance still. Miranda: Sir, had I not four or five Women once that tended me? Prospero: Thou hadst, and more, Miranda: what see’st thou else in the dark back-ward, and abyss of Time? If thou remembrest ought e’re thou cam’st here, then, how thou cam’st thou may’st remember too. Miranda: Sir, that I do not. Prospero: Fifteen Years since, Miranda, thy Father was the Duke of Millan, and a Prince of power. Miranda: Sir, are not you my Father? Prospero: Thy Mother was all virtue, and she said, thou wast my Daughter, and thy Sister too. Miranda: O Heavens! what foul play had we, that we hither came, or was’t a blessing that we did? Prospero: Both, both, my Girl. Miranda: How my heart bleeds to think what you have suffer’d. But, Sir, I pray proceed. Prospero: My Brother, and thy Uncle, call’d Antonio, to whom I trusted then the manage of my State, while I was wrap’d with secret Studies: That false Uncle (do’st thou attend me Child?) Miranda: Sir, most heedfully. Prospero: Having attain’d the craft of granting suits, and of denying them; whom to advance, or lop, for over-toping, soon was grown the Ivy which did hide my Princely Trunck, and suckt my verdure out: thou attend’st not.

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Miranda: O good Sir, I do. Prospero: I thus neglecting worldly ends, and bent to closeness, and the bettering of my mind, wak’d in my false Brother an evil Nature: He did believe He was indeed the Duke, because he then did execute the outward face of Soveraignty. Do’st thou still mark me? Miranda: Your story would cure deafness. Prospero: To have no screen between the part he plaid, and whom he plaid it for; he needs would be Absolute Millan, and Confederates (so dry he was for Sway) with Savoy’s Duke, to give him Tribute, and to do him homage. Miranda: False man! Prospero: This Duke of Savoy being an Enemy, To me inveterate, strait grants my Brother’s suit, And on a night Mated to his design, Antonio opened the Gates of Millan, and i’th’ dead of darkness, hurri’d me thence with thy young Sister, and thy crying self. Miranda: But wherefore did they not that hour destroy us? Prospero: They durst not, Girl, in Millan, For the love my people bore me; in short, they hurri’d us away to Savoy, and thence aboard a Bark at Nissa’s Port: bore us some Leagues to Sea, where they prepar’d a rotten Carkass of a Boat, not rigg’d, no Tackle, Sail, nor Mast; the very Rats instinctively had quit it: they hoisted us, to cry to Seas which roar’d to us; to sigh to Winds, whose pity sighing back again, did seem to do us loving wrong. Miranda: Alack! what trouble was I then to you? Prospero: Thou and thy Sister were two Cherubins, which did preserve me: you both did smile, infus’d with fortitude from Heaven. Miranda: How came we ashore? Prospero: By Providence Divine, Some food we had, and some fresh Water, which a Noble man of Savoy, called Gonzalo, appointed Master of that black design, gave us; with rich Garments, and all necessaries, which since have steaded much: and of his gentleness (knowing I lov’d my Books) he furnisht me from mine own Library, with Volumes which I prize above my Dukedom. Miranda: Would I might see that man. Prospero: Here in this Island we arriv’d, and here have I your Tutor been. But by my skill I find that my mid-Heaven doth depend on a most happy Star, whose influence if I now court not, but omit, my Fortunes will ever after droop: here cease more question, thou art inclin’d to sleep: ’tis a good dulness, and give it way; I know thou canst not chuse.

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[She falls asleep.] Come away my Spirit: I am ready now, approach My Ariel, Come. [Enter Ariel.] Ariel: All hail great Master, grave Sir, hail, I come to answer thy best pleasure, be it to fly, to swim, to shoot into the fire, to ride on the curl’d Clouds; to thy strong bidding, task Ariel and all his qualities. Prospero: Hast thou, Spirit, perform’d to point the Tempest that I bad thee? Ariel: To every Article. I boarded the Duke’s Ship, now on the Beak, now in the Waste, the Deck, in every Cabin; I flam’d amazement, and sometimes I seem’d to burn in many places on the Top-Mast, the Yards and Bore-sprit; I did flame distinctly. Prospero: May brave Spirit! Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil did not infect his Reason? Ariel: Not a soul But felt a Feaver of the mind, and play’d some tricks of desperation; all, but Mariners, plung’d in the foaming brine, and quit the Vessel: the Duke’s Son, Ferdinand, with hair upstairing (more like Reeds than Hair) was the first man that leap’d; cry’d, Hell is empty, and all the Devils are here. Prospero: Why that’s my Spirit; But was not this nigh Shore? Ariel: Close by my Master. Prospero: But, Ariel, are they safe? Ariel: Not a hair perisht. In Troops I have dispers’d them round this Isle. The Duke’s Son I have landed by himself, whom I have left warming the air with sighs, in an odde angle of the Isle, and sitting, his arms he folded in this sad knot. Prospero: Say how thou hast dispos’d the Mariners of the Duke’s Ship, and all the rest of the Fleet. Ariel: Safely in Harbour Is the Duke’s Ship, in the deep Nook, where once thou call’dst Me up at midnight to fetch Dew from the Still vext Bermoothes, there she’s hid, The Mariners all under hatches stow’d, Whom, with a charm, join’d to their suffer’d labour, I have left asleep, and for the rest o’th’ Fleet (Which I disperst) they all have met again, And are upon the Mediterranean Float, Bound sadly home for Italy;

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Supposing that they saw the Duke’s Ship wrackt, And his great person perish. Prospero: Ariel, thy charge Exactly is perform’d, but there’s more work: What is the time o’th’ day? Ariel: Past the mid-season. Prospero: At least two Glasses: the time tween six and now must by us both be spent most preciously. Ariel: Is there more toyl? since thou dost give me pains, let me remember thee what thou hast promis’d, which is not yet perform’d me. Prospero: How now, Moodie? What is’t thou canst demand? Ariel: My liberty. Prospero: Before the time be out? no more. Ariel: I prethee! Remember I have done thee faithful service, Told thee no lyes, made thee no mistakings, Serv’d without or grudge, or grumblings: Thou didst promise to bate me a full year. Prospero: Dost thou forget From what a torment I did free thee? Ariel: No. Prospero: Thou dost, and think’st it much to tread the Ooze Of the salt deep: To run against the sharp wind of the North, To do my business in the Veins of the Earth, When it is bak’d with Frost. Ariel: I do not, Sir. Prospero: Thou ly’st, malignant thing! hast thou forgot the foul Witch Sycorax, who with age and envy was grown into a Hoop? hast thou forgot her? Ariel: No Sir! Prospero: Thou hast; where was she born? speak, tell me. Ariel: Sir, in Argier. Prospero: Oh, was she so! I must Once every Month recount what thou hast been, which thou forgettest. This damn’d Witch Sycorax for mischiefs manifold, and sorceries too terrible to enter humane hearing, from Argier thou knowst was banisht: but for one thing she did, they would not take her life: is not this true? Ariel: I Sir. Prospero: This blew-ey’d Hag was hither brought with child, And here was left by th’ Saylors, thou, my slave,

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As thou report’st thy self, wast then her servant, And ’cause thou wast a spirit too delicate To act her earthy and ahborr’d commands; Refusing her grand Hests, she did confine thee, By help of her more potent Ministers, (In her unmitigable rage) into a cloven Pine, Within whose rist imprison’d, thou didst painfully Remain a dozen years; within which space she dy’d, And left thee there; where thou didst vent thy Groans, as fast as Mill-wheels strike. Then was this Isle (save for two Brats, which she did Litter here, the brutish Caliban, and his twin Sister, Two freckel’d-hag-born Whelps) not honour’d with A humane shape. Ariel: Yes! Caliban her Son, and Sycorax his Sister. Prospero: Dull thing, I say so; he, that Caliban, and she that Sycorax, whom I now keep in service. Thou best knowst what torment I did find thee in, thy groans did make Wolves howl, and penetrate the breasts of ever angry Bears, it was a torment to lay upon the damn’d, which Sycorax could ne’re again undo: It was my Art, when I arriv’d, and heard thee, that made the Pine to gape and let thee out. Ariel: I thank thee, Master. Prospero: If thou more murmurest, I will rend an Oak, And peg thee in his knotty Entrails, till thou Hast howld away twelve Winters more. Ariel: Pardon, Master, I will be correspondent to command, and be A gentle spirit. Prospero: Do so, and after two days I’le discharge thee. Ariel: That’s my noble Master. What shall I do? say? what? what shall I do? Prospero: Be subject to no sight but mine; invisible to Every eye-ball else: hence with diligence. My daughter wakes. Anon thou shalt know more.

1679—John Dryden. From the Preface to Troilus and Cressida To return once more to Shakespear, no man ever drew so many characters, or generally distinguished ’em better one another, excepting only Johnson: I

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will instance but in one, to show the copiousness of his invention; ’tis that of Calyban, or the monster in the Tempest. He seems there to have created a person which was not in Nature, a boldness which at first sight would appear intolerable; for he makes him a species of himself, begotten by an Incubus on Witch; but this, as I have elsewhere prov’d, is not wholly beyond the bounds of credibility, at least the vulgar still believe it. We have the separated notions of a spirit and of a witch; (and spirits, according to Plato, are vested with a subtil body; according to some of his followers, have different sexes) therefore as from the distinct apprehensions of a horse, and of a man, Imagination has form’d a Centaur, so from those of an Incubus and a Sorceress, Shakespear has produc’d his Monster. Whether or no his generation can be defended, I leave to Philosophy; but of this I am certain, the Poet has most judiciously furnish’d him with a person, a language, and a character which will suit him both by Father’s and Mother’s side: he has all the discontents and malice of a Witch, and of a Devil; besides a convenient proportion of the deadly sins; Gluttony, Sloth, and Lust, are manifest; the dejectedness of a slave is likewise given him, and the ignorance of one bred up in a Desart Island. His person is monstrous, as he is the product of unnatural lust; and his language is as hobgoblin as his person; in all things he is distinguished from other mortals.

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THE TEMPEST IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY q Whatever Spirit, careless of his Charge, His Post neglects, or leaves the Fair at large, Shall feel sharp Vengeance soon o’ertake his Sins, Be stop’d in Vials, or transfixt with Pins; Or plung’d in Lakes of bitter Washes lie, Or wedg’d whole Ages in a Bodkin’s Eye. —The Rape of the Lock, Canto II, 123ff.

These few lines of Alexander Pope’s mock-heroic epic reflect the fate of The Tempest in the eighteenth century. The reference is clearly to Ariel’s punishment at the hand of Sycorax, of which Prospero reminds him and threatens to repeat should he become rebellious. While in Shakespeare’s play, Ariel was confined by Sycorax in an oak for refusing to perform acts of black magic, in Pope’s lines, the numerous spirits of the dressing table are threatened with confinement in perfume bottles and the eyes of needles should they fail to guard the lady who fashions herself at her vanity table. In the eighteenth century, The Tempest was often reduced to a similarly opulent spectacle on the stage. Late in the century, the former theater inspector Edward Capell acknowledged the difference between his century and Shakespeare’s age in his annotations of The Tempest. The advances in stage mechanics and special effects, he believed, had limited the imaginative freedom of the playwrights of his day. While The Tempest as Shakespeare wrote it was rarely performed during the eighteenth century, the play continued to enjoy the success it had achieved in the seventeenth century in its several adaptations. These were usually derived more from The Enchanted Isle, Davenant and Dryden’s adaptation, than from Shakespeare’s original. The play was most often performed as a grand extravaganza with music, scenery, and spectacular effects. Perhaps the most astonishing version was presented by John Kemble in 1789 at the Drury Lane Theater. Kemble’s Tempest joined together parts of all the preceding versions.

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As successful as the adaptations were with eighteenth-century audiences, they did not always please critics. For instance, Charles Gildon, writing in 1710, admired Shakespeare’s original for its poetry and for the way it conformed to Aristotle’s dramatic criteria, known as “the unities.” Gildon demonstrated that The Tempest observes the unities of time (everything happens in a single day), of place (everything happens on Prospero’s island), and of action (Prospero brings his foes under his power and forgives them for the wrongs they have done him). But Gildon found much to criticize or ridicule in The Enchanted Island in what he mockingly referred to as Davenant and Dryden’s “corrections,” especially their additions of characters and scenes and their alterations of Shakespeare’s language when they did retain it. Criticism of The Tempest throughout the century came most often from textual editors such as Nicolas Rowe (writing in 1709), Alexander Pope, (1723–1725), Lewis Theobald (1733), Samuel Johnson (1765), George Steevens (1773), Edward Capell (1780), and Edmond Malone (1790). All of these editors attempted to give eighteenth-century readers the most accurate text of The Tempest, as well as all of Shakespeare’s other plays, by collating earlier texts, correcting them when they seemed wrong, and annotating them. Because the original, printed in the 1623 Folio, was well prepared, The Tempest needed less textual correction than many of the other plays did. There were a few minor controversies, however. For example, Lewis Theobald assigned a certain speech of Miranda’s to Prospero, following one of John Dryden’s alterations; both men considered it too rough for Miranda. Later editors have reversed his “correction” in the interest of allowing Miranda the fullness of her own personality. Many of the editors who prepared editions of The Tempest also offered their own assessments of the plays. Rowe, like Gildon, was skeptical of seventeenthcentury alterations of the original play and admired both Shakespeare’s imaginative flair and his faithfulness to the classical unities. Joseph Warton (1753–1754) similarly approved of The Tempest’s adherence to the unities and celebrated its “pleasing extravagance.” He also praised the portrayal of the play’s characters, who, in his view, demonstrated internal consistency despite their fantastical setting. The most famous of the eighteenth-century editors to turn his attention to Shakespeare’s plays was Samuel Johnson, who was the most important critic of his century. In examining The Tempest, Johnson focused his attention on the nature of Ariel’s songs and on particular details—for example, analyzing the roots of Caliban’s language. Johnson praised the play in general for its authenticity, despite the outlandish nature of its plot and characters.

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1709—Nicolas Rowe. From Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear Nicholas Rowe (1674–1718) was an actor, dramatist, and, in 1715, poet laureate of England. His edition of Shakespeare’s works is said to mark the beginning of the modern Shakespeare text. Rowe also wrote a short account of Shakespeare’s life, as well as The Tragedy of Jane Shore; Written in Imitation of Shakespear’s Style.

But certainly the greatness of this Author’s Genius do’s no where so much appear, as where he gives his Imagination an entire Loose, and raises his Fancy to a flight above Mankind and the Limits of the visible World. Such are his Attempts in The Tempest, Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Macbeth and Hamlet. Of these, The Tempest, however it comes to be plac’d the first by the former Publishers of his Works, can never have been the first written by him: It seems to me as perfect in its Kind, as almost any thing we have of his. One may observe, that the Unities are kept here with an Exactness uncommon to the Liberties of his Writing: Tho’ that was what, I suppose, he valu’d himself least upon, since his Excellencies were all of another Kind. I am very sensible that he do’s, in this Play, depart too much from that likeness to Truth which ought to be observ’d in these sort of Writings; yet he do’s it so very finely, that one is easily drawn in to have more Faith for his sake, than Reason does well allow of. His Magick has something in it very Solemn and very Poetical: And that extravagant Character of Caliban is mighty well sustain’d, shews a wonderful Invention in the Author, who could strike out such a particular wild Image, and is certainly one of the finest and most uncommon Grotesques that was ever seen. The Observation, which I have been inform’d three very great Men concurr’d in making upon this Part, was extremely just. That Shakespear had not only found out a new Character in his Caliban, but had also devis’d and adapted a new manner of Language for that Character. Among the particular Beauties of this Piece, I think one may be allow’d to point out the Tale of Prospero in the First Act; his Speech to Ferdinand in the Fourth, upon the breaking up the Masque of Juno and Ceres; and that in the Fifth, where he dissolves his Charms, and resolves to break his Magick Rod. This Play has been alter’d by Sir William D’Avenant and Mr. Dryden; and tho’ I won’t Arraign the Judgment of those two great Men, yet I think I may be allow’d to say, that there are some things left out by them, that might, and even ought to have been kept in. Mr. Dryden was an Admirer of our Author, and, indeed, he owed him a great deal, as those who have read them both may very easily observe.

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1710—Charles Gildon. From “Remarks on the Plays of Shakespear,” in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear Charles Gildon (1665–1724) was a translator, biographer, essayist, playwright, and poet. He wrote a series of notes and essays to accompany Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare, providing the first extensive commentaries of the plays. Gildon counted among his literary enemies Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift.

I can’t find that this Plot [of The Tempest] was taken from any Novel. . . . But it does not at all follow that there was no such Story in any of the Books of his Time which might never reach our Age, nor is it of much Importance. Tho’ the Fable of this Play must come short of Perfection in some particulars yet I must say this, that we have few on the English Stage that can compare with it for Excellence. For first it is the Imitation of the Action, i.e. The Restoration of Prospero to his Dutchy of Milan. The Action is of a just Extent, for it has a Beginning, Middle and End. “The casting away of the K. of Naples, Antonio, &c. on the Enchanted Island is plainly the Beginning, since to this there is nothing necessary to be before; it is the Sequel, indeed, of something else, but not the Effect. Thus their being cast on the Coast produces all that happens to them till the Discovery, which is the Middle; and when Prospero is reconciled by their Sufferings, and his Passions abated, the Middle which is their Sufferingsproduces the End in the Reconciliation of the Parties. Here is likewise in this Fable a Peripetie and Discovery. For the State, Condition, and Fortune of the King is chang’d from the extremist Misery to Happiness by the Discovery of Prospero and Ferdinand. ’Tis true the Discovery of Prospero is not so fine as that of Ulysses by the Nurse, but it is e’ry whit as good as the Discovery that Ulysses makes of himself to the Shepherds. There is a perfect Unity in the Action and in the Time, which tho’ a little confusedly express’d (which I attribute to the repeated Errors of the Editors, not to Shakespeare) yet it is concluded by Alonso and the Sailors to be but three Hours. . . . The whole Time from the raising the Storm to the End of the Play is but six Hours. The Play plainly opens at the very End of the Storm, so that we cannot suppose it more than three Hours and a half; which is far more Regular in that Particular than any that I know of on the Stage. The Unity of Place is not quite so regular, and yet we have few Plays that excell it even in this Particular. But if the Scene of the Storm were out, and which has very little to do there, the Place wou’d be brought into much a less Compass, and the several Scenes may very well be allow’d to be reasonably suppos’d pretty contiguous. At least when two Gentlemen set themselves to alter a Poet of Shakespeare’s Genius, one wou’d expect that they shou’d endeavour to correct his Errors, not to add more. It had been extremely easy for Sir William and Mr.

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Dryden to have remedy’d this Particular, which they have not at all attempted, nay they have added nothing but what makes their Composition not only much less perfect but infinitely more Extravagant than this Poem which they pretend to alter; as I shall show when I come to the Characters. Shakespeare had met with this Fortune in many of his Plays, while Mr. D----y, [D’Urfey] and Mr. C--b-r [Cibber] have only given us their wise Whimseys for what they blotted out of the Poet. The Pretenders to alter this Poet shou’d never meddle with him unless they cou’d mend his Fable and Conduct, since they can never give us the Manners, Sentiments, Passions, and Diction finer and more perfect than they find them in the Original. As the Fable has all these Advantages so is the Conduct of the Play very regular. Aristotle divides the Parts of Quantity of a Play into four Parts, which he call the Prologue, the Episode, the Exode, and the Chorus. By the Prologue he does not mean what is nowadays spoke before the Play and has seldom any Relation to the Play, and will therefore serve any other Play as well as that to which it is spoken; but by the Prologue here is understood all our first Act, and is to explain to the Audience not only what concerns the Subject of the Poem but what is proper and necessary, and makes a true Part of it. Thus Prospero, to satisfy his Daughter of the Cause of his raising the Storm, very artfully lets the Audience know the material part of his History which past before that Hour, and that necessarily: for it was not only natural for Miranda to enquire into the Cause of so terrible a Storm, the Effects of which had extremely mov’d her Compassion, and the Work that was going to be done by Prospero seems to mark out that as the only proper time that he cou’d ever have related his Fortunes to her and inform her of her Condition, that he had now got all his Enemies into his Hands. ’tis true this Narration may seem a little too calm and that it had been more Dramatic had it been told in a Passion, but if we consider it the Story as Prospero tells it is not without a Pathos. And if this first Narration cou’d be brought under this Censure yet the second is as far from it, being very artfully thrown into a sort of Passion or Anger against Ariel, and is therefore truly Dramatic, for in the Drama indeed there shou’d be very little that is not Action and Passion. It was very necessary likewise that when the Poet was giving the Audience a Creature of his own Formation he shou’d let them know whence he sprung, his very Origin preparing us for a Character so much out of the Way and makes us expect that Language from him which he utters. But there being still some things done which fell not into the Knowledge of Prospero and yet were necessary to be known to the Audience, the Poet, in the first Scene of the second Act, makes the shipwreck’d Princes discover it very judiciously. The next to the Prologue is the Episode, which was all that us’d formerly to go betwixt the four Choruses, which with us is the second, third, and fourth Act; that is, it contains all the Subject of the Play, or rather the Intrigues and Plot till the Unravelling. And the Exode, which was all that came after the last

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singing of the Chorus, contain’d the Perepetie and Discovery or the unravelling of the Plot, which answered our fifth Act and is the Unravelling or Catastrophe of the Piece. This division of Aristotle is perfectly observ’d by Shakespeare in the Conduct of this Play of the Tempest. For, as we have seen, the first Act Discovers all that was necessary for the Audience to know of the Story that happen’d before the Commencement of the Action of the Play, and that in an admirable and judicious Manner. Next, all the Intrigue of the Play, as the several Adventures and Torments of the King, the uniting the Hearts of Miranda and Ferdinand, and the Attempts of the Mob Characters, make up the second, third, and fourth Acts. The fifth is wholly employ’d in the Discovery and Perepetie, or in the Unravelling of the Plot, restoring Tranquility to all the Dramatic Persons. The Scene likewise is generally unbroken; especially in the first, fourth, and fifth, they are perfectly entire. The Manners are every way just; they are well-Mark’d, and Convenient, and equal (there is no room here for the Likeness, the Story being a Fiction). Thus we find every one perfectly distinct from the other. Caliban, as born of a Witch, shews his Original Malice, ill Nature, Sordidness, and Villany. Antonio is always Ambitious and Treacherous, and even there promoting and persuading Sebastian to the committing the same unnatural Act against his Brother that he had against Prospero, with his Aggravation of adding Fratricide to Usurpation. The Sentiments are every where the just Effect of the Manners, and the Diction generally just and elegant, as we shall see in those beautiful Thoughts I shall add to my Remarks on this Play. But I can’t leave my general Consideration of this Play till I have added a Word about the most questionable Part of it, and that is the Magic or Sorcery. Those who make this a Fault in our Poet know little of the Matter, for it is sufficient for him to go upon received Notions, no Matter whether Philosophically or absolutely true or not. Shakespeare liv’d in an Age not so remote from a Time in which the Notion of Spirits and Conjurers and the strange and wonderful Power of Magic, but that it was almost an article of faith among the many. . . .

QQQ 1733—Lewis Theobald. From The Works of Shakespeare, Collated with the Oldest Copies, and Corrected, with Notes, Exemplary and Critical Lewis Theobald (1688–1744), an author and editor, contributed to the development of serious editing of Shakespeare. His contemporary and rival Alexander Pope, who was the principal object of Theobald’s

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criticism, lampooned Theobald in the mock epic The Dunciad. Nonetheless, Pope incorporated many of Theobald’s emendations to his own edition of Shakespeare’s works.

In all the printed Edition [the speech in Act 1, scene 2, beginning “Abhorrèd slave,” at line 351] is given to Miranda; but I am persuaded, the Author never design’d it for her. In the first place, ’tis probable Prospero taught Caliban to speak, rather than left that Office to his Daughter; in the next Place, as Prospero was here rating Caliban it would be a great Impropriety for her to take the Discipline out of his hands, and indeed in some sort an Indecency in her to reply to what Caliban last was speaking of. Mr. Dryden, I observe, in his Alteration of this Play, has judiciously placed this Speech to Prospero. I can easily guess that the change was first deriv’d from the Players, who not loving that any Character should stand too long silent on the stage, to obviate that inconvenience with Regard to Miranda clap’d this Speech to her Part.

QQQ 1753–1754—Joseph Warton. “Observations on The Tempest of Shakespeare” and “Observations on The Tempest Concluded,” from The Adventurer Joseph Warton (1722–1800) was a poet and critic. A champion of the imagination, he is often seen as a precursor to the Romantic movement. Like his contemporary Samuel Johnson, Warton wrote in the literary publications of his day, including The Adventurer; the following extracts are from issues 93 and 97.

Of all the plays of Shakespeare, The Tempest is the most striking instance of his creative power. He has there given the reins to his boundless imagination, and has carried the romantic, the wonderful, and the wild, to the most pleasing extravagance. The scene is a desolate island; and the characters the most new and singular that can well be conceived: a prince who practises magic, an attendant spirit, a monster the son of a witch, and a young lady who had been brought to this solitude in her infancy, and had never beheld a man except her father. As I have affirmed that Shakespeare’s chief excellence is the consistency of his characters, I will exemplify the truth of this remark, by pointing out some master-strokes of this nature in the drama before us. The poet artfully acquaints us that Prospero is a magician, by the very first words which his daughter Miranda speaks to him:

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If by your art, my dearest father, you have Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them. [I. ii. 1–2] which intimate that the tempest described in the preceding scene, was the effect of Prospero’s power. The manner in which he was driven from his dukedom of Milan, and landed afterward on this solitary island, accompanied only by his daughter, is immediately introduced in a short and natural narration. The officers of his attendant Spirit, Ariel, are enumerated with amazing wildness of fancy, and yet with equal propriety: his employment is said to be, To tread the ooze Of the salt deep; To run upon the sharp wind of the north; To do—business in the veins o’ th’ earth, When it is bak’d with frost; to dive into the fire; to ride On the curl’d clouds. [I. ii. 252–56, 191–92] ... Ariel, being one of those elves or spirits, “whose pastime is to make midnight mushrooms, and who rejoice to listen to the solemn curfew” [V. i. 38–40]; by whose assistance Prospero has bedimm’d the sun at noon-tide, And ’twixt the green sea and the azur’d vault, Set roaring war; [V. i. 43–4] has a set of ideas and images peculiar to his station and office; a beauty of the same kind with that which is so justly admired in the Adam [in Paradise Lost] of Milton, whose manners and sentiments are all Paradisaical. How delightfully and how suitably to his character, are the habitations and pastimes of this invisible being pointed out in the following exquisite song! Where the bee sucks, there suck I: In a cowslip’s bell I lie; There I couch when owls do cry. On the bat’s back I do fly, After sun-set merrily. [V. i. 88–92]

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. . . But the poet rises still higher in his managment of the character of Ariel, by making a moral use of it, that is, I think, incomparable, and the greatest effort of his art. Ariel informs Prospero, that he has fulfilled his orders, and punished his brother and companions so severely, that if he himself was now to behold their sufferings, he would greatly compassionate them. To which Prospero answers, Dost thou think so, Spirit? Ariel. Mine would, Sir, were I human. Prospero. And mine shall. [V. ii. 19–20] He then takes occasion, with wonderful dexterity and humanity, to draw an argument from the incorporeality of Ariel, for the justice and necessity of pity and forgiveness: Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions; and shall not myself, One of their kind, that relish all as sharply, Passion’d as they, be kindlier mov’d than thou art? [V. i. 21–4] The poet is a more powerful magician than his own Prospero: we are transported into fairy land; we are wrapt in a delicious dream, from which it is misery to be disturbed; all around is enchantment! The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. [III. ii. 135ff.] . . . “Whoever ventures,” says Horace, “to form a character totally original, let him endeavour to preserve it with uniformity and consistency; but the formation of an original character is a work of great difficulty and hazard.” In this arduous and uncommon task, however, Shakespeare has wonderfully succeeded in his Tempest: the monster Calyban is the creature of his own imagination, in the formation of which he could derive no assistance from observation or experience. Calyban is the son of a witch, begotten by a demon: the sorceries of his mother were so terrible, that her countrymen banished her into this desert island, as unfit for human society: in conformity, therefore, to this diabolical propagation, he is represented as a prodigy of cruelty, malice, pride, ignorance, idleness, gluttony, and lust. He is introduced with great propriety, cursing Prospero and Miranda,

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whom he had endeavoured to defile; and his execrations are artfully contrived to have reference to the occupation of his mother: As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed, With raven’s feather, from unwholesome fen, Drop on you both! All the charms Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you! [I. ii. 321–23, 339–40] His kindness is, afterward, expressed as much in character, as his hatred, by an enumeration of offices, that could be of value only in a desolate island, and in the estimation of a savage: I pr’ythee, let me bring thee where crabs grow; And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts,. . . . I’ll shew thee the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries; I’ll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough. [II. ii. 167ff., 160–61] Which last is, indeed, a circumstance of great use, in a place, where to be defended from the cold was neither easy nor usual; and it has a farther peculiar beauty, because the gathering wood was the occupation to which Caliban was subjected by Prospero, who, therefore, deemed it a service of high importance. The gross ignorance of this monster is represented with delicate judgment: he knew not the names of the sun and moon, which he calls the bigger light and the less; and he believes that Stephano was the man in the moon, whom his mistress had often shewn him: and when Prospero reminds him that he first taught him to pronounce articulately, his answer is full of malevolence and rage: You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse: [I. ii. 363–64] the properest return for such a fiend to make for such a favour. The spirits whom he supposes to be employed by Prospero perpetually to torment him, and the many forms and different methods they take for this purpose, are described with the utmost liveliness and force of fancy: Sometimes like apes, that moe and chatter at me, And after bite me; then like hedge-hogs, which Lie tumbling in my bare-foot way, and mount

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Their pricks at my foot-fall: sometimes am I All wound with adders, who, with cloven tongues, Do hiss me into madness. [II. ii. 9–14] It is scarcely possible for any speech to be more expressive of the manners and sentiments, than that in which our poet has painted the brutal barbarity and unfeeling savageness of this son of Sycorax, by making him enumerate, with a kind of horrible delight, the various ways in which it was possible for the drunken sailors to surprise and kill his master: There thou may’st brain him, Having first seiz’d his books; or with a log Batter his skull; or paunch him with a stake; Or cut his wezand with thy knife. [III. ii. 88–91] He adds, in allusion to his own abominable attempt, “Above all, be sure to secure the daughter; whose beauty,” he tells them, “is incomparable.” The charms of Miranda could not be more exalted, than by extorting this testimony from so insensible a monster. Shakespeare seems to be the only poet who possesses the power of uniting poetry with propriety of character; of which I know not an instance more striking, than the image Caliban makes use of to express silence, which is at once highly poetical, and exactly suited to the wildness of the speaker: Pray you tread softly, that the blind mole may not Hear a foot-fall. [IV. i. 194–95] I always lament that our author has not preserved this fierce and implacable spirit in Caliban to the end of the play; instead of which, he has, I think, injudiciously put into his mouth, words that imply repentance and understanding. I’ll be wise hereafter, And seek for grace. What a thrice double ass Was I, to take this drunkard for a God, And worship this dull fool! [V. i. 295–98] It must not be forgotten, that Shakespeare has artfully taken occasion, from this extraordinary character, which is finely contrasted to the mildness

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and obedience of Ariel, obliquely to satirize the prevailing passion for new and wonderful sights, which has rendered the English so ridiculous. “Were I in England now,” says Trinculo, on first discovering Caliban, “and had but this fish painted, not an holiday-fool there but would give a piece of silver.—When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian” [II. ii. 27–33]. . . . The resentment of Prospero for the matchless cruelty and wicked usurpation of his brother; his parental affection and solicitude for the welfare of his daughter, the heiress of his dukedom; and the awful solemnity of his character, as a skilful magician; are all along preserved with equal consistency, dignity, and decorum. One part of his behaviour deserves to be particularly pointed out: during the exhibition of a mask with which he had ordered Ariel to entertain Ferdinand and Miranda, he starts suddenly, from the recollection of the conspiracy of Caliban, and his confederates, against his life, and dismisses his attendant spirits, who instantly vanish to a hollow and confused noise. He appears to be greatly moved; and suitably to this agitation of mind, which his danger has excited, he takes occasion, from the sudden disappearance of the visionary scene, to moralize on the dissolution of all things: These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits; and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a wreck behind. [IV. i. 148–56] To these noble images he adds a short but comprehensive observation on human life, not excelled by any passage of the moral and sententious Euripides: We are such stuff As dreams are made of; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep! [IV. i. 156–58] Thus admirably is a uniformity of character, that leading beauty in dramatic poetry, preserved throughout the Tempest. And it may be farther remarked, that the unities of action, of place, and of time, are in this play, though almost constantly violated by Shakespeare, exactly observed. The action is one, great, and

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entire, the restoration of Prospero to his dukedom: this business is transacted in the compass of a small island, and in or near the cave of Prospero; though, indeed, it had been more artful and regular, to have confined it to this single spot: and the time which the action takes up, is only equal to that of the representation; an excellence, which ought always to be aimed at in every well-conducted fable; and for the want of which, a variety of the most entertaining incidents can scarcely atone.

QQQ 1765—Samuel Johnson. From The Works of Mr. William Shakespear Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) is thought by many to be the greatest commentator on Shakespeare. He was a poet, critic, prose writer, lexicographer, editor, and a celebrated raconteur. Johnson’s edition of the works of Shakespeare contained some of his famous thoughts on the plays. The following comments are taken from annotations he supplied to his text of The Tempest.

[On the system of enchantment in the play] . . . That the character and conduct of Prospero may be understood, something must be known of the system of enchantment, which supplied all the marvellous found in the romances of the middle ages. This system seems to be founded on the opinion that the fallen spirits, having different degrees of guilt, had different habitations allotted them at their expulsion, some being confined in hell, “some” (as Hooker, who delivers the opinion of our poet’s age, expresses it) “dispersed in air, some on earth, some in water, others in caves, dens, or minerals under the earth.” Of these, some were more malignant and mischievous than others. The earthy spirits seem to have been thought the most depraved, and the aerial the least vitiated. Thus Prospero observes of Ariel: Thou wast a spirit too delicate To act her earthy and abhorr’d commands. Over these spirits a power might be obtained by certain rites performed or charms learned. This power was called “The Black Art”, or “Knowledge of Enchantment”. The enchanter being (as king James observes in his “Demonology”) one “who commands the devil, whereas the witch serves him”. Those who thought best of this art, the existence of which was, I am afraid, believed very seriously, held, that certain sounds and characters had a physical

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power over spirits, and compelled their agency; others who condemned the practice, which in reality was surely never practised, were of opinion, with more reason, that the power of charms arose “only” from compact, and was no more than the spirits voluntar[il]y allowed them for the seduction of man. The art was held by all, though not equally criminal, yet unlawful, and therefore Causabon, speaking of one who had commerce with spirits, blames him, though he imagines him “one of the best kind who dealt with them by way of command.” Thus Prospero repents of his art in the last scene. The spirits were always considered as in some measure enslaved to the enchanter, at least for a time, and as serving with unwillingness, therefore Ariel so often begs for liberty; and Caliban observes, that the spirits serve Prospero with no good will, but “hate him rootedly.” —Of these trifles enough. [On Caliban’s new language] Whence these critics derived the notion of a new language appropriated to Caliban, I cannot find: they certainly mistook brutality of sentiment for uncouthness of words. Caliban had learned to speak of Prospero and his daughter, he had no names for the sun and moon before their arrival, and could not have invented a language of his own without more understanding than Shakespeare has thought it proper to bestow upon him. His diction is indeed somewhat clouded by the gloominess of his temper, and the malignity of his purposes; but let any other being entertain the same thoughts, and he will find them easily issue in the same expressions. [On the song “Full fathom five thy father lies”] I know not whether Dr. Warburton has very successfully defended these songs from Gildon’s accusation. Ariel’s lays, however seasonable and efficacious, must be allowed to be of no supernatural dignity or elegance, they express nothing great, nor reveal any thing above mortal discovery. The reason for which Ariel is introduced thus trifling is, that he and his companions are evidently of the fairy kind, an order of beings to which tradition has always ascribed a sort of diminutive agency, powerful but ludicrous, a humorous and frolick controlment of nature, well expressed by the songs of Ariel. [Johnson’s general observation] It is observed of The Tempest, that its plan is regular. . . . I think [that is] an accidental effect of the story, not intended or regarded by our author. But whatever might be Shakespeare’s intention in forming or adopting the plot, he has made it instrumental to the production of many characters, diversified with boundless invention, and preserved with profound skill in nature, extensive knowledge of opinions, and accurate observation of life. In a single drama are

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here exhibited princes, courtiers, and sailors, all speaking in their real characters. There is the agency of airy spirits, and of an earthly goblin. The operation of magick, the tumults of a storm, the adventures of a desert island, the native effusion of untaught affection, the punishment of guilt, and the final happiness of the pair for whom our passions and reason are equally interested.

QQQ 1780—Edward Capell. From Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare Edward Capell (1713–1781) was Deputy Inspector of Plays beginning in 1737. Capell spent 15 years preparing his master edition of Shakespeare’s plays, focusing on historic details of staging and production.

. . . No well-advis’d poet will think, at this time of day, of bringing into his piece an action like to that of this [first] scene [of The Tempest]; as, under every advantage that stages now derive from their scenery, or can ever derive were mechanism even push’d to the utmost, such action will want the power of imposing in that degree that we ourselves have made necessary. But this touch’d not Shakespeare, his imposing was not by eyes but by ears; the former his stage deny’d him . . . and therefore left him at liberty to fix upon any action that lik’d him, and that suited his plot. The other mode of imposing he has been at pains to provide for, by drawing his sea-characters justly, and by putting into their mouths the proper terms of their calling.

QQQ

THE TEMPEST IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY q Eighteenth-century producers, adapters, and critics of The Tempest and its successors had concentrated on the story’s exterior aspects and seen the play as a vehicle for extravagant spectacle. By contrast, nineteenth-century writers on The Tempest focused more on its interior depths. The great critic William Hazlitt, for instance, thought of the play as a poem to be staged in the mind rather than as a theatrical work to be performed on stage. Writing in 1822, Hazlitt’s contemporary Charles Lamb deplored the exaggerated staging of The Enchanted Island, Davenant and Dryden’s seventeenthcentury adaptation of The Tempest. To Lamb, such a literal representation was not credible, and he asserted the superiority of the reader’s imagination in evoking the story’s fanciful world. Commenting on a London performance of The Tempest in July 1857, an anonymous reviewer in The Athenaeum (a weekly magazine) lamented another problem caused by complicated staging: the long, dull pauses that audiences had to endure as sets were changed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge expressed his own revulsion at stagings of The Tempest, arguing that “Shakespeare’s works may be said to have been recited rather than acted—that is to say, description and narration supplied the place of visual exhibition.” According to Coleridge, excessive trappings prevented the play from touching the viewer’s spirit. In this opinion, Coleridge was in agreement with A. W. Schlegel, the German philologist and translator of Shakespeare. In 1809, Schlegel offered a close reading of The Tempest in his larger, historical study of world literature, concentrating on mood, structure, and characters. He saw “little action or progressive movement” in the play but much poetry and wisdom. Other nineteenth-century writers also made close studies of the characters’ qualities. One such was the critic Anna Brownell Jameson, a pioneer in the study of Shakespeare’s female characters, who wrote in 1832; she found Miranda particularly compelling. Some critics extended the approach to argue that Shakespeare himself emerged as a character in the play, behind the mask of Prospero. The idea of identifying Prospero with Shakespeare was first presented by a Scottish poet and critic named Thomas Campbell in 1838, when he said, 71

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Shakespeare, as if conscious that [The Tempest] would be his last [play], and as if inspired to typify himself, has made its hero a natural, dignified, and benevolent magician, who could conjure up spirits. . . . Shakespeare himself is Prospero, or rather a superior genius who commands both Prospero and Ariel. But the time was approaching when the potent sorcerer was to break his staff. Writing in 1875, Edward Dowden identified the qualities in Prospero that supported the character’s identification with Shakespeare. In 1880, the poet A. C. Swinburne agreed that the play’s place in Shakespeare’s canon—it was the last play he wrote—contributed to the notion that Prospero represented Shakespeare. Swinburne himself regarded the idea as graceful, but unlikely. Others creative writers who examined the play in the nineteenth century included the playwright George Bernard Shaw. Shaw, who considered himself in may ways Shakespeare’s better, nonetheless praised Shakespeare’s language in an article published in 1897. He also extolled the virtues of spare rather than spectacular productions: “The reason is, not that a man can always imagine things more vividly than art can present them to him, but that it takes an altogether extraordinary degree of art to compete with the pictures which the imagination makes when it is stimulated by such potent forces as the maternal instinct, superstitious awe, or the poetry of Shakespeare.” The great critic and thinker John Ruskin also examined The Tempest, which inspired in him thoughts on the nature of slavery. In the nineteenth century, The Tempest served not only as a source of adaptations but also as an inspiration for truly creative works. In his dramatic monologue “Caliban upon Setebos,” the poet Robert Browning explored the concept of deity. (Setebos is the name of Caliban’s god.) Written in 1864, the monologue reveals how Caliban projects his own earth-based nature upon his idea of god. Indirectly, Browning’s monologue raises the question of whether people do this as well. In 1878, the French political philosopher Ernest Renan wrote a play called Caliban that is neither an adaptation nor a revision of The Tempest. Rather, it is an intellectual discourse (in dramatic form) opposing the culture of democracy then emerging. Renan’s Caliban uses the characters of Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban as archetypes for the aristocratic ruler, the ideal of beauty and culture, and the industrialized masses.

1809—August Wilhelm Schlegel. From Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) was a German critic and poet. One of the most influential figures of the German Romantic movement, he translated a number of Shakespeare’s plays into German.

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The Tempest has little action or progressive movement; the union of Ferdinand and Miranda is settled at their first interview, and Prospero merely throws apparent obstacles in their way; the shipwrecked band go leisurely about the island; the attempts of Sebastian and Antonio on the life of the King of Naples, and the plot of Caliban and the drunken sailors against Prospero, are nothing but a feint, for we foresee that they will be completely frustrated by the magical skill of the latter; nothing remains therefore but the punishment of the guilty by dreadful sights which harrow up their consciences, and then the discovery and final reconciliation. Yet this want of movement is so admirably concealed by the most varied display of the fascinations of poetry, and the exhilaration of mirth, the details of the execution are so very attractive, that it requires no small degree of attention to perceive that the dénouement is, in some degree, anticipated in the exposition. The history of the loves of Ferdinand and Miranda, developed in a few short scenes, is enchantingly beautiful: an affecting union of chivalrous magnanimity on the one part, and on the other of the virgin openness of a heart which, brought up far from the world on an uninhabited island, has never learned to disguise its innocent movements. The wisdom of the princely hermit Prospero has a magical and mysterious air; the disagreeable impression left by the black falsehood of the two usurpers is softened by the honest gossiping of the old and faithful Gonzalo; Trinculo and Stephano, two good-for-nothing drunkards, find a worthy associate in Caliban; and Ariel hovers sweetly over the whole as the personified genius of the wonderful fable. Caliban has become a by-word as the strange creation of a poetical imagination. A mixture of gnome and savage, half daemon, half brute, in his behaviour we perceive at once the traces of his native disposition, and the influence of Prospero’s education. The latter could only unfold his understanding, without, in the slightest degree, taming his rooted malignity: it is as if the use of reason and human speech were communicated to an awkward ape. In inclination Caliban is maliciously cowardly, false, and base; and yet he is essentially different from the vulgar knaves of a civilized world, as portrayed occasionally by Shakespeare. He is rude, but not vulgar; he never falls into the prosaic and low familiarity of his drunken associates, for he is, in his way, a poetical being; he always speaks in verse. He has picked up every thing dissonant and thorny in language to compose out of it a vocabulary of his own; and of the whole variety of nature, the hateful, repulsive, and pettily deformed, have alone been impressed on his imagination. The magical world of spirits, which the staff of Prospero has assembled on the island, casts merely a faint reflection into his mind, as a ray of light which falls into a dark cave, incapable of communicating to it either heat or illumination, serves merely to set in motion the poisonous vapours. The delineation of this monster is throughout inconceivably consistent and profound, and, notwithstanding its hatefulness, by no means hurtful to our feelings, as the honour of human nature is left untouched.

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In the zephyr-like Ariel the image of air is not to be mistaken, his name even bears an allusion to it; as, on the other hand Caliban signifies the heavy element of earth. Yet they are neither of them simple, allegorical personifications but beings individually determined. In general we find in The Midsummer Night’s Dream, in The Tempest, in the magical part of Macbeth, and wherever Shakespeare avails himself of the popular belief in the invisible presence of spirits, and the possibility of coming in contact with them, a profound view of the inward life of nature and her mysterious springs, which, it is true, can never be altogether unknown to the genuine poet, as poetry is altogether incompatible with mechanical physics, but which few have possessed in an equal degree with Dante and himself.

QQQ 1811–1812—Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Lecture IX,” from The Lectures of 1811–1812 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was a great poet and critic who was, with William Wordsworth, one of the founders of English Romanticism. In collaboration with Wordsworth, he published Lyrical Ballads, which among other pieces contained his enduring poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Coleridge’s best-known critical work is Biographia Literaria.

Among the ideal plays, I will take The Tempest, by way of example. Various others might be mentioned, but it is impossible to go through every drama, and what I remark on The Tempest will apply to all Shakespeare’s productions of the same class. In this play Shakespeare has especially appealed to the imagination, and he has constructed a plot well adapted to the purpose. According to his scheme, he did not appeal to any sensuous impression (the word “sensuous” is authorised by Milton) of time and place, but to the imagination, and it is to be borne in mind, that of old, and as regards mere scenery, his works may be said to have been recited rather than acted—that is to say, description and narration supplied the place of visual exhibition: the audience was told to fancy that they saw what they only heard described; the painting was not in colours, but in words. This is particularly to be noted in the first scene—a storm and its confusion on board the king’s ship. The highest and the lowest characters are brought together, and with what excellence! Much of the genius of Shakespeare is displayed in these happy combinations—the highest and the lowest, the gayest

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and the saddest; he is not droll in one scene and melancholy in another, but often both the one and the other in the same scene. Laughter is made to swell the tear of sorrow, and to throw, as it were, a poetic light upon it, while the tear mingles tenderness with the laughter. Shakespeare has evinced the power, which above all other men he possessed, that of introducing the profoundest sentiments of wisdom, where they would be least expected, yet where they are most truly natural. One admirable secret of his art is, that separate speeches frequently do not appear to have been occasioned by those which preceded, and which are consequent upon each other, but to have arisen out of the peculiar character of the speaker. Before I go further, I may take the opportunity of explaining what is meant by mechanic and organic regularity. In the former the copy must appear as if it had come out of the same mould with the original; in the latter there is a law which all the parts obey, conforming themselves to the outward symbols and manifestations of the essential principle. If we look to the growth of trees, for instance, we shall observe that trees of the same kind vary considerably, according to the circumstances of soil, air, or position; yet we are able to decide at once whether they are oaks, elms, or poplars. So with Shakespeare’s characters: he shows us the life and principle of each being with organic regularity. The Boatswain, in the first scene of The Tempest, when the bonds of reverence are thrown off as a sense of danger impresses all, gives a loose to his feelings, and thus pours forth his vulgar mind to the old Counsellor: “Hence! What care these roarers for the name of King? To cabin: silence! trouble us not.” Gonzalo replies—“Good; yet remember whom thou hast aboard.” To which the Boatswain answers—“None that I more love than myself. You are a counsellor: if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more; use your authority: if you cannot, give thanks that you have lived so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if it so hap.—Cheerly, good hearts!—Out of our way, I say.” An ordinary dramatist would, after this speech, have represented Gonzalo as moralising, or saying something connected with the Boatswain’s language; for ordinary dramatists are not men of genius: they combine their ideas by association, or by logical affinity; but the vital writer, who makes men on the stage what they are in nature, in a moment transports himself into the very being of each personage, and, instead of cutting out artificial puppets, he brings before us the men themselves. Therefore, Gonzalo soliloquises,—“I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks, he hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good fate, to his hanging! make the

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rope of his destiny our cable, for our own doth little advantage. If he be not born to be hanged, our case is miserable.” In this part of the scene we see the true sailor with his contempt of danger, and the old counsellor with his high feeling, who, instead of condescending to notice the words just addressed to him, turns off, meditating with himself, and drawing some comfort to his own mind, by trifling with the ill expression of the boatswain’s face, founding upon it a hope of safety. Shakespeare had predetermined to make the plot of this play such as to involve a certain number of low characters, and at the beginning be pitched the note of the whole. The first scene was meant as a lively commencement of the story; the reader is prepared for something that is to be developed, and in the next scene he brings forward Prospero and Miranda. How is this done? By giving to his favourite character, Miranda, a sentence which at once expresses the violence and fury of the storm, such as it might appear to a witness on the land, and at the same time displays the tenderness of her feelings—the exquisite feelings of a female brought up in a desert, but with all the advantages of education, all that could be communicated by a wise and affectionate father. She possesses all the delicacy of innocence, yet with all the powers of her mind unweakened by the combats of life. Miranda exclaims: O! I have suffered With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel, Who had, no doubt, some noble creatures in her, Dash’d all to pieces. The doubt here intimated could have occurred to no mind but to that of Miranda, who had been bred up in the island with her father and a monster only: she did not know, as others do, what sort of creatures were in a ship; others never would have introduced it as a conjecture. This shows, that while Shakespeare is displaying his vast excellence, he never fails to insert some touch or other, which is not merely characteristic of the particular person, but combines two things—the person, and the circumstances acting upon the person. She proceeds: O! the cry did knock Against my very heart. Poor souls! they perish’d. Had I been any god of power, I would Have sunk the sea within the earth, or e’er It should the good ship so have swallow’d, and The fraughting souls within her.

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She still dwells upon that which was most wanting to the completeness of her nature—these fellow creatures from whom she appeared banished, with only one relict to keep them alive, not in her memory, but in her imagination. Another proof of excellent judgment in the poet, for I am now principally adverting to that point, is to be found in the preparation of the reader for what is to follow. Prospero is introduced, first in his magic robe, which, with the assistance of his daughter, he lays aside, and we then know him to be a being possessed of supernatural powers. He then instructs Miranda in the story of their arrival in the island, and this is conducted in such a manner, that the reader never conjectures the technical use the poet has made of the relation, by informing the auditor of what it is necessary for him to know. The next step is the warning by Prospero, that he means, for particular purposes, to lull his daughter to sleep; and here he exhibits the earliest and mildest proof of magical power. In ordinary and vulgar plays we should have had some person brought upon the stage, whom nobody knows or cares anything about, to let the audience into the secret. Prospero having cast a sleep upon his daughter, by that sleep stops the narrative at the very moment when it was necessary to break it off, in order to excite curiosity, and yet to give the memory and understanding sufficient to carry on the progress of the history uninterruptedly. Here I cannot help noticing a fine touch of Shakespeare’s knowledge of human nature, and generally of the great laws of the human mind: I mean Miranda’s infant remembrance. Prospero asks her— Canst thou remember A time before we came unto this cell? I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not Out three years old. Miranda answers, Certainly, sir, I can. Prospero inquires, By what? by any other house or person? Of any thing the image tell me, that Hath kept with thy remembrance. To which Miranda returns, ’Tis far off; And rather like a dream than an assurance

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That my remembrance warrants. Had I not Four or five women once, that tended me? This is exquisite! In general, our remembrances of early life arise from vivid colours, especially if we have seen them in motion: for instance, persons when grown up will remember a bright green door, seen when they were quite young; but Miranda, who was somewhat older, recollected four or five women who tended her. She might know men from her father, and her remembrance of the past might be worn out by the present object, but women she only knew by herself, by the contemplation of her own figure in the fountain, and she recalled to her mind what had been. It was not, that she had seen such and such grandees, or such and such peeresses, but she remembered to have seen something like the reflection of herself: it was not herself, and it brought back to her mind what she had seen most like herself. In my opinion the picturesque power displayed by Shakespeare, of all the poets that ever lived, is only equalled, if equalled, by Milton and Dante. The presence of genius is not shown in elaborating a picture: we have had many specimens of this sort of work in modern poems, where all is so dutchified, if I may use the word, by the most minute touches, that the reader naturally asks why words, and not painting, are used? I know a young lady of much taste, who observed, that in reading recent versified accounts of voyages and travels, she, by a sort of instinct, cast her eyes on the opposite page, for coloured prints of what was so patiently and punctually described. The power of poetry is, by a single word perhaps, to instil that energy into the mind, which compels the imagination to produce the picture. Prospero tells Miranda, One midnight, Fated to the purpose, did Antonio open The gates of Milan; and i’ the dead of darkness, The ministers for the purpose hurried thence Me, and thy crying self. Here, by introducing a single happy epithet, “crying,” in the last line, a complete picture is presented to the mind, and in the production of such pictures the power of genius consists. In reference to preparation, it will be observed that the storm, and all that precedes the tale, as well as the tale itself, serve to develop completely the main character of the drama, as well as the design of Prospero. The manner in which the heroine is charmed asleep fits us for what follows, goes beyond our ordinary belief, and gradually leads us to the appearance and disclosure of a being of the most fanciful and delicate texture, like Prospero, preternaturally gifted.

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In this way the entrance of Ariel, if not absolutely forethought by the reader, was foreshewn by the writer: in addition, we may remark, that the moral feeling called forth by the sweet words of Miranda, Alack, what trouble Was I then to you! in which she considered only the sufferings and sorrows of her father, puts the reader in a frame of mind to exert his imagination in favour of an object so innocent and interesting. The poet makes him wish that, if supernatural agency were to be employed, it should be used for a being so young and lovely. “The wish is father to the thought,” and Ariel is introduced. Here, what is called poetic faith is required and created, and our common notions of philosophy give way before it: this feeling may be said to be much stronger than historic faith, since for the exercise of poetic faith the mind is previously prepared. I make this remark, though somewhat digressive, in order to lead to a future subject of these lectures—the poems of Milton. When adverting to those, I shall have to explain farther the distinction between the two. Many Scriptural poems have been written with so much of Scripture in them, that what is not Scripture appears to be not true, and like mingling lies with the most sacred revelations. Now Milton, on the other hand, has taken for his subject that one point of Scripture of which we have the mere fact recorded, and upon this he has most judiciously constructed his whole fable. So of Shakespeare’s King Lear: we have little historic evidence to guide or confine us, and the few facts handed down to us, and admirably employed by the poet, are sufficient, while we read, to put an end to all doubt as to the credibility of the story. It is idle to say that this or that incident is improbable, because history, as far as it goes, tells us that the fact was so and so. Four or five lines in the Bible include the whole that is said of Milton’s story, and the Poet has called up that poetic faith, that conviction of the mind, which is necessary to make that seem true, which otherwise might have been deemed almost fabulous. But to return to The Tempest, and to the wondrous creation of Ariel. If a doubt could ever be entertained whether Shakespeare was a great poet, acting upon laws arising out of his own nature, and not without law, as has sometimes been idly asserted, that doubt must be removed by the character of Ariel. The very first words uttered by this being introduce the spirit, not as an angel, above man; not a gnome, or a fiend, below man; but while the poet gives him the faculties and the advantages of reason, he divests him of all mortal character, not positively, it is true, but negatively. In air he lives, from air he derives his being, in air he acts; and all his colours and properties seem to have been obtained from the rainbow and the skies. There is nothing about Ariel that cannot be conceived to exist either

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at sunrise or at sunset: hence all that belongs to Ariel belongs to the delight the mind is capable of receiving from the most lovely external appearances. His answers to Prospero are directly to the question, and nothing beyond; or where he expatiates, which is not unfrequently, it is to himself and upon his own delights, or upon the unnatural situation in which he is placed, though under a kindly power and to good ends, Shakespeare has properly made Ariel’s very first speech characteristic of him. After he has described the manner in which he had raised the storm and produced its harmless consequences, we find that Ariel is discontented—that he has been freed, it is true, from a cruel confinement, but still that he is bound to obey Prospero, and to execute any commands imposed upon him. We feel that such a state of bondage is almost unnatural to him, yet we see that it is delightful for him to be so employed. It is as if we were to command one of the winds in a different direction to that which nature dictates, or one of the waves, now rising and now sinking, to recede before it bursts upon the shore: such is the feeling we experience, when we learn that a being like Ariel is commanded to fulfil any mortal behest. When, however, Shakespeare contrasts the treatment of Ariel by Prospero with that of Sycorax, we are sensible that the liberated spirit ought to be grateful, and Ariel does feel and acknowledge the obligation; he immediately assumes the airy being, with a mind so elastically correspondent, that when once a feeling has passed from it, not a trace is left behind. Is there anything in nature from which Shakespeare caught the idea of this delicate and delightful being, with such child-like simplicity, yet with such preternatural powers? He is neither born of heaven, nor of earth; but, as it were, between both, like a May-blossom kept suspended in air by the fanning breeze, which prevents it from falling to the ground, and only finally, and by compulsion, touching earth. This reluctance of the Sylph to be under the command even of Prospero is kept up through the whole play, and in the exercise of his admirable judgment Shakespeare has availed himself of it, in order to give Ariel an interest in the event, looking forward to that moment when he was to gain his last and only reward—simple and eternal liberty. Another instance of admirable judgment and excellent preparation is to be found in the creature contrasted with Ariel—Caliban, who is described in such a manner by Prospero, as to lead us to expect the appearance of a foul, unnatural monster. He is not seen at once: his voice is heard; this is the preparation; he was too offensive to be seen first in all his deformity, and in nature we do not receive so much disgust from sound as from sight. After we have heard Caliban’s voice he does not enter, until Ariel has entered like a water-nymph. All the strength of contrast is thus acquired without any of the shock of abruptness, or of that unpleasant sensation, which we experience when the object presented is in any way hateful to our vision.

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The character of Caliban is wonderfully conceived: he is a sort of creature of the earth, as Ariel is a sort of creature of the air. He partakes of the qualities of the brute, but is distinguished from brutes in two ways—by having mere understanding without moral reason; and by not possessing the instincts which pertain to absolute animals. Still, Caliban is in some respects a noble being: the poet has raised him far above contempt: he is a man in the sense of the imagination: all the images he uses are drawn from nature, and are highly poetical; they fit in with the images of Ariel. Caliban gives us images from the earth, Ariel images from the air. Caliban talks of the difficulty of finding fresh water, of the situation of morasses, and of other circumstances which even brute instinct, without reason, could comprehend. No mean figure is employed, no mean passion displayed, beyond animal passion, and repugnance to command. The manner in which the lovers are introduced is equally wonderful, and it is the last point I shall now mention in reference to this, almost miraculous, drama. The same judgment is observable in every scene, still preparing, still inviting, and still gratifying, like a finished piece of music. I have omitted to notice one thing, and you must give me leave to advert to it before I proceed: I mean the conspiracy against the life of Alonzo. I want to shew you how well the poet prepares the feelings of the reader for this plot, which was to execute the most detestable of all crimes, and which, in another play, Shakespeare has called “the murder of sleep.” Antonio and Sebastian at first had no such intention; it was suggested by the magical sleep cast on Alonzo and Gonzalo; but they are previously introduced scoffing and scorning at what was said by others, without regard to age or situation—without any sense of admiration for the excellent truths they heard delivered, but giving themselves up entirely to the malignant and unsocial feeling, which induced them to listen to everything that was said, not for the sake of profiting by the learning and experience of others, but of hearing something that might gratify vanity and self-love, by making them believe that the person speaking was inferior to themselves. This, let me remark, is one of the grand characteristics of a villain; and it would not be so much a presentiment, as an anticipation of hell, for men to suppose that all mankind were as wicked as themselves, or might be so; if they were not too great fools. Pope, you are perhaps aware, objected to this conspiracy; but in my mind, if it could be omitted, the play would lose a charm which nothing could supply. Many, indeed innumerable, beautiful passages might be quoted from this play, independently of the astonishing scheme of its construction. Every body will call to mind the grandeur of the language of Prospero in that divine speech, where he takes leave of his magic art; and were I to indulge myself by repetitions of the kind, I should descend from the character of a lecturer to that of a mere reciter. Before I terminate, I may particularly recall one short passage, which has

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fallen under the very severe, but inconsiderate, censure of Pope and Arbuthnot, who pronounce it a piece of the grossest bombast. Prospero thus addresses his daughter, directing her attention to Ferdinand: The fringed curtains of thine eye advance, And say what thou seest yond. Taking these words as a periphrase of—“Look what is coming yonder,” it certainly may to some appear to border on the ridiculous, and to fall under the rule I formerly laid down—that whatever, without injury, can be translated into a foreign language in simple terms, ought to be in simple terms in the original language; but it is to be borne in mind, that different modes of expression frequently arise from difference of situation and education: a blackguard would use very different words, to express the same thing, to those a gentleman would employ, yet both would be natural and proper; difference of feeling gives rise to difference of language: a gentleman speaks in polished terms, with due regard to his own rank and position, while a blackguard, a person little better than half a brute, speaks like half a brute, showing no respect for himself, nor for others. But I am content to try the lines I have just quoted by the introduction to them; and then, I think, you will admit, that nothing could be more fit and appropriate than such language. How does Prospero introduce them? He has just told Miranda a wonderful story, which deeply affected her, and filled her with surprise and astonishment, and for his own purposes he afterwards lulls her to sleep. When she awakes, Shakespeare has made her wholly inattentive to the present, but wrapped up in the past. An actress, who understands the character of Miranda, would have her eyes cast down, and her eyelids almost covering them, while she was, as it were, living in her dream. At this moment Prospero sees Ferdinand, and wishes to point him out to his daughter, not only with great, but with scenic solemnity, he standing before her, and before the spectator, in the dignified character of a great magician. Something was to appear to Miranda on the sudden, and as unexpectedly as if the hero of a drama were to be on the stage at the instant when the curtain is elevated. It is under such circumstances that Prospero says, in a tone calculated at once to arouse his daughter’s attention, The fringed curtains of thine eye advance, And say what thou seest yond. Turning from the sight of Ferdinand to his thoughtful daughter, his attention was first struck by the downcast appearance of her eyes and eyelids; and, in my humble opinion, the solemnity of the phraseology assigned to Prospero is completely in character, recollecting his preternatural capacity, in which the most familiar objects in nature present themselves in a mysterious point of view.

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It is much easier to find fault with a writer by reference to former notions and experience, than to sit down and read him, recollecting his purpose, connecting one feeling with another, and judging of his words and phrases, in proportion as they convey the sentiments of the persons represented. Of Miranda we may say, that she possesses in herself all the ideal beauties that could be imagined by the greatest poet of any age or country; but it is not my purpose now, so much to point out the high poetic powers of Shakespeare, as to illustrate his exquisite judgment, and it is solely with this design that I have noticed a passage with which, it seems to me, some critics, and those among the best, have been unreasonably dissatisfied. If Shakespeare be the wonder of the ignorant, he is, and ought to be, much more the wonder of the learned: not only from profundity of thought, but from his astonishing and intuitive knowledge of what man must be at all times, and under all circumstances, he is rather to be looked upon as a prophet than as a poet. Yet, with all these unbounded powers, with all this might and majesty of genius, he makes us feel as if he were unconscious of himself, and of his high destiny, disguising the half god in the simplicity of a child.

QQQ 1817—William Hazlitt. “The Tempest,” from Characters of Shakespear’s Plays William Hazlitt (1778–1830) was an English essayist and one of the finest Shakespearean critics of the nineteenth century. He examined the work of poets, dramatists, essayists, and novelists.

The Tempest is one of the most original and perfect of Shakespear’s productions, and he has shown in it all the variety of his powers. It is full of grace and grandeur. The human and imaginary characters, the dramatic and the grotesque, are blended together with the greatest art, and without any appearance of it. Though he has here given ‘to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’, yet that part which is only the fantastic creation of his mind, has the same palpable texture, and coheres ‘semblably’ with the rest. As the preternatural part has the air of reality, and almost haunts the imagination with a sense of truth, the real characters and events partake of the wildness of a dream. The stately magician, Prospero, driven from his dukedom, but around whom (so potent is his art) airy spirits throng numberless to do his bidding; his daughter Miranda (‘worthy of that name’) to whom all the power of his art points, and who seems the goddess of the isle; the princely Ferdinand, cast by fate upon the haven of his happiness in this idol of his love; the delicate Ariel; the savage Caliban, half

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brute, half demon; the drunken ship’s crew—are all connected parts of the story, and can hardly be spared from the place they fill. Even the local scenery is of a piece and character with the subject. Prospero’s enchanted island seems to have risen up out of the sea; the airy music, the tempest-tossed vessel, the turbulent waves, all have the effect of the landscape background of some fine picture. Shakespeare’s pencil is (to use an allusion of his own) ‘like the dyer’s hand, subdued to what it works in’. Everything in him, though it partakes of ‘the liberty of wit’, is also subjected to ‘the law’ of the understanding. For instance, even the drunken sailors, who are made reeling-ripe, share, in the disorder of their minds and bodies, in the tumult of the elements, and seem on shore to be as much at the mercy of chance as they were before at the mercy of the winds and waves. These fellows with their sea-wit are the least to our taste of any part of the play: but they are as like drunken sailors as they can be, and are an indirect foil to Caliban, whose figure acquires a classical dignity in the comparison. The character of Caliban is generally thought (and justly so) to be one of the author’s masterpieces. It is not indeed pleasant to see this character on the stage any more than it is to see the God Pan personated there. But in itself it is one of the wildest and most abstracted of all Shakespeare’s characters, whose deformity whether of body or mind is redeemed by the power and truth of the imagination displayed in it. It is the essence of grossness, but there is not a particle of vulgarity in it. Shakespeare has described the brutal mind of Caliban in contact with the pure and original forms of nature; the character grows out of the soil where it is rooted uncontrolled, uncouth and wild, uncramped by any of the meannesses of custom. It is ‘of the earth, earthy’. It seems almost to have been dug out of the ground, with a soul instinctively superadded to it answering to its wants and origin. Vulgarity is not natural coarseness, but conventional coarseness, learnt from others, contrary to, or without an entire conformity of natural power and disposition; as fashion is the commonplace affectation of what is elegant and refined without any feeling of the essence of it. Schlegel, the admirable German critic on Shakespeare observes that Caliban is a poetical character, and ‘always speaks in blank verse’. He first comes in thus: Caliban. As wicked dew as e’er my mother brush’d With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen, Drop on you both: a south-west blow on ye, And blister you all o’er! Prospero. For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps, Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins Shall for that vast of night that they may work,

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All exercise on thee: thou shalt be pinch’d As thick as honey-combs, each pinch more stinging Than bees that made ’em. Caliban. I must eat my dinner. This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak’st from me. When thou camest first, Thou strok’dst me, and mad’st much of me; would’st give me Water with berries in ’t; and teach me how To name the bigger light and how the less That burn by day and night; and then I lov’d thee, And show’d thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle, The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile: Curs’d be I that I did so! All the charms Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you! For I am all the subjects that you have, Who first was mine own king; and here you sty me In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me The rest o’ th’ island. And again, he promises Trinculo his services thus, if he will free him from his drudgery. I’ll show thee the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries, I’ll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough. I pr’ythee let me bring thee where crabs grow, And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts: Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmozet: I’ll bring thee To clust’ring filberds; and sometimes I’ll get thee Young scamels from the rock. In conducting Stephano and Trinculo to Prospero’s cell, Caliban shows the superiority of natural capacity over greater knowledge and greater folly; and in a former scene, when Ariel frightens them with his music, Caliban to encourage them accounts for it in the eloquent poetry of the senses: Be not afraid, the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices, That if I then had waked after long sleep,

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Would make me sleep again; and then in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me: when I wak’d I cried to dream again. This is not more beautiful than it is true. The poet here shows us the savage with the simplicity of a child, and makes the strange monster amiable. Shakespeare had to paint the human animal rude and without choice in its pleasures, but not without the sense of pleasure or some germ of the affections. Master Barnardine in Measure for Measure, the savage of civilized life, is an admirable philosophical counterpart to Caliban. Shakespeare has, as it were by design, drawn off from Caliban the elements of whatever is ethereal and refined, to compound them in the unearthly mould of Ariel. Nothing was ever more finely conceived than this contrast between the material and the spiritual, the gross and delicate. Ariel is imaginary power, the swiftness of thought personified. When told to make good speed by Prospero, he says, ‘I drink the air before me.’ This is something like Puck’s boast on a similar occasion, ‘I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.’ But Ariel differs from Puck in having a fellow-feeling in the interests of those he is employed about. How exquisite is the following dialogue between him and Prospero! Ariel. Your charm so strongly works ’em, That if you now beheld them, your affections Would become tender. Prospero. Dost thou think so, spirit? Ariel. Mine would, sir, were I human. Prospero. And mine shall. Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, One of their kind, that relish all as sharply, Passion’d as they, be kindlier moved than thou art? It has been observed that there is a peculiar charm in the songs introduced in Shakespeare, which, without conveying any distinct images, seem to recall all the feelings connected with them, like snatches of half-forgotten music heard indistinctly and at intervals. There is this effect produced by Ariel’s songs, which (as we are told) seem to sound in the air, and as if the person playing them were invisible. We shall give one instance out of many of this general power.

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Enter Ferdinand; and Ariel invisible, playing and singing. Ariel’s Song Come unto these yellow sands, And then take hands; Curt’sied when you have, and kiss’d, (The wild waves whist;) Foot it featly here and there; And sweet sprites the burden bear. [Burden dispersedly.] Hark, hark! bowgh-wowgh: the watch-dogs bark, Bowgh-wowgh. Ariel. Hark, hark! I hear The strain of strutting chanticleer Cry cock-a-doodle-doo. Ferdinand. Where should this music be? in air or earth? It sounds no more: and sure it waits upon Some god o’ th’ island. Sitting on a bank Weeping against the king my father’s wreck, This music crept by me upon the waters, Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air; thence I have follow’d it, Or it hath drawn me rather:—but ’tis gone.— No, it begins again. Ariel’s Song Full fathom Eve thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made: Those are pearls that were his eyes, Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea change, Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell— Hark! I now I hear them, ding-dong bell. [Burden ding-dong.] Ferdinand. The ditty does remember my drown’d father. This is no mortal business, nor no sound That the earth owns: I hear it now above me.

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The courtship between Ferdinand and Miranda is one of the chief beauties of this play. It is the very purity of love. The pretended interference of Prospero with it heightens its interest, and is in character with the magician, whose sense of preternatural power makes him arbitrary, tetchy, and impatient of opposition. The Tempest is a finer play than the Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has sometimes been compared with it; but it is not so fine a poem. There are a greater number of beautiful passages in the latter. Two of the most striking in The Tempest are spoken by Prospero. The one is that admirable one when the vision which he has conjured up disappears, beginning, ‘The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,’ &c., which has so often been quoted that every schoolboy knows it by heart; the other is that which Prospero makes in abjuring his art: Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves, And ye that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him When he comes back; you demi-puppets, that By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make, Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice To hear the solemn curfew, by whose aid (Weak masters tho’ ye be) I have be-dimm’d The noon-tide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds, And ’twixt the green sea and the azur’d vault Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder Have I giv’n fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak With his own bolt; the strong-bas’d promontory Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck’d up The pine and cedar: graves at my command Have wak’d their sleepers; op’d, and let ’em forth By my so potent art. But this rough magic I here abjure; and when I have requir’d Some heav’nly music, which ev’n now I do, (To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for) I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fadoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound, I’ll drown my book. We must not forget to mention among other things in this play, that Shakespeare has anticipated nearly all the arguments on the Utopian schemes of modern philosophy.

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Gonzalo. Had I plantation of this isle, my lord, — Antonio. He’ld sow’t with nettle-seed. Sebastian. Or docks, or mallows. Gonzalo. And were the king on’t, what would I do? Sebastian. ’Scape being drunk for want of wine. Gonzalo. I’ the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty;— Sebastian. Yet he would be king on’t. Antonio. The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning. Gonzalo. All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, Would I not have; but nature should bring forth, Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people. Sebastian. No marrying ’mong his subjects? Antonio. None, man; all idle: whores and knaves. Gonzalo. I would with such perfection govern, sir, To excel the golden age. Sebastian. God save his majesty!

QQQ 1822—Charles Lamb. From “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare; with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage-Representation” Charles Lamb (1775–1834) was an English essayist and poet. Together with his sister Mary he wrote prose narratives of Shakespeare’s plays, which were published as Tales from Shakespeare.

. . . Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile mixture which Dryden has thrown into The Tempest: doubtless without some such vicious alloy,

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the impure ears of that age would never have sate out to hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the sweet courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is The Tempest of Shakespeare at all a subject for stage representation? It is one thing to read of an enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale while we are reading it; but to have a conjurer brought before us in his conjuring-gown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself and some hundred of favored spectators before the curtain are supposed to see, involves such a quantity of the hateful incredible, that all our reverence for the author cannot hinder us from perceiving such gross attempts upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they cannot even be painted—they can only be believed. But the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended. That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher faculties positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to aid. A parlor or a drawing-room— a library opening into a garden—a garden with an alcove in it—a street, or the piazza of Covent Garden, does well enough in a scene; we are content to give as much credit to it as it demands; or rather, we think little about it—it is little more than reading at the top of a page, “Scene, a garden”; we do not imagine ourselves there, but we readily admit the imitation of familiar objects. But to think by the help of painted trees and caverns, which we know to be painted, to transport our minds to Prospero, and his island and his lonely cell; or by the aid of a fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an interval of speaking, to make us believe that we hear those super-natural noises of which the isle was full[!] The garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more impossible to be shown on a stage, than the Enchanted Isle, with its no less interesting and innocent first settlers.

QQQ 1832—Anna Brownell Jameson. “On Miranda,” from Shakespeare’s Heroines: Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical Anna Murphy Brownell Jameson (1794–1860), born in Dublin, is best remembered for her character studies of Shakespeare’s heroines.

We might have deemed it impossible to go beyond Viola [in Twelfth Night], Perdita [in The Winter’s Tale], and Ophelia [in Hamlet], as pictures of feminine beauty—to exceed the one in tender delicacy, the other in ideal grace, and the

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last in simplicity—if Shakespeare had not done this; and he alone could have done it. Had he never created a Miranda, we should never have been made to feel how completely the purely natural and the purely ideal can blend into each other. The character of Miranda resolves itself into the very elements of womanhood. She is beautiful, modest, and tender, and she is these only; they comprise her whole being, external and internal. She is so perfectly unsophisticated, so delicately refined, that she is all but ethereal. Let us imagine any other woman placed beside Miranda—even one of Shakespeare’s own loveliest and sweetest creations—there is not one of them that could sustain the comparison for a moment; not one that would not appear somewhat coarse or artificial when brought into immediate contact with this pure child of nature. . . . [Shakespeare] has removed Miranda far from all comparison with her own sex; he has placed her between the demi-demon of earth and the delicate spirit of air. The next step is into the ideal and supernatural; and the only being who approaches Miranda, with whom she can be contrasted, is Ariel. Beside the subtle essence of this ethereal sprite, this creature of elemental light and air, that “ran upon the winds, rode the curl’d clouds, and in the colours of the rainbow lived,” Miranda herself appears a palpable reality, a woman, “breathing thoughtful breath”. . . walking the earth in her mortal loveliness, with a heart as frail-strung, as passion-touched, as ever fluttered in a female bosom. I have said that Miranda possesses merely the elementary attributes of womanhood; but each of these stand in her with a distinct and peculiar grace. She resembles nothing upon earth: but do we therefore compare her, in our own minds, with any of those fabled beings with which the fancy of ancient poets peopled the forest depths, the fountain, or the ocean?—oread or dryad fleet, sea-maid or naiad of the stream? We cannot think of them together. Miranda is a consistent, natural, human being. Our impression of her nymph-like beauty, her peerless grace and purity of soul, has a distinct and individual character. Not only is she exquisitely lovely, being what she is, but we are made to feel that she could not possibly be otherwise than as she is portrayed. She has never beheld one of her own sex; she has never caught from society one imitated or artificial grace. The impulses which have come to her, in her enchanted solitude, are of heaven and nature, not of the world and its vanities. She has sprung up into beauty beneath the eye of her father, the princely magician; her companions have been the rocks and woods, the many-shaped, many-tinted clouds, and the silent stars; her playmates the ocean billows, that stooped their foamy crests and ran rippling to kiss her feet. Ariel and his attendant sprites hovered over her head, ministered duteous to her every wish, and presented before her pageants of beauty and grandeur. The very air, made vocal by her father’s art, floated in music around her. If we can pre-suppose such a situation

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with all its circumstances, do we not behold in the character of Miranda not only the credible, but the natural, the necessary results of such a situation? She retains her woman’s heart, for that is unalterable and inalienable, as a part of her being; but her deportment, her looks, her language, her thoughts—all these, from the supernatural and poetical circumstances around her, assume a cast of the pure ideal; and to us, who are in the secret of her human and pitying nature, nothing can be more charming and consistent than the effect which she produces upon others, who never having beheld anything resembling her, approach her as “a wonder,” as something celestial— Be sure! the goddess on whom these airs attend! And again— What is this maid? . . . Is she the goddess who hath sever’d us, And brought us thus together? And Ferdinand exclaims, while gazing on her— My spirits as in a dream are all bound up! My father’s loss the weakness which I feel, The wreck of all my friends, or this man’s threats, To whom I am subdued, are but light to me, Might I but through my prison once a day Behold this maid: all corners else o’ the earth Let liberty make use of, space enough Have I in such a prison. Contrasted with the impression of her refined and dignified beauty, and its effect on all beholders, is Miranda’s own soft simplicity, her virgin innocence, her total ignorance of the conventional forms and language of society. It is most natural that, in a being thus constituted, the first tears should spring from compassion, “suffering with those that she saw suffer” . . . and that her first sigh should be offered to a love at once fearless and submissive, delicate and fond. She has no taught scruples of honor like Juliet; no coy concealments like Viola; no assumed dignity standing in its own defence. Her bashfulness is less a quality than an instinct; it is like the self-folding of a flower, spontaneous and unconscious. I suppose there is nothing of the kind in poetry equal to the scene between Ferdinand and Miranda. In Ferdinand, who is a noble creature, we have all the chivalrous magnanimity with which man, in a high state of civilisation, disguises his real superiority, and does humble homage to the

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being of whose destiny he disposes; while Miranda, the mere child of nature, is struck with wonder at her own new emotions. Only conscious of her own weakness as a woman, and ignorant of those usages of society which teach us to dissemble the real passion, and assume (and sometimes abuse) an unreal and transient power, she is equally ready to place her life, her love, her service beneath his feet. . . . Miranda. I am a fool, To weep at what I am glad of. Ferdinand. Wherefore weep you? Miranda. At mine unworthiness, that dare not offer What I desire to give; and much less take What I shall die to want. But this is trifling; And all the more it seeks to hide itself, The bigger bulk it shows. Hence, bashful cunning! And prompt me, plain and holy innocence! I am your wife, if you will marry me; If not, I’ll die your maid. To be your fellow You may deny me; but I’ll be your servant Whether you will or no! Ferdinand. My mistress, dearest! And I thus humble ever. As Miranda, being what she is, could only have had a Ferdinand for her lover, and an Ariel for an attendant, so she could have had with propriety no other father than the majestic and gifted being who fondly claims her as “a thread of his own life—nay, that for which he lives.” Prospero, with his magical powers, his superhuman wisdom, his moral worth and grandeur, and his kingly dignity, is one of the most sublime visions that ever swept with ample robes, pale brow, and sceptred hand before the eye of fancy. He controls the invisible world, and works through the agency of spirits; not by any evil and forbidden compact, but solely by superior might of intellect—by potent spells gathered from the lore of ages, and abjured when he mingles again as a man with his fellow-men. He is as distinct a being from the necromancers and astrologers celebrated in Shakspeare’s age as can well be imagined: and all the wizards of poetry and fiction, even Faust and St. Leon, sink into common-places before the princely, the philosophic, the benevolent Prospero.

QQQ

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1857—[unsigned]. Review of The Tempest, from The Athenaeum The Athenaeum was a weekly magazine published in London from 1828 to 1923, covering topics ranging from literature, fine arts, music, and theater to politics and popular science. Reviews in The Athenaeum were generally unsigned, but many of the anonymous contributors were wellknown literary figures.

[4 July 1857] Elaborate as have been Mr. Kean’s Shaksperian revivals, his production of ‘The Tempest’ on Wednesday excelled its predecessors in the complexity of its details. Mr. Kean has now to encounter the difficulty that sooner or later must beset his system of representation. Every fresh attempt must present fresh attractions, and claim especial admiration as something other or better than all that had preceded it. Complicated machinery to an indefinite extent must be provided, in order to produce startling effects, as well as finely painted scenery and gorgeous costumes to aid the picturesque result. Accordingly, we find that the unwieldy manœuvres of the machinist that have been employed on the present occasion have not only demanded the expenditure of a large capital in the first instance, but involve a nightly expense not a little startling. Mr. Kean pleads in the postscript to his Preface for the delay that must take place in the setting of the scenes, stating that “the scenic appliances of the play are of a more extensive and complicated nature than have ever yet been attempted in any theatre in Europe; requiring the aid of above 140 operatives nightly, who (unseen by the audience) are engaged in working the machinery, and in carrying out the various effects.” Unfortunately, for the result, the very ponderousness of the causes employed, and the delays needful between the acts, not only produce weariness, but a state of consciousness that precludes illusion; and, therefore, instead of illustrating the drama and aiding its poetic expression, they protrude themselves as mechanical tricks, and are so accepted and judged by the audience. This was eminently the case on Wednesday, and the house was frequently on this account in a very unquiet state; a condition of things exceptional on first nights at this theatre. The stage arrangements are certainly striking and startling, as well as novel. The shipwreck of the first scene is brought to the footlights, and the heaving and turning of the vessel, while on the deck Ariel “flames amazement” are sufficiently appalling. We heard it remarked, however, that it lasted too long; that it survived the moment of surprise, and the spectator was thereby enabled to discover the contrivance. The set scene of Prospero’s island was exceedingly beautiful, and the disposition of the enchanter and his daughter (Miss C. Leclercq) on the summit of a cliff was picturesque. The whole of the scene

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was, indeed, beautifully acted. Here, too, commence the series of appearances of Ariel, who throughout is attached to some machine or other, and produced with the accessories of light and distance, in aid of the enchantment. Owing to this mode of arrangement, it seems not to have been convenient to entrust the “tricksy spirit” with the songs, which are sung by Miss Poole and choristers behind the scenes. This takes away from Ariel a great charm, which the scenic arrangements, however, are designed to compensate. To this scene, also, belongs the first appearance of Caliban (Mr. Ryder), which was promising; but the poetic and romantic feeling was not sustained by the actor to the end. There was some rough heartiness in his singing the song of “ ’Ban, ’ban, CaCaliban”; but the preternatural and the monstrous were not equally impressive. But we are now in the interior of the island, with its scenery so admirably contrived, and the log-piles that indicate the task-work to which Caliban had been subjected. Here the groups of the undrowned princely Neapolitans fill the stage; and some tolerably fair acting on the part of Mr. Cathcart, as Antonio, the usurping Duke, deserves notice. The Trinculo and Stephano scenes, by Mr. Harley and Mr. Frank Matthews, were, of course, admirable. We were not so well pleased with the love-scenes, in the third act, between Ferdinand and Miranda. The propriety of representing the former by a female (Miss Bufton) is doubtful;—the real contrast of the sexes in this instance is decidedly wanting. The lady-lover, however, was graceful in her attitudes, and though deficient in force, was not unpleasing. To this succeed a storm of thunder and lightning, the eruption of a volcano in the distance, and the entry of Naiads, Dryads, and Satyrs, bringing in the banquet with which the guilty group are mocked. Mr. Kean takes credit for this scene, and justly,—the contrivances of it were signally complex, ingenious and beautiful. To one only objection is it liable—it is too much like a transformation scene in a pantomime, and thus draws off the mind from the poetry of the incident to the stage contrivance. The “shapes,” moreover, return to the stage in order to bring down the curtain on a tableau not in the mind of the poet. The “masque” in Prospero’s cell was indeed magnificent, and worthy of entire commendation. The descent of Juno, with the Graces, the Seasons and Hymen floating in the air about her, is all in the highest style of scenic art, and in the best possible taste. An expedient is resorted to at the end of the fourth act, when the spirits are shown hunting Trinculo and his companion, Ariel being presented flying on a bat’s back. To bring also the curtain down with effect at the conclusion of the fifth act, scenes of Night’s descending, and spirits being released by Prospero are introduced;—and with the break of the morning we are shown the King’s ship in a clam prepared to convey him and his suit back to Naples. The effect of this spectacle, however, is marred by the delay needful in setting it. But partial failures of this kind are due, in the present instance, not to any shortcoming in the management, but to its desire to accomplish the almost impossible in order

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to astonish with the novel and the wondrous. Altogether, this revival is the most elaborate specimen of stage appliances ever witnessed in this country.

QQQ 1864—Robert Browning. From “Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island” The poet Robert Browning (1812–1889) wrote for the London stage in his early career. He is best known, however, for his dramatic monologues such as “My Last Duchess” and “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” the latter of which draws on Shakespeare’s King Lear. In the following passage (the first half of the poetic monologue), Caliban reflects on his god, Setebos.

[’Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best, Flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire, With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin. And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush, And feels about his spine small eft-things course, Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh: And while above his head a pompion-plant, Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye, Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard, And now a flower drops with a bee inside, And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,— He looks out o’er yon sea which sunbeams cross And recross till they weave a spider-web (Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times) And talks to his own self, howe’er he please, Touching that other, whom his dam called God. Because to talk about Him, vexes—ha, Could He but know! and time to vex is now, When talk is safer than in winter-time. Moreover Prosper and Miranda sleep In confidence he drudges at their task, And it is good to cheat the pair, and gibe, Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech.] Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos! ’Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon. ’Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,

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But not the stars; the stars came otherwise; Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that: Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon, And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same. ’Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease: He hated that He cannot change His cold, Nor cure its ache. ’Hath spied an icy fish That longed to ’scape the rock-stream where she lived, And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine O’ the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid, A crystal spike ’twixt two warm walls of wave; Only, she ever sickened, found repulse At the other kind of water, not her life, (Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o’ the sun) Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe, And in her old bounds buried her despair, Hating and loving warmth alike: so He. ’Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle, Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing. Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue That pricks deep into oak warts for a worm, And says a plain word when she finds her prize, But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks About their hole—He made all these and more, Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else? He could not, Himself, make a second self To be His mate; as well have made Himself: He would not make what He mislikes or slights, An eyesore to Him, or not worth His pains: But did, in envy, listlessness or sport, Make what Himself would fain, in a manner, be— Weaker in most points, stronger in a few, Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while, Things He admires and mocks too,—that is it. Because, so brave, so better though they be, It nothing skills if He begin to plague.

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Look, now, I melt a gourd-fruit into mash, Add honeycomb and pods, I have perceived, Which bite like finches when they bill and kiss,— Then, when froth rises bladdery, drink up all, Quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain; Last, throw me on my back i’ the seeded thyme, And wanton, wishing I were born a bird. Put case, unable to be what I wish, I yet could make a live bird out of clay: Would not I take clay, pinch my Caliban Able to fly?—for, there, see, he hath wings, And great comb like the hoopoe’s to admire, And there, a sting to do his foes offence, There, and I will that he begin to live, Fly to yon rock-top, nip me off the horns Of grigs high up that make the merry din, Saucy through their veined wings, and mind me not. In which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay, And he lay stupid-like,—why, I should laugh; And if he, spying me, should fall to weep, Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong, Bid his poor leg smart less or grow again,— Well, as the chance were, this might take or else Not take my fancy: I might hear his cry, And give the mankin three sound legs for one, Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg And lessoned he was mine and merely clay. Were this no pleasure, lying in the thyme, Drinking the mash, with brain become alive, Making and marring clay at will? So He. ’Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him, Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord. ’Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs That march now from the mountain to the sea; ’Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. ’Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off; ’Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm, And two worms he whose nippers end in red; As it likes me each time, I do: so He.

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Well then, ’supposeth He is good i’ the main, Placable if His mind and ways were guessed, But rougher than His handiwork, be sure! Oh, He hath made things worthier than Himself, And envieth that, so helped, such things do more Than He who made them! What consoles but this? That they, unless through Him, do nought at all, And must submit: what other use in things? ’Hath cut a pipe of pithless elder-joint That, blown through, gives exact the scream o’ the jay When from her wing you twitch the feathers blue: Sound this, and little birds that hate the jay Flock within stone’s throw, glad their foe is hurt: Put case such pipe could prattle and boast forsooth “I catch the birds, I am the crafty thing, I make the cry my maker cannot make With his great round mouth; he must blow through mine!” Would not I smash it with my foot? So He. . . .

QQQ 1872—John Ruskin. From Munera Pulveris: Six Essays on the Elements of Political Economy John Ruskin (1819-1900) was one of the great Victorian thinkers, social reformers, and prose stylists, and perhaps the greatest art critic of the century.

. . .The fact is that slavery is not a political institution at all, but an inherent, natural, and eternal inheritance of a large portion of the human race—to whom, the more you give of their own free will, the more slaves they will make themselves. In common parlance, we idly confuse captivity with slavery, and are always thinking of the difference between pine-trunks (Ariel in the pine), and cowslip-bells (“in the cowslip-bell I lie”), or between carrying wood and drinking (Caliban’s slavery and freedom), instead of noting the far more serious differences between Ariel and Caliban themselves, and the means by which, practically, that difference may be brought about or diminished. Plato’s slave, in the Polity, who, well dressed and washed, aspires to the hand of his master’s daughter, corresponds curiously to Caliban attacking Prospero’s cell; and there is an undercurrent of meaning throughout, in the Tempest as well as in the Merchant of Venice; referring in this case to government, as in that to

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commerce. Miranda (“the wonderful,” so addressed first by Ferdinand, “Oh, you wonder!”) corresponds to Homer’s Arete: Ariel and Caliban are respectively the spirits of faithful and imaginative labour, opposed to rebellious, hurtful, and slavish labour. Prospero (“for hope”), a true governor, is opposed to Sycorax, the mother of slavery, her name “Swine-raven” indicating at once brutality and deathfulness; hence the line— As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed With raven’s feather,—etc. For all these dreams of Shakespeare, as those of true and strong men must be, are “phantasmata theia, kai skiai ton onton”—divine phantasms, and shadows of things that are. We hardly tell our children, willingly, a fable with no purport in it; yet we think God sends His best messengers only to sing fairy tales to us, fond and empty. The Tempest is just like a grotesque in a rich missal, “clasped where paynims pray.” Ariel is the spirit of generous and free-hearted service, in early stages of human society oppressed by ignorance and wild tyranny: “venting groans as fast as mill-wheels strike”; in shipwreck of states, dreadful; so that “all but mariners plunge in the brine, and quit the vessel, then all afire with me,” yet having in itself the will and sweetness of truest peace, whence that is especially called “Ariel’s” song, “Come unto these yellow sands, and there, take hands, courtesied when you have, and kissed, the wild waves whist”: (mind, it is “cortesia,” not “curtsey,”) and read “quiet” for “whist,” if you want the full sense. Then you may indeed foot it featly, and sweet spirits bear the burden for you—with watch in the night, and call in early morning. The vis viva in elemental transformation follows—“Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made.” Then, giving rest after labour, it “fetches dew from the still vent Bermoöthes,” and, “with a charm joined to their suffered labour,” leaves men asleep. Snatching away the feast of the cruel, it seems to them as a harpy; followed by the utterly vile, who cannot see it in any shape, but to whom it is “the picture of nobody,” it still gives shrill harmony to their false and mocking catch, “Thought is free”; but leads them into briars and foul places, and at last hollas the hounds upon them. Minister of fate against the great criminal, it joins itself with the “incensed seas and shores”—the sword that layeth at it cannot hold, and may “with bemocked-at stabs as soon kill the still-closing waters, as diminish one dowle that is in its plume.” As the guide and aid of true love, it is always called by Prospero “fine” (the French “fine,” not the English), or “delicate”—another long note would be needed to explain all the meaning in this word. Lastly, its work done, and war, it resolves itself into the elements. The intense significance of the last song, “Where the bee sucks,” I will examine in its due place. The types of slavery in Caliban are more palpable, and need not be dwelt on now: though I will notice them also, severally, in their proper places;—the heart

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of his slavery is in his worship: “That’s a brave god, and bears celestial—liquor.” But, in illustration of the sense in which the Latin “benignus” and “malignus” are to be coupled with Eleutheria and Douleia, note that Caliban’s torment is always the physical reflection of his own nature—“cramps” and “side stitches that shall pen thy breath up; thou shalt be pinched, as thick as honeycombs”: the whole nature of slavery being one cramp and cretinous contraction. Fancy this of Ariel! You may fetter him, but you set no mark on him; you may put him to hard work and far journey, but you cannot give him a cramp.

QQQ 1875—Edward Dowden. From Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art Edward Dowden (1843–1913) was a critic, a poet, and a lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin. His books of literary criticism include Shakspere, his Mind and Art; Shakspere Primer; and Studies in Literature.

The wrong-doers of The Tempest are a group of persons of various degrees of criminality, from Prospero’s perfidious brother, still active in plotting evil, to Alonzo, whose obligations to the Duke of Milan had been of a public or princely kind. Spiritual powers are in alliance with Prospero, and these, by terror and the awakening of remorse, prepare Alonzo for receiving the balm of Prospero’s forgiveness. He looks upon his son as lost, and recognizes in his son’s loss the punishment of his own guilt. “The powers delaying, not forgetting,” have incensed the sea and shores against the sinful men; nothing can deliver them except “heart-sorrow, and a clear life ensuing.” Goethe, in the opening of the second part of Faust, has represented the ministry of external nature fulfilling functions with reference to the human conscience precisely the reverse of those ascribed to it in The Tempest. Faust, escaped from the prison-scene and the madness of Margarete, is lying on a flowery grass-plot, weary, restless, striving to sleep. The Ariel of Goethe calls upon his attendant elvish spirits to prepare the soul of Faust for renewed energy by bathing him in the dew of Lathe’s stream, by assuaging his pain, by driving back remorse: Besäntftiget des Herzens grimmen Strauss; Entfernt des Vorwurfs glühend bittre Pfeils, Sein Innres reinigt von erlebtem Graus. To dismiss from his conscience the sense of the wrong he has done to a dead woman, is the initial step in the further education and development of Faust.

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Shakspere’s Ariel, breathing through the elements and the powers of nature, quickens the remorse of the king, for a crime of twelve years since: O it is monstrous, monstrous! Methought the billows spoke and told me of it; The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass, Therefore my son i’ the ooze is bedded, and I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded, And with him there lie mudded. The enemies of Prospero are now completely in his power. How shall he deal with them? They had perfidiously taken advantage of his unworldly and unpractical habits of life; they had thrust him away from his dukedom; they had exposed him with his three-years’-old daughter in a rotten boat to the mercy of the waves. Shall he not now avenge himself without remorse? What is Prospero’s decision? Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick, Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury Do I take part; the rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance; they being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further. We have seen how Timon turned fiercely upon mankind, and hated the wicked race, “I am Misanthropos and hate mankind.” The wrongs inflicted upon Prospero were crueller and more base than those from which Timon suffered. But Prospero had not lived in a summer mood of lax and prodigal benevolence; he had lived severely, “all dedicated to closeness and the bettering of my mind.” And out of the strong comes forth sweetness. In the play of Cymbeline, the wrong which Posthumus has suffered from the Italian Iachimo is only less than that which Othello endures at the hands of Iago. But Iachimo, unlike Iago, is unable to sustain the burden of his guilt, and sinks under it. In the closing scene of Cymbeline, that in which Posthumus is himself welcomed home to the heart of Imogen, Posthumus in his turn becomes the pardoner:— Kneel not to me; The bower that I have on you is to spare you; The malice toward you to forgive you; live, And deal with others better.

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Hermione, Imogen, Prospero,—these are, as it were, names for gracious powers which extend forgiveness to men. From the first Hermione, whose clearsightedness is equal to her courage, had perceived that her husband laboured under a delusion which was cruel and calamitous to himself. From the first she transcends all blind resentment, and has true pity for the man who wrongs her. But if she has fortitude for her own uses, she also is able to accept for her husband the inevitable pain which is needful to restore him to his better mind. She will not shorten the term of his suffering, because that suffering is beneficent. And at the last her silent embrace carries with it—and justly—a portion of that truth she hail uttered long before: How will this, grieve you, When you shall come to clearer knowledge, that You thus have published me! Gentle my lord, You scarce can right me throughly then to say You did mistake. The calm and complete comprehension of the fact is a possession painful yet precious to Hermione, and it lifts her above all vulgar confusion of heart or temper, and above all unjust resentment. Imogen, who is the reverse of grave and massive in character, but who has an exquisite vivacity of feeling and of fancy, and a heart pure, quick, and ardent, passes from the swoon of her sudden anguish to a mood of bright and keen resentment, which is free from every trace of vindictive passion, and is indeed only pain disguised. And in like manner she forgives, not with self-possession and a broad, tranquil joy in the accomplished fact, but through a pure ardour, an exquisite eagerness of love and of delight. Prospero’s forgiveness is solemn, judicial, and has in it something abstract and impersonal. He cannot wrong his own higher nature, he cannot wrong the nobler reason, by cherishing so unworthy a passion as the desire of vengeance. Sebastian and Antonio, from whose conscience no remorse has been elicited, are met by no comfortable pardon. They have received their lesson of failure and of pain, and may possibly be convinced of the good sense and prudence of honourable dealing, even if they cannot perceive its moral obligation, Alonzo, who is repentant, is solemnly pardoned. The forgiveness of Prospero is an embodiment of impartial wisdom and loving justice. A portion of another ploy certainly belongs to this latest period of Shakspere’s authorship—a portion of King Henry VIII.1 Dr Johnson observed that the genius of Shakspere comes in and goes out with Queen Katharine. What then chiefly interested the dramatist in this designed and partly accomplished Henry VIII.? The presence of a noble sufferer,—one who was grievously wronged, and who by a plain loyalty to what is faithful and true, by a disinterestedness of soul, and enduring magnanimity, passes out of all passion and personal resentment

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into the reality of things, in which much indeed of pain remains, but no ignoble wrath or shallow bitterness of heart. Her earnest endeavour for the welfare of her English subjects is made with fearless and calm persistence in the face of Wolsey’s opposition. It is integrity and freedom from self-regard set over against guile, and power, and pride. In her trial-scene the indignation of Katharine flashes forth against the Cardinal, but is an indignation which unswervingly progresses towards and penetrates into the truth. When a man has attained some high and luminous table-land of joy or of renouncement, when he has really transcended self, or when some one of the everlasting, virtuous powers of the world,—duty or sacrifice, or the strength of anything higher than oneself—has assumed authority over him, forthwith a strange, pathetic, ideal light is shed over all beautiful things in the lower world which has been abandoned. We see the sunlight on our neigbbour’s field, while we are pre-occupied about the grain that is growing in our own. And when we have ceased to hug our souls to any material possession, we see the sunlight wherever it falls. In the last chapter of George Eliot’s great novel, Romola, who has ascended into her clear and calm solitude of self-transcending duty, bends tenderly over the children of Tito, uttering in words made simple for their needs, the lore she has learnt from life, and seeing on their faces the light of strange, ideal beauty. In the latest plays of Shakspere, the sympathetic reader can discern unmistakably a certain abandonment of the common joy of the world, a certain remoteness from the usual pleasures and sadnesses of life, and at the same time, all the more, this tender bending over those who are like children still absorbed in their individual joys and sorrows. Over the beauty of youth and the love of youth, there is shed, in these plays of Shakspere’s final period, a clear yet tender luminousness, not elsewhere to be perceived in his writings. In his earlier plays, Shakspere writes concerning young men and maidens, their loves, their mirth, their griefs, as one who is among them, who has a lively, personal interest in their concerns, who can make merry with them, treat them familiarly, and, if need be, can mock them into good sense. There is nothing in these early plays wonderful, strangely beautiful, pathetic about youth and its joys and sorrows. In the histories and tragedies, as was to be expected, more massive, broader, or more profound objects of interest engaged the poet’s imagination. But in these latest plays, the beautiful pathetic light is always present. There are the sufferers, aged, experienced, tried—Queen Katharine, Prospero, Hermione. And over against these there are the children absorbed in their happy and exquisite egoism,—Perdita and Miranda, Florizel and Ferdinand, and the boys of old Belarius. The same means to secure ideality for these figures, so young and beautiful, is in each case (instinctively perhaps rather than deliberately) resorted to. They are lost children,—princes or a princess, removed from the court, and its conventional surroundings, into some scene of rare, natural beauty. There are the lost princes—

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Arviragus and Guiderius, among the mountains of Wales, drinking the free air, and offering their salutations to the risen sun. There is Perdita, the shepherdessprincess, “queen of curds and cream,” sharing with old and young her flowers, lovelier and more undying than those that Proserpina let fall from Dis’s waggon. There is Miranda, (whose very name is significant of wonder), made up of beauty, and love, and womanly pity, neither courtly nor rustic, with the breeding of an island of enchantment, where Prospero is her tutor and protector, and Caliban her servant, and the Prince of Naples her lover. In each of these plays we can see Shakspere, as it were, tenderly bending over the joys and sorrows of youth. We recognise this rather through the total characterization, and through a feeling and a presence, than through definite incident or statement. But some of this feeling escapes in the disinterested joy and admiration of old Belarius when he gazes at the princely youths, and in Camillo’s loyalty to Florizel and Perdita; while it obtains more distinct expression in such a word as that which Prospero utters, when from a distance he watches with pleasure Miranda’s zeal to relieve Ferdinand from his task of log-bearing:—“Poor worm, thou art infected.”2 It is not chiefly because Prospero is a great enchanter, now about to break his magic staff, to drown his book deeper than ever plummet sounded, to dismiss his airy spirits, and to return to the practical service of his Dukedom, that we identify Prospero in some measure with Shakspere himself. It is rather because the temper of Prospero, the grave harmony of his character, his self-mastery, his calm validity of will, his sensitiveness to wrong, his unfaltering justice, and with these, a certain abandonment, a remoteness from the common joys and sorrows of the world, are characteristic of Shakspere as discovered to us in all his latest plays. Prospero is a harmonious and fully developed will. In the earlier play of fairy enchantments, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the “human mortals,” wander to and fro in a maze of error, misled by the mischievous frolic of Puck, the jester and clown of Fairyland. But here the spirits of the elements, and Caliban the gross genius of brute-matter,—needful for the service of life,—are brought under subjection to the human will of Prospero.3 What is more, Prospero has entered into complete possession of himself. Shakspere has shown us his quick sense of injury, his intellectual impatience, his occasional moment of keen irritability, in order that we may be more deeply aware of his abiding strength and self-possession, and that we may perceive how these have been grafted upon a temperament, not impassive or unexcitable. And Prospero has reached not only the higher levels of moral attainment; he has also reached an altitude of thought from which he can survey the whole of human life, and see how small and yet how great it is. His heart is sensitive, he is profoundly touched by the joy of the children, with whom in the egoism of their love he passes for a thing of secondary interest; he is deeply moved by the perfidy of his brother. His brain is readily set a-work, and can with difficulty be checked from eager and excessive energizing; he is subject to the access of sudden and

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agitating thought. But Prospero masters his own sensitiveness, emotional and intellectual:— We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vexed; Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled: Be not disturb’d with my infirmity; If you be pleased, retire into my cell And there repose; a turn or two I’ll walk, To still my beating mind. “Such stuff as dreams are made on.” Nevertheless, in this little life, in this dream, Prospero will maintain his dream rights and fulfil his dream duties. In the dream, he, a Duke, will accomplish Duke’s work. Having idealized everything, Shakspere left everything real. Bishop Berkeley’s foot was no less able to set a pebble flying than was the lumbering foot of Dr Johnson. Nevertheless, no material substance intervened between the soul of Berkeley and the immediate presence of the play of Divine power.4 A thought which seems to run through the whole of The Tempest, appearing here and there like a coloured thread in some web, is the thought that the true freedom of man consists in service. Ariel, untouched by human feeling, is panting for his liberty; in the last words of Prospero are promised his enfranchisement and dismissal to the elements. Ariel reverences his great master, and serves him with bright alacrity; but he is bound by none of our human ties, strong and tender, and he will rejoice when Prospers is to him as though he never were.5 To Caliban, a land-fish, with the duller elements of earth and water in his composition, but no portion of the higher elements, air and fire, though he receives dim intimations of a higher world,—a musical humming, or a twangling, or a voice heard in sleep—to Caliban, service is slavery.6 He hates to bear his logs; he fears the incomprehensible power of Prospero, and obeys, and curses. The great master has usurped the rights of the brute-power Caliban. And when Stephano and Trinculo appear, ridiculously impoverished specimens of humanity, with their shallow understandings and vulgar greeds, this poor earth-monster is possessed by a sudden schwärmerei, a fanaticism for liberty!— ’Ban, ’ban, Ca’-Caliban, Has a new master; get a new man. Freedom, heyday! heyday, freedom! freedom! freedom, heyday freedom! His new master also sings his impassioned hymn of liberty, the Marseillaise of the enchanted island:

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Flout ’em and scout ’em, And scout ’em and flout ’em; Thought is free. The leaders of the revolution, escaped from the stench and foulness of the horse-pond, King Stephano and his prime minister Trinculo, like too many leaders of the people, bring to an end their great achievement on behalf of liberty by quarrelling over booty,—the trumpery which the providence of Prospero had placed in their way. Caliban, though scarce more truly wise or instructed than before, at least discovers his particular error of the day and hour: What a thrice-double ass Was I, to take this drunkard for a god, And worship this dull fool! It must be admitted that Shakspere, if not, as Hartley Coleridge asserted, “a Tory and a gentleman,” had within him some of the elements of English conservatism. But while Ariel and Caliban, each in his own way, is impatient of service, the human actors, in whom we are chiefly interested, are entering into bonds—bonds of affection, bonds of duty, in which they find their truest freedom. Ferdinand and Miranda emulously contend in the task of bearing the burden which Prospero has imposed upon the prince: I am in my condition A prince, Miranda; I do think, a king I would, not so! and would no more endure This wooden slavery than to suffer The flesh-fly blow my mouth. Hear my soul speak: The very instant that I saw you, did My heart fly to your service; there resides, To make me slave to it; and for your sake Am I this patient log-man. And Miranda speaks with the sacred candour from which spring the nobler manners of a world more real and glad than the world of convention and proprieties and pruderies: Hence, bashful cunning! And prompt me, plain and holy innocence! I am your wife, if you will marry me; If not, I’ll die your maid: to be your fellow

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You may deny me; but I’ll be your servant Whether you will or no. Fer. My mistress, dearest; And I thus humble ever. Mir. My husband, then? Fer. Ay, with a heart as willing As bondage e’er of freedom. In an earlier part of the play, this chord which runs through it had been playfully struck in the description of Gonzalo’s imaginary commonwealth, in which man is to be enfranchised from all the laborious necessities of life. Here is the ideal of notional liberty, Shakspere would say, and to attempt to realise it at once lands us in absurdities and self-contradictions: For no kind of traffic Would I admit: no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known: riches, poverty, And use of service none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all, And women too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty. Seb. Yet he would be king on’t.7 Finally, in the Epilogue, which was written perhaps by Shakspere, perhaps by some one acquainted with his thoughts, Prospero in his character of a man, no longer a potent enchanter, petitions the spectators of the theatre for two things, pardon and freedom. It would be straining matters to discover in this Epilogue profound significances. And yet in its playfulness it curiously falls in with the moral purport of the whole. Prospero, the pardoner, implores pardon. Shakspere was aware—whether such be the significance (aside—for the writer’s mind) of this Epilogue or not—that no life is ever lived which does not need to receive as well as to render forgiveness. He knew that every energetic dealer with the world must seek a sincere and liberal pardon for many things. Forgiveness and freedom: these are keynotes of the play. When it was occupying the mind of Shakspere, he was passing from his service as artist to his service as English country gentleman. Had his mind been dwelling on the question of how he should employ his new freedom, and had he been enforcing upon himself the truth that the highest freedom lies in the bonds of duty?8 It remains to notice of The Tempest that it has had the quality, as a work of art, of setting its critics to work as if it were an allegory; and forthwith it baffles

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them, and seems to mock them for supposing that they had power to “pluck out the heart of its mystery.” A curious and interesting chapter in the history of Shaksperian criticism might be written if the various interpretations were brought together of the allegorical significances of Prospero, of Miranda, of Ariel, of Caliban. Caliban, says Kreyssig, is the People. He is Understanding apart from Imagination, declares Professor Lowell. He is the primitive man abandoned to himself, declares M. Mézières; Shakspere would say to Utopian thinkers, predecessors of Jean Jacques Rousseau, “Your hero walks on four feet as well as on two.” That Caliban is the missing link between man and brute (Shakspere anticipating Darwinian theories), has been elaborately demonstrated by Daniel Wilson. Caliban is one of the powers of nature over which the scientific intellect obtains command, another critic assures us, and Prospero is the founder of the Inductive Philosophy. Caliban is the colony of Virginia. Caliban is the untutored early drama of Marlowe.9 Such allegorical interpretations, however ingenious, we cannot set much store by. But the significance of a work of art like the character of a man is not to be discovered solely by investigation of its inward essence. Its dynamical qualities, so to speak, must be considered as well as its statical. It must be viewed in action; the atmosphere it effuses, its influence upon the minds of men must be noted. And it is certainly remarkable that this, the last or almost the last of Shakspere’s plays, more than any other, has possessed this quality, of soliciting men to attempt the explanation of it, as of an enigma, and at the same time of baffling their enquiry. If I were to allow my fancy to run out in play after such an attempted interpretation, I should describe Prospero as the man of genius, the great artist, lacking at first in practical gifts which lead to material success, and set adrift on the perilous sea of life, in which he finds his enchanted island, where he may achieve his works of wonder. He bears with him Art in its infancy,—the marvellous child, Miranda. The grosser passions and appetites—Caliban—he subdues to his service, Mir. ’Tis a villain, sir, I do not love to look on. Pros. But as ’tis We cannot miss him. and he partially informs this servant-monster with intellect and imagination; for Caliban has dim affinities with the higher world of spirits. But these grosser passions and appetites attempt to violate the purity of art. Caliban would seize upon Miranda and people the island with Calibans; therefore his servitude must be strict. And who is Ferdinand? Is he not, with his gallantry and his beauty, the young Fletcher, in conjunction with whom Shakspere worked upon the two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII? Fletcher is conceived as a follower

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of the Shaksperian style and method in dramatic art; he had “eyed full many a lady with best regard,” for several virtues had liked several women, but never any with whole-hearted devotion except Miranda. And to Ferdinand the old enchanter will entrust his daughter, “a third of his own life.” But Shakspere had perceived the weak point in Fletcher’s genius—its want of hardness of fibre, of patient endurance, and of a sense of the solemnity and sanctity of the service of art. And therefore he finely hints to his friend that his winning of Miranda must not be too light and easy. It shall be Ferdinand’s task to remove some thousands of logs, and pile them according to the strict injunction of Prospero. “Don’t despise drudgery and dryasdust work, young poets,” Shakspere would seem to say, who had himself so carefully laboured over his English and Roman histories; “for Miranda’s sake such drudgery may well seem light.” Therefore, also, Prospero surrounds the marriage of Ferdinand to his daughter with a religious awe. Ferdinand must honour her as sacred, and win her by hard toil. But the work of the higher imagination is not drudgery,—it is swift and serviceable among all the elements, fire upon the topmast, the sea-nymph upon the sands, Ceres the goddess of earth, with harvest blessings, in the Masque. It is essentially Ariel, an airy spirit,—the imaginative genius of poetry but recently delivered in England from long slavery to Sycorax. Prospero’s departure from the island is the abandoning by Shakspere of the theatre, the scene of his marvellous works:— Graves at my command Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth, By my so potent art. Henceforth Prospero is but a man; no longer a great enchanter. He returns to the dukedom he had lost, in Stratford upon Avon, and will pay no tribute henceforth to any Alonzo or Lucy of them all.10 Thus one may be permitted to play with the grave subject of The Tempest, and I ask no more credit for the interpretation here proposed than is given to any other equally innocent, if trifling, attempt to read the supposed allegory. Shakspere’s work, however, will indeed not allow itself to be lightly treated. The prolonged study of any great interpreter of human life is a discipline. Our loyalty to Shakspere must not lead us to assert that the discipline of Shakspere will be suitable to every nature. He will deal rudely with heart, and will, and intellect, and lay hold of them in unexpected ways, and fashion his disciple, it may be, in a manner which at first is painful, and almost terrible. There are persons who, all through their lives, attain their highest strength only by virtue of the presence of certain metaphysical entities which rule their lives; and in the lives of almost all men there is a metaphysical period, when they need such supposed entities more than the real presences of those personal

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and social forces which surround them. For such persons, and during such a period, the discipline of Shakspere will be unsuitable. He will seem precisely the reverse of what he actually is: he will seem careless about great facts and ideas; limited, restrictive, deficient in enthusiasms and imagination. To one who finds the highest poetry in Shelley, Shakspere will always remain a kind of prose. Shakspere is the poet of concrete things and real. True, but are not these informed with passion and with thought? A time not seldom comes when a man, abandoning abstractions and metaphysical entities, turns to the actual life of the world, and to the real men and women who surround him, for the sources of emotion, and thought, and action—a time when he strives to come into communion with the Unseen, not immediately, but through the revelation of the Seen. And then he finds the strength and sustenance with which Shakspere has enriched the world. “ ‘The true question to ask,’ says the Librarian of Congress, in a paper read before the Social Science Convention, at New York, October 1869, ‘The true question to ask respecting a book, is, Has it helped any human soul!’ This is the hint, statement, not only of the great Literatus, his book, but of every great Artist. It may be that all works of art are to be first tried by their art-qualities, their image-forming talent, and their dramatic, pictorial, plot-constructing, euphonious, and other talents. Then, whenever claiming to be first-class works, they are to be strictly and sternly tried by their foundation in, and radiation, in the highest sense, and always indirectly, of the ethic principles, and eligibility to free, arouse, dilate.”11 What shall be said of Shakspere’s radiation through art of the ultimate truths of conscience and of conduct? What shall be said of his power of freeing, arousing, dilating? Something may be gathered out of the foregoing chapters in answer to these questions. But the answers remain insufficient. There is an admirable sentence by Emerson: “A good reader can in a sort nestle into Plato’s brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakspere’s. We are still out of doors.” We are still out of doors; and for the present let us cheerfully remain in the large, good space. Let us not attenuate Shakspere to a theory. He is careful that we shall not thus lose our true reward; “The secrets of Nature have not more gift in taciturnity.”12 Shakspere does not supply us with a doctrine, with an interpretation, with a revelation. What he brings to us, is this—to each one, courage, and energy, and strength, to dedicate himself and his work to that,—whatever it be,—which his life has revealed to him as best, and highest, and most real. NOTES 1. Karl Elze, in his article “Zu Heinrich VIII.” (Shakespeare Jahrbuch, vol. ix), attempts to show, not successfully, I think, that the play was written in 1603, and “was set aside on account of Elizabeth’s death, and kept there till Rowley brought

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out his ‘When you See Me you Know Me; or the famous Chronicle Historie of King Henrie the Eight,’ in 1613. The Globe Company thereupon thought of their unused Henry VIII., put it into Fletcher’s hands to alter, and then acted it.” The portions of the play by Shakspere are Act i, Scenes 1 and 2; Act ii, Scenes 3 and 4; Act iii, Scene 2 (in part Shakspere); Act v, Scene 1. Roderick, in Edwards’ “Canons of Criticism,” (1765) noticed the peculiarity of the versification of this play. Mr Spedding and Mr Hickson {1850) independently arrived at identical results as to the division of parts between Fletcher and Shakspere. Mr Fleay (1874) has confirmed the conclusions of Mr Spedding, (double-endings forming in this instance his chief test); Professor Ingram has further confirmed them by the weak-ending test, and Mr Furnivall by the stopt-line test. 2. The same feeling appears in the lines which end Act iii, Scene 1. Prospero. So glad of this as they I cannot be, Who are surprised with all; but my rejoicing At nothing can be more. 3. This point of contrast between The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is noticed by Mézières: “Shakespeare, ses Œuvres et ses Critiques,” pp. 441, 442. 4. See a remarkable article on Goethe and Shakspere by Professor Masson, reprinted among his collected Essays. On The Tempest, the reader may consult as an excellent summary of facts, the article “On the origin of Shakspeare’s Tempest:” Cornhill Magazine, October 1872. It is founded upon Meissner’s “Untersuchungen über Shakespeare’s Sturm,” (1872). See also Meissner’s article in the “Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft,” vol. v. Jacob Ayrer’s “Comedia von der schönen Sidea,” will be found, with a translation, in Mr Albert Cohn’s interesting volume “Shakespeare in Germany” (Asher: 1885). 5. Ariel is promised his freedom after two days, Act i, Scene 2. Why two days? The time of the entire action of the Tempest is only three hours. What was to be the employment of Ariel during two days? To make the winds and seas favourabie during the voyage to Naples. Prospero’s island therefore was imagined by Shakspere as within two days’ quick sail of Naples. 6. The conception of Caliban, the “servant-monster,” “plain fish and no doubt marketable,” the “tortoise,” “his fins like arms,” with “a very ancient and fish-like smell,” who gabbled until Prospero taught him language—this conception was in Shakspere’s mind when he wrote Troilus and Cressida. Thersites describes Ajax, (Act iii. Scene 3), “He’s grown a very land-fish, languageless, a monster.” 7. Act ii. Scene 1.—The prolonged and dull joking of Sebastian is this scene cannot be meant by Shakspere to be really bright and witty. It is meant to show that the intellectual poverty of the conspirators is as great as their moral obliquity. They are monsters more ignoble than Caliban. Their laughter is “the crackling of thorns under a pot.” 8. Mr Furnivall, observing that in these later plays breaches of the family bond are dramatically studied, and the reconciliations are domestic reconciliations in Cymbeline and A Winter’s Tale, suggest to me that they were a kind of confession on Shakspere’s part that he had inadequately felt the beauty and tenderness of the common relations of father and child, wife and husband; and that he was now quietly resolving to be gentle, and wholly just to his wife and his home. I cannot

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altogether make this view of the later plays my own, and leave it to the reader to accept and develop as he may be able. 9. This last suggestion is that of M. Emile Montégut in the Revue des Deux Mondes. The following passage from Professor Lowell will compensate for its length by its ingenuity. “In The Tempest the scene is laid nowhere, or certainly in no country laid down on any map. Nowhere, then? At once nowhere and anywhere,— for it is in the soul of man that still vexed island hung between the upper and the nether world, and liable to incursions from both. . . . Consider for a moment if ever the Imagination has been so embodied as in Prospero, the Fancy as in Ariel, the brute Understanding as in Caliban, who, the moment his poor wits are warmed with the glorious liquor of Stephano, plots rebellion against his natural lord, the higher Reason. Miranda is mere abstract Womanhood, as truly so before she sees Ferdinand as Eve before she was awakened to consciousness by the echo of her own nature coming back to her, the same, and yet not the same, from that of Adam. Ferdinand, again, is nothing more than Youth, compelled to drudge at something he despises, till the sacrifice of will, and abnegation of self, win him his ideal in Miranda. The subordinate personages are simply types: Sebastian and Antonio of weak character and evil ambition; Gonzalo, of average sense and honesty; Adrian and Francisco, of the walking gentlemen, who serve to fill up a world. They are not characters in the same sense with Iago, Falstaff, Shallow, or Leontius; and it is curious how every one of them loses his way in this enchanted island of life, all the victims of one illusion after another, except Prospero, whose ministers are purely ideal. The whole play, indeed, is a succession of illusions, winding up with those solemn words of the great enchanter, who had summoned to his service every shape of merriment or passion, every figure in the great tragicomedy of life, and who was now bidding farewell to the scene of his triumphs. For in Prospero shall we not recognise the Artist himself:— That did not better for his life provide Than public means which public manners breeds, Whence comes it that his name receives a brand— who has forfeited a shining place in the world’s eye by devotion to his art, and who, turned adrift on the ocean of life in the leaky carcass of a boat, has shipwrecked on that Fortunate Island (as men always do who find their true vocation) where he is absolute lord, making all the powers of Nature serve him, but with Ariel and Caliban as special ministers? Of whom else could he have been thinking when he says, Graves, at my command, Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth, By my so potent art?” “Among my Books. Shakespeare Once More,” pp. 191–192. 10. Ulrici has recently expressed his opinion that a farewell to the theatre may be discovered in The Tempest; but he rightly places Henry VIII. later than The Tempest. Shakespeare Jahrbuch, vol. vi. p. 358. 11. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, p. 67. 12. Troilus and Cressida, Act iv, Scene 2.

QQQ

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1880—A. C. Swinburne. From A Study of Shakespeare Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) was a precocious writer who from his early career was associated with the Pre-Raphaelite artists D. G. Rossetti and William Morris. Most famous for his poetry, Swinburne was also an astute critic who wrote monographs on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and others.

True or false, and it would now seem something less than likely to be true, the fancy which assumed the last lines spoken by Prospero to be likewise the last words of the last completed work of Shakespeare was equally in either case at once natural and graceful. . . . In no nook or corner of the island as we leave it is any savor left or any memory lingering of any inexpiable evil. Alonzo is absolved; even Antonio and Sebastian have made no such ineffaceable mark on it by the presence of their pardoned crimes as is made by those which cost the life of Mamillius [in The Winter’s Tale] and the labors of Imogen [in Cymbeline]. Poor Caliban is left in such comfort as may be allowed him by divine grace in the favorable aspect of Setebos; and his comrades go by us “reeling ripe” and “gilded” not by “grand liquor” only but also by the summer lightning of men’s laughter: blown softly out of our sight, with a sound and a gust of music, by the breath of the song of Ariel.

QQQ 1897—George Bernard Shaw. “Shakespear and Mr. Barrie,” from The Saturday Review George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), known for his wit, was a music critic, social critic, and an important playwright. He often expressed his ambivalence toward Shakespeare.

[13 November 1897] It was a curious experience to see “The Tempest” one night and “The Little Minister” the next. I should like to have taken Shakespear to the Haymarket play. How well he would have recognized it! For he also once had to take a popular novel; make a shallow, unnatural, indulgent, pleasant, popular drama of it; and hand it to the theatre with no hint of his feelings except the significant title “As you Like It.” And we have not even the wit to feel the snub, but go on complacently talking of the manufacture of Rosalinds and Orlandos (a sort of thing that ought really to be done in a jam factory) as “delineation of character”

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and the like. One feels Shakespear’s position most strongly in the plays written after he had outgrown his interest in the art of acting and given up the idea of educating the public. In “Hamlet” he is quite enthusiastic about naturalness in the business of the stage, and makes Hamlet hold forth about it quite Wagnerianly: in “Cymbeline” and “The Tempest” he troubles himself so little about it that he actually writes down the exasperating clownish interruptions he once denounced; brings on the god in the car; and, having indulged the public in matters which he no longer set any store by, took it out of them in poetry. The poetry of “The Tempest” is so magical that it would make the scenery of a modern theatre ridiculous. The methods of the Elizabethan Stage Society (I do not commit myself to their identity with those of the Elizabethan stage) leave to the poet the work of conjuring up the isle “full of noises, sounds and sweet airs.” And I do not see how this plan can be beaten. If Sir Henry Irving were to put the play on at the Lyceum next season (why not, by the way?) what could he do but multiply the expenditure enormously, and spoil the illusion? He would give us the screaming violin instead of the harmonious viol; “characteristic” music scored for wood-wind and percussion by Mr. German instead of Mr. Dolmetsch’s pipe and tabor; an expensive and absurd stage ship; and some windless, airless, changeless, soundless, electric-lit, wooden-floored mockeries of the haunts of Ariel. They would cost more; but would they be an improvement on the Mansion House arrangement? Mr. Poel says frankly, “See that singers’ gallery up there! Well, let’s pretend that it’s the ship.” We agree; and the thing is done. But how could we agree to such a pretence with a stage ship? Before it we should say, “Take that thing away: if our imagination is to create a ship, it must not be contradicted by something that apes a ship so vilely as to fill us with denial and repudiation of its imposture. The singing gallery makes no attempt to impose on us: it disarms criticism by unaffected submission to the facts of the case, and throws itself honestly on our fancy, with instant success. In the same way a rag doll is fondly nursed by a child who can only stare at a waxen simulacrum of infancy. A superstitious person left to himself will see a ghost in every ray of moonlight on the wall and every old coat hanging on a nail; but make up a really careful, elaborate, plausible, picturesque, bloodcurdling ghost for him, and his cunning grin will proclaim that he sees through it at a glance. The reason is, not that a man can always imagine things more vividly than art can present them to him, but that it takes an altogether extraordinary degree of art to compete with the pictures which the imagination makes when it is stimulated by such potent forces as the maternal instinct, superstitious awe, or the poetry of Shakespear. The dialogue between Gonzalo and that “bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog” the boatswain, would turn the House of Lords into a ship: in less than ten words—“What care these roarers for the name of king?”—you see the white horses and the billowing green mountains playing football with crown and purple. But the Elizabethan method would not do for a play like “The White

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Heather,” excellent as it is of its kind. If Mr. Poel, on the strength of the Drury Lane dialogue, were to leave us to imagine the singers’ gallery to be the bicycling ring in Battersea Park, or Boulter’s Lock, we should flatly decline to imagine anything at all. It requires the nicest judgment to know exactly how much help the imagination wants. There is no general rule, not even for any particular author. You can do best without scenery in “The Tempest” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” because the best scenery you can get will only destroy the illusion created by the poetry; but it does not at all follow that scenery will not improve a representation of “Othello.” Maeterlinck’s plays, requiring a mystical inscenation in the style of Fernand Knopf, would be nearly as much spoiled by Elizabethan treatment as by Drury Lane treatment. Modern melodrama is so dependent on the most realistic scenery that a representation would suffer far less by the omission of the scenery than of the dialogue. This is why the manager who stages every play in the same way is a bad manager, even when he is an adept at his one way. A great deal of the distinction of the Lyceum productions is due to the fact that Sir Henry Irving, when the work in hand is at all within the limits of his sympathies, knows exactly how far to go in the matter of scenery. When he makes mistakes, they are almost always mistakes in stage management, by which he sacrifices the effect of some unappreciated passage of dialogue of which the charm has escaped him. Though I was sufficiently close to the stage at “The Tempest” to hear, or imagine I heard, every word of the dialogue, yet it was plain that the actors were not eminent after-dinner speakers, and had consequently never received in that room the customary warning to speak to the second pillar on the right of the door, on pain of not being heard. Though they all spoke creditably, and some of them remarkably well, they took matters rather too easily, with the result that the quieter passages were inaudible to a considerable number of the spectators. I mention the matter because the Elizabethan Stage Society is hardly yet alive to the accoustic difficulties raised by the lofty halls it performs in. They are mostly troublesome places for a speaker; for if he shouts, his vowels make such a roaring din that his consonants are indistinguishable; and if he does not, his voice does not travel far enough. They are too resonant for noisy speakers and too vast for gentle ones. A clean, athletic articulation, kept up without any sentimental or indolent relaxations, is indispensable as a primary physical accomplishment for the Elizabethan actor who “takes to the halls.” The performance went without a hitch. Mr. Dolmetsch looked after the music; and the costumes were worthy of the reputation which the Society has made for itself in this particular. Ariel, armless and winged in his first incarnation, was not exactly a tricksy sprite; for as the wing arrangement acted as a strait waistcoat, he had to be content with the effect he made as a living picture. This disability on his part was characteristic of the whole performance, which had to be taken in a somewhat low key and slow tempo, with a minimum of movement. If any

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attempt had been made at the impetuosity and liveliness for which the English experts of the sixteenth century were famous throughout Europe, it would have not only failed, but prevented the performers from attaining what they did attain, very creditably, by a more modest ambition. To our host the Lord Mayor I take off my hat. When I think of the guzzling horrors I have seen in that room, and the insufferable oratory that has passed through my head from ear to ear on its way to the second pillar on the right of the door (which has the advantage of being stone deaf), I hail with sincere gratitude the first tenant of the Mansion House who has bidden me to an entertainment worthy of the first magistrate of a great city, instead of handing me over to an army of waiters to be dealt with as one “whose god is his belly.”

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THE TEMPEST IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY q The twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of critical commentary on The Tempest, with critics employing a great diversity of approaches. Most continued to admire the play as a rare and wonderful object. By century’s end, however, a series of critics skeptical of its “wonder” had emerged. In the first half of the century, many established critics examined the form of The Tempest, building on the nineteenth-century tradition of formalist criticism. (Formalist criticism emphasizes aspects such as plot, character, and symbolism and pays less attention to issues like the author’s biography or the political climate the author wrote in.) Some of these critics focused primarily on scholarly matters such as the work’s sources, its critical history, and the interrelations of its parts. For example, in 1919, John Rea sought the source for the storm in The Tempest in the work of Erasmus and examined the idea of “shipwreck” as it appears in his writings. In 1925, E. K. Chambers surveyed criticism of The Tempest in an attempt to demonstrate the “integrity” of the work. In 1926, Helen Sandison examined the use and significance of clothing in The Tempest. Writers like Wolfgang Clemen sought to understand the play (and all of Shakespeare) through a study of its imagery. Other critics attempted more comprehensive explorations. In 1907, Henry James approached The Tempest in awe of what seemed to him its unfathomable depth. G. Wilson Knight (1947) regarded the play as “an interpretation of Shakespeare’s world” because, he said, it included no “non-essentials.” In 1938, E. M. W. Tillyard considered what he called The Tempest’s “tragic pattern,” in opposition to its conventional designation as a comedy or romance. Harold Goddard, in his 1951 book The Meaning of Shakespeare, also compared the play to tragedies such as King Lear and Macbeth, in addition to the comedies it is more usually associated with. Some critics remarked on the mystery of The Tempest. For instance, Mark Van Doren said in 1939 that readers ought to approach the play without trying to understand it completely. Northrop Frye concluded his introduction to the Pelican edition of The Tempest (1959) on a

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similar note: “However we take it, The Tempest is a play not simply to be read or seen or even studied, but possessed.” In 1949, Derek Traversi traced the development of the themes of misdeed, forgiveness, and reconciliation as they run through Shakespeare’s plays and are resolved in The Tempest. But William Empson attacked this view in 1964, calling Traversi and others in his vein “Moral Critics.” Contentious interpretation of the play continued in the next decades: The cultural changes that exploded in the 1960s had a dramatic impact on the way critics understood The Tempest. Critics in the 1960s and succeeding decades tended to regard the play as a text to manipulate rather than a wonder to be contemplated. This, in itself, was not a new approach. Among others in the nineteenth century, Robert Browning had taken this tack (in “Caliban upon Setebos”). In the early 1940s, the poet W. H. Auden did likewise in The Sea and the Mirror, which is a cross between an adaptation of The Tempest and a commentary upon it. In this work Auden not only explored The Tempest and art but also used the play to consider his own return to the Anglican Church. What was new in the latter part of the twentieth century were the issues that engaged critics and commentators. Rather than seeking inherent shape and meaning in the play or archetypal qualities in its characters, critical readings and theatrical productions aimed to reshape The Tempest. Colonial, post-colonial, and anticolonial readings; feminist readings; and readings informed by the history of the enslavement of Africans all became significant entries into the body of Tempest criticism and production. For example, in 1972 the maverick American critic Leslie Fiedler identified Caliban as an archetype of the American Indian. Such schools of interpretation often reflect the concerns of the critic more than the meaning of the work. Late twentieth-century criticism, however, was not lacking in scholarship; the scholarship it practiced had simply expanded. These multiple interpretations invited assessment of their own merits. In 1989 Meredith Anne Skura evaluated her peers’ criticism regarding colonialism in The Tempest. Meanwhile, Harold Bloom asserted in 1992 (in opposition to critical trends) that the relationship between Prospero and Caliban was more familial than colonial.

1907—Henry James. “Introduction to The Tempest” Harold Bloom has called Henry James (1843–1916) “the major American writer of prose fiction.” A proponent of psychological realism, James was the author of more than 100 short stories, novellas, and novels, including The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove. He was also a noted critic, both of others’ writing and his own.

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If the effect of the Plays and Poems, taken in their mass, be most of all to appear often to mock our persistent ignorance of so many of the conditions of their birth, and thereby to place on the rack again our strained and aching wonder, this character has always struck me as more particularly kept up for them by The Tempest; the production, of the long series, in which the Questions, as the critical reader of Shakespeare must ever comprehensively and ruefully call them and more or less resignedly live with them, hover before us in their most tormenting form. It may seem no very philosophic state of mind, the merely baffled and exasperated view of one of the supreme works of all literature; though I feel, for myself, that to confess to it now and then, by way of relief, is no unworthy tribute to the work. It is not, certainly, the tribute most frequently paid, for the large body of comment and criticism of which this play alone has been the theme abounds much rather in affirmed conclusions, complacencies of conviction, full apprehensions of the meaning and triumphant pointings of the moral. The Questions, in the light of all this wisdom, convert themselves with comparatively small difficulty, into smooth and definite answers; the innumerable dim ghosts that flit, like started game at eventide, through the deep dusk of our speculation, with just form enough to quicken it and no other charity for us at all, bench themselves along the vista as solidly as Falstaff and as vividly as Hotspur. Everything has thus been attributed to the piece before us, and every attribution so made has been in turn brushed away; merely to glance at such a monument to the interest inspired is to recognise a battleground of opposed factions, not a little enveloped in sound and smoke. Of these copious elements, produced for the most part of the best intention, we remain accordingly conscious; so that to approach the general bone of contention, as we can but familiarly name it, for whatever purpose, we have to cross the scene of action at a mortal risk, making the fewest steps of it and trusting to the probable calm at the centre of the storm. There in fact, though there only, we find that serenity; find the subject itself intact and unconscious, seated as unwinking and inscrutable as a divinity in a temple, save for that vague flicker of derision, the only response to our interpretative heat, which adds the last beauty to its face. The divinity never relents—never, like the image of life in The Winter’s Tale, steps down from its pedestal; it simply leaves us to stare on through the ages, with this fact indeed of having crossed the circle of fire, and so got into the real and right relation to it, for our one comfort. The position of privilege of The Tempest as the latest example, to all appearance, of the author’s rarer work, with its distance from us in time thereby shortened to the extent of the precious step or two, was certain to expose it, at whatever final cost, we easily see, to any amount of interpretative zeal. With its first recorded performance that of February 1613, when it was given in honour of the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth, its finished state cannot have preceded his death by more than three years, and we accordingly take it as the finest flower of his experience. Here indeed, as on so many of the Questions, judgments

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sharply differ, and this use of it as an ornament to the nuptials of the daughter of James I and the young Elector Palatine may have been but a repetition of previous performances; though it is not in such a case supposable that these can have been numerous. They would antedate the play, at the most, by a year or two, and so not throw it essentially further back from us. The Tempest speaks to us, somehow, convincingly, as a pièce de circonstance, and the suggestion that it was addressed, in its brevity, its rich simplicity, and its free elegance, to courtproduction, and above all to providing, with a string of other dramas, for the ‘intellectual’ splendour of a wedding-feast, is, when once entertained, not easily dislodged. A few things fail to fit, but more fit strikingly. I like therefore to think of the piece as of 1613. To refer it, as it is referred by other reckonings, to 1611 is but to thicken that impenetrability of silence in which Shakespeare’s latest years enfold him. Written as it must have been on the earlier calculation, before the age of forty-seven, it has that rare value of the richly mature note of a genius who, by our present measure of growth and fulness, was still young enough to have had in him a world of life: we feel behind it the immense procession of its predecessors, while we yet stare wistfully at the plenitude and the majesty, the expression as of something broad-based and ultimate, that were not, in any but a strained sense, to borrow their warrant from the weight of years. Nothing so enlarges the wonder of the whole time-question in Shakespeare’s career as the fact of this date, in easy middle life, of his time-climax; which, if we knew less, otherwise, than we do about him, might affect us as an attempt, on the part of treacherous History, to pass him off as one of those monsters of precocity who, fortunately for their probable reputation, the too likely betrayal of short-windedness, are cut off in their comparative prime. The transmuted young rustic who, after a look over London, brief at the best, was ready at the age of thirty to produce The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (and this after the half-dozen splendid prelusive things that had included, at twenty-eight, Romeo and Juliet), had been indeed a monster of precocity—which all geniuses of the first order are not; but the day of his paying for it had neither arrived nor, however faintly, announced itself, and the fathomless strangeness of his story, the abrupt stoppage of his pulse after The Tempest, is not, in charity, lighted for us by a glimmer of explanation. The explanation by some interposing accident is as absent as any symptom of ‘declining powers’. His powers declined, that is—but declined merely to obey the spring we should have supposed inherent in them; and their possessor’s case derives from this, I think, half the secret of its so inestimably mystifying us. He died, for a nature so organized, too lamentably soon; but who knows where we should have been with him if he had not lived long enough so to affirm, with many other mysteries, the mystery of his abrupt and complete cessation? There is that in The Tempest, specifically, though almost all indefinably, which seems to show us the artist consciously tasting of the first and rarest of his gifts, that of imaged

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creative Expression, the instant sense of some copious equivalent of thought for every grain of the grossness of reality; to show him as unresistingly aware, in the depths of his genius, that nothing like it had ever been known, or probably would ever be again known, on earth, and as so given up, more than on other occasions, to the joy of sovereign science. There are so many sides from which any page that shows his stamp may be looked at that a handful of reflections can hope for no coherency, in the chain of association immediately formed, unless they happen to bear upon some single truth. Such a truth then, for me, is this comparative—by which one can really but mean this superlative—artistic value of the play seen in the meagre circle of the items of our knowledge about it. Let me say that our knowledge, in the whole connection, is a quantity that shifts, surprisingly, with the measure of a felt need; appearing to some of us, on some sides, adequate, various, large, and appearing to others, on whatever side, a scant beggar’s portion. We are concerned, it must be remembered, here—that is for getting generally near our author—not only with the number of the mustered facts, but with the kind of fact that each may strike us as being: never unmindful that such matters, when they are few, may go far for us if they be individually but ample and significant; and when they are numerous, on the other hand, may easily fall short enough to break our hearts if they be at the same time but individually small and poor. Three or four stepping-stones across a stream will serve if they are broad slabs, but it will take more than may be counted if they are only pebbles. Beyond all gainsaying then, by many an estimate, is the penury in which even the most advantageous array of the Shakespearean facts still leaves us: strung together with whatever ingenuity they remain, for our discomfiture, as the pebbles across the stream. To balance, for our occasion, this light scale, however, The Tempest affects us, taking its complexity and its perfection together, as the rarest of all examples of literary art. There may be other things as exquisite, other single exhalations of beauty reaching as high a mark and sustained there for a moment, just as there are other deep wells of poetry from which cupfuls as crystalline may, in repeated dips, be drawn; but nothing, surely, of equal length and variety lives so happily and radiantly as a whole: no poetic birth ever took place under a star appointed to blaze upon it so steadily. The felicity enjoyed is enjoyed longer and more intensely, and the art involved, completely revealed, as I suggest, to the master, holds the securest revel. The man himself, in the Plays, we directly touch, to my consciousness, positively nowhere: we are dealing too perpetually with the artist, the monster and magician of a thousand masks, not one of which we feel him drop long enough to gratify with the breath of the interval that strained attention in us which would be yet, so quickened, ready to become deeper still. Here at last the artist is, comparatively speaking, so generalised, so consummate and typical, so frankly amused with himself, that is with his art, with his power, with his theme, that it is as if he came to meet us more than his usual halfway, and

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as if, thereby, in meeting him, and touching him, we were nearer to meeting and touching the man. The man everywhere, in Shakespeare’s work, is so effectually locked up and imprisoned in the artist that we but hover at the base of thick walls for a sense of him; while, in addition, the artist is so steeped in the abysmal objectivity of his characters and situations that the great billows of the medium itself play with him, to our vision, very much as, over a ship’s side, in certain waters, we catch, through transparent tides, the flash of strange sea-creatures. What we are present at in this fashion is a series of incalculable plunges—the series of those that have taken effect, I mean, after the great primary plunge, made once for all, of the man into the artist: the successive plunges of the artist himself into Romeo and into Juliet, into Shylock, Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Cleopatra, Antony, Lear, Othello, Falstaff, Hotspur; immersions during which, though he always ultimately finds his feet, the very violence of the movements involved troubles and distracts our sight. In The Tempest, by the supreme felicity I speak of, is no violence; he sinks as deep as we like, but what he sinks into, beyond all else, is the lucid stillness of his style. One can speak, in these matters, but from the impression determined by one’s own inevitable standpoint; again and again, at any rate, such a masterpiece puts before me the very act of the momentous conjunction taking place for the poet, at a given hour, between his charged inspiration and his clarified experience: or, as I should perhaps better express it, between his human curiosity and his aesthetic passion. Then, if he happens to have been, all his career, with his equipment for it, more or less the victim and the slave of the former, he yields, by way of a change, to the impulse of allowing the latter, for a magnificent moment, the upper hand. The human curiosity, as I call it, is always there—with no more need of making provision for it than use in taking precautions against it; the surrender to the luxury of expertness may therefore go forward on its own conditions. I can offer no better description of The Tempest as fresh re-perusal lights it for me than as such a surrender, sublimely enjoyed; and I may frankly say that, under this impression of it, there is no refinement of the artistic consciousness that I do not see my way—or feel it, better, perhaps, since we but grope, at the best, in our darkness—to attribute to the author. It is a way that one follows to the end, because it is a road, I repeat, on which one least misses some glimpse of him face to face. If it be true that the thing was concocted to meet a particular demand, that of the master of the King’s revels, with his prescription of date, form, tone and length, this, so far from interfering with the Poet’s perception of a charming opportunity to taste for himself, for himself above all, and as he had almost never so tasted, not even in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of the quality of his mind and the virtue of his skill, would have exceedingly favoured the happy case. Innumerable one may always suppose these delicate debates and intimate understandings of an artist with himself. ‘How much taste, in the world, may I conceive that I have?—and what a charming idea to snatch a moment for

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finding out? What moment could be better than this—a bridal evening before the Court, with extra candles and the handsomest company—if I can but put my hand on the right “scenario”?’ We can catch, across the ages, the searching sigh and the look about; we receive the stirred breath of the ripe, amused genius; and, stretching, as I admit I do at least, for a still closer conception of the beautiful crisis, I find it pictured for me in some such presentment as that of a divine musician who, alone in his room, preludes or improvises at close of day. He sits at the harpsichord, by the open window, in the summer dusk; his hands wander over the keys. They stray far, for his motive, but at last he finds and holds it; then he lets himself go, embroidering and refining: it is the thing for the hour and his mood. The neighbours may gather in the garden, the nightingale be hushed on the bough; it is none the less a private occasion, a concert of one, both performer and auditor, who plays for his own ear, his own hand, his own innermost sense, and for the bliss and capacity of his instrument. Such are the only hours at which the artist may, by any measure of his own (too many things, at others, make heavily against it); and their challenge to him is irresistible if he has known, all along, too much compromise and too much sacrifice. The face that beyond any other, however, I seem to see The Tempest turn to us is the side on which it so superlatively speaks of that endowment for Expression, expression as a primary force, a consuming, an independent passion, which was the greatest ever laid upon man. It is for Shakespeare’s power of constitutive speech quite as if he had swum into our ken with it from another planet, gathering it up there, in its wealth, as something antecedent to the occasion and the need, and if possible quite in excess of them; something that was to make of our poor world a great flat table for receiving the glitter and clink of outpoured treasure. The idea and the motive are more often than not so smothered in it that they scarce know themselves, and the resources of such a style, the provision of images, emblems, energies of every sort, laid up in advance, affects us as the storehouse of a king before a famine or a siege—which not only, by its scale, braves depletion or exhaustion, but bursts, through mere excess of quantity or presence, out of all doors and windows. It renders the poverties and obscurities of our world, as I say, in the dazzling terms of a richer and better. It constitutes, by a miracle, more than half the author’s material; so much more usually does it happen, for the painter or the poet, that life itself, in its appealing, overwhelming crudity, offers itself as the paste to be kneaded. Such a personage works in general in the very elements of experience; whereas we see Shakespeare working predominantly in the terms of expression, all in the terms of the artist’s specific vision and genius; with a thicker cloud of images to attest his approach, at any point than the comparatively meagre given case ever has to attest its own identity. He points for us as no one else the relation of style to meaning and of manner to motive; a matter on which, right and left, we hear such rank ineptitudes uttered. Unless it be true that these things, on either hand, are inseparable; unless it be

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true that the phrase, the cluster and order of terms, is the object and the sense, in as close a compression as that of body and soul, so that any consideration of them as distinct, from the moment style is an active, applied force, becomes a gross stupidity: unless we recognise this reality the author of The Tempest has no lesson for us. It is by his expression of it exactly as the expression stands that the particular thing is created, created as interesting, as beautiful, as strange, droll or terrible—as related, in short, to our understanding or our sensibility; in consequence of which we reduce it to naught when we begin to talk of either of its presented parts as matters by themselves. All of which considerations indeed take us too far; what it is important to note being simply our Poet’s high testimony to this independent, absolute value of Style, and to its need thoroughly to project and seat itself. It had been, as so seating itself, the very home of his mind, for his all too few twenty years; it had been the supreme source to him of the joy of life. It had been in fine his material, his plastic clay; since the more subtly he applied it the more secrets it had to give him, and the more these secrets might appear to him, at every point, one with the lights and shades of the human picture, one with the myriad pulses of the spirit of man. Thus it was that, as he passed from one application of it to another, tone became, for all its suggestions, more and more sovereign to him, and the subtlety of its secrets an exquisite interest. If I see him, at the last, over The Tempest, as the composer, at the harpsichord or the violin, extemporising in the summer twilight, it is exactly that he is feeling there for tone and, by the same token, finding it—finding it as The Tempest, beyond any register of ours, immortally gives it. This surrender to the highest sincerity of virtuosity, as we nowadays call it, is to my perception all The Tempest; with no possible depth or delicacy in it that such an imputed character does not cover and provide for. The subject to be treated was the simple fact (if one may call anything in the matter simple) that refinement, selection, economy, the economy not of poverty, but of wealth a little weary of congestion—the very air of the lone island and the very law of the Court celebration—were here implied and imperative things. Anything was a subject, always, that offered to sight an aperture of size enough for expression and its train to pass in and deploy themselves. If they filled up all the space, none the worse; they occupied it as nothing else could do. The subjects of the Comedies are, without exception, old wives’ tales—which we are not too insufferably aware of only because the iridescent veil so perverts their proportions. The subjects of the Histories are no subjects at all; each is but a row of pegs for the hanging of the cloth of gold that is to muffle them. Such a thing as The Merchant of Venice declines, for very shame, to be reduced to its elements of witless ‘story’; such things as the two Parts of Henry the Fourth form no more than a straight convenient channel for the procession of evoked images that is to pour through it like a torrent. Each of these productions is none the less of incomparable splendour; by which splendour we are bewildered till we see how

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it comes. Then we see that every inch of it is personal tone, or in other words brooding expression raised to the highest energy. Push such energy far enough— far enough if you can!—and, being what it is, it then inevitably provides for Character. Thus we see character, in every form of which the ‘story’ gives the thinnest hint, marching through the pieces I have named in its habit as it lives, and so filling out the scene that nothing is missed. The ‘story’ in The Tempest is a thing of naught, for any story will provide a remote island, a shipwreck and a coincidence. Prospero and Miranda, awaiting their relatives, are, in the present case, for the relatives, the coincidence—just as the relatives are the coincidence for them. Ariel and Caliban, and the island-airs and island-scents, and all the rest of the charm and magic and the ineffable delicacy (a delicacy positively at its highest in the conception and execution of Caliban) are the style handed over to its last disciplined passion of curiosity; a curiosity which flowers, at this pitch, into the freshness of each of the characters. There are judges for whom the piece is a tissue of symbols; symbols of the facts of State then apparent, of the lights of philosophic and political truth, of the ‘deeper meanings of life’, above all, of a high crisis in its author’s career. At this most relevant of its mystic values only we may glance; the consecrated estimate of Prospero’s surrender of his magic robe and staff as a figure for Shakespeare’s own self-despoilment, his considered purpose, at this date, of future silence. Dr. George Brandes works out in detail that analogy; the production becomes, on such a supposition, Shakespeare’s ‘farewell to the stage’; his retirement to Stratford, to end his days in the care of his property and in oblivion of the theatre, was a course for which his arrangements had already been made. The simplest way to put it, since I have likened him to the musician at the piano, is to say that he had decided upon the complete closing of this instrument, and that in fact he was to proceed to lock it with the sharp click that has reverberated through the ages, and to spend what remained to him of life in walking about a small, squalid country-town with his hands in his pockets and an ear for no music now but the chink of the coin they might turn over there. This is indeed in general the accepted, the imposed view of the position he had gained: this freedom to ‘elect’, as we say, to cease, intellectually, to exist: this ability, exercised at the zenith of his splendour, to shut down the lid, from one day to another, on the most potent aptitude for vivid reflection ever lodged in a human frame and to conduct himself thereafter, in all ease and comfort, not only as if it were not, but as if it had never been. I speak of our ‘accepting’ the prodigy, but by the established record we have no choice whatever; which is why it is imposed, as I say, on our bewildered credulity. With the impossibility of proving that the author of The Tempest did, after the date of that production, ever again press the spring of his fountain, ever again reach for the sacred key or break his heart for an hour over his inconceivable act of sacrifice, we are reduced to behaving as if we understood the strange case; so that any rubbing of our eyes, as under the

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obsession of a wild dream, has been held a gesture that, for common decency, must mainly take place in private. If I state that my small contribution to any renewed study of the matter can amount, accordingly, but to little more than an irresistible need to rub mine in public, I shall have done the most that the condition of our knowledge admits of. We can ‘accept’, but we can accept only in stupefaction—a stupefaction that, in presence of The Tempest, and of the intimate meaning so imputed to it, must despair of ever subsiding. These things leave us in darkness—in gross darkness about the Man; the case of which they are the warrant is so difficult to embrace. None ever appealed so sharply to some light of knowledge, and nothing could render our actual knowledge more contemptible. What manner of human being was it who could so, at a given moment, announce his intention of capping his divine flame with a twopenny extinguisher, and who then, the announcement made, could serenely succeed in carrying it out? Were it a question of a flame spent or burning thin, we might feel a little more possessed of matter for comprehension; the fact being, on the contrary, one can only repeat, that the value of The Tempest is, exquisitely, in its refinement of power, its renewed artistic freshness and roundness, its mark as of a distinction unequalled, on the whole (though I admit that we here must take subtle measures), in any predecessor. Prospero has simply waited, to cast his magic ring into the sea, till the jewel set in it shall have begun to burn as never before. So it is then; and it puts into a nutshell the eternal mystery, the most insoluble that ever was, the complete rupture, for our understanding, between the Poet and the Man. There are moments, I admit, in this age of sound and fury, of connections, in every sense, too maddeningly multiplied, when we are willing to let it pass as a mystery, the most soothing, cooling, consoling too perhaps, that ever was. But there are others when, speaking for myself, its power to torment us intellectually seems scarcely to be borne; and we know these moments best when we hear it proclaimed that a comfortable clearness reigns. I have been for instance reading over Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, and I find him apparently of the opinion that it is all our fault if everything in our author’s story, and above all in this last chapter of it, be not of a primitive simplicity. The complexity arises from our suffering our imagination to meddle with the Man at all; who is quite sufficiently presented to us on the face of the record. For critics of this writer’s complexion the only facts we are urgently concerned with are the facts of the Poet, which are abundantly constituted by the Plays and the Sonnets. The Poet is there, and the Man is outside: the Man is for instance in such a perfectly definite circumstance as that he could never miss, after The Tempest, the key of his piano, as I have called it, since he could play so freely with the key of his cash-box. The supreme master of expression had made, before fifty, all the money he wanted; therefore what was there more to express? This view is admirable if you can get your mind to consent to it. It must ignore any impulse, in presence of Play or Sonnet (whatever vague stir behind either may momentarily act as provocation)

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to try for a lunge at the figured arras. In front of the tapestry sits the immitigably respectable person whom our little slateful of gathered and numbered items, heaven knows, does amply account for, since there is nothing in him to explain; while the undetermined figure, on the other hand—undetermined whether in the sense of respectability or of anything else—the figure who supremely interests us, remains as unseen of us as our Ariel, on the enchanted island, remains of the bewildered visitors. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps’s theory, as I understand it—and I refer to it but as an advertisement of a hundred others—is that we too are but bewildered visitors, and that the state of mind of the Duke of Naples and his companions is our proper critical portion. If our knowledge of the greatest of men consists therefore but of the neat and ‘proved’ addition of two or three dozen common particulars, the rebuke to a morbid and monstrous curiosity is no more than just. We know enough, by such an implication, when we admire enough, and as difficulties would appear to abound on our attempting to push further, this is an obvious lesson to us to stand as still as possible. Not difficulties—those of penetration, exploration, interpretation, those, in the word that says everything, of appreciation—are the approved field of criticism, but the very forefront of the obvious and the palpable, where we may go round and round, like holiday-makers on hobbyhorses, at the turning of a crank. Differences of estimate, in this relation, come back, too clearly, let us accordingly say, to differences of view of the character of genius in general—if not, in truth, more exactly stated, to that strangest of all fallacies, the idea of the separateness of a great man’s parts. His genius places itself, under this fallacy, on one side of the line and the rest of his identity on the other; the line being that, for instance, which, to Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps’s view, divides the author of Hamlet and The Tempest from the man of exemplary business-method whom alone we may propose to approach at all intimately. The stumbling-block here is that the boundary exists only in the vision of those able to content themselves with arbitrary marks. A mark becomes arbitrary from the moment we have no authoritative sign of where to place it, no sign of higher warrant than that it smoothes and simplifies the ground. But though smoothing and simplifying, on such terms, may, by restricting our freedom of attention and speculation, make, on behalf of our treatment of the subject, for a livelier effect of business—that business as to a zealous care for which we seem taught that our author must above all serve as our model—it will see us little further on any longer road. The fullest appreciation possible is the high tribute we must offer to greatness, and to make it worthy of its office we must surely know where we are with it. In greatness as much as in mediocrity the man is, under examination, one, and the elements of character melt into each other. The genius is a part of the mind, and the mind a part of the behaviour; so that, for the attitude of inquiry, without which appreciation means nothing, where does one of these provinces end and the other begin? We may take the genius first or the behaviour first,

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but we inevitably proceed from the one to the other; we inevitably encamp, as it were, on the high central table-land that they have in common. How are we to arrive at a relation with the object to be penetrated if we are thus forever met by a locked door flanked with a sentinel who merely invites us to take it for edifying? We take it ourselves for attaching—which is the very essence of mysteries—and profess ourselves doomed forever to hang yearningly about it. An obscurity endured, in fine, one inch further, or in one hour longer, than our necessity truly holds us to, strikes us but as an artificial spectre, a muffled object with waving arms, set up to keep appreciation down. For it is never to be forgotten that we are here in presence of the human character the most magnificently endowed, in all time, with the sense of the life of man, and with the apparatus for recording it; so that of him, inevitably, it goes hardest of all with us to be told that we have nothing, or next to nothing, to do with the effect in him of this gift. If it does not satisfy us that the effect was to make him write King Lear and Othello, we are verily difficult to please: so it is, meanwhile, that the case for the obscurity is argued. That is sovereign, we reply, so far as it goes; but it tells us nothing of the effect on him of being able to write Lear and Othello. No scrap of testimony of what this may have been is offered us; it is the quarter in which our blankness is most blank, and in which we are yet most officiously put off. It is true of the poet in general—in nine examples out of ten—that his life is mainly inward, that its events and revolutions are his great impressions and deep vibrations, and that his ‘personality’ is all pictured in the publication of his verse. Shakespeare, we essentially feel, is the tenth, is the millionth example; not the sleek bachelor of music, the sensitive harp set once for all in the window to catch the air, but the spirit in hungry quest of every possible experience and adventure of the spirit, and which, betimes, with the boldest of all intellectual movements, was to leap from the window into the street. We are in the street, as it were, for admiration and wonder, when the incarnation alights, and it is of no edification to shrug shoulders at the felt impulse (when made manifest) to follow, to pursue, all breathlessly to track it on its quickly-taken way. Such a quest of imaginative experience, we can only feel, has itself constituted one of the greatest observed adventures of mankind; so that no point of the history of it, however far back seized, is premature for our fond attention. Half our connection with it is our desire to ‘assist’ at it; so how can we fail of curiosity and sympathy? The answer to which is doubtless again that these impulses are very well, but that as the case stands they can move but in one channel. We are free to assist in the Plays themselves—to assist at whatever we like; so long, that is, as, after the fashion I have noted, we rigidly limit our inductions from them. It is put to us once more that we can make no bricks without straw, and that, rage as we may against our barrier, it none the less stubbornly exists. Granted on behalf of the vaulting spirit all that we claim for it, is still, in the street, as we say—and in spite of the effect we see it as acrobatically producing there—absolutely defies

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pursuit. Beyond recovery, beyond curiosity, it was to lose itself in the crowd. The crowd, for that matter, the witnesses we must take as astonished and dazzled, has, though itself surviving but in a dozen or two dim, scarce articulate ghosts, been interrogated to the last man and the last distinguishable echo. This has practically elicited nothing—nothing, that is, of a nature to gratify the indiscreetly, the morbidly inquisitive; since we find ourselves not rarely reminded that morbidity may easily become a vice. He was notoriously not morbid; he stuck to his business—save when he so strangely gave it up; wherefore his own common sense about things in general is a model for the tone he should properly inspire. ‘You speak of his career as a transcendent “adventure,” as the conspicuously transcendent adventure—even to the sight of his contemporaries—of the mind of man; but no glimmer of any such story, of any such figure or “presence,” to use your ambiguous word, as you desire to read into the situation, can be discerned in any quarter. So what is it you propose we should do? What evidence do you suggest that, with this absence of material, we should put together? We have what we have; we are not concerned with what we have not.’ In some such terms as that, one makes out, does the best attainable ‘appreciation’ appear to invite us to let our great personage, the mighty adventurer, slink past. He slunk past in life: that was good enough for him, the contention appears to be. Why therefore should he not slink past in immortality? One’s reply can indeed only be that he evidently must; yes I profess that, even while saying so, our poor point, for which The Tempest once more gives occasion, strikes me as still, as always, in its desperate way, worth the making. The question, I hold, will eternally interest the student of letters and of the human understanding, and the envied privilege of our play in particular will be always to keep it before him. How did the faculty so radiant there contrive, in such perfection, the arrest of its divine flight? By what inscrutable process was the extinguisher applied and, when once applied, kept in its place to the end? What became of the checked torrent, as a latent, bewildered presence and energy, in the life across which the dam was constructed? What other mills did it set itself turning, or what contiguous country did it—rather indeed did it not, in default of these—inevitably ravage? We are referred, for an account of the matter, to recorded circumstances which are only not supremely vulgar because they are supremely dim and few; in which character they but mock, and as if all consciously, as I have said, at our unrest. The one at all large indication they give is that our hero may have died—since he died so soon—of his unnatural effort. Their quality, however, redeems them a little by having for its effect that they throw us back on the work itself with a rebellious renewal of appetite and yearning. The secret that baffles us being the secret of the Man, we know, as I have granted, that we shall never touch the Man directly in the Artist. We stake our hopes thus on indirectness, which may contain possibilities; we take that very truth for our counsel of despair, try to look at it as helpful for the Criticism of the future. That of the past has been too

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often infantile; one has asked one’s self how it could, on such lines, get at him. The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there, with its immensity of surface and its proportionate underside. May it not then be but a question, for the fulness of time, of the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge?

QQQ 1938—E. M. W. Tillyard. “The Tragic Pattern: ‘The Tempest’,” from Shakespeare’s Last Plays E. M. W. Tillyard (1889–1962) was a critic known for books on Elizabethan literature in general and on the works of Shakespeare and Milton in particular. He promoted the idea that people who lived in the Renaissance believed in a highly stratified world order ordained by God.

It is a common notion that Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale are experiments leading to the final success of The Tempest. I think it quite untrue of The Winter’s Tale, which, in some ways though not in others, deals with the tragic pattern more adequately than the later play. Certainly it deals with the destructive portion more directly and fully. On the other hand, The Tempest, by keeping this destructive portion largely in the background and dealing mainly with regeneration, avoids the juxtaposition of the two themes, which some people (of whom I am not one) find awkward in The Winter’s Tale. The simple truth is that if you cram a trilogy into a single play something has to be sacrificed. Shakespeare chose to make a different sacrifice in each of his two successful renderings of the complete tragic pattern: unity in The Winter’s Tale, present rendering of the destructive part of the tragic pattern in The Tempest. Many readers, drugged by the heavy enchantments of Prospero’s island, may demur at my admitting the tragic element to the play at all. I can cite in support one of the latest studies of the play, Dover Wilson’s1 (although I differ somewhat in the way I think the tragic element is worked out). Of the storm scene he writes: It is as if Shakespeare had packed his whole tragic vision of life into one brief scene before bestowing his new vision upon us. But one has only to look at the total plot to see that in its main lines it closely follows those of Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, and that tragedy is an organic part of it. Prospero, when one first hears of him, was the ruler of an

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independent state and beloved of his subjects. But all is not well, because the King of Naples is his enemy. Like Basilius in Sidney’s Arcadia, he commits the error of not attending carefully enough to affairs of state. The reason for this error, his Aristotelian amartia, is his love of study. He hands over the government to his brother Antonio, who proceeds to call in the King of Naples to turn Prospero out of his kingdom. Fearing the people, Antonio refrains from murdering Prospero and his infant daughter, but sets them adrift in a boat. Now, except for this last item, the plot is entirely typical of Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Allow Prospero to be put to death, give him a son instead of a daughter to live and to avenge him, and your tragic plot is complete. Such are the affinities of the actual plot of The Tempest. And in the abstract it is more typically tragic in the fashion of its age than The Winter’s Tale, with its debt to the Greek romances. In handling the theme of regeneration, Shakespeare in one way alters his method. Although a royal person had previously been the protagonist, it had been only in name. Cymbeline had indeed resembled Prospero in having his enemies at his mercy and in forgiving them, but he owed his power not to himself, but to fortune and the efforts of others. As for Leontes, he has little to do with his own regeneration; for it would be perverse to make too much of his generosity in sheltering Florizel and Perdita from the anger of Polixenes. But Prospero is the agent of his own regeneration, the parent and tutor of Miranda; and through her and through his own works he changes the minds of his enemies. It was by this centering of motives in Prospero as well as by subordinating the theme of destruction that Shakespeare gave The Tempest its unified structure. In executing his work, Shakespeare chose a method new to himself but repeated by Milton in Samson Agonistes. He began his action at a point in the story so late that the story was virtually over; and he included the total story either by narrating the past or by re-enacting samples of it: a complete reaction from the method of frontal attack used in The Winter’s Tale. For the re-enactment of tragedy it is possible to think with Dover Wilson that the storm scene does this. But it does nothing to re-enact the specific tragic plot in the play, the fall of Prospero; and one of its aims is to sketch (as it does with incomparable swiftness) the characters of the ship’s company. The true re-enactment is in the long first scene of the second act where Antonio, in persuading Sebastian to murder Alonso, personates his own earlier action in plotting against Prospero, thus drawing it out of the past and placing it before us in the present. This long scene, showing the shipwrecked king and courtiers and the conspiracy, has not had sufficient praise nor sufficient attention. Antonio’s transformation from the cynical and lazy badgerer of Gonzalo’s loquacity to the brilliantly swift and unscrupulous man of action is a thrilling affair. Just so Iago awakes from his churlish “honesty” to his brilliant machinations. Antonio is indeed one of Shakespeare’s major villains:

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Antonio. Will you grant with me That Ferdinand is drown’d? Sebastian. He’s gone. Antonio. Then, tell me, Who’s the next heir to Naples? Sebastian. Claribel. Antonio. She that is Queen of Tunis; she that dwells Ten leagues beyond man’s life; she that from Naples Can have no note, unless the sun were post— The man i’ the moon’s too slow—till newborn chins Be rough and razorable; she that from whom We all were sea-swallow’d, though some cast again, And by that destiny, to perform an act Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come, In yours and my discharge. Sebastian. What stuff is this! how say you? ’Tis true my brother’s daughter’s Queen of Tunis, So is she heir of Naples; ’twixt which regions There is some space. Antonio. A space whose every cubit Seems to cry out, “How shall that Claribel Measure us back to Naples? Keep in Tunis, And let Sebastian wake.” Say this were death That now hath seized them; why, they were no worse Than now they are. There be that can rule Naples As well as he that sleeps; lords that can prate As amply and unnecessarily As this Gonzalo; I myself could make A chough of as deep chat. O, that you bore The mind that I do! What a sleep were this For your advancement! Do you understand me? We should do wrong to take the conspiracy very seriously in itself. We know Prospero’s power, and when Ariel enters and wakes the intended victims we have no fears for their future safety. But all the more weight should the scene assume as recalling the past. Dover Wilson2 greatly contributes to a right understanding of the play by stressing the first lines of the fifth act, when Prospero declares to Ariel that he will pardon his enemies, now quite at his mercy: Ariel. Your charm so strongly works ’em That if you now beheld them, your affections

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Would become tender. Prospero. Dost thou think so, spirit? Ariel. Mine would, sir, were I human. Prospero. And mine shall. Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, One of their kind, that relish all as sharply, Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art? Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick, Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury Do I take part: the rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further. But when Dover Wilson would have this to represent Prospero’s sudden conversion from a previously intended vengeance, I cannot follow him. It is true that Prospero shows a certain haste of temper up to that point of the play, and that he punishes Caliban and the two other conspirators against his life with some asperity; but his comments on them, after his supposed conversion, have for me the old ring: Mark but the badges of these men, my lords, Then say if they be true. This misshapen knave, His mother was a witch, and one so strong That could control the moon, make flows and ebbs, And deal in her command without her power. These three have robb’d me; and this demi-devil— For he’s a bastard one—had plotted with them To take my life. Two of these fellows you Must know and own; this thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine. The last words express all Prospero’s old bitterness that Caliban has resisted him and refused to respond to his nurture.3 Indeed, Prospero does not change fundamentally during the play, though, like Samson’s, his own accomplished regeneration is put to the test. If he had seriously intended vengeance, why should he have stopped Sebastian and Antonio murdering Alonso? That he did stop them is proof of his already achieved regeneration from vengeance to mercy. This act, and his talk to Ariel of taking part with his reason against his fury, are once again a re-enactment of a process now past, perhaps extending over a period of many years. I do not wish to imply that the re-enactment is weak or

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that the temptation to vengeance was not there all the time. Prospero’s fury at the thought of Caliban’s conspiracy, which interrupts the masque, must be allowed full weight. It is not for nothing that Miranda says that— never till this day Saw I him touch’d with anger so distemper’d. We must believe that Prospero felt thus, partly because Caliban’s conspiracy typifies all the evil of the world which has so perplexed him, and partly because he is still tempted to be revenged on Alonso and Antonio. He means to pardon them, and he will pardon them. But beneath his reason’s sway is this anger against them, which, like Satan’s before the sun in Paradise Lost, disfigures his face. When Dover Wilson calls Prospero a terrible old man, almost as tyrannical and irascible as Lear at the opening of his play, he makes a valuable comparison, but it should concern Prospero as he once was, not the character who meets us in the play, in whom these traits are mere survivals. The advantage of this technique of re-enactment was economy, its drawback an inevitable blurring of the sharp outline. The theme of destruction, though exquisitely blended in the whole, is less vivid than it is in The Winter’s Tale. Having made it so vivid in that play, Shakespeare was probably well content to put the stress on the theme of re-creation. And here he did not work solely by re-enactment. He strengthened Prospero’s re-enacted regeneration by the figures of Ferdinand and Miranda. I argued above that, in view of his background of Elizabethan chivalrous convention, Ferdinand need not have been as insignificant as he is usually supposed. Similarly, Miranda’s character has been unduly diminished in recent years. Today, under the stress of the new psychology, men have become nervous lest they should be caught illicitly attaching their daydreams of the perfect woman to a character in fiction. They laugh at the Victorians for falling unawares into this error, and Miranda may have been one of the most popular victims. Hence the anxiety not to admire her too much. E. K. Chambers has written: Unless you are sentimentalist inveterate, your emotions will not be more than faintly stirred by the blameless loves at first sight of Ferdinand and Miranda. Schücking4 goes further and considers Miranda a poor imitation of Beaumont and Fletcher’s idea of the chaste female, an idea that could be dwelt on so

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lovingly and emphatically only in a lascivious age. In depicting her with her talk of “modesty, the jewel in my dower” and her protests that if Ferdinand will not marry her, “I’ll die your maid,” and in making Prospero so insistent that she should not lose her maidenhead before marriage, Shakespeare, according to Schücking, is yielding to the demands of his age against his own better judgment. But Miranda is sufficiently successful a symbolic figure for it to matter little if she makes conventional and, in her, unnatural remarks. And even this defense may be superfluous. Since Miranda had never seen a young man, it might reasonably be doubted whether she would behave herself with entire propriety when she did. Prospero, too, had made enough mistakes in his life to be very careful to make no more. Further, Miranda was the heiress to the Duchy of Milan and her father hoped she would be Queen of Naples. What most strikingly emerged from the abdication of our late King was the strong “anthropological” feeling of the masses of the people concerning the importance of virginity in a king’s consort. The Elizabethans were not less superstitious than ourselves and would have sympathized with Prospero’s anxiety that the future Queen of Naples should keep her maidenhead till marriage: otherwise ill luck would be sure to follow. To revert to Miranda’s character, like Perdita she is both symbol and human being, yet in both capacities somewhat weaker. She is the symbol of “original virtue,” like Perdita, and should be set against the devilish figure of Antonio. She is the complete embodiment of sympathy with the men she thinks have been drowned: and her instincts are to create, to mend the work of destruction she has witnessed. She is—again like Perdita, though less clearly—a symbol of fertility. Stephano asks of Caliban, “Is it so brave a lass?” and Caliban answers, Ay, lord; she will become thy bed, I warrant, And bring thee forth brave brood. Even if The Tempest was written for some great wedding, it need not be assumed that the masque was inserted merely to fit the occasion. Like the goddesses in Perdita’s speeches about the flowers, Juno and Ceres and the song they sing may be taken to reinforce the fertility symbolism embodied in Miranda: Juno. Honor, riches, marriage blessing, Long continuance, and increasing, Hourly joys be still upon you! Juno sings her blessings on you. Ceres. Earthës increase, foison plenty, Barns and garners never empty, Vines with clustering bunches growing, Plants with goodly burthen bowing;

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Spring come to you at the farthest In the very end of harvest! Scarcity and want shall shun you; Ceres’ blessing so is on you. The touches of ordinary humanity in Miranda—her siding with Ferdinand against a supposedly hostile father, for instance—are too well known to need recalling. They do not amount to a very great deal and leave her vaguer as a human being than as a symbol. Middleton Murry is not at his happiest when he says that “they are so terribly, so agonizingly real, these women of Shakespeare’s last imagination.” As far as Miranda is concerned, any agonizing sense of her reality derives from the critic and not from the play. But this does not mean that, judged by the play’s requirements (which are not those of brilliant realism), Miranda is not perfection. Had she been more weakly drawn, she would have been insignificant, had she been more strongly, she would have interfered with the unifying dominance of Prospero. Not only do Ferdinand and Miranda sustain Prospero in representing a new order of things that has evolved out of destruction; they also vouch for its continuation. At the end of the play Alonso and Prospero are old and worn men. A younger and happier generation is needed to secure the new state to which Prospero has so painfully brought himself, his friends, and all his enemies save Caliban. NOTES 1. The Meaning of the Tempest, the Robert Spence Watson Memorial Lecture for 1936, delivered before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastleupon-Tyne, on October 5th, 1936. 2. Op. cit., pp. 14–18. 3. See the admirable discussion of “nature” and “nurture” in The Tempest in Middleton Murry’s Shakespeare, pp. 396 ff. 4. Character Problems in Shakespeare’s Plays, pp. 249–50.

QQQ 1939—Mark Van Doren. “The Tempest,” from Shakespeare Mark Van Doren (1894–1972) was a Pulitzer prize–winning poet, a literary critic, and an editor and reviewer for the magazine the Nation. He was also a professor at Columbia University for nearly 40 years.

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If Shakespeare thought of “The Tempest” as the last play he would write he may have said to himself—silently, we must assume—that he could afford to let action come in it to a kind of rest; that its task was not so much to tell a story as to fix a vision; that the symbols he hitherto had defined his art by concealing might now confess themselves, even obtrude themselves, in measured dance and significant song; and that while he was at it he would recapitulate his poetic career. It is interesting to conjecture thus, but it is perilous. “The Tempest” does bind up in final form a host of themes with which its author has been concerned. It is a mirror in which, if we hold it very still, we can gaze backward at all of the recent plays; and behind them will be glimpses of a past as old as the tragedies, the middle comedies, and even “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Or it is a thicket of resonant trees, in an odd angle of the Shakespearean wood, which hums with echoes of every distant aisle. And certainly its symbols expose themselves as their ancestors in Shakespeare seldom or never did. The play seems to order itself in terms of its meanings; things in it stand for other things, so that we are tempted to search its dark backward for a single meaning, quite final for Shakespeare and quite abstract. The trouble is that the meanings are not selfevident. One interpretation of “The Tempest” does not agree with another. And there is deeper trouble in the truth that any interpretation, even the wildest, is more or less plausible. This deep trouble, and this deep truth, should warn us that “The Tempest” is a composition about which we had better not be too knowing. If it is one of Shakespeare’s successes, and obviously it is, it will not yield its secret easily; or it has no secret to yield. Notwithstanding its visionary grace, its tendency toward lyric abstraction, it keeps that lifelike surface and that humor with which Shakespeare has always protected his meaning if he had one: that impenetrable shield off which the spears of interpretation invariably glance—or return, bent in the shaft and dulled at the point, to the hand of the thrower. It may well be that Shakespeare in “The Tempest” is telling us for the last time, and consciously for the last time, about the world. But what he is telling us cannot be simple, or we could agree that it is this or that. Perhaps it is this: that the world is not simple. Or, mysteriously enough, that it is what we all take it to be, just as “The Tempest” is whatever we would take it to be. Any set of symbols, moved close to this play, lights up as in an electric field. Its meaning, in other words, is precisely as rich as the human mind, and it says that the world is what it is. But what the world is cannot be said in a sentence. Or even in a poem as complete and beautiful as “The Tempest.” Separations and reconciliations are woven here within the circle of a remote and musical island where an enchanter, controlling the black magic of native witchcraft with the white magic of his liberal art, controls also a tempest until it brings to pass all things he has desired. The ship it founders on the shore, or seems to founder, carries his two chief enemies: his brother Antonio, whose treason has put the sea between them, and Alonso king of Naples, confederate to

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this treason. Prospero as duke of Milan had honored his brother with “confidence sans bound.” But Antonio had abused his trust, and that is the first separation. The second has occurred likewise before the play begins, and nothing in the play can cure it. Alonso has lost his fair daughter Claribel by marriage to the King of Tunis, and indeed it is from that “sweet marriage” that he is returning, bound sadly home for Naples, when he suffers shipwreck on Prospero’s island. Alonso’s loss of his remaining heir, his son Ferdinand, is temporary in so far as Prospero merely keeps them apart on the island until the separation has served its purpose, meanwhile entertaining the prince with the unearthly music of Ariel and with the charms of his own daughter Miranda; but it is permanent when Ferdinand and Miranda give themselves away to each other in love. And by the same blow, happy though it be, Prospero loses Miranda. The plot of “The Tempest” is a complex of separations—and, swiftly and harmoniously, of reconciliations, so that Gonzalo can say: In one voyage Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis, And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife Where he himself was lost, Prospero to his dukedom In a poor isle, and all of us ourselves When no man was his own. (V, i, 208–13) But we have known from the beginning that Gonzalo would have grounds for speaking so. Prospero’s isle is not poor; it is rich and strange and full of fair noises, and the magic with which he controls it will maneuver all lives into peace. We know this not merely from his assuring Miranda in the second scene that the sea-storm has been “safely ordered” (29), or from Ariel’s report that not a hair has perished (217), but from the sense we always have here that danger is not real, that artifice is disarmingly at work, and that woe is only waiting upon sea-change. Tides of understanding must “shortly fill the reasonable shore” (V, i, 79–82) when music like this music plays—constantly, and with such continuing sweetness that the one unregenerate person on the island can speak of “sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not” (III, ii, 145). The hag-born Caliban is not deaf to the “thousand twangling instruments” that hum about his ears. He is, however, the lowest inhabitant of the play; the human scale which Shakespeare has built begins with him. The island as we have it is among other things a microcosm of humanity, and its meanest soul smells music rather than apprehends it; or receives it at any rate in his grosser senses. We know Caliban first of all by his style, which may not be the “special language” an old critical tradition says it is, but which gives us a creature complete in beastliness. His characteristic speech does not open the mouth to

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music; it closes it rather on harsh, hissing, or guttural consonants that in the slowness with which they must be uttered express the difficult progress of a mind bemired in fact, an imagination beslimed with particulars. Caliban has no capacity for abstraction, and consequently for the rational harmonies of music and love. As wicked dew as e’er my mother brush’d With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen Drop on you both! A south-west blow on ye And blister you all o’er! (I, ii, 321–4) The second of these sentences is scarcely articulated; it is a mouthed curse which no tongue’s skill can refine. This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first, Thou strok’dst me and made much of me, wouldst give me Water with berries in ’t, and teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night; and then I lov’d thee And show’d thee all the qualities o’ the isle, The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile. Curs’d be I that did so! All the charms Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you! (I, ii, 331–40) “Thou strok’dst me and made much of me”—the second word is a thicket of vile sound, and the m’s that follow are the mutterings of less than human lips. All the infections that the sun sucks up From bogs, fens, fiats, on Prosper fall and make him By inch-meal a disease! His spirits hear me And yet I needs must curse. But they’ll nor pinch, Fright me with urchin-shows, pitch me i’ the mire, Nor lead me, like a firebrand, in the dark Out of my way, unless he bid ’em; but For every trifle are they set upon me, Sometime like apes that mow and chatter at me And after bite me, then like hedgehogs which Lie tumbling in my barefoot way and mount Their pricks at my footfall; sometime am I All wound with adders who with cloven tongues Do hiss me into madness. (II, ii, 1–14)

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“Like hedgehogs which lie tumbling”—the tongue of the speaker is thick in his throat, his palate is untrained. Pray you, tread softly, that the blind mole may not Hear a foot fall. (IV, i, 194–5) Out of its context this has been thought pretty, but its context is an island among whose pits and thistles Caliban roots more like a hog than a man. He knows every detail of the place but he understands nothing. I’ll show thee every fertile inch o’ the island. . . . I’ll show thee the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries; I’ll fish for thee and get thee wood enough. . . . I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow; And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts; Show thee a jay’s nest and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmoset. I’ll bring thee To clust’ring filberts and sometimes I’ll get thee Young scamels from the rock. (II, ii, 151–76) “I’ll dig thee pig-nuts,” he promises the drunken Stephano, ignorant that Stephano is not a god. It may not matter what relation Caliban bears to Montaigne’s cannibal—whether he is an answer to the doctrine of the noble savage, or whether he supports the doctrine by showing how nature is degraded upon contact with culture—so long as one sees that in Prospero’s mind, which is the only mind where he counts, he is uneducable. He cannot take any print of goodness; he has that in him which good natures cannot abide to be with; he is a born devil on whose nature nurture can never stick. The phrases are Prospero’s, for it is only Prospero who has taken pains with this thing of deformity, and it is only he who cares that failure has been his reward. He has failed with Caliban, either because Caliban was incapable of becoming man or because there is no art, Prospero’s or Shakespeare’s, by which the inhuman can be made human. Caliban represents the lower limit, as Prospero to his own confusion forgets for a moment when he loses himself in a certain “vanity” of his art and entertains Ferdinand with the pageant of Iris, Ceres, Juno, and the Naiads. Remembering Caliban’s plot against his life, and remembering even more the intractable nature of the beast, he starts suddenly and waves the pageant away—explaining to Ferdinand that it has melted into air even as the earth will dissolve into sleep when its dreamer ceases to dream: You do look, my son, in a mov’d sort, As if you were dismay’d. Be cheerful, sir,

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Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (IV, i, 146–58) Scarcely higher on the scale than Caliban stand Trinculo and Stephano—or reel, for they are drunken rascals past reform, and there is no promise for them, as there is for Alonso and Antonio, of “a clear life ensuing” (III, iii, 82). Alonso and Antonio will reach the reasonable shore and own themselves again. When they do they will find Gonzalo there, for he has never strayed away. The good old counselor who made it possible for Prospero to survive the voyage from Milan with his daughter and his secret books, who amuses three cynical gentlemen with talk of the golden age (II, i, 143–79), who seasons all of his discourse with a wise wit, and who upon recognizing Prospero can weep, has always been possessed of an honor which “cannot be measur’d or confin’d” (V, i, 121–2). He sits near the top of the scale, just beneath the honey-throated Ferdinand and his admired Miranda. The top is reserved for these young lovers who have yet to know the world, and who for that reason alone are its best lovers. Ferdinand is all gallantry and devotion, and the compliments he pays his island mistress are worthy of one who when she first saw him could say: “Nothing natural I ever saw so noble” (I, ii, 418–9). He had seemed to her almost divine, as if the upper human limit were more than reached in him. He continues to deserve her wonder, as she his: You, O you, So perfect and so peerless, are created Of every creature’s best. . . . I Beyond all limit of what else i’ the world Do love, prize, honour you. (III, i, 46–73) Miranda, as her name half tells, is all tears and wonder. Her pity is had before it is asked, since she is without guile; and she knows how to weep for joy when Ferdinand returns her adoration. And if Shakespeare was thinking of “The Tempest” as his last play he may have written a special meaning, not to say a special irony, into these now famous words:

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O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in ’t! (V, i, 181–4) “’Tis new to thee,” says Prospero quietly, noting that Miranda is more beautiful than any man she beholds, and more virtuous. The carcass of the world that age hands on to youth is suddenly not a carcass but a brave new goodly thing. There is mystery in that, and an irony which works either way, for both age and youth are as right as they are wrong. Prospero is in one sense not measured on the scale, since he himself is its measurer. Yet he has human traits, one of which is his pride in his art and another of which is his sternness as he employs it. For he belongs among the strict elders of the later plays; his behavior not only toward Caliban but toward the delightful Ariel is harsh with threats and curses, and if his cruelty to Ferdinand is only feigned “lest too light winning make the prize light” (I, ii, 451–2), the feigner at least is master of the mood. My father’s of a better nature, sir, Than he appears by speech. (I, ii, 496–7) But Miranda does not know her father perfectly. She perhaps does not follow the turnings of his great speech on dreams. She has never shared with him the secret knowledge to which he bids farewell as he breaks his wand and takes breath for a masterpiece of hymn new-harmonized from Arthur Golding’s Ovid: Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves, And ye that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him When he comes back; you demi-puppets that By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make, Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid, Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm’d The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds, And ’twixt the green sea and the azur’d vault Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak With his own bolt; the strong-bas’d promontory

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Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck’d up The pine and cedar; graves at my command Have wak’d their sleepers, op’d, and let ’em forth By my so potent art. But this rough magic I here abjure, and, when I have requir’d Some heavenly music, which even now I do, To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. (v, i, 33–57) And if she is giving him any attention at the end she probably does not guess what he means when he speaks of a retirement to Milan where Every third thought shall be my grave. (V, i, 310–11) The meaning may be Shakespeare’s no less than Prospero’s. If so, the ambiguity does admirably for an ending note. Is Shakespeare Prospero, and is his magic the art with which he has fabricated thirty-seven plays? Is he now burying his book—abandoning the theater—and retiring where every third thought will be his grave? And does “The Tempest” so signify? Answers are not too easy. Shakespeare has never dramatized himself before, and it may not have occurred to him to do so now. Also, “The Tempest” is not a cantata; it is still a play, and it is ballasted with much life. It has snarling beasts and belching drunkards to match its innocent angels and white magicians. It contains two of Shakespeare’s finest songs— “Full fathom five thy father lies” and “Come unto these yellow sands”—and two of his coarsest—“’Ban, ’Ban, Cacaliban” and “The master, the swabber, the boatswain, and I.” And Ariel is more than an angelic musician; he is a mischiefmaker, another Puck, unwilling at his work and restless under the burden of magic he bears. It can be doubted, in other words, that Shakespeare sat down solemnly to decorate his life’s work with a secret signature. “The Tempest,” pressed a little, yields this meaning as it yields most of the meanings ingenuity can insist upon, and yields it with grace. But a better signature was the play itself, which, if its author had been given to such exercises, he might have recognized as one of the most beautiful literary objects ever made. He would scarcely, however, have been so conscious of what he had done. He is more likely to have let the moment go with four simple words: Now I will rest.

QQQ

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1944—W. H. Auden. From “The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest” W. H. Auden (1907–1973) was one of the most famous poets of the century, and his criticism was also influential. “The Sea and the Mirror” is a long poem that purports to comment on Shakespeare’s play. One of its sections is a prose speech by Caliban that Auden considered his masterpiece. The passage below is from the poem’s opening.

Prospero to Ariel Stay with me Ariel, while I pack, and with your first free act Delight my leaving; share my resigning thoughts As you have served my revelling wishes: then, brave spirit, Ages to you of song and daring, and to me Briefly Milan, then earth. In all, things have turned out better Than I once expected or ever deserved; I am glad that I did not recover my dukedom till I do not want it; I am glad that Miranda No longer pays me any attention; I am glad I have freed you So at last I can really believe I shall die. . . .

QQQ 1947—G. Wilson Knight. “The Shakespearian Superman: A Study of The Tempest,” from The Crown of Life G. Wilson Knight (1897–1985) was professor of English at Leeds University and also taught at the University of Toronto. At both universities he produced and acted in Shakespeare plays. In addition, Knight wrote plays for the British stage and television. His books include The Wheel of Fire, Shakespearian Production, and Lord Byron: Christian Virtues.

We have seen how [Shakespeare’s] final plays tend to refashion old imagery into some surprising dramatic incident; of which the most striking examples are the jewel-thrown-into-the-sea, Thaisa in her casket-coffin; Pericles on board his storm-tossed ship; the co-presence of actual storm and bear, an old poetic association, in The Winter’s Tale; the appearance of Jupiter the Thunderer in Cymbeline. This is, however, a variation of a normal Shakespearian process; for Shakespeare is continually at work splitting up and recombining already

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used plots, persons, and themes, weaving something ‘new and strange’ from old material. . . . The last plays are peculiar in their seizing on poetry itself, as it were, for their dominating effects; and in doing this also find themselves often reversing the logic of life as we know it, redeveloping the discoveries and recognitions of old comedy into more purposeful conclusions, impregnated with a far higher order of dramatic belief. . . . This tendency The Tempest drives to the limit. For once, Shakespeare has no objective story before him from which to create. He spins his plot from his own poetic world entirely, simplifying the main issues of his total work—plot, poetry, persons; whittling off the non-essential and leaving the naked truth exposed. The Tempest, patterned of storm and music, is thus an interpretation of Shakespeare’s world. Its originating action is constructed, roughly, on the pattern of The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, wherein wreck in tempest leads to separation of certain persons and their reunion on a strange shore; the plots being entwined with magic and amazement, as in Antipholus of Syracuse’s comment on Ephesus as a land of ‘Lapland sorcerers’ (The Comedy of Errors, IV. iii. 11), and Sebastian’s amazement at Olivia’s welcome (Twelfth Night, IV. iii. 1–21; see also Viola’s pun on Illyria and Elysium at I. ii. 2–3). There is an obvious further relation of The Tempest to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both plays showing a fairy texture, with Puck and Ariel, on first acquaintance, appearing as blood-brethren, though the differences are great. The balance of tempests and music, not only in imagery but in plot too, throughout the Comedies (including A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice) here reaches its consummation; but the Tragedies, wherein tempests and music are yet more profoundly important, are also at work within our new pattern of shipwreck and survival. Prospero is a composite of many Shakespearian heroes; not in ‘character’, since there is no one quite like him elsewhere, but rather in his fortunes and the part he plays. As a sovereign wrongfully dethroned he carries the overtones of tragic royalty enjoyed by Richard II. Ejected from his dukedom by a wicked brother—‘That a brother should be so perfidious’ (I. ii. 67)—he is placed, too, like the unfortunate Duke in As You Like It and as Don Pedro might have been placed had Don John’s rebellion succeeded in Much Ado about Nothing. Clarence, Orlando and Edgar suffer from similar betrayals. Now Prospero’s reaction is one of horror at such betrayal of a ‘trust’ and a ‘confidence sans bound’ (I. ii. 96) by ‘one whom’, as he tells Miranda, ‘next thyself of all the world I lov’d’ (I. ii. 69). So Valentine suffers from Proteus’ betrayal in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Antonio, as he thinks, from Sebastian in Twelfth Night. King Henry treats the faithless lords in Henry V to a long tirade of withering blank-verse on ingratitude and betrayal comparable with Richard II’s scathing denunciation of his betrayers. Ingratitude generally is basic to the

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emotions, speeches, and songs of As You Like It; and in King Lear we have a ‘filial ingratitude’ (III. iv. 14), corresponding to Prospero’s viewing of himself as ‘a good parent’, too kindly begetting in his child (meaning his brother) a corresponding ‘falsehood’ (I. ii. 94; cp. King Lear, ‘Your old kind father whose frank heart gave all’ at III. iv. 20). Loyalty to king, master, friend, wife, husband, is a continual theme. It is basic in Julius Caesar, in Brutus’ relation to Caesar, in Portia’s to Brutus, in the friendship of Brutus and Cassius: it vitalizes the whole of Antony and Cleopatra, with the subtly defined, personal, tragedy of Enobarbus—‘a master-leaver and a fugitive’ (IV. ix. 22). There are the loyal friends: Antonio to Sebastian; Horatio to Hamlet; or servants—the Bastard in King John, Adam, Kent; Gonzalo here winning a corresponding honour. The extensions into sexual jealousy are equally, or more, important; as in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet (felt on the father’s behalf by the son), Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline. There is a recurring sense of desertion, of betrayal, very strong in Troilus and Cressida; and also in King Lear, the old man’s age underlining his helplessness. In King Lear, and often elsewhere, the result is a general nausea at human falsity; the poet continually driving home a distinction of falsehood, and especially flattery, and true, unspectacular, devotion (as in Theseus’ words to Hippolyta, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V. i. 89–105). This disgust tends to project the action into wild nature, conceived, as in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It, and King Lear, as an improvement on the falsities of civilization. In King Lear the return to nature is acted by Edgar and endured, for his purgation, by Lear on the tempest-torn heath; while many variations are played throughout on the comparison and contrast of human evil with the beasts and elemental forces. The pattern of The Winter’s Tale shows a similar movement from falsehood through rugged nature to an idealized rusticity. Of all this the great prototype, or archetype, is Timon of Athens, where the princely hero, conceived as a sublime patron and lover of humanity, is so thunder-struck by discovery of falsehood and ingratitude that he rejects man and all his works and in uncompromising bitterness retires in nakedness to a cave by the sea-shore, where he denounces to all who visit him the vices of civilization and communes, in savage solitude, with all of nature that is vast and eternal; his story finally fading into the ocean surge. The Tempest shows a similar movement. Prospero, like Timon and Bellarius—for Bellarius is another, driven to the mountains by the ingratitude of Cymbeline— lives (presumably) in a cave; like Timon, by the sea. He is akin, too, to all princes whose depth of understanding accompanies or succeeds political failure: to Hamlet, Brutus, Richard II, Henry VI. Hamlet, like Timon, is an archetypal figure, being a complex of many heroes. He is out of joint with a society of which he clearly sees the decadence and evil. Through his ghostly converse and consequent profundity of spiritual disturbance, he is unfitted for direct action, while nevertheless doing much to control the

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other persons, indeed dominating them, half magically, from within. Hamlet is a student and scholar; and in this too, as in his surface (though not actual) ineffectuality and his revulsion from an evil society, he forecasts the learned Prospero, whose dukedom was reputed In dignity, and for the liberal arts, Without a parallel. (I. ii. 72) Such enlightenment was bought at a cost: these being all my study, The government I cast upon my brother, And to my state grew stranger, being transported And rapt in secret studies. (I. ii. 74) Prospero is in straight descent from those other impractical governors, Agamemnon in Troilus and Cressida, whose philosophic attitude to his army’s disaster (I. iii. 1–30) calls forth Ulysses’ famous speech on order; and Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, in Measure for Measure, whose depth of study and psychological insight make execution of justice impossible. All these are in Prospero; while the surrounding action, both serious and comic, condenses the whole of Shakespeare’s political wisdom. He is also a recreation of Cerimon in Pericles. Listen to Cerimon: I hold it ever Virtue and cunning were endowments greater Than nobleness or riches; careless heirs May the two latter darken and expend But immortality attends the former, Making a man a god. (Pericles, III. ii. 26) And to Prospero: I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated To closeness and the bettering of my mind With that which, but by being so retir’d, O’erpriz’d all popular rate . . . (I. ii. 89) The lines set the disadvantage of the monastic life against the supreme end it pursues. Duke Prospero was, like Lord Cerimon (also a nobleman), a religious recluse on the brink of magical power; and may be compared with those earlier

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religious persons, Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet, whose magic arts control the action (and who speaks, like Prospero, of his ‘cell’), and Friar Francis in Much Ado about Nothing, who negotiates Hero’s death and reappearance. These are people of spiritual rather than practical efficiency; like Duke Vincentio and Hamlet (who so mysteriously dominates his society, by play-production and otherwise), they are plot-controllers; Duke Vincentio, disguised as a Friar, organizing the whole action, and being directly suggestive of ‘power divine’ (Measure for Measure, V. i. 370). So, too, Prospero manipulates his own plot like a god. He is a blend of Theseus and Oberon. Prospero is a matured and fully self-conscious embodiment of those moments of fifth-act transcendental speculation to which earlier tragic heroes, including Macbeth, were unwillingly forced. He cannot be expected to do more than typify; there is not time; and, as a person, he is, no doubt, less warm, less richly human, than most of his poetic ancestors. But only if we recognize his inclusiveness, his summing of nearly all Shakespeare’s more eminent persons, shall we understand clearly what he is about. He, like others, Vincentio and Oberon preeminently, is controlling our plot, composing it before our eyes; but, since the plot is, as we shall see, so inclusive an interpretation of Shakespeare’s life-work, Prospero is controlling, not merely a Shakespearian play, but the Shakespearian world. He is thus automatically in the position of Shakespeare himself, and it is accordingly inevitable that he should often speak as with Shakespeare’s voice. Ariel incorporates all those strong picturizations of angels aerially riding observed in our recent analysis of the Vision in Cymbeline.1 To these we may add the Dauphin’s humorous but poetically revealing comparison of his horse to a Pegasus in Henry V: When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes. . . . It is a beast for Perseus; he is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him but only in patient stillness while his rider mounts him; he is indeed a horse. . . . It is a theme as fluent as the sea. (III. vii. 11–44) Precisely from this complex of air, fire, music and lightly apprehended sea in contrast to the duller Caliban-elements of earth and water Ariel is compounded. He personifies all Shakespeare’s more volatile and aerial impressionism (he is called a ‘bird’ at IV. i. 184, ‘chick’ at V. i. 316, and ‘an airy spirit’ in the dramatis personae), especially those images or phrases involving ‘swift’ (i.e. either intuitional or emotional) thought (a vein of poetry discussed in The Shakespearian Tempest, Appendix A, particularly pp. 308–11). A good example occurs in the association of thought’s swiftness and ‘feathered Mercury’ at King John, IV. ii. 174. Ariel is mercurial and implicit in both the agile wit and Queen Mab fantasies of the

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aptly-named Mercutio; compare his definition of dreams, ‘as thin of substance as the air’ (Romeo and Juliet, I. iv. 100), with Prospero’s ‘thou, which art but air’ (V. i. 21), addressed to Ariel. Ariel is implicit often in Shakespeare’s love-poetry: though he is not an Eros-personification, yet, wherever we find emphasis on love’s lightning passage, as at Romeo and Juliet, II. ii. 118–20 or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I. i. 141–9; on its uncapturable perfection, as throughout Troilus and Cressida (with strong emphasis on volatility and speed at III. ii. 8–15 and IV. ii. 14); on its spiritual powers, as in the aerial imagery and energy of Antony and Cleopatra, with Cleopatra at death as ‘fire and air’ (V. ii. 291); or on its delicate and tender sweetness, as in the ‘piece of tender air’, Imogen (Cymbeline, V. v. 436–53); wherever such elusive and intangible excellences are our matter, there Ariel is forecast. He is the spirit of love’s aspiration ‘all compact of fire’ in Venus and Adonis, 1.49. He is made of Biron’s speech of elaborate love-psychology with its contrast of ‘slow arts’ and the quicksilver swiftnesses of love’s heightened consciousness, its new delicacy of perception and increased power, all entwined with fire, thoughts of mythology, poetry and music, and the ability (shown by Ariel’s music in The Tempest at III. ii. 123–50 and IV. i. 175–8) to ravish savage ears And plant in tyrants mild humility; while at the limit touching, as does Ariel (at V. i. 19), ‘charity’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV. iii. 320–65). Closely similar is Falstaff ’s speech on sherris-sack, which makes the brain ‘apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable shapes which, deliverer’d o’er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit’ (2 Henry IV, IV. iii. 107). Ariel is, indeed, forecast by other passages on wit (in the modern sense), so often, as with Mercutio, levelled against love; as when the shafts of feminine mockery are compared to the swiftness of ‘arrows, bullets, wind, thought’ at Love’s Labour’s Lost, V. ii. 262. Ariel exists in a dimension overlooking normal categories of both reason and emotion: he is the ‘mutual flame’ in which the winged partners of The Phoenix and the Turtle transcend their own duality. Since, moreover, he personifies these subtle and overruling powers of the imagination, he becomes automatically a personification of poetry itself. His sudden appearance depends, precisely, on Prospero’s ‘thought’ (IV. i. 164–5; cp. ‘the quick forge and working-house of thought’, Henry V, V. chor. 23). He is the poetic medium, whatever the subject handled, his powers ranging over the earthy and the ethereal, tragic and lyric, with equal ease. As a dramatic person, he certainly descends from Puck and also, in view of his songs and trickery—he is a ‘tricksy spirit’ (V. i. 226; a word associated with Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, III. v. 75)—from the jesters Feste, Touchstone, even Lear’s Fool; all of whom share something of the poet’s own, critical, awareness, as in

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certain of Puck’s generalized speeches and his final epilogue, the philosophic detachment of Feste’s and Touchstone’s wit, and the Fool’s perceptual clarity. Ariel likewise is apart: he is emotionally detached, though actively engaged, everyone and everything, except Prospero and Miranda, being the rough material of creation on which the Ariel-spirit of poetry works; an opposition seen most starkly in his piping to Caliban. Ariel is accordingly shown as the agent of Prospero’s purpose. He is Prospero’s instrument in controlling and developing the action. Through him Prospero raises the tempest, Ariel (like mad Tom in Lear) being part of it, acting it (I. ii. 195–215). He puts people to sleep, so tempting the murderers, but wakes them just in time (II. i), thunderously interrupts the feast, pronouncing judgement and drawing the moral (III. iii). He plays tricks on the drunkards (III. ii), hears their plot and leads them to disaster (III. ii; IV. i. 171–84). His music leads Ferdinand to Miranda (I. ii). He puts the ship safely in harbour (I. ii. 226) and later releases and conducts the mariners (V. i). He is Prospero’s stage-manager; more, he is the enactor of Prospero’s conception: Prospero is the artist, Ariel the art. He is a spirit of ‘air’ (V. i. 21) corresponding to the definition of poetry as ‘airy nothing’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (V. i. 16). His powers range freely over and between the thunderous and the musical, tragic and lyric, extremes of Shakespearian drama. Caliban condenses Shakespeare’s concern, comical or satiric, with the animal aspect of man; as seen in Christopher Sly and the aptly-named Bottom (whose union with Titania drives fantasy to an extreme), Dogberry, writ down ‘an ass’ (Much Ado about Nothing, IV. ii. 75–93), Sir Toby Belch; and Falstaff, especially in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where his animality is punished by fairies (that Falstaff should show contacts with both Ariel and Caliban exactly defines the universal nature of his complexity). Caliban also symbolizes all brainless revolution, such as Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI, and the absurdities of mob-mentality in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. So much is fairly obvious; but there is more. Caliban derives from other ill-graced cursers, a ‘misshapen knave’ and ‘bastard’ (V. i. 268–73) like the deformed Thersites (‘bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valour, in everything illegitimate,’ Troilus and Cressida, V. vii. 17) and bitter as Apemantus; from the ‘indigest deformed lump’, ‘abortive rooting hog’, ‘poisonous bunch-back’d toad’ and ‘cacodemon’, Richard III (3 Henry VI, V. vi. 51; Richard III, I. iii. 228, 246, 144; cp. Caliban as ‘demi-devil’ at V. i. 272); and from all Shakespeare’s imagery of nausea and evil expressed through reptiles or, since we must not forget Sycorax (who may be allowed to sum all Shakespeare’s evil women), creatures of black magic, as in Macbeth. He derives from all bad passion, as when Lear and Coriolanus are called dragons (King Lear, I. i. 124; Coriolanus, V. iv. 14). He combines the infranatural evil of Macbeth with the bestial evil of King Lear, where man’s suicidal voracity is compared to ‘monsters of the deep’ (King Lear, IV. ii. 50). He is

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himself a water-beast, growing from the ooze and slime of those stagnant pools elsewhere associated with vice, being exactly defined by Thersites’ description of Ajax as ‘a very land-fish, languageless, a monster’ (Troilus and Cressida, III. iii. 266). But he has a beast’s innocence and pathos too, and is moved by music as are the ‘race of youthful and unhandled colts’ of The Merchant of Venice (V. i. 71–9; cp. the comparison of the music-charmed Caliban to ‘unback’d colts’ at IV. i. 176–8). He sums up the ravenous animals that accompany tempest-passages, the boar, bull, bear; especially the much-loathed boar of Venus and Adonis. In him is the ugliness of sexual appetite from Lucrece onwards, and also the ugliness vice raises in those who too much detest it, the ugliness of hatred itself and loathing, the ugliness of Leontes. Man, savage, ape, water-beast, dragon, semi-devil—Caliban is all of them; and because he so condenses masses of great poetry, is himself beautiful. He is the physical as opposed to the spiritual; earth and water as opposed to air and fire. That he may, like Ariel, be considered in closest relation to Prospero himself is witnessed by Prospero’s admission: ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’ (V. i. 275). These three main persons present aspects of Timon. Besides Prospero’s resemblance already observed, Ariel’s thunderous denunciation (at III. iii. 53) recalls Timon’s prophetic fury, both addressed to a society that has rejected true nobility for a sham, while Caliban reproduces his naked savagery and the more ugly, Apemantus-like, affinities of his general hatred. This especial inclusiveness marks Timon’s archetypal importance. To turn to the subsidiary persons. Alonso and his party present a varied assortment of more or less guilty people. We have, first, a striking recapitulation of Macbeth, Antonio persuading Sebastian to murder the sleeping king in phrases redolent of Duncan’s murder: What might, Worthy Sebastian? O! what might?—No more: And yet methinks I see it in thy face, What thou should’st be. The occasion speaks thee; and My strong imagination sees a crown Dropping upon thy head. (II. i. 199) We remember ‘Your face, great thane, is as a book . . .’; ‘Nor time, nor place, did then adhere and yet you would make both; they have made themselves . . .’; and ‘all that impedes thee from the golden round . . .’ (Macbeth, I. v. 63; I. vii. 51; I. v. 29). Antonio’s O! If you but knew how you the purpose cherish Whiles thus you mock it . . . (II. i. 218)

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is a crisp capitulation of Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy on her husband’s divided will (I. v. 17–30). Macbeth is resurrected in both phrase and verse-texture: And by that destiny to perform an act Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come Is yours and my discharge. (II. i. 247) Compare Macbeth’s ‘happy prologues to the swelling act of the imperial theme’ and Lady Macbeth’s ‘Leave all the rest to me’ (Macbeth, I. iii. 128; I. v. 74). Death and sleep are all but identified in both (II. i. 255–7; Macbeth, II. ii. 54). Antonio’s attitude to conscience (‘Ay, sir, where lies that?’ at II. i. 271) parallels Lady Macbeth’s, while her ‘Who dares receive it other?’ (Macbeth, I. vii. 77) is expanded into Antonio’s scornful certainty that ‘all the rest’ will take suggestion as a cat laps milk; They’ll tell the dock to any business that We say befits the hour . . . (II. i. 283) —where even the cat, a comparatively rare Shakespearian animal, harks back to ‘the poor cat i’ the adage’ (Macbeth, I. vii. 45). In both plays the victim’s weariness is brutally advanced as an assurance of sleep: compare Duncan’s ‘day’s hard labour,’ which shall ‘invite’ him to sound sleep (Macbeth, I. vii. 62) with ‘now they are oppressed with travel’ (III. iii. 15). That Macbeth should be singled out for so elaborate a re-enactment is not strange, since, standing alone in point of absolute and abysmal evil, it shares only slightly (via Sycorax) in the general recapitulation covered by Caliban, whom Prospero specifically acknowledges. Thus poetic honesty leaves Antonio’s final reformation doubtful. Alonso is less guilty, nor is there here any so vivid correspondence to be observed. Sebastian blames him for insisting on marrying his daughter Claribel against her and his subjects’ will to an African (II. i. 119–31); and, since Gonzalo partly sanctions the criticism, we must, it would seem, perhaps with some faint reference to Desdemona’s ill-starred marriage, regard Alonso’s action as a fault. He was also a silent accomplice to Antonio’s original treachery, and Ariel later asserts that he is being punished for it by his son’s loss (III. iii. 75). As one of Shakespeare’s many autocratic fathers and also as a king rather pathetically searching for his child, he is a distant relative of Lear. Both are purgatorial figures: he realizes his ‘trespass’ (III. iii. 99). The faithful and garrulous old lord Gonzalo is a blend of Polonius, Adam and Kent. The courtiers Adrian and Francisco are not particularized. The wit of Antonio and Sebastian on their first entry needs, however, a remark. It is cynical and cruel. The points made are of slight importance except for the extraordinary reiteration of ‘widow Dido’ (II. i. 73–79). There is presumably

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a sneer at an unmarried woman who has been deserted by her lover being given the status of ‘widow’; and this we may tentatively relate to Antony and Cleopatra, wherein ‘Dido and her Aeneas’ are once compared to the protagonists (IV. xii. 53) and which in Cleopatra’s phrase ‘Husband, I come!’ (V. ii. 289) reaches a compact self-interpretation in direct answer to such cynicism as Antonio’s. The whole dialogue, starting with criticism of Gonzalo’s and Adrian’s insistence on the isle’s fertility (the island varies mysteriously according to the nature of the spectator) and leading through ridicule of Gonzalo’s phrase ‘widow Dido’ and his identification of Tunis and Carthage, to a final flowering in his Utopian dream, serves very precisely to define an opposition of cynic and romantic.2 The points at issue are less important than the points of view: Antonio. He misses not much. Sebastian. No. He doth but mistake the truth totally. (II. i. 54) That is cynical keenness in good form; and our dialogue takes us accordingly to the threshold at least of Antony and Cleopatra, the supreme answer of romanticism, wherein human love, though criticized as filth, wins through to glory. There is further corroboration: not only do the phrases ‘such a paragon to their queen’, ‘miraculous harp’ and ‘impossible matter’ (II. i. 79, 83, 85) raise, ironically or otherwise, suggestion of the marvellous harking back to Antony and Cleopatra, but we have one direct reminder: Sebastian. I think he will carry this island home in his pocket, and give it his son for an apple. Antonio. And, sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands. (II. i. 86) Compare Cleopatra’s dream, with its ‘realms and islands were as plates dropt from his pocket’ (Antony and Cleopatra, v. ii. 91). We find the romantic extreme, whether in jocular cynicism or in visionary earnest, reaching definition in similar terms. Certainly one expects some trace of the earlier play, some honest facing in this austere work of its golden sexuality; and perhaps the easiest way to honour it was through the self-negating cynicism of an Antonio.3 To return to the marriage of Claribel to the King of Tunis. Any further correspondences (outside Othello) may again be sought in Antony and Cleopatra, where a west–east conflict in relation to marriage is strongly developed; and again in the Prince of Morocco, in The Merchant of Venice (see also The Winter’s Tale, v. i. 156–67). Criticism of the marriage originates from Sebastian, the cynic being naturally hostile, as in Othello, to the eastern glamour; while Gonzalo changes his view later, regarding it as part of the general happiness (V. i. 209). To Shakespeare Africa and the Orient are at once glamorous and dangerous

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(Sycorax came from Argier), with something of the disturbing magic wielded by the Indian fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: perhaps that is why Antonio seems to regard Tunis as an infinite distance from Milan. The central experience of this group is the offering and sudden withdrawal of the mysterious banquet, with Ariel’s appearance as a Harpy and speech of denunciation. Feasts are regularly important throughout Shakespeare, but are so obvious that one accepts them without thought. It is the mark of greatest literature to play on such fundamentals of human existence and we must remember their importance in Homer and the New Testament; in the one direct, in the other, in event, miracle and parable, carrying symbolic overtones. Shakespeare ends his two morality farces, The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor, with feasts, acted or announced, to convey a sense of general good-will succeeding horse-play. In Romeo and Juliet a feast and dance relate neatly to the family feud, raising questions of daring, adventure and hospitality. There is the rough feasting in Arden and Bellarius’ cave, both characterized by hospitality. Eating and drinking are continually given dramatic emphasis, with various ethical implications: they are important throughout Antony and Cleopatra, with one gorgeous feast-scene celebrating union after hostility, though nearly ruined by treachery. An elaborate banquet occurs in Pericles, with Thaisa as ‘queen of the feast’ (II. iii. 17) pointing on, as we have seen, to Perdita as ‘mistress of the feast’ (IV. iii. 68) in The Winter’s Tale. Important examples occur in Timon of Athens and Macbeth. In Timon there are two: the first (I. ii) conceived as a sacrament of love and friendship (with New Testament reminiscence at line 51), crowned by Timon’s speech and negatively underlined by Apemantus’ cynicism; the second (III. vi), planned as a deadly serious practical joke, in which Timon, after raising his false friends’ hopes, speaks an ironic grace, overturns (probably) their tables, and douses them with lukewarm water. In Macbeth, we have first the irony of the feasting of Duncan (I. vii), and later on (IV. i) the inverted good of the ‘hell-broth’ brewed by the Weird Women; and, in between (III. iv), the feast to which Banquo has been carefully invited and which he attends as a ghost, smashing up the conviviality and social health so vividly emphasized in the text, and thus denying to Macbeth’s tyrannous and blood-stained rule all such sacraments of brotherhood. These two broken feasts in Timon of Athens and Macbeth, related to the two main Shakespearian evils of unfaithfulness and crime, are key-scenes; and their shattering stage-power derives precisely from the simplicity of the effects used, planted squarely as they are on fundamentals. The meaning of the feast offered but denied to Alonso, Sebastian and Antonio will now be clear; and also its relevance to the Shakespearian world. The ‘solemn and strange music’ (III. iii. 18) of the feast is followed by Ariel’s appearance as a Harpy to ‘thunder and lightning’ (III. iii. 53). The sequence

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recalls the Vision in Cymbeline, and Ariel’s harpy-appearance drives home the similarity. Like Jupiter, he enters as a figure of overruling judgment, speaking scornfully of the lesser beings who think to dispute the ordinances of ‘fate’ (III. iii.; cp. ‘How dare you ghosts . . .’ Cymbeline, V. iv. 94). Both epitomize the Shakespearian emphasis on thunder as the voice of the gods, or God. So Ariel acts the more awe-inspiring attributes of Shakespeare’s tempest-poetry before our eyes, and in a long speech drives home its purgatorial purpose. Besides Alonso and his party, we have the comic group of Stephano and Trinculo, in association with Caliban. The comedy is delightful, but scarcely subtle. Stephano the butler is an unqualified, almost professional, drunkard, with nothing of the philosophic quality of Falstaff or the open if unprincipled bonhomie of Sir Toby. Both those are, in their way, gentlemen, and yet their new representative (as drunkard) is of a low type socially; as are Dogberry, Bottom and the Gravediggers, though Stephano is a poor equivalent, lacking natural dignity. Trinculo is an equally poor successor to Touchstone, Feste, Yorick and Lear’s Fool. Note that their representative quality is nevertheless emphasized by their joint embodiment of the two main sorts of clown: the natural and the artificial. The Tempest is an austere work. The poet, while giving his clowns full rein in comic appeal, allows them no dignity. In writing of Autolycus we have observed Shakespeare’s tendency there, as with Falstaff, earlier, to show his humorist as disintegrating; both as losing dignity and revealing ugly tendencies. So, too, with Sir Toby: in spite of his admirable ‘cakes and ale’ (Twelfth Night, II. iii. 125) he is carefully made to lose dignity towards the play’s conclusion, the balance of conviviality and reproof being carefully held. Both Falstaff and Autolycus, as their glow of humour pales, show themselves as rather cheaply ambitious: whilst bearers of the comic spirit, they are, for a while, the superiors of kings; but when they, in their turn, ape the courtier, join in the vulgar scramble for show, they fall lower than their meanest dupes. Falstaff in 2 Henry IV is enjoying his advance, ordering new clothes, being the grand man. Here the distinction is subtle; but the way is open for his final disintegration in The Merry Wives of Windsor. So, too, with Autolycus: he dresses as a courtier, apes a courtier’s grandiosity and trades sadistically on the Shepherd’s and Clown’s anguish. He is finally shown as cringing to his former dupe. Now, remembering, too, Hamlet’s disgust at the heavy drinking of Claudius’ court, observe what happens to our comic trio, especially Stephano. First, he drinks and sings maudlin songs. Next, he becomes a petty tyrant and engages in a bloody plot, aiming to make himself lord of the island. He is a burlesque of the power-quest, with all the absurdity of a barbaric despotism, having his foot licked by Caliban and posing as king, resembling Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and the Macbeth of

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Now does he feel his title Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe Upon a dwarfish thief. (Macbeth, V. ii. 20) Stephano parodies the essential absurdity of tyrannic ambition. Now he and his companions are lured by Ariel to a filthy pool: at last I left them I’ the filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell, There dancing up to the chins, that the foul lake O’erstunk their feet. (IV. i. 181) Stagnant water occurs regularly to suggest filth and indignity. Poor Tom in King Lear has been led by the foul fiend ‘through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, o’er bog and quagmire’; and an utmost degradation is suggested by his eating ‘the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water’ and drinking ‘the green mantle of the standing pool’ (King Lear, III. iv. 50; 132, 137). The lascivious Falstaff is ducked in The Merry Wives of Windsor; in flowing water, certainly, but the dirty-linen basket supplies the rest. There is also the final entry of the absurd braggart, Parolles, in All’s Well that Ends Well, bedraggled, with filthy clothes, and admitting that he is ‘muddied in Fortune’s mood’ and smelling ‘somewhat strong of her strong displeasure’; with a developed dialogue on bad smells, an ‘unclean fish-pond’, ‘carp’, etc. (V. ii, 1–27). Notice that (i) lust—there is direct association of pools to sexual vice at The Winter’s Tale, I. ii. 195 and Cymbeline, I. iv. 103—and (ii) braggadocio are involved. Stephano, the would-be tyrant, meant to possess Miranda after murdering Prospero; Caliban has already tried to rape her; and all three are accordingly left in the ‘filthymantled pool’. Our buffoons are next tempted, like Autolycus, by an array of ‘trumpery’ (IV. i. 186), of ‘glistering apparel’ (IV. i. 193). Rich clothes were a more pressing masculine temptation in Shakespeare’s day than in ours. One of Faustus’ ambitions was to clothe Wittenberg’s students in silk, and Macbeth’s power-quest is characterized in terms of ‘a giant’s robe’ (Macbeth, V. ii. 21; cp. The Tempest, II. i. 267). Shakespeare reiterates his scorn for the latest (usually foreign) fashions, for all tinsel of clothes, speech, or manners, in play after play; as with Claudio, Sir Andrew and his ‘flame-colour’d stock’ (Twelfth Night, I. iii. 146), Kent’s ‘a tailor made thee’ (King Lear, II, ii. 59), Osric, and many others. The prim Malvolio is fooled in his yellow stockings; Christopher Sly dressed absurdly in a nobleman’s robes; Katharina the Shrew tormented with finery. This vein of satire beats in our present symbolic incident: the two fools are ensnared by a tinsel glitter, though Caliban, being closer to nature, has more sense (the temptation is perhaps slightly out of character for the others too,

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whose job here is, however, to parody their social superiors). All three are next chased off by Prospero’s hounds. The pool and the show of garments will be now understood, but what of the hounds? Hounds are impregnated with a sense of healthy, non-brutal, and (like Shakespeare’s horses) man-serving virility, occurring favourably at Venus and Adonis, 913–24; Henry V, III. i. 31; and Timon of Athens, I. ii. 198. Hunting is a noble sport, though sympathy can be accorded the hunted hare (at Venus and Adonis, 679–708, and 3 Henry VI, II. v. 130). Courteous gentlemen, such as Theseus and Timon, necessarily hunt, especially important being the long description of Theseus’ musical hounds, with reference also to those of Hercules, baying the bear in Crete (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, IV. i. 112–32). Hounds are adversaries to the bear and (in Venus and Adonis) the boar, both ‘tempest-beasts’, and, though the fawning of dogs is used satirically, hounds, as such, may be musically, almost spiritually, conceived: hence their picturesque names in The Tempest: ‘Mountain’, ‘Silver’, ‘Fury’ and ‘Tyrant’.4 They are spirit-essences directed against the bestial Caliban and his companions. So, too, the fleshly and ‘corrupt’ Falstaff was punished by fairies or supposed fairies in The Merry Wives of Windsor by pinching, conceived as a punishment of ‘sinful fantasy’, ‘lust’ and ‘unchaste desire’ by spirits (V. v. 96–108). Here Caliban regularly (I. ii. 327–32, 371–3; II. ii. 4), and now Stephano and Trinculo, too, are thoroughly pinched and given cramps and aches (IV. i. 258–61).5 Such is Shakespeare’s judgement on drunkenness, sexual lust and braggart ambition. Such evils have, variously, held dignity, as in Falstaff ’s speech on sherris-sack (2 Henry IV, IV. iii. 92), the riotous love of Antony and Cleopatra and, for the power-quest, Macbeth; but it is a tight-rope course; one slip and the several vices appear in their nakedness. That naked essence, in all its lewd and ludicrous vulgarity, is here emphasized. There remain Ferdinand and Miranda. These are representative of beautiful and virtuous youth as drawn in former plays (Marina, Florizel and Perdita, Guiderius and Arviragus), though lacking something of their human impact. Our new pair illustrate humility (as in Ferdinand’s log-piling), innocence, faith and purity; their words being characterized by utter simplicity and sincerity. They are whittled down to these virtues with slight further realization, and in comparison with earlier equivalents must be accounted pale. As elsewhere, essences are abstracted and reclothed. Except for Prospero, Ariel and Caliban, the people scarcely exist in their own right. The real drama consists of the actions and interplay of our three major persons with the natural, human and spiritual powers in which their destiny is entangled. Prospero, who controls this comprehensive Shakespearian world, automatically reflects Shakespeare himself. Like Hamlet, he arranges dramatic shows to rouse his sinning victims’ conscience: the mock-feast (whose vanishing, as we have seen, recalls Macbeth’s ghost-shattered banquet), brought in by a ‘living drollery’

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of ‘shapes’ (III. iii. 21); and the masque of goddesses and dancers (IV. i), which, like the Final Plays themselves (of whose divinities these goddesses are pale reflections), is addressed to the purer consciousness (Ferdinand’s). This tendency, as in Hamlet, reflects some degree of identification of the protagonist with the playwright, whose every work is a parable. Prospero himself delivers what is practically a long prologue in Act I, and in his own person speaks the epilogue. He is, even more than the Duke in Measure for Measure, a designer of the drama in which he functions as protagonist. We have seen how many of Shakespeare’s tragic themes are covered by him; and that his farewell might have been spoken by Shakespeare is a correspondence demanded by the whole conception. He addresses (V. i. 33–57) the various powers (drawn from folk-lore and called, with a grand humility, ‘weak’) by whose aid he has ‘bedimm’d the noontide sun’ (as ‘the travelling lamp’ is strangled in Macbeth, II, iv. 7) and loosed the ‘mutinous winds’ to ‘set roaring war’ between sea and sky, thereby recalling such tempests throughout the great tragedies, in Julius Caesar, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, with their many symbolic undertones of passionate conflict here crisply recapitulated in thought of war betwixt ‘sea’ and ‘sky’. He has used ‘Jove’s own bolt’ to blast (as at Measure for Measure, II. ii. 116, and Coriolanus, V. iii. 152) Jove’s tree, the oak, recalling Jupiter the Thunderer in Cymbeline. From such images the speech moves inevitably to: Graves at my command Have wak’d their sleepers, op’d, and let them forth By my so potent art. (V. i. 48) The statement, with its parallel in the resurrections of Pericles and The Winter’s Tale and the less vivid restoration of Imogen in Cymbeline, may seem to apply more directly to Shakespeare than to Prospero; though the miraculous preservation of the ship and its crew must be regarded as an extension of earlier miracles. Prospero’s speech, ending in ‘heavenly’ or ‘solemn’ (V. i. 52, 57) musics, forms a recapitulation of Shakespeare’s artistic progress from tempest-torn tragedy to resurrection and music (cp. the ‘music of the spheres’ at Pericles, V. i. 231, and the resurrection music of Pericles, III. ii. 88, 91; and The Winter’s Tale, V. iii. 98) corresponding to its forecast in Richard II. Prospero uses his tempest-magic to draw his enemies to the island, and there renders them harmless. He wrecks and saves, teaches through disaster, entices and leads by music, getting them utterly under his power, redeeming and finally forgiving. What are the Shakespearian analogies? The poet himself labours to master and assimilate that unassuaged bitterness and sense of rejection so normal a lot to humanity (hence the popularity of Hamlet) by drawing the hostile elements within his own world of artistic creation; and this he does mainly through tragedy and its thunderous music; and by seeing that, in spite

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of logic, his creation is good. By destroying his protagonists, he renders them deathless; by expressing evil, in others and in himself, he renders it innocent. And throughout this tumult of creative activity, turning every grief to a star, making of his very loathing something ‘rich and strange’, there is a danger: a certain centre of faith or love must be preserved, this centre at least kept free from the taint of that rich, wild, earthy, lustful, violent, cursing, slimy yet glittering thing that is creation itself, or Caliban; that uses cynicism (born of the knowledge of lust) to ruin Desdemona, though not Othello’s love for her; that tries in vain, but only just in vain, to make of Timon an Apemantus. Therefore Prospero keeps Miranda intact, though threatened by Caliban, just as Marina was threatened in the brothel of Mitylene. Alone with her he had voyaged far to his magic land, cast off in a wretched boat, To cry to the sea that roar’d to us; to sigh To the winds whose pity, sighing back again, Did us but loving wrong. (I. ii. 149) What an image of lonely, spiritual, voyage, like that of Wordsworth’s Newton ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’; while echoing back, through the long story of Shakespearian ‘sea-sorrow’ (I. ii. 170) to the Nordic origins of our literature in The Wanderer and The Seafarer. Prospero, unlike Lear, Pericles and Leontes, guards his Miranda, and with her survives on his island of poetry, with Ariel and Caliban. Who are these? The one, clearly, his art, his poetry in action; the other, the world of creation, smelling of earth and water, with the salt tang of the physical, of sexual energy, and with, too, all those revulsions and curses to which it gives birth. Prospero finds both Ariel and Caliban on the island, releasing the one (as genius is regularly characterized less by inventiveness than by the ability to release some dormant power) and aiming to train the other; and both must be strictly controlled. Prospero, Ariel, Caliban, Miranda: all are aspects of Shakespeare himself. Prospero, corresponding to the poet’s controlling judgement, returns to Milan, uniting his daughter, his human faith, to his enemy’s son; and Shakespeare’s life-work, in Henry VIII, draws to its conclusion. It is, indeed, remarkable how well the meanings correspond. Prospero has been on the island for twelve years (I. ii. 53); and it is roughly twelve years since the sequence of greater plays started with Hamlet. Before that, Ariel had been prisoned in a tree for another twelve years (I. ii. 279); again roughly, the time spent by Shakespeare in his earlier work, before the powers of bitterness and abysmal sight projected him into the twilit, lightning-riven and finally transcendent regions; rather as Herman Melville passed from Typee and White Jacket to Moby Dick, Pierre and his later poetry. And now, as the end draws near, Ariel cries (as does Caliban too) for freedom from ceaseless ‘toil’:

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Prospero. How now! moody? What is’t thou canst demand? Ariel. My liberty. Prospero. Before the time be out? No more! (I. ii. 244) Prospero dominates Ariel and Caliban with an equal severity: as Shakespeare may be supposed to have willed, sternly, the safe conclusion of his labour in Henry VIII. That labour is not all easy. Prospero, though still, is not static. As with Hamlet, his very centrality is dynamic, drawing others to him, like Timon in his retirement, radiating power; or rather those earlier spiritual radiations are here given appropriate, symbolic, action, just as, according to Shelley’s definition, poetry itself holds, in its very reserve, its stillness, a myriad radiations. NOTES 1. See G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (1947), p. 187. 2. According to Vergil, Dido was widowed before Aeneas’ arrival at Carthage and Gonzalo here, as in his identification of Tunis and Carthage, is correct. The cynic’s sneer is based on lack of information. 3. My suggestion must remain tentative; but it has at least some confirmation from my brother’s reading of Vergil’s poetic methods. (See W. F. Jackson Knight, Roman Vergil (1944).) 4. The use of such names as ‘Tyrant’ and ‘Fury’ does not lower the animals’ status, since the implied humanizing serves as an idealization; as with battleships, where the names H.M.S. Furious or H.M.S. Venomous, by attributing living status to a machine, witness a respect not usually offered to ill-temper and snakes. 5. Compare the fairies’ song ‘Pinch him black and blue’ in Lyly’s Endimion.

QQQ 1949—Derek Traversi. From “The Tempest,” in Scrutiny Derek Traversi (1912–2005) was known as a practitioner of “New Criticism.” He was born in England and taught in the United States at Swarthmore College, University of California–Davis, and Hofstra University. His books include An Approach to Shakespeare, Shakespeare: The Roman Plays, and T. S. Eliot: The Longer Poems.

III In his presentation (in The Tempest II. i) of the social situation created on the island mainly by Prospero’s devisings, Shakespeare carries (forward) his analysis of the nature and development of evil. He relates it, in fact, to a personal interpretation

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of the doctrine of the original innocence of man. This he does by putting into the mouth of Gonzalo an example, apparently drawn from Montaigne, of those nostalgic speculations about primeval simplicity which seem to have so greatly attracted the sophisticated court societies of the sixteenth century and to which the discovery of the New World had given a fresh meaning. In landing upon the island Alonso and his followers are placed in the possession of virgin soil. Here, according to Gonzalo, is their opportunity to organize a community untainted by competition or the shadow of ambition, an arcadian anarchy founded upon the permission given to each of its members to follow his own instincts. His remarks with the accompanying comments of Antonio and Sebastian, are full of interest: Gonzalo: Had I plantation of this isle, my lord,— Antonio: He’d sow it with nettle-seed. Sebastian: Or docks or mallows. Gonzalo: And were the king on’t, what would I do? Sebastian: ’Scape being drunk for want of wine. Gonzalo: I’ the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none . . . No occupation, all men idle, all; And women, too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty;— Sebastian: Yet he would be king on’t. Antonio: The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning. The dispassionate, academic catalogue in which Gonzalo expresses himself reflects perfectly the unreality of the whole dream. The nostalgia for an arcadian simplicity which produced, among other things, the pastoral convention of the sixteenth century was an international development which a writer like Cervantes, in Don Quixote’s discourse on the Golden Age,1 could raise to genuine intensity of feeling. No doubt it was a half-realized reaction against the sense of anarchy and moral pessimism which dominated so much of the court life of the time. Yet it is not Shakespeare’s purpose here to express any nostalgia of this kind, but rather to use its inherent weakness as a foil to bring out certain conceptions of his own. The sources of human misery are indeed to be excluded, according to Gonzalo, from the commonwealth; but with them, as soon appears, every distinctive quality of human life. Gonzalo’s next words show that the state of innocence is also necessarily the state of inexperience;

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All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavour, treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine Would I not have; but nature should bring north Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people. All this is to come about, according to Gonzalo’s ideal, ‘without sweat or endeavour’; but also without the salutary experience of effort from which is born, often slowly and painfully, the capacity to distinguish between good and evil which is the foundation of the whole moral life. For knowledge of good implies awareness of the evil from which it is distinguished; and this knowledge is acquired through a process, difficult but redeeming, of procreation and maturity. The inadequacy of Gonzalo’s simplicity, already sufficiently indicated in his own words, is revealed once more by the comments of Antonio and Sebastian: Sebastian: No marrying ’mong his subjects? Antonio: None, man, all idle; whores and knaves. Gonzalo’s commonwealth is founded upon an amorality which leaves place for ‘nettle-seed’, ‘docks’, and ‘mallows’ to take possession of the ground. The fact that men like Antonio and Sebastian exist proves that some kind of cultivation of the human terrain is necessary. This cultivation, as they point out, is admitted by Gonzalo himself when he imagines that he is king of the island; for the ‘latter’, the anarchic end of his commonwealth had forgotten that its beginning was founded upon kingship, accepted authority, ‘degree’. The substance of the passage is evidently paralleled in the conception which underlies the treatment of the pastoral scene in The Winter’s Tale. The state of nature is one which man must, in the nature of things, outgrow as his experience develops; the crucial problem is whether this development will be towards good, in the acceptance of some defined moral standard (sanctioned, in this play, by the Destiny which upholds Prospero) or towards the anarchy of unlimited personal desires. At this point it is time to consider Caliban. For Caliban, half man and half beast, represents the real state of nature far more truly than any of Gonzalo’s courtly theorizings, and in his relations with Prospero the connection between ‘nature’ and the moral, civilized state is far more profoundly considered. The poetic strain which, it has been generally agreed, Caliban possesses, represents in him the positive aspect of the real state of nature. Unlike the men with whom he comes into contact and who corrupt him, Caliban has the advantage of being in touch with natural simplicity. His poetry turns invariably upon his knowledge of and appreciation for the natural forces of the island. When

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Trinculo and Stephano meet him he offers, in language that contrasts vividly and surely of set intention with their coarseness, to show them ‘the best springs’ and ‘berries’, where the jay’s nest is to be found, and how ‘to snare the nimble marmoset’. All this is attractive, so attractive that we are sometimes apt to find Prospero’s harshness to him—‘Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself ’ (I, ii)—excessive and unsympathetic. Yet, if we consider further, the harshness is a necessary part of Shakespeare’s purpose. For Caliban, with his natural simplicity, is indissolubly bound to Prospero. Prospero himself admits this to Miranda when he tells her: We cannot miss him; he does make our fire, Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices That profit us. (I, ii) The kind of life that Prospero has established on his island assumes, in short, the existence of Caliban as a necessary condition. Besides being necessary, moreover, Caliban is in part Prospero’s creation. Finding him already on the island and needing him, Prospero tried from the first to incorporate him into the new civilized order of moral realities; and Caliban himself in his reply at once admits this and turns it into a most formidable indictment of the whole civilizing process which began by flattering him and finally turned into his tyrant: When thou camest first, Thou strok’st me, and made much of me; wouldst give me Water with berries in it; and teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night; and then I lov’d thee, And show’d thee all the qualities o’ the isle, The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile: Curs’d be I that did so! All the charms Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you! For I am all the subjects that you have. Which first was mine own king. From this we may learn more than one thing fundamental to the play. In the first place, the poetry which we admire in Caliban was given to him, at least in part, by Prospero; the instinctive appreciation was, if we like, his own, a natural endowment, but the gift of expression, essentially a social, a civilizing gift, came to him from Prospero. The natural and the civilized orders are, in other words, inextricably mixed, and the problem with which Prospero is wrestling is simply that the natural, animal man is a complete anarchist. For the burden of Caliban’s

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grievance is that Prospero has deprived him of his freedom, subjected his physical individuality to the preeminence of spiritual rule: For I am all the subjects that you have, Which first was my own king; and he goes on to accuse Prospero of keeping him in prison who had originally been master of the whole island. Prospero’s answer once more shows the problem in all its complexity: I have used thee, Filth as thou art, with human care, and lodg’d thee In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate The honour of my child. Caliban, who is necessary to Prospero, whose animal instincts are a true part of human nature, is yet, by virtue of his very character, recalcitrant to all restraint, to every claim of moral discipline. Regarding himself as lawful owner of the island he echoes, in his own way, Antonio by the assertion of his right to enjoy everything that appeals to his passions as desirable; so that when Prospero gave him liberty and the use of his own cell, he used his liberty to attack his master’s dearest possession in the person of his daughter. The conflict of flesh and spirit, which is simply that between civilized values and the state of nature, is not at this point in the play within sight of resolution. The animal instincts which man inherits from nature can neither be ignored, for they are a necessary part of his being, nor integrated in the new spiritual order; and so they lie in bondage to the master who came to give them spiritual significance but who has in fact destroyed their original spontaneity: Prospero: Abhorred slave, Which any print of goodness will not take, Being capable of all ill. I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but would gabble, like A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes With words that make them known. But thy vile race, Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures Could not abide to be with: therefore wast thou Deservedly confined into this rock, who had’st Deserved more than a prison.

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Caliban: You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse. Prospero’s denunciation and Caliban’s reply are each, from their own point of view, unanswerable. How to harmonize these points of view, how to fit the claims of animal instinct harmoniously into those of reasonable spirituality, is something that Prospero himself does not yet appear to see; not until the events precipitated on the island by the advent of strangers have taken their course and Ariel has spoken with the voice of judgment, is there any sign of clarification. The deficiencies of Caliban’s natural anarchism, already suggested by Prospero, are further brought out by his meeting with Stephano and Trinculo. Once more the theme is one which was being worked out in the New World before the eyes of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The arrival on the island of men from the outer world of ‘civilization’ is fatal to the natural creature, who escapes from the bondage of Prospero only to fall into that, infinitely more degrading, of the basest camp-followers of a supposedly civilized society. Caliban is, of course, greatly superior to Stephano and Trinculo. The poetry of his simplicity is enough to ensure that; but, divorced as he is from spiritual judgment and seeking only the anarchic freedom of his desires, he falls into a slavery which the superiority of the expression, being so incongruous, only serves to make more grotesque. Seduced by the ‘celestial liquor’ which Stephano gives him, he offers to serve him as a god: I prithee be my god. That’s a brave god and bears celestial liquors; I’ll kneel to him. I’ll kiss thy foot and swear myself thy subject. (II, ii) His aim in doing so is above all to free himself from service—‘I’ll bear no more sticks, but follow thee’—but, in following the freedom thus offered him by his fallacious instincts, he goes out drunk, crying ‘Freedom, hey-day!’, indeed, but reduced in reality to a slavery far more degrading than any to which he had been subjected before. The depth of his degradation, and that of his new masters, is fully brought out when they next appear. Completely enslaved as he now is in his ignorance to the worthless Stephano, Caliban’s savagery begins to inspire the drunken sailors to plot against Prospero; animality takes charge of human nature and debases it to new levels of evil. For Caliban, ridiculous though he has become in his worship of Stephano and Trinculo, is far more dangerous than the other two. In the brutal savagery of his proposals something breaks out which has been held in check so far by the domination of Prospero. That something finds expression in the unrestrained physical cruelty of the speeches in which he outlines his plot

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against his former master. Prospero is to be brained in his sleep, to have his skull battered in with a log, to be ‘paunched’ with a stake, to have his throat cut; most brutally of all perhaps— I’ll yield thee him asleep Where thou mayst knock a nail into his head. (III, ii) But first, and above all, he must be deprived of his books: Remember First to possess his books; for without them He’s but a sot as I am, nor hath not One spirit to command: they all do hate him As rootedly as I. In ascribing his own hatred to the other spirits Caliban is speaking falsely, measuring spiritual things in terms of his own anarchic bestiality; but his emphasis on the books, and on his own comparative sottishness without them, shows that he realizes and fears the sources of Prospero’s power. His realization accounts for the vehemence of his proposals. Against the spiritual power of Prospero his own instincts arise in physically inspired revulsion. The true motive of his craving for liberty is expressed more directly in the same and other speeches: that most deeply to consider is The beauty of his daughter. She will become thy bed, I warrant, And bring thee forth brave brood. The use of the word ‘brood’ to describe the progeny of this imagined union brings out well the animal spirit in which it is conceived, the revolt of passion against reason, of ‘blood’ against moral control which it implies. And this is the spirit which leads Caliban to ‘lick the boots’ of the coarsest, lowest kind of human being. That he is still superior to Stephano and Trinculo is shown by the survival of his poetic instincts (‘Be not afeared, the isle is full of noises’); but his subjection is in essence complete and springs inevitably from his conception of liberty. We are reminded of Shakespeare’s treatment of the problem of liberty in Measure for Measure. In that play Claudio, as he is being taken to prison, freely confesses that the cause of his present condition is ‘liberty, too much liberty’.2 Freedom from restraint, unchecked by adherence to any spiritual loyalty freely accepted, can lead man through his instincts only to moral dissolution and chaos. This in turn is the lowest form of slavery. Caliban is bound by his nature to service, but his service, which might have been that offered him by Prospero

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when he first took him into his cell and tried to teach him the civilized graces, turns to a mixture of the lowest animal brutality and sheer folly.

IV At this point the development of the situation on the island is substantially complete. The two plots—that against Alonso and that against Prospero—are fully launched and the original seclusion of the island has been most effectively shattered by the entry of human passion and sin. Yet Prospero, in spite of all, has the threads in his hands and it is precisely at this moment that he chooses to indicate the moral resolution. Ariel’s great speech addressed to Alonso and his companions before he deprives them of the enchanted banquet that has just been set before them is, in fact, nothing less than the keystone upon which the structure of the whole play rests: You are three men of sin, whom Destiny, That hath to instrument this lower world, And what is in’t, the never-surfeited sea Hath caus’d to belch up you; and, on this island, Where man doth not inhabit, you ’mongst men Being most unfit to live . . . But remember (For that’s my business to you) that you three From Milan did supplant good Prospero, Expos’d unto the sea (which hath requit it) Him and his innocent child: for which foul deed, The powers delaying, not forgetting, have Incens’d the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures, Against your peace. Thee of thy son, Alonso, They have bereft; and do pronounce by me Lingering perdition (worse than any death Can be at once) shall step by step attend You and your ways, whose wraths to guard you from, Which here, in this most desolate isle, else falls Upon your heads, is nothing but heart’s sorrow And a clear life ensuing. (III, iii) Here at last—rather even than in any speech of Prospero’s—is an explicit statement of what The Tempest is about. Shakespeare is careful to introduce the speech with a degree of pageantry and circumstance that make it stand out with great dramatic force against the general action. Ariel—generally the ‘gentle Ariel’ of Prospero’s preference—is brought on to the stage in the form of a harpy to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning. He causes the banquet to vanish

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by a motion of his wings and then, left face to face with those he has come to judge, he speaks. His words have a weighted simplicity that underlines their unique character and seriousness. The effect is obtained by means so direct that they barely call for analysis. Partly by the persistent use of heavy vocalic stresses, partly by the emphatic use of pauses in the middle and at the end of lines, partly by the significant insertion of parenthetic pauses into long unfolding sentences, the speech attains a measured magnificence unsurpassed, in its kind, anywhere in Shakespeare. Unsurpassed because, perhaps for the first time in his work, the voice of Destiny delivers itself directly in judgment. ‘I and my fellows’, says Ariel, ‘are ministers of Fate’. As such he speaks and, by so speaking, he brings out the full meaning of the play. The most important feature of the speech, indeed, is its affirmation of Destiny. This affirmation is, in its unequivocal expression, unique in Shakespeare’s work. Much of the symbolism of the later plays—the use, for example, of the associations of ‘grace’ in relation to fertility—has religious implications; but nowhere, not even in The Winter’s Tale with its still rather misty references to ‘the gods’, is Destiny so personally conceived or conceded such absolute power in the working out of human affairs. Destiny, according to Ariel, ‘hath to instrument the lower world’. ‘Delaying, not forgetting’, it watches over the whole story and brings the characters concerned in it, with infallible foreknowledge to the conclusions willed by absolute justice. All this, however it may have been foreshadowed in earlier works, is substantially new, but at the same time inevitable. For all Shakespeare’s symbolism, with the harmonizing purpose which underlies it, moves towards the presentation of the problems, moral and artistic, involved in this final acceptance of the personal reality of Destiny. Without that acceptance the intuition of ‘grace’ is only an insubstantial dream, a tenuous harmony woven out of elements that have no more validity than that of a personal mood; with it, possibly, the author lays himself open to the charge of going beyond his experience, of introducing an element of discontinuity in what had been so far the harmonious pattern of his work. Whatever we may conclude in this respect, we should do well to begin by recognizing that the problem, and the effort to resolve it, were implicit in the whole Shakespearean experience. Needless to say it was not part of the artist’s purpose to substantiate this objective conception of Destiny by argument; but it was his aim, inevitable and necessary, to place it in the centre of his play, to allow the symbolic web of experiences to form around it and to see if it would, in the last analysis, fit. In the detailed working out of this conception he returns to familiar ground. The symbolic use of storm and its association with new-born forces of harmony is one common to all Shakespeare’s last plays. Marina in Pericles loses her mother and is herself apparently lost in a storm at sea, but the storm itself throws her up on a friendly shore and eventually she is restored to her father’s arms. In The Winter’s Tale, when Perdita is exposed to the elements by her father’s unreasoning

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folly, she is found by the shepherds and her finding, while the storm is still raging and the younger Clown sees a ship struggling in vain to preserve itself against the elements, is really the first step in reconciliation: ‘thou mettest with things dying, I with things new-born’.3 So it is in The Tempest. Only here ‘the neversurfeited seas’ are explicitly controlled by a Destiny which has ‘incensed’ them against the ‘foul deed’ of those who plotted against Prospero and made them, in their anger, the instruments of an inexorable justice. The sea, to which Prospero and Miranda were exposed by human selfishness, has—through Prospero’s own action—brought the criminals to judgment. The key-note of the whole play, which Ariel comes to emphasize, is indeed judgment. Only when the good and evil in human nature have been understood and separated will the final reconciliation and restoration of harmony take place. This moral judgment is based in The Tempest upon an objective sanction which needs to be proved in operation. For this purpose—and really for this purpose alone—the various actors in the forgotten story of Naples and Milan have been brought together through the providential action of the storm upon ‘this most desolate isle’, ‘where man doth not inhabit’. Desolate surely because the work of purgation which is about to be accomplished needs to be accompanied by abstinence and a certain asceticism; and desolate too because it is not a place upon which men are to live their full, civilized lives—after the final reconciliation it is left by all except those whose nature debars them from playing a part in the ‘brave new world’ of beings at once spiritualized and social to which they are being offered entry—but on which they are to achieve moral understanding and learn to accept the judgment passed upon them. In this process of education the fundamental need is for repentance. Repentance is the necessary consequence, on the human side, of accepting judgment. Here again the conception is not new in Shakespeare. His last plays throw an increasing stress upon the Christian conception of penitence. Lear is restored to his daughter after becoming aware of his own folly although the restoration, still insufficiently developed to prevail against the tragic spirit which dominates the play, is only temporary and illusory; Leontes, after sixteen years of penance for the follies to which his own passion has prompted him, is restored to Hermione and, through the innocence of his daughter, to his broken friendship with Polixenes. Ariel calls for a similar repentance from Alonso and his fellows. Unless their sojourn ‘on this most desolate isle’ has taught them their own evil and folly, unless it has shown them the necessity for ‘heart’s sorrow’ and a ‘clear life’ to follow, their doom is certain. For it is in the nature of unbridled passion, as Shakespeare had already presented it in the great series of tragedies from Othello to Timon of Athens, to lead its victims to self-destruction; and The Tempest, with its insistence upon ideas of penance and amendment that can only follow from acceptance of a personal, spiritual conception of Destiny, is conceived as nothing less than a counterpoise to this tragic process of ruin.

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1. Don Quixote, Part 1, chapter xi. 2. Measure for Measure, I, ii. 3. Act III, Sc. iii. I have tried to indicate the importance of this and other passages from The Winter’s Tale in an essay on the play published in Arena, January 1938, pp. 301–314.

QQQ 1951—Harold C. Goddard. “The Tempest,” from The Meaning of Shakespeare Harold C. Goddard (1878–1950) was head of the English Department at Swarthmore College. One of the most important twentieth-century books on Shakespeare is his The Meaning of Shakespeare, published after his death. God knows there are desert islands enough to go round—the difficulty is to sail away from them—but dream islands . . . they are rare, rare. —Katherine Mansfield on The Tempest

I It is customary to set The Tempest beside A Midsummer-Night’s Dream as Shakespeare’s mature compared with his more youthful treatment of fairyland. Its connection with Macbeth, if less obvious, is profounder, the earlier play revealing the relation to human life of the darker part of the spiritual world as the later one does the brighter. But a still more interesting, if more unusual, way of taking The Tempest is as a sequel to King Lear. We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage. The Enchanted Isle is like a bird cage only in a certain sense and Prospero and Miranda bear no personal resemblance to Lear and Cordelia. But there they are—they two alone—father and daughter, transmigrated and altered as they might be in a dream. For what other name than Wonderful could fit Cordelia after the miracle of her “death” and what compensation better suit the angry and irrational old King than power to command the winds of which he formerly had been the victim? Yet even this little runs the risk of making too particular an analogy that should be left vague. Enough if we feel that the storm that rocked King Lear all but to the end is not unrelated to the tempest that is just about

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to blow itself out as this play begins. In Othello and King Lear we thought we caught glimpses into a region on the Other Side of the Storm. Nearly all of this play takes place there. In that sense—but in that sense only—The Tempest is King Lear in Heaven.

II The opening scene of The Tempest—the shipwreck—is like an overture throughout which we catch echoes, like distant thunder, of the themes that dominated the historical and tragic music dramas of Shakespeare’s earlier periods. It is an extraordinary epitome. “What cares these roarers for the name of king?” Into that question—or exclamation, if you will—the disdainful Boatswain condenses not only King Lear but all that Shakespeare ever said on the subject of worldly place and power. Here are a group of “great ones”—from king down—up against it. “The king and prince at prayers!” The mingled surprise, humor, and consternation in those words of old Gonzalo says it all. When kings and princes are reduced to prayer, then indeed is the day of doom near. The roaring Boatswain—a kind of emancipated and active twin of Barnardine in Measure for Measure—is the one man who shines in this crisis, his combined cheerfulness, energy, resourcefulness, and contempt being just the brew needed in the situation. Even the master of the boat relies on him to carry ship, mariners, passengers, and master himself through on his lone shoulders. Emergencies crown their own kings. As the Bastard needed no title in King John, so this man can stand on his own feet. Nature hands him the command and everybody of any account concurs. “Keep your cabins; you do assist the storm,” he orders his royal passengers. There is a symbolic diagnosis of war in eight words, with a prescription for peace thrown in. Let “great ones” go below and leave the decks to the boatswains and their mariners. It is still sound advice. Even the good Gonzalo, with his philosophy, strikes us as a bit superfluous at the moment. “You are a counsellor,” says the Boatswain; “if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more; use your authority . . . Cheerly, good hearts! Out of our way, I say.” Again Shakespeare amends Plato: not when philosophers are kings, but when boatswains are. William James declared that the best thing education can impart is the power to know a good man when you see him. In that case these scions of royalty are not educated, for all they can call this genius of the storm is bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog, whoreson, insolent noisemaker, and cur. What fools! What a man! What a scene! Commentators have long been tempted to identify Prospero with Shakespeare and to find in his farewell to his art, with the breaking of his wand and the drowning of his book, the poet’s farewell to the stage. The magician’s summary of his deeds—the graves he has opened, the wars of the elements he has fomented, the oaks he has rifted with lightning-bolts, on to the heavenly

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music he is even now “requiring,” which might so easily be The Tempest itself—fits the masterpieces of the poet so exactly that the inference seems all but inescapable. (And then there are Miranda and Judith Shakespeare.) But a parallelism, however close at one or two points, is a different matter from a full identification, and we can easily believe that Shakespeare had his own retirement from the theater in mind when he wrote this particular speech, without committing ourselves to the idea that Prospero is the author throughout. Indeed it is hard to see how anyone who has attended to the whole of Prospero’s role could entertain such a notion for a moment. For there are two Prosperos in this play, the man and the magician, Prospero the father of Miranda, and Prospero the master of Caliban and Ariel, fomenter of tempests. Miranda’s father is an antitype of Hamlet’s father (as ghost) in his treatment of his child, beginning, in this respect at least, where King Lear left off. From this angle The Tempest might be entitled The Education of Miranda and be put over against The Education of Coriolanus. But there should be no hasty inference that children should be brought up by their fathers rather than their mothers, for though Prospero calls himself Miranda’s schoolmaster, I imagine that, like Cadwal and Polydore, she was brought up mainly by a woman, Nature. Prospero, like Belarius, probably merely added a touch of wisdom here or exerted the restraining hand of experience there, so little, under healthy conditions, does civilization need to interfere with the natural impulses of a gifted child. And he was rewarded. Miranda plainly taught him more than he did her, and laid in him that basis of love and wonder which made possible the miraculous change that comes over him in the end. His discarding of his magic mantle in her presence in the first scene of the play is clearly a preparation for his final discarding of it in the last scene. (There is a reason for Shakespeare’s careful attention to stage directions in The Tempest.) But Prospero the magician is a being of a different order from Miranda’s father. He can be traced to the former Duke of Milan, the recluse so absorbed in his books that he was unconscious of the conspiracy of the brother who deposed him. Now in exile, this master of strange lore can emerge from solitude to issue stern commands and rebukes. Those who nonchalantly equate him with Shakespeare have not only his treatment of his abhorred fetcher of fuel to come to terms with, but the more difficult fact of his sharp words to Ariel. “Dull thing”—of all things to this spirit of fire and air!—“Thou liest, malignant thing!” His threat to imprison his winged servant if he murmurs is enough in itself to put any identification with the author out of court. How shall we reconcile these opposites—the loving father and the harsh taskmaster?

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III The Tempest has an unrivaled power to inspire in almost all sensitive readers a belief that it contains a secret meaning. Even those who make no attempt to search it out retain the feeling that it is there and that if it could only be found it would lead close not merely to the heart of Shakespeare’s convictions about life but close to the heart of life itself. Naturally I have no reference here to the many minute and elaborate allegorical interpretations of the play that have been offered, which, even if they were convincing within their own limits, could have only a historical, biographical, or other subpoetical interest. What I have in mind rather are more modest attempts to connect and elucidate the main themes and symbols around which the poem is obviously built and which seem to have in peculiar degree the power, in Keats’s words, to “tease us out of thought as doth eternity.” To set out to interpret The Tempest (which I do not intend to do) is one thing; to point out certain aspects of its symbolism and thematic structure with which any satisfactory interpretation must come to terms as a sort of minimum requirement is another and much less ambitious undertaking. To begin with, this play is centrally concerned with the three things that Shakespeare had perhaps come to value most highly in life: liberty, love, and wonder—the identical trinity, by the way, that Hafiz, long before Shakespeare, had also chosen. Concerned with realities rather than with names, the poet not only gives examples of these things but, to make clear what they are in their purity, shows us what they are in their perversions: license is set over against liberty; lust against love; banality, but more particularly “wonders,” against wonder. And the play has also what might be called a biological theme. As has often been pointed our, the characters are arranged in a sort of evolutionary hierarchy from Caliban, who is a kind of demi-creature of water and earth, up through human strata of various stages of development to Ariel, who is all fire and air— though it is made clear that where human nature becomes degenerate it seems to sink to a level lower than that of Caliban. Closely allied to this, yet distinct from it, is a psychological interest. The play is fairly saturated with references to sleep and waking—and to various states of consciousness and unconsciousness between the two, drowsiness, daydreaming, dreaming, trance, hallucination, and other hypnagogic conditions. Likewise The Tempest is filled from end to end with noises and music—from the thunder and roaring of the storm itself, the howling of beasts, through the sounds and sweet airs of the Enchanted Isle that could charm even Caliban, through every variety of human utterance from the cries and coarse ballads of drunkards to the voices of lovers, up finally to the songs of Ariel. And Shakespeare seems interested not only in these two things, sleep and music, but even more in the relation between them—in the relation, to put it more pedantically, between music and the

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unconscious mind. The voices of the isle could induce such sleep in Caliban that when he waked he cried to dream again. Miranda falls asleep on the entrance of Ariel and awakens on his exit. The same is true in some degree of the other good characters, but not of the baser ones, who become victims on at least one occasion of an evil form of waking hallucination. All these reactions turn on the receptivity of the unconscious mind. These various themes and symbols are inextricably interwoven, and, seen from a slightly different angle, give us Shakespeare’s final word on a subject that had engaged his attention from the beginning: the different kinds of power that men possess and are possessed by. Here the political and religious aspects of the story merge as we are carried all the way from the demonic tyranny of the witch Sycorax to the reign of pure goodness in old Gonzalo’s ideal commonwealth. More specifically, we have within the main action of the play: the political and military power of Alonso and Antonio, the magical power of Prospero, the alcoholic power of Stephano, the unveiling power of love in Ferdinand and Miranda, and the musical power of Ariel. (Nor am I omitting, though I may seem to be, the religious power of forgiveness.) The play culminates in three emancipations—of Caliban from the enthralment of the drunken Stephano, of Prospero from his magic, and of Ariel from the service of Prospero in the cause of that magic (not to mention the emancipation from moral bondage of Alonso and his companions). What might be called, grotesquely, the biography of Ariel gives at least an intimation of what these interrelated emancipations mean, though we must beware here not to fetter the play within any rigid allegory. For twelve years—“years” doubtless comparable to the “days” of creation in Genesis—Ariel was imprisoned in a cloven pine by the witch Sycorax because he was a spirit too delicate To act her earthy and abhorr’d commands. This imprisonment, once imposed, Sycorax is powerless to undo and Prospero with his art must come to the rescue. What does this signify? Might it not mean that when imagination is enslaved by the senses superstition usurps its function—and the senses become powerless to release it? It must be set free by knowledge and reason. But that is not the end of the story. Out from under the domination of the senses, imagination now becomes the slave of the very intellect that rescued it. Prospero is now master and the delicate spirit he has set free from Sycorax is impressed into the service of his magic—even at one point at the threat of a second imprisonment, in a cloven oak, of like duration as the first, if he complains. Here, again, is a Prospero remote enough from anything we associate with Shakespeare.

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What is the character of Prospero’s magic? If it is not black art, it certainly is not “white” in the sense of being dedicated unreservedly to noble ends. Prospero was indeed the victim of injustice. But his main miracle, the raising of the tempest, appears to have been undertaken primarily to get his enemies within his power for purposes of revenge. Moreover, his magic banquets and charmed swords have an element of mere display about them that is reminiscent of the “wonders” of the common conjurer. The higher the nature of the miracle sought, the more Prospero seems to intrust its execution to Ariel’s improvisation, as in the saving of Gonzalo and most of all the falling in love of Ferdinand and Miranda. Prospero willed this love affair, but the bringing of it into being was plainly Ariel’s work, and his success so delights Prospero that he promises his servant his freedom as a reward: Pros.: It goes on, I see, As my soul prompts it. (Not, notice, “as I ordered” but “as my soul prompts”!) Spirit, fine spirit! I’ll free thee Within two days for this. And as if he would not have us miss the point, the poet repeats it a moment later: At the first sight They have chang’d eyes. Delicate Ariel, I’ll set thee free for this! He sees that this is Ariel’s accomplishment—nothing of his own magic at all. (From Prospero’s command to his servant to summon his “rabble” of spirits and “incite them to quick motion” we seem entitled to think that even the wedding masque is mainly the latter’s doing.) As in the case of Lear and his Fool, the servant has become the master of the master, a fact that comes out emphatically when Prospero has his enemies at his mercy. He is then in the same position as was the banished Coriolanus, except that the force at his command is knowledge and magic rather than the sword. Now does my project gather to a head, he cries triumphantly in the first line of the last act. His foes, along with some innocent ones entangled with them, are powerless to budge, and we feel that he

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is now about to get even for the injustices they formerly inflicted on him. And then, like Virgilia with her kiss, Ariel speaks: Ariel: Him that you term’d, sir, “the good old lord, Gonzalo,” His tears run down his beard like winter’s drops From eaves of reeds. Your charm so strongly works them That if you now beheld them, your affections Would become tender. Pros.: Dost thou think so, spirit? Ariel: Mine would, sir, were I human. Pros.: And mine shall. Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, One of their kind, that relish all as sharply Passion as they, be kindlier mov’d than thou art? Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick, Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury Do I take part. The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further. Go release them, Ariel. My charms I’ll break, their senses I’ll restore, And they shall be themselves. Prospero thinks it is his reason that overcomes his fury. But what has just happened contradicts him. It was his angel that whispered the suggestion in his car. And a man’s angel or genius is not to be confused with the man himself.1 Indeed this very one of Prospero’s is a spirit whose independence he is about to declare. Crying, “My charms I’ll break,” he invokes the elves and demi-puppets— “weak masters” who have helped him to do only such trifles as to bedim the sun and call forth winds—and bids farewell forever to them and magic. Ariel, his strong master, enters on the instant, with music, to displace them. And forthwith follows a wonder that genuinely deserves the name—the forgiveness and reconciliation that Prospero has just resolved on. Here is a divine right of kings to which even the strictest equalitarian could not object—the intervention of one of those angels in whom Richard II, because he was unworthy, trusted in vain. Here is the counterpart and antithesis of Macbeth’s surrender to the Witches. As they tempted him to crime and death, so Ariel tempts Prospero to forgiveness and life. How all this illuminates what has gone before! The stages in Ariel’s estate now stand out unmistakable. While he was subjected to Sycorax, he was imprisoned and powerless. While he obeys Prospero, he performs material wonders—though

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even then, if the initiative is left to him, he goes beyond them. Finally, when it is he who whispers the hint in Prospero’s ear and Prospero obeys him, the wonder of a spiritual miracle occurs. Music replaces magic; Ariel’s songs achieve what is beyond the scope of Prospero’s wand. Those who, once powerful, suffer defeat, are restored to power, and then might take revenge but do not—they hold the keys of peace. That is what the end of The Tempest seems to say, as Shakespeare himself said it in the 94th sonnet: They that have power to hurt and will do none . . . They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces. It is an old truth—no discovery of Shakespeare’s. But crowning as it does the last act of what was probably the last full play he ever wrote, backed up by hundreds, we might almost say thousands, of minute particulars from his previous works, and embodied in his own practice of understanding rather than judging all humanity from saint to sinner, it acquires the character of a revelation. Be cheerful And think of each thing well. By itself, that could sound commonplace or even banal. But against the inferno of the Tragedies, it is no silly philosophy of smiling evil out of existence.

IV Where the bee sucks, there suck I, sings Ariel when Prospero tells him the moment of his release is near, Where the bee sucks, there suck I. In a cowslip’s bell I lie; There I couch when owls do cry. On the bat’s back I do fly After summer merrily. Merrily, merrily shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on the bough. This angel will not use his freedom to fly away to some distant heaven: he will hide under the nearest flower. The world of spirit, in other words, is not Another World after all. It is this world rightly seen and heard. From end to end The Tempest reiterates this. To innocent senses the isle itself is pure loveliness; to corrupted ones it is no better than a swamp:

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Adrian: The air breathes upon us here most sweetly. Sebastian: As if it had lungs, and rotten ones. Antonio: Or as ’twere perfumed by a fen. Gonzalo: Here is everything advantageous to life. Antonio: True; save means to live. Even in Caliban an Ariel slumbers. He loves the voices of the isle, and his moral awakening at the end— What a thrice-double ass Was I, to take this drunkard for a god And worship this dull fool! —though passed over swiftly is as hopeful a note as is struck in the entire play. Prospero was wrong in thinking that Caliban was impervious to education. But it is Miranda of course, of the human inhabitants of the isle, who gives supreme expression to the way the world looks to uncontaminated senses and imagination: O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in ’t! Imagination, as dreams show, is something that awakens in most of us only when the senses are put to sleep. It is only when they awaken refreshed at sunrise that we occasionally see the world for a moment as God intended us to. But really, Shakespeare is telling us in The Tempest, sense and spirit are as much made for each other as lovers are. It is appetite and intellect that have put an abyss between them. That is what Prospero the Magician learned from Ariel and his own child. Miranda did not need to read King Lear. But unless we have a child or angel to teach us, we do. We must go to Shakespeare and the other poets—for poetry, as Shelley said, “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar things as if they were not familiar.” But whatever may be true of the rest of us, why does a poet need poetry? It is easy to see why a young poet does. But why should an old one? We have noted how Shakespeare’s need for drama in the narrower sense yielded to his need for poetry. Was his need for poetry now yielding to his need for life? It was the moment after Prospero listened to his spirit that he decided to break his staff and drown his book. Perhaps Shakespeare at last perceived that dramatic compositions, even poetic ones, are only airy charms. Perhaps he said to himself,

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. . . this rough magic I here abjure: I will return from the necromancy of art to the wonder of life itself. Whatever he said or didn’t say, he must have come to realize what creative minds in the end are almost bound to see: that the arts are to men only what toys are to children, a means for the rehearsal of life. And so, paradoxically, the object of art is to get rid of the arts. When they mature, the art of life will be substituted for them—as children outgrow their toys. Merrily, merrily shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on the bough. Perhaps Shakespeare had himself in mind when he wrote those lines of Ariel’s. I picture him retired to Stratford lying under a plum tree in May doing “nothing.” “Had I a little son,” said Charles Lamb, “I would christen him Nothing-to-Do; he should do nothing.” Shakespeare would have understood. “Nothing brings me all things.”

V Shakespeare could have bidden farewell to the theater in no better way than through Ariel, for no figure he ever created more utterly transcends the stage. How shall Ariel be acted? The most graceful girl to be found for the part, the most charming boy, will instantly blur or erase the Shakespearean conception. Which, indeed, should play the role, if it is to be played, boy or girl? And what pronoun should be resorted to in referring to this spirit of music and the dance? The paucity of language compels us, as in the case of the angels, to use either the masculine or the feminine. But neither will do. Ariel is above sex. In that respect this ultimate creation of the poet’s genius seems like the culmination of something he had been seeking all his life. From Adonis and the Young Man of the Sonnets, through Rosalind and Hamlet, Desdemona and Cordelia, on to Imogen, Florizel and Cadwal, Ferdinand and Miranda (remember her willingness to carry logs!), Shakespeare is bent on finding men and women who, without losing the virtues and integrity of their own sex, have also the virtues of the other. If Shakespeare had no admiration for the womanly woman in the sense of the clinging vine, neither had he any for the manly man as embodied in what our generation refers to as the “he-man” or the “red-blooded man.” He scorned the gentleman, but all his best men are gentle men. Whatever else he may be, Ariel is a symbol of this union of the masculine and feminine elements of the soul. But what makes Ariel even more akin, if possible, to the spirit of his maker is the capacity to assume any form or shape, to perform any function, to be at home

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in any element. By universal consent this is close to Shakespeare’s supreme gift. And there is no better example of it than his creation (along with Caliban) of this very Ariel—a creature so unique that he seems to have sprung full-blown from the head of his maker. But even Ariel has been prepared for. From Puck with his flower juice squeezed in lovers’ eyes, to the Fool with his wise folly whispered in Lear’s ear, Ariel has seldom been far away in Shakespeare wherever spiritual force from without comes to the rescue of weak or foolish or proud humanity. Who shall say that Ariel was not there when the God Hercules left Antony and music was heard in the air, or when Cleopatra herself turned to fire and air?

VI Of the many universal symbols on which The Tempest is erected that of the island is fundamental. An island is a bit of a higher element rising out of a lower—like a fragment of consciousness thrusting up out of the ocean of unconsciousness. Like a clearing in the wilderness or a walled city, like a temple or a monastery, it is a piece of cosmos set over against chaos and ready to defend itself if chaos, as it will be bound to do, tries to bring it back under its old domination. It is a magic circle, a small area of perfection shutting out all the rest of infinite space. What wonder that an island has come to be a symbol of birth and of rebirth, or that from the fabled Atlantis and that earthly island, the Garden of Eden, to the latest Utopia, an island, literal or metaphorical, is more often than any other the spot the human imagination chooses for a fresh experiment in life!2 Like Ariel himself, this island play, The Tempest, is so sui generis that we do not easily see how naturally it emerges from the rest of Shakespeare. In its emphasis on parent and child and the theme of reconciliation, its kinship with the others in the group of plays that begins with Pericles, it is true, is a commonplace. But its roots go deeper than that. Prospero, Duke of Milan, deprived of his dukedom and exiled on an island, is restored at the end to his former place, a man so altered by his experience that henceforth, he declares, every third thought shall be his grave. Obviously, this is the pattern of As You Like It with the Forest of Arden in place of the Enchanted Isle and with the difference that the Senior Duke is in no need of regeneration. But, less obviously, this theme of the King, Prince, Duke, or other person of high estate losing his place or inheritance only to recover it or its spiritual equivalent, after exile or suffering, in a sense in which he never possessed it before, is repeated by Shakespeare over and over. All stemming in a way from that early and undervalued study of King Henry VI, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and parts of Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale are built on this situation. They all, in one way or another, contrast with and supplement Hamlet, whose hero propounds the same problem, wavers on the edge of a fresh solution, only to offer in the end the old erroneous

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answer. They all, in various keys, reiterate the theme of Timon: “Nothing brings me all things.” But it is not just those who have lost worldly kingdoms in a literal sense who come to realize this truth. Shakespeare uses the same idea metaphorically. Over and over in his plays when the object valued or the person loved is taken away, an imaginative object or person, more than compensating for the loss, appears in its place. Friar Francis in Much Ado about Nothing formulates the psychology of it. Hero, accused at the marriage altar by Claudio of unfaithfulness, falls unconscious— dead, it is thought at first. Give it out that she is dead, advises Friar Francis later, and you will perceive a miracle: the real Hero will be reborn in Claudio’s soul. So will it fare with Claudio. When he shall hear she died upon his words, The idea of her life shall sweetly creep Into his study of imagination, And every lovely organ of her life Shall come apparell’d in more precious habit, More moving-delicate and full of life, Into the eye and prospect of his soul, Than when she liv’d indeed. And so it proves, when the supposedly dead Hero, posing as her own cousin, is produced, and Claudio, seeing now with his imagination, superimposes his purified memory on the new bride and cries, “Another Hero!” Another Hero indeed, and yet the same. Beatrice and Benedick, too, are toppled out of their pride and disdain by a variation of the same psychology. Listening to “lies” about each other and themselves that are nearer the truth than the counterfeit personalities their wit has created, and shaken into sincerity by Claudio’s mistreatment of Hero, they bid farewell to contempt and confess their love. And as if fascinated by the situation, Shakespeare relies on it yet again in All’s Well That Ends Well, when Bertram resees the “dead” Helena at the end. In the light comedy of these over-theatrical plays, however, Claudio and Bertram have acted so outrageously that their conversions are to many modern readers or spectators unconvincing. Some will suspect the poet himself of skepticism or irony in these happy endings. But the moment we pass to tragedy we accept this psychology without question. Romeo falls in love with Juliet at first sight but he loves her utterly only when she lies “dead” at his feet. Hamlet3 realizes what Ophelia is to him only when he has driven her to madness and death and is literally with her in her grave. Othello recognizes the divinity of Desdemona only after he has killed her. Lear “sees” Cordelia fully only when she is dead in his arms. Antony becomes

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conqueror of himself only when he believes that Cleopatra has committed suicide, and Cleopatra is translated into fire and air only when her Emperor has proved his faith by taking his own life. The number of repetitions of this theme or situation in the Tragedies is startling and it is continued in modified form in the last group of plays. Posthumus discards his Italian weeds and his shame only when he believes he has murdered Imogen. Leontes falls truly in love with the “dead” wife he has wronged only when she is transformed into a statue. Symbolically this last instance might stand for all. The “illusion” of loss permits the senses to see life as if it were a work of art. In how many cases imagination is the child of death: in tragedy generally of death itself, in comedy often of a false report of death—death being the supreme “nothing” that brings “all things.” In the dramatic romances especially Shakespeare seems to be asking whether some great shock short of death cannot awaken the imagination as death itself does in the Tragedies. In banishment, exile, or separation Shakespeare finds such shocks, but even these understudies of death, as they might be called, are rather the necessary condition than the cause of the awakening. Prospero on his island is not enough. There must be a Miranda too. And in all the plays where this theme of exile is conspicuous, of which The Tempest is the typical and terminal one, we never fail to find childhood or a childlike innocence preserved into maturity as seed for the soil that has been plowed by adversity. It is not chance that in these last plays there are so many children, unspotted maidens (and young men) together with older women and old men who have attained the wisdom of a renewed childhood: young Mamillius, Cadwal and Polydore, Perdita and Florizel, Marina, Imogen, Ferdinand and Miranda, Hermione, Paulina, Belarius, the Old Shepherd, and Prospero himself. (The innocent Desdemona is in a sense the tragic mother of them all.) One of the certainties about the later Shakespeare is his conviction of the reciprocal necessity of childhood to age and of age to childhood. Confirming King Lear, these plays assert that where the older generation has sinned it must seek pardon of the younger generation: Alonso: But O! how oddly will it sound that I Must ask my child forgiveness! but where it has kept virtuous, as Belarius did, its function is to help keep the younger generation uncontaminated by the world—uncontaminated by it, be it noted, not unacquainted with it. For Shakespeare is the last one to advocate the closing of eyes to fact. Only he keeps faith in the power of imagination to subdue fact to its own shape. The Tempest seems like the summation and consummation of what he has been saying on that subject all his life. Prospero, when expelled from his dukedom, is a narrow and partial man. Thanks to his child, the island, and Ariel, he gives promise of coming back to it something like a whole one.

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But an integrated man is only another name for an imaginative man. And so the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda is not the only union this play celebrates, nor is the island the only symbol of wholeness. On this isle we have all found ourselves, Gonzalo proclaims in the end, “when no man was his own.” In this location of spiritual treasure within the self (“The Kingdom of Heaven is within you”) as well as in its emphasis on childhood and forgiveness, together with the note of humility and the appeal for mercy on which its epilogue ends, The Tempest is a profoundly Christian play.

VII When we consider out of what this poem is woven, is it any wonder it produces the effect it does? Its action takes place on an enchanted island. Its main human character is a magician. Its most celestial figure is the very spirit of metamorphosis. Its most earthy one undergoes a seemingly impossible transformation—an extreme example of the moral regeneration that comes to a number of others in the play. Its atmosphere throughout is as insubstantial as a rainbow. (Iris herself actually appears at one point.) The best-remembered sentence from its best-remembered speech is We are such stuff As dreams are made on. Shakespeare must have known what would happen within the minds of readers and auditors to such a diaphanous and ethereal thing. Life, as he had long since discovered, reveals as much of herself to any man as he brings to her—and no two bring the same. Bright or dark, the world seems contrived to confirm whatever idea of it we conceive it under. A poem, in proportion as it is like life, like that world, will do the same. What else than this is the ultimate meaning of the Shakespearean firmament at which we have been gazing—this human universe we have been passing in review—wherein hundreds of stars, though they inhabit the same sky, differ in glory each from each? A single universal symbol invites projection as surely as a mirror does reflection. The Tempest is crowded with such symbols from end to end. How inevitable that it should tempt the sensitive reader, as the stories of Belarius did Cadwal, to “strike life” into it and “show much more his own conceiving”! So long as we reverence and do not neglect its text, what The Tempest means, then, is what it means to you or to me. And it will never mean when we are in one mood precisely what it does when we are in another, or mean tomorrow precisely what it does today. And so, as in the case of Hamlet, and in due degree of the other plays, each age will find its own interpretation of The Tempest, and, miraculously, it will seem to have been written for each age. A main thing it says to our age ought to

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be plain. Its great opposed symbols are the tempest of Prospero, which Ariel made as Prospero’s slave, and Ariel’s music, which Ariel made of his own free will. The former is the result of necromantic science or theurgy. The latter is a spontaneous overflow of joy in life. The one creates an opportunity for revenge. The other resolves the situation thus created. What that says to a generation that has used its own science to make an atomic bomb is as illuminating as a flash of lightning by night.

VIII If lovers of Shakespeare were asked to select a single passage from his works best representative of both his poetry and his philosophy of life, there would probably be nearly unanimous agreement in choosing Prospero’s lines beginning, Our revels now are ended . . . through We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. In their context, as Prospero utters them, they are susceptible of a profoundly sad, not to say pessimistic, interpretation. But as Shakespeare’s words the world has on the whole refused to take them so, finding in them rather a supreme expression of the mystery and wonder of life. “Rounded with a sleep” can mean several other things than ended with a sleep, and when did a dream ever exist without a dreamer? There is one little word here, of only two letters, that makes all the difference. Most commentators explain that “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” means according to Elizabethan usage, as indeed it may, “We are such stuff as dreams are made of.” But it may also mean just what it says to the unlearned modern mind. Whether we are such stuff as dreams are made of is at best a matter of opinion or conviction, even though Shakespeare’s authority is supposed to support the assertion. But that we are such stuff as dreams are made on is a matter of fact. It is indeed the one datum of consciousness— more nearly ultimate even than Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum. The science of our age seeks to explain the constitution of matter. But perhaps the final secret and definition of matter will turn out to be not some mathematical formula but simply this: Matter is that stuff on which dreams can be imprinted, that substance, in other words, on which creative energy can be projected. How else could things as frail as dreams have survived the tempest and chaos of material evolution?

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How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? A question that contains its own answer. NOTES 1. “Thy demon—that’s thy spirit which keeps thee” (Antony and Cleopatra, II, iii, 19). 2. A rarely beautiful and subtle example is Green Island in Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. 3. This case, it is admitted, is debatable.

QQQ 1959—Northrop Frye. Introduction to The Tempest The Canadian scholar Northrop Frye (1912–1991) was one of the most influential literary critics of the twentieth century. Harold Bloom has called him “the largest and most crucial literary critic in the English language” since Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. One of Frye’s most famous books is The Anatomy of Criticism.

In the opening scene of The Tempest there is not only a sinking ship but a dissolving society. The storm, like the storm in King Lear, does not care that it is afflicting a king, and Gonzalo’s protests about the deference due to royalty seem futile enough. But while everyone is unreasonable, we can distinguish Gonzalo, who is ready to meet his fate with some detachment and humor, from Antonio and Sebastian, who are merely screaming abuse at the sailors trying to save their lives. The boatswain, who comes so vividly to life in a few crisp lines, dominates this scene and leaves us with a strong sense of the superiority of personal character to social rank. The shipwrecked characters are then divided by Ariel into three main groups: Ferdinand; the Court Party proper; Stephano and Trinculo. Each goes through a pursuit of illusions, an ordeal, and a symbolic vision. The Court Party hunts for Ferdinand with strange shapes appearing and vanishing around them; their ordeal is a labyrinth of “forthrights and meanders” in which they founder with exhaustion, and to them is presented the vision of the disappearing banquet, symbolic of deceitful desires. There follows confinement and a madness which brings them to conviction of sin, self-knowledge, and repentance. Like Hamlet, Prospero delays revenge and sets up a dramatic action to catch the conscience

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of a king; like Lear on a small scale, Alonso is a king who gains in dignity by suffering. The search of Stephano and Trinculo for Prospero is also misled by illusions; their ordeal is a horse-pond and their symbolic vision the “trumpery” dangled in front of them. What happens to them is external and physical rather than internal and mental: they are hunted by hounds, filled with cramps, and finally reach what might be called a conviction of inadequacy. Probably they then settle into their old roles again: if a cold-blooded sneering assassin like Antonio can be forgiven, these amusing and fundamentally likeable rascals can be too. Ferdinand, being the hero, has a better time: he is led by Ariel’s music to Miranda, undergoes the ordeal of the log pile, where he takes over Caliban’s role as a bearer of wood, and his symbolic vision is that of the wedding masque. The characters thus appear to be taking their appropriate places in a new kind of social order. We soon realize that the island looks different to different people—it is a pleasanter place to Gonzalo than to Antonio or Sebastian—and that each one is stimulated to exhibit his own ideal of society. At one end, Ferdinand unwillingly resigns himself to becoming King of Naples by the death of Alonso; at the other, Sebastian plots to become King of Naples by murdering Alonso. In between come Stephano, whose ambition to be king of the island is more ridiculous but somehow less despicable than Sebastian’s, and Gonzalo, who dreams of a primitive golden age of equality and leisure, not very adequate as a social theory, but simple and honest, full of good nature and good will, like Gonzalo himself. Into the midst of this society comes the islander Caliban, who is, on one level of nature, a natural man, a primitive whose name seems to echo the “cannibals” of Montaigne’s famous essay. He is not a cannibal, but his existence in the play forms an ironic comment on Gonzalo’s reverie, which has been taken from a passage in the same essay. Caliban is a human being, as Ariel is not; and whatever he does, Prospero feels responsible for him: “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine,” Prospero says. Whether or not he is, as one hopeful critic suggested, an anticipation of Darwin’s “missing link,” he knows he is not like the apes “With foreheads villainous low”; his sensuality is haunted by troubled dreams of beauty; he is not taken in by the “trumpery,” and we leave him with his mind on higher things. His ambitions are to kill Prospero and rape Miranda, both, considering his situation, eminently natural desires; and even these he resigns to Stephano, to whom he tries to be genuinely loyal. Nobody has a good word for Caliban: he is a born devil to Prospero, an abhorred slave to Miranda, and to others not obviously his superiors either in intelligence or virtue he is a puppy-headed monster, a mooncalf, and a plain fish. Yet he has his own dignity, and he is certainly no Yahoo, for all his ancient and fishlike smell. True, Shakespeare, like Swift, clearly does not assume that the natural man on Caliban’s level is capable also of a reasonable life. But he has taken pains to make Caliban as memorable and vivid as any character in the play.

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As a natural man, Caliban is mere nature, nature without nurture, as Prospero would say: the nature that manifests itself more as an instinctive propensity to evil than as the calculated criminality of Antonio and Sebastian, which is rationally corrupted nature. But to an Elizabethan poet “nature” had an upper level, a cosmic and moral order that may be entered through education, obedience to law, and the habit of virtue. In this expanded sense we may say that the whole society being formed on the island under Prospero’s guidance is a natural society. Its top level is represented by Miranda, whose chastity and innocence put her, like her poetic descendant the Lady in Comus, in tune with the harmony of a higher nature. The discipline necessary to live in this higher nature is imposed on the other characters by Prospero’s magic. In Shakespeare’s day the occult arts, especially alchemy, whose language Prospero is using at the beginning of the fifth act, were often employed as symbols of such discipline. Shakespeare did not select Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals as the basis for Gonzalo’s “commonwealth” speech merely at random. Montaigne is no Rousseau: he is not talking about imaginary noble savages. He is saying that, despite their unconventional way of getting their proteins, cannibals have many virtues we have not, and if we pretend to greater virtues we ought to have at least theirs. They are not models for imitation; they are children of nature who can show us what is unnatural in our own lives. If we can understand that, we shall be wiser than the cannibals as well as wiser than our present selves. Prospero takes the society of Alonso’s ship, immerses it in magic, and then sends it back to the world, its original ranks restored, but given a new wisdom in the light of which Antonio’s previous behavior can be seen to be “unnatural.” In the Epilogue Prospero hands over to the audience what his art has created, a vision of a society permeated by the virtues of tolerance and forgiveness, in the form of one of the most beautiful plays in the world. And, adds Prospero, you might start practising those virtues by applauding the play. The Tempest is not an allegory, or a religious drama: if it were, Prospero’s great “revels” speech would say, not merely that all earthly things will vanish, but that an eternal world will take their place. In a religious context, Prospero’s renunciation of magic would represent the resigning of his will to a divine will, one that can do what the boatswain says Gonzalo cannot do, command the elements to silence and work the peace of the present. In Christianity the higher level of nature is God’s original creation, from which man broke away with Adam’s fall. It is usually symbolized by the music of the heavenly spheres, of which the one nearest us is the moon. The traditional conception of the magician was of one who could control the moon: this power is attributed to Sycorax, but it is a sinister power not associated with Prospero, whose magic and music belong to the sublunary world. In the wedding masque of the fourth act and the recognition scene of the fifth, therefore, we find ourselves moving, not out of the world, but from an

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ordinary to a renewed and ennobled vision of nature. The masque shows the meeting of a fertile earth and a gracious sky introduced by the goddess of the rainbow, and leads up to a dance of nymphs representing the spring rains with reapers representing the autumnal harvest. The masque has about it the freshness of Noah’s new world, after the tempest had receded and the rainbow promised that seedtime and harvest should not cease. There is thus a glimpse, as Ferdinand recognizes, of an Earthly Paradise, where, as in Milton’s Eden, there is no winter but spring and autumn “Danced hand in hand.” In the last act, as in The Winter’s Tale, there is a curious pretense that some of the characters have died and are brought back to life. The discovery of Ferdinand is greeted by Sebastian, of all people, as “A most high miracle” But the miracles are those of a natural, and therefore also a moral and intellectual, renewal of life. Some of Shakespeare’s romances feature a final revelation through a goddess or oracle, both of which Alonso expects, but in The Tempest goddess and oracle are represented by Miranda and Ariel (in his speech at the banquet) respectively. Ariel is a spirit of nature, and Miranda is a natural spirit, in other words a human being, greeting the “brave new world” in all the good faith of innocence. Hence we distort the play if we think of Prospero as supernatural, just as we do if we think of Caliban as a devil. Prospero is a tempest-raiser like the witches in Macbeth, though morally at the opposite pole; he is a “white” magician. Anyone with Prospero’s powers is an agent of fate, a cheating fate if evil, a benevolent fate or providence if motivated as he is. Great courage was required of all magicians, white or black, for the elemental spirits they controlled were both unwilling and malignant, and any sign of faltering meant terrible disaster. Ariel is loyal because of his debt of gratitude to Prospero, and because he is a very high-class spirit, too delicate to work for a black witch like Sycorax. But even he has a short memory, and has to be periodically reminded what his debt of gratitude is. Of the others Caliban says, probably with some truth, “They all do hate him / As rootedly as I.” The nervous strain of dealing with such creatures shows up in Prospero’s relations with human beings too; and in his tormenting of Caliban, in his lame excuse for making Ferdinand’s wooing “uneasy,” in his fussing over protecting Miranda from her obviously honorable lover, there is a touch of the busybody. Still, his benevolence is genuine, and as far as the action of the play goes he seems an admirable ruler. Yet he appears to have been a remarkably incompetent Duke of Milan, and not to be promising much improvement after he returns. His talents are evidently dramatic rather than political, and he seems less of a practical magician plotting the discomfiture of his enemies than a creative artist calling spirits from their confines to enact his present fancies. It has often been thought that Prospero is a self-portrait of Shakespeare, and there may well be something in him of a harassed overworked actor-manager, scolding the lazy actors, praising the good ones in connoisseur’s language, thinking up jobs for the idle, constantly aware of his limited time before his show goes on, his nerves

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tense and alert for breakdowns while it is going on, looking forward longingly to peaceful retirement, yet in the meantime having to go out and beg the audience for applause. Prospero’s magic, in any case, is an “art” which includes, in fact largely consists of, music and drama. Dramatists from Euripides to Pirandello have been fascinated by the paradox of reality and illusion in drama: the play is an illusion like the dream, and yet a focus of reality more intense than life affords. The action of The Tempest moves from sea to land, from chaos to new creation, from reality to realization. What seems at first illusory, the magic and music, becomes real, and the Realpolitik of Antonio and Sebastian becomes illusion. In this island the quality of one’s dreaming is an index of character. When Antonio and Sebastian remain awake plotting murder, they show that they are the real dreamers, sunk in the hallucinations of greed. We find Stephano better company because his are the exuberant dreams of the stage boaster, as when he claims to have swum thirty-five leagues “off and on,” when we know that he has floated to shore on a wine cask. Caliban’s life is full of nightmare interspersed by strange gleams of ecstasy. When the Court Party first came to the island “no man was his own”; they had not found their “proper selves.” Through the mirages of Ariel, the mops and mows of the other spirits, the vanities of Prospero’s art, and the fevers of madness, reality grows up in them from inside, in response to the fertilizing influence of illusion. Few plays are so haunted by the passing of time as The Tempest: it has derived even its name from a word (tempestas) which means time as well as tempest. Timing was important to a magician: everything depended on it when the alchemist’s project gathered to a head; astrologers were exact observers of time (“The very minute bids thee ope thine ear,” Prospero says to Miranda), and the most famous of all stories about magicians, the story told in Greene’s play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, had the warning of “time is past” for its moral. The same preoccupation affects the other characters too, from the sailors in the storm to Ariel watching the clock for his freedom. The tide, which also waits for no man, ebbs and flows around this Mediterranean island in defiance of geography, and its imagery enters the plotting of Antonio and Sebastian and the grief of Ferdinand. When everyone is trying to make the most of his time, it seems strange that a melancholy elegy over the dissolving of all things in time should be the emotional crux of the play. A very deliberate echo in the dialogue gives us the clue to this. Morally, The Tempest shows a range of will extending from Prospero’s self-control, which includes his control of all the other characters, to the self-abandonment of Alonso’s despair, when, crazed with guilt and grief, he resolves to drown himself “deeper than e’er plummet sounded.” Intellectually, it shows a range of vision extending from the realizing of a moment in time, the zenith of Prospero’s fortune, which becomes everyone else’s zenith too, to the sense of the nothingness

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of all temporal things. When Prospero renounces his magic, his “book” falls into the vanishing world, “deeper than did ever plummet sound.” He has done what his art can do; he has held the mirror up to nature. Alonso and the rest are promised many explanations after the play is over, but we are left only with the darkening mirror, the visions fading and leaving not a rack behind. Once again the Epilogue reminds us that Prospero has used up all his magic in the play, and what more he can do depends on us. It is not difficult to see, then, why so many students of Shakespeare, rightly or wrongly, have felt that The Tempest is in a peculiar sense Shakespeare’s play, and that there is something in it of Shakespeare’s farewell to his art. Two other features of it reinforce this feeling: the fact that no really convincing general source for the play has yet been discovered, and the fact that it is probably the last play wholly written by Shakespeare. Whether a general source turns up or not, The Tempest is still erudite and allusive enough, full of echoes of literature, from the classics to the pamphlets of Shakespeare’s own time. The scene of the play, an island somewhere between Tunis and Naples, suggests the journey of Aeneas from Carthage to Rome. Gonzalo’s identification of Tunis and Carthage, and the otherwise tedious business about “Widow Dido” in the second act, seems almost to be emphasizing the parallel. Like The Tempest, the Aeneid begins with a terrible storm and goes on to tell a story of wanderings in which a banquet with harpies figures prominently. Near the route of Aeneas’ journey, according to Virgil, was the abode of Circe, of whom (at least in her Renaissance form) Sycorax is a close relative. Circe suggests Medea, whose speech in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the model for Prospero’s renunciation speech. Echoes from the shipwreck of St Paul (Ariel’s phrase “Not a hair perished” recalls Acts xxvii, 34), from St Augustine, who also had associations with Carthage, and from Apuleius, with his interest in magic and initiation, are appropriate enough in such a play. Most of the traditional magical names of elemental spirits were of Hebrew origin, and “Ariel,” a name occurring in the Bible (Isaiah xxix, i), was among them. The imagery of contemporary accounts of Atlantic voyages has also left strong traces in The Tempest, and seems almost to have been its immediate inspiration. One ship of a fleet that sailed across the ocean to reinforce Ralegh’s Virginian colony in 1609 had an experience rather like that of Alonso’s ship. It was driven aground on the Bermudas by a storm and given up for lost, but the passengers managed to survive the winter there and reached Virginia the following spring. William Strachey’s account of this experience, True Repertory of the Wracke, dated July 15, 1610, was not published until after Shakespeare’s death, and as Shakespeare certainly knew it, he must have read it in manuscript. Strachey’s and a closely related pamphlet, Sylvester Jourdain’s Discovery of the Barmudas (1610), lie behind Caliban’s allusions to making dams for fish and to water with “berries” (i.e. cedar-berries) in it. Other details indicate Shakespeare’s reading in similar

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accounts. Setebos is mentioned as a god (“divell”) of the Patagonians in Richard Eden’s History of Travayle in the West and East Indies (1577), and the curious “Bowgh, wawgh” refrain in Ariel’s first song seems to be from a contemporary account of an Indian dance. It is a little puzzling why New World imagery should be so prominent in The Tempest, which really has nothing to do with the New World, beyond Ariel’s reference to the “still-vexed Bermoothes” and a general, if vague, resemblance between the relation of Caliban to the other characters and that of the American Indians to the colonizers and drunken sailors who came to exterminate or enslave them. However that may be, the dates of these pamphlets help to establish the fact that The Tempest is a very late play. A performance of it is recorded for November 1, 1611, in Whitehall, and it also formed part of the celebrations connected with the wedding of King James’ daughter Elizabeth in the winter of 1612–13. The versification is also that of a late play, for The Tempest is written in the direct speaking style of Shakespeare’s last period, the lines full of weak endings and so welded together that every speech is a verse paragraph in itself, often very close in its rhythm to prose, especially in the speeches of Caliban. One should read the verse as an actor would read it, attending to the natural stresses, of which there are usually four to a line, rather than the metre. Some critics have felt that a few lines are “unmetrical,” but no line that can be easily spoken on the stage is unmetrical, and it is simple enough to find the four natural stresses in “You do look, my son, in a moved sort,” or (in octosyllabics) “Earth’s increase, foison plenty” In such writing all the regular schematic forms of verse, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and the like, fall into the background, peeping out irregularly through the texture: I will stand to, and feed; Although my last, no matter, since I feel The best is past. Brother, my lord the Duke, Stand to, and do as we. In its genre The Tempest shows a marked affinity with dramatic forms outside the normal range of tragedy and comedy. Among these is the masque: besides containing an actual masque, The Tempest is like the masque in its use of elaborate stage machinery and music. The magician with his wand and mantle was a frequent figure in masques, and Caliban is like the “wild men” common in the farcical interludes known as antimasques. Another is the commedia dell’arte, which was well known in England. Some of the sketchy plots of this half-improvised type of play have been preserved, and they show extraordinary similarities to The Tempest, especially in the Stephano–Trinculo scenes. The Tempest in short is a spectacular and operatic play, and when we think of other plays like it, we are more apt to think of, say, Mozart’s Magic Flute than of ordinary stage plays.

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But more important than these affiliations is the position of The Tempest as the fourth and last of the great romances of Shakespeare’s final period. In these plays Shakespeare seems to have distilled the essence of all his work in tragedy, comedy, and history, and to have reached the very bedrock of drama itself, with a romantic spectacle which is at once primitive and sophisticated, childlike and profound. In these plays the central structural principles of drama emerge with great clarity, and we become aware of the affinity between the happy endings of comedy and the rituals marking the great rising rhythms of life: marriage, springtime, harvest, dawn, and rebirth. In The Tempest there is also an emphasis on moral and spiritual rebirth which suggests rituals of initiation, like baptism or the ancient mystery dramas, as well as of festivity. And just as its poetic texture ranges from the simplicity of Ariel’s incredibly beautiful songs to the haunting solemnity of Prospero’s speeches, so we may come to the play on any level, as a fairy tale with unusually lifelike characters, or as an inexhaustibly profound drama that has influenced some of the most complex poems in the language, including Milton’s Comus and Eliot’s The Waste Land. However we take it, The Tempest is a play not simply to be read or seen or even studied, but possessed.

QQQ 1964—William Empson. From “Hunt the Symbol,” in Essays on Shakespeare William Empson (1906–1984) was a professor at Sheffield University, a poet, and one of the finest literary critics of his time. Two of his bestknown books are Seven Types of Ambiguity and Some Versions of Pastoral.

As to the moralising which these religious critics naturally insert as part of their programme, I have a different objection: I think their morals are bad. Just as there isn’t only one “religion”, but a lot of religions, so there are many different ethical beliefs and a man who is simply in favour of “religion and morality” is pretty sure to include bad ones. The instincts of Derek Traversi keep him fairly straight, but his principles might land him anywhere. In The Tempest, Traversi invents a startling punishment for the clowns: “Stephano and Trinculo will be, in turn, left by Prospero on the island which he himself abandons to return to the fullness of civilised life.” Prospero says to his guests, when the two sinful comics and Caliban shamble in at the end: two of these fellows you Must know and own; this thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine.

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The “cell” needs getting ready to lodge the guests, and almost all Prospero says to Caliban is: Go, sirrah, to my cell: Take with you your companions: as you look To have my pardon, trim it handsomely. The “owners” of the fellows are responsible for looking after them, and Caliban is given a strong hint that he will be pardoned. Marooning was naturally thought a terrible punishment, and the only drama in the play is that Prospero has brought himself to forgive his enemies. Traversi had no reason to expect marooning, except that he felt spiteful, and believed that this was a moral way to feel. Caliban has also to be viewed gravely because in his case there is Symbolism at work. Sentimental critics have given Caliban credit for a poetical nature, but Traversi has an answer: “the poetry which we admire in Caliban was given him, at least in part, by Prospero” (“You taught me language; and my profit on ’t/Is, I know how to curse”). We know that Caliban is beyond redemption because when boasting he threatens to inflict on Prospero “unrestrained physical cruelty”; whereas when Prospero makes Caliban scream with pain all night that is spiritual power. Indeed “Caliban is bound by his nature to service”; please notice that Traversi is expressing here the pure milk of the master-race doctrine, and it is presented with the usual glum sanctimoniousness as a traditional Christian moral, with no sign that it has ever been questioned. Before the first entry of Caliban, Miranda expresses distaste for him and Prospero answers: But, as ’tis, We cannot miss him: he does make our fire, Fetch in our wood; and serves in offices That profit us. The kind of life that Prospero has established in his retreat assumes, in fact, the submission of Caliban as a necessary condition. That this submission requires an effort, indicates once more that the island is a reflection of the outer world. It appears that, if you have to pinch Caliban black and blue as soon as he stops chopping wood, that is rather like keeping a vow of chastity. I must say, I wouldn’t like to run into a Moral Critic on a dark night; there is something very shambling and subhuman about the whole movement. Frank Kermode, whose edition of The Tempest came out the same year as The Last Phase (1954), realises that the tradition of “the Savage” was a very contradictory one: he appreciates the paradoxes of The Faerie Queene Book VI, and denies that the utopian fancy of Gonzalo is meant as satire upon the reflections in favour of savages by Montaigne. But he maintains that the

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description of Caliban in the List of Names as “a savage and deformed slave” means that Shakespeare considered him inherently a slave, much as Aristotle would have done. Well, Caliban simply is a slave of Prospero, who first addresses him as “slave!”; this is not in itself proof that Shakespeare approved of slavery. You might as well say that to write “a prostitute” in the dramatis personae would mean approval of prostitution. When Kermode assumes it he is accepting a formula: “Way back in early times they didn’t have advanced ideas, like we have; they just had moral ideas, and that was much better.” His own mind does not stop there, and I was not struck with the praise of slavery in reading the introduction to his edition; but then a student at Sheffield wrote an essay on it for me, and it was plain that her natural earnestness had been gravely misled. How could a prince be wicked, she wondered, when he has royal blood and a first class education too; it seemed to her a more painful difficulty than it does to Kermode; though she too brightened up at the thought that it illustrates the doctrine of Free Will. The first audiences of course could hardly feel the same surprise, because they seldom saw any play without a wicked prince in it. Surely it is an absurdly deluding education for the modern world, when it reaches the peak of this exquisite flowering confusion—how can a royal prince be bad at all? I don’t think there can be much future in it.

QQQ 1972—Leslie A. Fiedler. “The New World Savage as Stranger,” from The Stranger in Shakespeare Leslie Fiedler (1917–2003) was a controversial professor and critic whom Harold Bloom has called “a Freudian with a difference.” Fiedler is best known for his critical study Love and Death in the American Novel.

To be sure, the world ‘slave’ is ambiguous in Shakespeare, meaning sometimes (as in the case of Iago) one so vile that only total subjugation to another seems an appropriate fate, and sometimes one actually thus subjugated (like Othello), whether he deserves it or not. Read either way, however, Caliban’s label raises themes of colonialism and race; and taken all together, such themes evoke the place in which, for two hundred years, white Europeans had been confronting them in fact as well as theory, the land already called by Shakespeare’s time ‘America,’ though he uses the word only once in a joke and never in The Tempest. There seems little doubt, however, that America was on Shakespeare’s mind, particularly at the point in Act II when he puts into the mouth of that kindly but ineffectual old wind-bag, Gonzalo, the speech beginning, ‘Had I the plantation

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of this isle, my lord—’ and ending, ‘I would with such perfection govern, sir, / To excel the Golden Age.’ There is something especially pathetic about the constantly interrupted speech of one who, having been unable to save Prospero and Miranda (he contented himself with smuggling the Duke’s favorite books aboard their rotting ship), can now scarcely hold his listeners’ attention long enough to make his points. But they are important points, all the same. I’ the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things, for no kind of traffic Would I admit, no name of magistrate. Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service none; . . . all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure; . . . All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavor. And when Shakespeare allows this vision to be mocked through the foul mouths of the bad brothers, Sebastian and Antonio, it is Montaigne’s dream of a communist utopia in the New World he is allowing them to vilify. For the very words he attributes to Gonzalo he has lifted from Florio’s translation of the French skeptic, whose skepticism seems to have failed him for once in his essay ‘Of the Cannibals.’ Montaigne had begun by reading the accounts of returned travelers from Brazil about the life lived by man-eating savages on the banks of the Amazon and, comparing their way of life. with that lived by his European neighbors, had moved toward a kind of cultural relativism. ‘Chacun appelle barbarie,’ he commented, ‘ce qui n’est pas de son usage’ (‘Each calls “savagery” customs different from his own’). It is the observation of a protoanthropologist, a contributor to the Encyclopédie born before his time. And beginning thus, he inevitably ends up with a sentimental paradox worthy of Rousseau: that the New World barbarians are, in some sense, less barbarous than the European ones, providing at least, for all their cannibalism, models for a perfect commonwealth, the Golden Age restored. If there is the merest hint of irony in all this, it is quite gone from Gonzalo’s version, which leaves all the ironical qualification to his interlocutors, who observe aside, ‘The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning.’ And this can be read as meaning not only that the old councillor, carried away by his own rhetoric, forgets how he has begun his speech before concluding it but also that he has forgotten the Fall in the garden with which the whole history of human society began. Certainly Shakespeare is on their side in the debate, utter, even hopeless villains though they may be, for the events of the play prove them, not

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Gonzalo, right. Indeed, that old man himself, who has begun by observing of the New World, ‘Here everything is advantageous to life,’ ends by confessing, ‘All torment, trouble, wonder, and amazement / Inhabits here. Some heavenly power guide us / Out of this fearful country!’ The pun on ‘maze’ is clearly intended, the image it suggests being picked up later by Alonso who says, ‘This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod.’ Indeed, the maze seems as central to the mythology of the West in The Tempest as the riddle is to the mythology of the East. And with its emergence, the two archetypal equations which underlie the play’s action are made completely manifest: the East = the past = incest = the riddle; the West = the future = rape and miscegenation = the maze. ‘And there is in this business more than nature / Was ever conduct of,’ Alonso continues. ‘Some oracle / Must rectify our knowledge.’ But Prospero proves ‘oracle’ enough, unriddling the enigma, unwinding the maze in his actions as well as his words. To seek the past, the fable of his life signifies, is to leave action for books and to end up enisled with a nubile daughter in an ultimate travesty of the endogamous family, an incestuous ménage à deux. But in place of the East he dreams, the common source of Rome and Carthage and the ‘mouldy tale’ of Apollonius of Tyre, he wakes to find the West, a beach more strange and fearful than the ‘still-vexed Bermoothes.’ Here rape and miscegenation threaten the daughter too dearly loved in an ultimate travesty of the exogamous family. And instead of himself—that is, the past—repeated in the child that daughter bears, he can look forward only to total strangers, monsters as grandchildren—that is, a future utterly alien to anything he knows. The identification of incest with the riddle is traditional enough to seem convincing, even without the testimony of Claude Lévi-Strauss; but that of miscegenation-rape with the maze may seem at first arbitrary and implausible. Yet a moment’s reflection on the myth of Crete reminds us that the latter identification, too, is rooted in ancient mythology; for at the center of the first of all mazes, the labyrinth, there lay in wait the Minotaur, bestial product of woman’s lust to be possessed, without due rite or ceremony, by the horned beast, monstrously hung but bereft of human speech. And Caliban is, in effect, a New World Minotaur, inheritor by Mutterrecht of a little world which proves, therefore, a maze to all European castaways, even those who dream it Paradise regained. But Caliban exists in history as well as myth, or more properly, perhaps, represents myth in the process of becoming history: the Minotaur rediscovered in the Indian. His very name is meant to indicate as much, since it is ‘cannibal’ anagrammatized and ‘cannibal’ is derived from ‘Carib,’ first tribal Indian name made known to Europe. Caliban seems to have been created, on his historical side, by a fusion in Shakespeare’s imagination of Columbus’s first New World savages with Montaigne’s Brazilians, Somers’s native Bermudans, and those Patagonian

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‘giants’ encountered by Pigafetta during his trip around the world with Magellan, strange creatures whose chief god was called, like Caliban’s mother’s, ‘Setebos.’ But to say that Caliban was for Shakespeare an Indian means that he was a problem, since the age had not been able to decide what in fact Indians were. And, in a certain sense, The Tempest must be understood as an attempt to answer that troubling question on the basis of both ancient preconceptions and new information about the inhabitants of the Americas. That Caliban seems to be part fish has always troubled some readers of Shakespeare, though the characterization is apt enough for a native of the hemisphere which medieval scholars had believed to be all water. He is portrayed finally as a creature of the mud flats who has managed to climb onto land at long last, but has not yet acclimatized himself to the higher elements of air and fire. Humanoid without being quite human, though a step above what he himself describes as ‘apes / With foreheads villainous low,’ he is as the play draws to its close called more and more exclusively ‘monster’: ‘servant-monster,’ ‘brave monster,’ ‘man-monster,’ or simply ‘monster’ unqualified. And the point is to identify him with a kind of subhuman freak imagined in Europe even before the discovery of red men in America: the homme sauvage or ‘savage man,’ who, in the nightmares of Mediterranean humanists, had been endowed with sexual powers vastly in excess of their own. Such monstrous virility Shakespeare attributes to Caliban, associating him not with cannibalism, after all, but with unbridled lust, as Prospero reminds us when he answers Caliban’s charges of exploitation and appropriation with the countercharge: I have used thee, Filth as thou art, with human care, and lodged thee In mine own cell till thou didst seek to violate The honor of my child. And Caliban, glorying in the accusation, answers: Oh ho, oh ho! Would ’t had been done! Thou didst prevent me. I had peopled else The isle with Calibans. He becomes thus the first nonwhite rapist in white man’s literature, ancestor of innumerable Indian warriors and skulking niggers who have threatened ever since in print, as well as on stage and screen, the fragile honor of their oppressors’ daughters. And it is his unredeemable carnality which, as both Prospero and Miranda insist, condemns him to eternal slavery, since, incapable of being educated to virtue, he must be controlled by force. ‘A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture never can stick,’ the master of arts describes him. And his

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daughter, more explicitly racist, concurs: ‘But thy vile race, / Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures / Could not abide to be with.’ This charge Caliban never directly answers, though with his usual generosity, Shakespeare permits him an eloquent plea on his own behalf, less relevant, perhaps, but quite as moving as Shylock’s. This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, Which thou takest from me. When thou camest first, Thou strokedst me, and madest much of me, wouldst give me Water with berries in ’t. And teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night. And then I loved thee, And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle. . . . Cursed be I that did so! . . . For I am all the subjects that you have, Which first was mine own king. And here you sty me In this hard rock whiles you do keep from me The rest o’ th’ island. There is, moreover, a kind of music in Caliban’s speech, one is tempted to say a ‘natural rhythm,’ quite remote from Shylock’s tone; for the Jew is postulated as an enemy of all sweet sound, whereas the New World savage is a singer of songs and a maker of poems, especially when he remembers the virginal world he inhabited before the coming of patriarchal power. Prospero thinks of his island kingdom as a place to be subdued, hewed, trimmed, and ordered, so that, indeed, the chief use of his slave is to chop down trees and pile logs for the fire. But Caliban remembers a world of unprofaned magic, a living nature, in which reality had not yet quite been separated from dream, nor waking from sleeping: Be not afeared. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about my ears, and sometimes voices, That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again. And then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked, I cried to dream again Once awakened from the long dream of primitive life, fallen out of the mother into the world of the father, there is no falling back into that intra-uterine

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sleep, only the hope for another kind of happiness, a new freedom on the farther side of slavery. Even drunk, Caliban remains a poet and visionary, singing that new freedom in a new kind of song. No more dams I’ll make for fish. Nor fetch in firing At requiring, Nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish. ’Ban, ’Ban, Cacaliban Has a new master—Get a new man. Freedom, heyday! Heyday, freedom! Freedom, heyday, freedom. Particularly in its Whitmanian long last lines—howled, we are told by the two mocking European clowns who listen—he has created something new under the sun: the first American poem. And what has this in common with the Old World pastoral elegance of the marriage masque, in which Prospero compels certain more ‘temperate’ spirits to speak for the top of his mind, even as the rebellious Caliban does for the depths of his soul. You nymphs, called Naiads, of the wandring brooks, With your sedged crowns and ever-harmless looks, Leave your crisp channels, and on this green land Answer your summons. Juno does command. Come, temperate nymphs. . . . They simply cannot see eye to eye, the bookman and the logman, for while one is planning marriage, the other is plotting rape, since the savage (as even Gonzalo seems to know, providing that ‘Letters should not be known . . .’ in his commonwealth) prefers freedom to culture and would rather breed new Americans in passion than himself become a new European in cold blood. But against Prospero’s ‘art’ he is powerless and must abide, therefore, enslaved and desexed until some outside deliverer comes to his rescue. That outside deliverer turns out to be, alas, the team of Stephano and Trinculo, the scum of the Old World promising themselves unaccustomed glory in the New and attempting to use against their old masters the New World savage, converted by whisky to their cause. But a drunken revolution is a comic one, and joining the clowns who would be kings, Caliban turns drunken, too, which is to say, becomes a clown himself. Indeed, the subject of drunkenness haunts The Tempest early and late quite as compulsively as it does Macbeth or Othello. But it has lost its tragic implications, providing only occasions for jokes,

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from the first scene, with its sodden sailors, to the last, from which Stephano and Trinculo exit ‘reeling ripe’ and prophesying that they will remain ‘pickled forever.’ ‘What a thrice-double ass / Was I,’ Caliban comments toward the play’s close, ‘to take this drunkard for a god.’ And we remember how only a little while before, he had cried, ‘That’s a brave god, and bears celestial liquor,’ thus preparing to become the first drunken Indian in Western literature. Together with Stephano and Trinculo, in any case, he had plotted a slave’s revolt against what Shakespeare believed to be proper authority. Caliban, in fact, was the tactician of this fool’s rebellion, suggesting, out of his fantasies of revenge, means to destroy their common enemy: ‘with a log / Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake, / Or cut his weasand with thy knife.’ But especially he insists that they must first take from the master of arts the instruments which give him a fatal advantage over them all: his books, which is to say, those symbols of a literate technology with which the ruling classes of Europe controlled the subliterates of two worlds. The theme recurs almost obsessively in his speeches: ‘Having first seized his books. . . . Remember / First to possess his books, for without them / He’s but a sot. . . . Burn but his books.’ Yet the revolt is foredoomed because Stephano and Trinculo prove interested only in the trashy insignia of power, while Caliban is dreaming not just the substitution of one master for another but the annihilation of all authority and all culture, a world eternally without slaves and clowns. Moreover, Prospero has been aware of what they plotted from the very start, only awaiting the proper moment to quash it. By the time he has hunted them down, however, with dogs called ‘Fury’ and ‘Tyrant,’ the whole history of imperialist America has been prophetically revealed to us in brief parable:1 from the initial act of expropriation through the Indian wars to the setting up of reservations, and from the beginnings of black slavery to the first revolts and evasions. With even more astonishing prescience, The Tempest foreshadows as well the emergence of that democracy of fugitive white slaves, deprived and cultureless refugees from a Europe they never owned, which D. H. Lawrence was so bitterly to describe. And it prophesies, finally, like some inspired piece of science fiction before its time, the revolt against the printed page, the anti-Gutenberg rebellion for which Marshall McLuhan is currently a chief spokesman. Thus fallen into history, however, has Shakespeare not also fallen out of his own myth, for what, after all, has America to do with Apollonius of Tyre, the guilt of expropriating ex-Europeans with that of incestuous fathers? It is easy enough to perceive on the literal level of his fable common images which betrayed Shakespeare from legend to chronicle: the sea voyage itself, for instance, along with the attendant circumstances of storm and shipwreck and miraculous salvation. In the most general sense, moreover, both the Old World of Apollonius and the New World of Caliban are worlds inhabited by terrifying and hostile strangers, or conversely, ones in which the castaway European feels himself a

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stranger in a strange land. Indeed, the word ‘strange’ appears everywhere in The Tempest, not only in the speeches of the shipwrecked Neapolitans but in the stage directions as well: ‘strange drowsiness,’ ‘strange beast,’ ‘strange music,’ ‘strange Shapes,’ ‘strange stare,’ ‘strange story’—all climaxing in Alonso’s description of Caliban: ‘This is a strange thing as e’er I looked on.’ These last words are only spoken, however, after Prospero’s unknotting of the web he has woven; before, it is themselves and their plight which the displaced Europeans find superlatively ‘strange.’ And the sense of total alienation stirs in them not only ‘wonder, and amazement’ but ‘trouble’ and ‘torment,’ too, which is to say, the pangs of guilt. It is not merely that all of them are in fact guilty of treachery and usurpation in respect to each other but that having entered so alien a realm, however inadvertently, they become also guilty, on the metaphorical level, of rape and miscegenation. They are all, in short, Calibans, for America was at once virgin and someone else’s before they came—and this they dimly surmise. The figure of Caliban, at any rate, casts its shadow upon two utopian visions at once: that of Montaigne-Gonzalo, on the one hand, and that of ShakespeareProspero, on the other, the dream of a political utopia and the vision of sexuality redeemed. Inside the skin of every free man, Mark Twain was to observe three centuries later, there is a slave; and Shakespeare has concurred in advance, adding, and a monster as well! But all this Prospero has somehow temporarily forgotten, as the play which Shakespeare let him write moves—inexorably, it seems—toward its intended happy endings. NOTE 1. Appropriately enough, one of the hounds pursuing two runaway stave girls in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is also called ‘Fury,’ whether in tribute to the prescience of Shakespeare (whom Mrs Stowe knew well) or by apt coincidence it is hard to be sure.

QQQ 1987—Harold Bloom. “Introduction,” from The Tempest (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) Harold Bloom (1930– ) is a professor at Yale University. He has edited dozens of anthologies of literature and literary criticism and is the author of more than 30 books, including The Western Canon and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

The Tempest is not a mystery play, offering a secret insight into human finalities; act 5 of Hamlet is closer to that. Perhaps The Tempest does turn ironically

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upon Shakespeare’s conscious farewell to his dramatic art, but such an irony or allegory does not enhance the play’s meanings. I sometimes think The Tempest was the first significant drama in which not much happens, beyond its protagonist’s abandonment of his scheme of justified revenge precisely when he has all his enemies in his power. Most explanations of Prospero’s refusal to take revenge reduce to the formulaic observation: “That’s the way things turn out in Shakespeare’s late romances.” Let us move again towards the question: why does Prospero not gratify himself by fulfilling his revenge? The originality of representation in The Tempest embraces only Prospero, the supernatural Ariel, compounded of fire and air, and the preternatural Caliban, compounded of earth and water. Unlike The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest contrives to be a romance of the marvelous without ever being outrageous; the Shakespearean exuberance expresses itself here by cheerfully discarding any semblance of a plot. Prospero, who is almost always sympathetic as Miranda’s father, is dubiously fair to Ariel, and almost too grimly censorious towards the wretched Caliban. His peculiar severity towards Ferdinand also darkens him. But only this split, between loving father and puritanical hermeticist, makes Prospero truly interesting. He does not move our imagination as Ariel does, and Ariel, a kind of revised Puck, is less original a representation than Caliban is. Caliban does not run off with the play, as Barnardine does in Measure for Measure, but he makes us wonder how much humanity Prospero has sacrificed in exchange for hermetic knowledge and wisdom. Caliban is uncanny to us, in precisely Freud’s sense of “the uncanny.” Something long estranged from us, yet still familiar, returns from repression in Caliban. We can be repelled by Caliban’s degradation and by his deformity, but like Prospero we have to acknowledge that Caliban is somehow ours, not to be repudiated. It is not clear to me whether Caliban is meant to be wholly human, as there is something amphibian about him, and his mother Sycorax, like the weird sisters in Macbeth, has her preternatural aspects. What is certain is that Caliban has aesthetic dignity, and that the play is not wholly Prospero’s only because of him. You could replace Ariel by various sprites (though not without loss), but you would not have The Tempest if you removed Caliban. Why Shakespeare called the play The Tempest I cannot understand. Perhaps he should have called it Prospero or even Prospero and Caliban. Though the “names of the actors” describes Caliban as a “savage and deformed slave,” I have never known any reader or theatergoer who could regard that as an adequate account of what may be Shakespeare’s most deeply troubling single representation after Shylock. Robert Browning’s Caliban, in the great monologue “Caliban upon Setebos,” seems to me the most remarkable interpretation yet ventured, surpassing all overt literary criticism, and so I will employ it here as an aid, while yielding to all those

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who would caution me that Browning’s Caliban is not Shakespeare’s. Yes, but whose Caliban is? Prospero forgives his enemies (and evidently will pardon Caliban because he achieves a complex stance that hovers between the disinterestedness of the Hamlet of act 5, and a kind of hermetic detachment from his own powers, perhaps because he sees that even those are dominated by a temporal ebb and flow. But there is also a subtle sense in which Prospero has been deeply wounded by his failure to raise up a higher Caliban, even as Caliban is palpably hurt (in many senses) by Prospero. Their relations, throughout the play, are not less than dreadful and wound us also, as they seem to have wounded Browning, judging by his Caliban’s meditation: Himself peeped late, eyed Prosper at his books Careless and lofty, lord now of the isle: Vexed, ’stiched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped, Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words; Has peeled a wand and called it by a name; Weareth at whiles for an enchanter’s robe The eyed skin of a supple oncelot; And hath an ounce sleeker than youngling mole, A four-legged serpent he makes cower and couch, Now snarl, now hold its breath and mind his eye, And saith she is Miranda and my wife: ’Keeps for his Ariel a tall pouch-bill crane He bids go wade for fish and straight disgorge; Also a sea-beast, lumpish, which he snared, Blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame, And split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge In a hole o’ the rock and calls him Caliban; A bitter heart that bides its time and bites. ’Plays thus at being Prosper in a way, Taketh his mirth with make-believes: so He. (ll. 150–69) That lumpish sea-beast, “a bitter heart that bides its time and bites,” is the tortured plaything of a sick child, embittered by having been cast out by a foster father. As a slave, Shakespeare’s Caliban is rhetorically defiant, but his curses are his only weapon. Since he has not inherited his mother’s powers, Caliban’s curses are in vain, and yet they have the capacity to provoke Prospero and Miranda, as in the first scene where the three appear together:

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PROSPERO: Come on, We’ll visit Caliban my slave, who never Yields us kind answer. MIRANDA: ’tis a villain, sir, I do not love to look on. PROSPERO: But as ’tis, We cannot miss him. He does make our fire, Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices That profit us. What ho! slave! Caliban! Thou earth, thou! speak. CALIBAN: (Within.) There’s wood enough within. PROSPERO: Come forth, I say, there’s other business for thee. Come, thou tortoise, when? Enter ARIEL like a water-nymph. Fine apparition! My quaint Ariel, Hark in thine ear. ARIEL: My lord, it shall be done. Exit. PROSPERO: Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself Upon thy wicked dam, come forth! Enter CALIBAN. CALIBAN: As wicked dew as e’er my mother brush’d With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen Drop on you both! A south-west blow on ye, And blister you all o’er! PROSPERO: For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps, Side-stitches, that shall pen thy breath up; urchins Shall, for that vast of night that they may work, All exercise on thee; thou shalt be pinch’d As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging Than bees that made ’em. CALIBAN: I must eat my dinner. This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first, Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me Water with berries in’t, and teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night; and then I lov’d thee And show’d thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle, The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile. Curs’d be I that did so! All the charms Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!

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For I am all the subjects that you have, Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me The rest o’ th’ island. PROSPERO: Thou most lying slave, Whom stripes may move, not kindness! I have us’d thee (Filth as thou art) with human care, and lodg’d thee In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate The honor of my child. CALIBAN: O ho, O ho, wouldst had been done! Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else This isle with Calibans. MIRANDA: Abhorred slave, Which any print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes With words that made them known. But thy vild race (Though thou didst learn) had that in’t which good natures Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou Deservedly confin’d into this rock, Who hadst deserv’d more than a prison. CALIBAN: You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse. The red-plague rid you For learning me your language! PROSPERO: Hag-seed, hence! Fetch us in fuel, and be quick, thou’rt best, To answer other business. Shrug’st thou, malice? If thou neglect’st, or dost unwillingly What I command, I’ll rack thee with old cramps, Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar That beasts shall tremble at thy din. CALIBAN: No, pray thee. [Aside.] I must obey. His art is of such pow’r, It would control my dam’s god, Setebos, And make a vassal of him. PROSPERO: So, slave, hence! Exit Caliban. (1.2.307–74)

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Is it, as some would say, that our resentment of Prospero and Miranda here and our sympathy (to a degree) with Caliban, are as irrelevant as a preference for Shylock over Portia? I do not think so, since Shylock is a grotesque bogeyman rather than an original representation, while Caliban, though grotesque, is immensely original. You can New Historicize Caliban if you wish, but a discourse on Caliban and the Bermudas trade is about as helpful as a neo-Marxist analysis of Falstaff and surplus value, or a Lacanianfeminist exegesis of the difference between Rosalind and Celia. Caliban’s peculiar balance of character and personality is as unique as Falstaff’s and Rosalind’s, though far more difficult to describe. But Prospero’s balance also yields reluctantly to our descriptions, as if more than his white magic is beyond us. Prospero never loses his anger or sense of outrage in regard to Caliban, and surely some guilt attaches to the magus, who sought to make Caliban into what he could not become and then went on punishing Caliban merely for being himself, Caliban, a man of his own island and its nature, and not at all a candidate for hermetic transformations. Caliban can be controlled and chastised by Prospero’s magical art, but he is recalcitrant, and holds on to the strange dignity of being Caliban, although endlessly insulted by everyone who speaks to him in the play. Alas, that dignity vanishes in the presence of the jester Trinculo and the drunken Stephano, with whom Caliban attempts to replace Prospero as master. The immense puzzle of Shakespeare’s vision of Caliban is enhanced when the slave’s most beautiful speech comes in the grotesque context of his seeking to soothe the fears of Trinculo and Stephano which are caused by the music of the invisible Ariel: Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, That if I then had wak’d after long sleep, Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I wak’d I cried to dream again. (3.2.135–43) This exquisite pathos is Caliban’s finest moment, and exposes the sensibility that Prospero presumably hoped to develop, before Caliban’s attempted rape of Miranda. The bitterest lines in the play come in Prospero’s Jehovah-like reflections upon his fallen creature:

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A devil, a born devil, on whose nature Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains, Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost; And as with age his body uglier grows, So his mind cankers. I will plague them all, Even to roaring. (4.1.88–93) This could be Milton’s God, Schoolmaster of Souls, fulminating at the opening of Paradise Lost, book 3. True, Prospero turns to the rarer action of forgiveness and promises Caliban he yet will receive pardon and Caliban promises to “seek for grace.” Yet Shakespeare was uninterested in defining that grace; he does not even tell us if Caliban will remain alone on the island in freedom, or whether he is to accompany Prospero to Milan, a weird prospect for the son of Sycorax. All that Prospero promises himself in Milan is a retirement “where / Every third thought shall be my grave.” We want Caliban to be left behind in what is, after all, his own place, but Shakespeare neither indulges nor denies our desires. If Prospero is at last a kind of benign Iago (an impossible oxymoron), then Caliban’s recalcitrances finally look like an idiosyncratic rebellion of actor against playwright, creature against demiurge. A warm monster is dramatically more sympathetic than a cold magus, but that simplistic difference does not explain away the enigma of Caliban. I suspect that Prospero forgives his enemies because he understands, better than we can, the mystery of time. His magic reduces to what Nietzsche called the will’s revenge against time, and against time’s “it was.” Caliban, who need not fear time, and who hates Prospero’s books of magic, perhaps represents finally time’s revenge against all those who conjure with books.

QQQ 1989—Meredith Anne Skura. “The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest,” from Shakespeare Quarterly Meredith Anne Skura (1944– ) teaches at Rice University, where she is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English. Her books include Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing and The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process.

For many years idealist readings of The Tempest presented Prospero as an exemplar of timeless human values. They emphasized the way in which his hard-earned “magical” powers enable him to re-educate the shipwrecked Italians, to heal their

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civil war—and, even more important, to triumph over his own vengefulness by forgiving his enemies; they emphasized the way he achieves, if not a wholly “brave,” at least a harmoniously reconciled new world. Within the last few years, however, numbers of critics have offered remarkably similar critiques of this reading. There is an essay on The Tempest in each of three recent anthologies of alternative, political, and reproduced Shakespeare criticism, and another in the volume on estranging Renaissance criticism; The Tempest was a focus for the 1988 SAA session on “Shakespeare and Colonialism” and was one of the masthead plays in the Folger Institute’s 1988 seminar on new directions in Shakespeare studies.1 Together, the revisionists call for a move to counteract some “deeply ahistorical readings” of The Tempest,2 a play that is now seen to be not simply an allegory about “timeless”3 or universal experience but rather a cultural phenomenon that has its origin in and effect on “historical” events, specifically in English colonialism. “New historicist” criticism in general, of which much recent work on The Tempest is a part, has itself begun to come under scrutiny, but the numerous historical reinterpretations of The Tempest deserve closer attention in their own right,4 and they will be the subject of the rest of this essay. In assessing the “new” historicist version of the play, it is important to realize that here, even more than in other new historical criticism, an historical emphasis in itself is not new. Since the early nineteenth century The Tempest has been seen in the historical context of the New World, and Frank Kermode, citing the early scholars, argued in the fifties that reports of a particular episode in British efforts to colonize North America had precipitated the play’s major themes.5 In 1609 nine ships had left England to settle the colony in Jamestown, Virginia, and the Sea Venture, carrying all of the colonial officers, had disappeared. But its passengers reappeared in Virginia one year later, miraculously saved; they had wrecked off the Bermudas, until then believed demonically dangerous but now found to be providentially mild and fruitful. These events, much in the news in the year just preceding The Tempest, have long been seen as a relevant context for the play by all but a very few critics.6 These earlier historical interpretations generally placed the play and its immediate source in the context of voyaging discourse in general, which stressed the romance and exoticism of discoveries in the Old as well as the New World. Even the “factual” reports in this discourse, as Charles Frey notes, were themselves colored by the romance of the situation, for better and for worse; and the traditional view was that The Tempest’s stylized allegory abstracts the romance core of all voyagers’ experience.7 Nor had traditional criticism entirely ignored either Prospero’s flaws8 or their relation to the dark side of Europe’s confrontation with the Other. Kermode had identified Caliban as the “core” or “ground” of the play, insofar as confrontation with this strange representative of “uncivilized” man prompts the play’s reexamination of “civilized” human nature. Harry Levin, Leslie Fiedler, Leo Marx, and others had suggested that in trying to understand the New World

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representatives of “uncivilized” human nature, Prospero, like other Europeans, had imposed Old (and New) World stereotypes of innocence and monstrosity on the Native Americans, distorting perception with hope and fear.9 Fiedler’s landmark book had indeed placed The Tempest suggestively in the context of a series of plays about the Other (or, as he called it in 1972, the “Stranger”) in Shakespeare, showing Caliban’s resemblance to the demonized women, Moors, and Jews in the canon. O. Mannoni had added that, in this process, Prospero displayed the psychology of colonials who projected their disowned traits onto New World natives.10 Why, then, so many recent articles? In part they are simply shifting the emphasis. Revisionists claim that the New World material is not just present but is right at the center of the play, and that it demands far more attention than critics have been willing to grant it. They argue that the civil war in Milan that had ousted Prospero should be recognized as merely an episode in a minor dispute between Italian dynasties, of little import compared to the transatlantic action;11 they show how the love story can be seen as a political maneuver by Prospero to ensure his return to power in Milan,12 and how even Caliban’s attempted rape of Miranda can be seen as an expression not merely of sexual but also of territorial lust, understandable in its context.13 These recent critics are not simply repeating the older ones, however; they are making important distinctions. First and most explicitly, they are not calling attention to history in general but rather to one aspect of history: to power relations and to the ideology in which power relations are encoded.14 The revisionists look not at the New World material in the play but to the play’s effect on power relations in the New World. What matters is not just the particular Bermuda pamphlets actually echoed in the play but rather the whole “ensemble of fictional and lived practices” known as “English colonialism,” which, it is now being claimed, provides the “dominant discursive con-texts”15 for the play. (Though the term “colonialism” may allude to the entire spectrum of New World activity, in these articles it most often refers specifically to the use of power, to the Europeans’ exploitative and self-justifying treatment of the New World and its inhabitants—and I shall use it in that sense.) If Caliban is the center of the play, it is not because of his role in the play’s self-contained structure, and not even because of what he reveals about man’s timeless tendency to demonize “strangers,” but because Europeans were at that time exploiting the real Calibans of the world, and The Tempest was part of the process. It is no longer enough to suggest that Europeans were trying to make sense of the Indian; rather, the emphasis is now on the way Europeans subdued the Indian to “make sense/order/money—not of him, so much as out of him.”16 Revisionists argue that when the English talked about these New World inhabitants, they did not just innocently apply stereotypes or project their own fears: they did so to a particular effect, whether wittingly

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or unwittingly. The various distortions were discursive strategies that served the political purpose of making the New World fit into a schema justifying colonialism.17 Revisionists therefore emphasize the discursive strategies that the play shares with all colonial discourse, and the ways in which The Tempest itself not only displays prejudice but fosters and even “enacts” colonialism by mystifying or justifying Prospero’s power over Caliban.18 The new point is that The Tempest is a political act. Second, this shift in our attitude toward the object of interpretation entails a less explicit but extremely important move away from the psychological interpretation that had previously seemed appropriate for the play (even to its detractors) largely because of its central figure who, so like Shakespeare, runs the show. Where earlier criticism of Prospero talked about his “prejudice,” the more recent revisionists talk about “power” and “euphemisation.” Thus, a critic writing in 1980 argued that The Tempest’s “allegorical and neoplatonic overlay masks some of the most damaging prejudices of Western civilization”;19 but by 1987 the formulation had changed: “The Tempest is . . . fully implicated in the process of ‘euphemisation’, the effacement of power,” in “operations [that] encode struggle and contradiction even as they, or because they, strive to insist on the legitimacy of colonialist narrative.”20 Psychological criticism of the play is seen as distracting at best; one recent critic, for example, opens his argument by claiming that we need to conceive The Tempest in an historical context that is not “hamstrung by specious speculations concerning ‘Shakespeare’s mind’.”21 Even in less polemical examples the “political unconscious” often replaces, rather than supplements, any other unconscious; attention to culture and politics is associated with an implicit questioning of individuality and of subjective experience. Such a stance extends beyond an objection to wholesale projections of twentieth-century assumptions onto sixteenth-century subjects, or to psychological interpretations that totally ignore the cultural context in which psyches exist. As Frederick Jameson argued in a work that lies behind many of these specific studies, it derives from the desire to transcend personal psychology altogether, because Freud’s psychology remains “locked into the category of the individual subject.”22 The emphasis now is on psychology as a product of culture, itself a political structure; the very concept of a psyche is seen to be a product of the cultural nexus evolved during the Renaissance, and indeed, psychoanalysis itself, rather than being a way of understanding the Renaissance psyche, is a marginal and belated creation of this same nexus.23 Thus the revisionists, with Jameson, may look for a “political unconscious” and make use of Freud’s insights into the “logic of dreams” 24—the concepts of displacement, condensation, the management of desire 25—but they do not accept Freud’s assumptions about the mind—or the subject—creating that logic.26 The agent who displaces or manages is not the individual but the “collective or associative” mind; at times it seems to be the

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text itself, seen as a “libidinal apparatus” or “desiring machine”27 independent of any individual creator. The revisionist impulse has been one of the most salutary in recent years in correcting New Critical “blindness” to history and ideology. In particular it has revealed the ways in which the play has been “reproduced” and drafted into the service of colonialist politics from the nineteenth century through G. Wilson Knight’s twentieth-century celebration of Prospero as representative of England’s “colonizing, especially her will to raise savage peoples from superstition and blood-sacrifice, taboos and witchcraft and the attendant fears and slaveries, to a more enlightened existence.”28 But here, as critics have been suggesting about new historicism in general, it is now in danger of fostering blindness of its own. Granted that something was wrong with a commentary that focused on The Tempest as a self-contained project of a self-contained individual and that ignored the political situation in 1611. But something seems wrong now also, something more than the rhetorical excesses characteristic of any innovative critical movement. The recent criticism not only flattens the text into the mold of colonialist discourse and eliminates what is characteristically “Shakespearean” in order to foreground what is “colonialist,” but it is also—paradoxically—in danger of taking the play further from the particular historical situation in England in 1611 even as it brings it closer to what we mean by “colonialism” today. It is difficult to extrapolate back from G. Wilson Knight’s colonialist discourse to seventeenth-century colonialist discourse without knowing more about the particulars of that earlier discourse. What is missing from the recent articles is the connection between the new insights about cultural phenomena like “power” and “fields of discourse” and the traditional insights about the text, its immediate sources, its individual author—and his individual psychology. There is little sense of how discourse is related to the individual who was creating, even as he was participating in, that discourse. The following discussion will suggest how such a relation might be conceived. Sections I and II briefly elaborate on The Tempest’s versions of problems raised by new historicist treatment of the text and its relation to the historical context; sections III and IV go on to suggest that the recognition of the individuality of the play, and of Shakespeare, does not counter but rather enriches the understanding of that context. Perhaps by testing individual cases, we can avoid the circularity of a definition that assumes that “colonialism” was present in a given group of texts, and so “discovers” it there.

I How do we know that The Tempest “enacts” colonialism rather than merely alluding to the New World? How do we know that Caliban is part of the “discourse of colonialism”? To ask such a question may seem perversely naive, but the play is notoriously slippery. There have been, for example, any number of interpretations of Caliban,29 including not only contemporary post-colonial versions in which

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Caliban is a Virginian Indian but also others in which Caliban is played as a black slave or as “missing link” (in a costume “half monkey, half coco-nut”30), with the interpretation drawing on the issues that were being debated at the time—on the discursive contexts that were culturally operative—and articulated according to “changing Anglo-American attitudes toward primitive man.”31 Most recently one teacher has suggested that The Tempest is a good play to teach in junior colleges because students can identify with Caliban. Interpretation is made even more problematic here because, despite the claims about the play’s intervention in English colonialism,32 we have no external evidence that seventeenth-century audiences thought the play referred to the New World. In an age when real voyages were read allegorically, the status of allegorical voyages like Prospero’s can be doubly ambiguous, especially in a play like The Tempest, which provides an encyclopedic context for Prospero’s experience, presenting it in terms of an extraordinary range of classical, biblical, and romantic exiles, discoveries, and confrontations.33 Evidence for the play’s original reception is of course extraordinarily difficult to find, but in the two nearly contemporary responses to Caliban that we do know about, the evidence for a colonialist response is at best ambiguous. In Bartholomew Fair (1614) Jonson refers scornfully to a “servant-monster,” and the Folio identifies Caliban as a “salvage and deformed slave”34 in the cast list. Both “monster” and “salvage” are firmly rooted in the discourse of Old World wild men, though the latter was of course also applied to the New World natives. In other words, these two seventeenth-century responses tend to invoke the universal and not the particular implications of Caliban’s condition. A recent study of the play’s history suggests that “if Shakespeare, however obliquely, meant Caliban to personify America’s natives, his intention apparently miscarried almost completely.”35 Despite this lack of contemporary testimony, the obvious reason for our feeling that the play “is” colonialist—more so than The Winter’s Tale or Henry VIII, for example, which were written at roughly the same time—is, of course, the literal resemblance between its plot and certain events and attitudes in English colonial history: Europeans arrive in the New World and assume they can appropriate what properly belongs to the New World Other, who is then “erased.” The similarities are clear and compelling—more so than in many cases of new historical readings; the problem, however, is that while there are also many literal differences between The Tempest and colonialist fictions and practice, the similarities are taken to be so compelling that the differences are ignored. Thus Caliban is taken to “be” a Native American despite the fact that a multitude of details differentiate Caliban from the Indian as he appeared in the travelers’ reports from the New World.36 Yet it does seem significant that, despite his closeness to nature, his naiveté, his devil worship, his susceptibility to European liquor, and, above all, his “treachery”—characteristics associated in writings of the time with the Indians—he nonetheless lacks almost all of the defining

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external traits in the many reports from the New World—no superhuman physique, no nakedness or animal skin (indeed, an English “gaberdine” instead), no decorative feathers,37 no arrows, no pipe, no tobacco, no body paint, and—as Shakespeare takes pains to emphasize—no love of trinkets and trash. No one could mistake him for the stereotyped “Indian with a great tool,” mentioned in passing in Henry VIII. Caliban in fact is more like the devils Strachey expected to find on the Bermuda island (but didn’t) than like the Indians whom adventurers did find in Virginia, though he is not wholly a monster from the explorers’ wild tales either.38 In other ways, too, it is assumed that the similarities matter but the differences do not: thus Prospero’s magic occupies “the space really inhabited in colonial history by gunpowder”39 (emphasis mine); or, when Prospero has Caliban pinched by the spirits, he shows a “similar sadism” to that of the Haitian masters who “roasted slaves or buried them alive”;40 or, when Prospero and Ariel hunt Caliban with spirit dogs, they are equated to the Spaniards who hunted Native Americans with dogs.41 So long as there is a core of resemblance, the differences are irrelevant. The differences, in fact, are themselves taken to be evidence of the colonialist ideology at work, rationalizing and euphemizing power—or else inadvertent slips. Thus the case for colonialism becomes stronger insofar as Prospero is good and insofar as Caliban is in some ways bad—he did try to rape Miranda—or is himself now caught trying to falsify the past by occluding the rape and presenting himself as an innocent victim of Prospero’s tyranny. Prospero’s goodness and Caliban’s badness are called rationalizations, justifications for Prospero’s tyranny. Nor does it matter that the play seems anti-colonialist to the degree that it qualifies Prospero’s scorn by showing Caliban’s virtues, or that Prospero seems to achieve some kind of transcendence over his own colonialism when at the end of the play he says, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”42 Prospero’s acknowledgement of Caliban is considered a mistake, a moment of inadvertent sympathy or truth, too brief to counter Prospero’s underlying colonialism: in spite of the deceptively resonant poetry of his acknowledgement, Prospero actually does nothing to live up to the meaning which that poetry suggests;43 it has even been argued that Prospero, in calling Caliban “mine,” is simply claiming possession of him: “It is as though, after a public disturbance, a slaveowner said, ‘Those two men are yours; this darkie’s mine.’”44 Nonetheless, in addition to these differences that have been seen as rationalizations, there are many other differences as well that collectively raise questions about what counts as “colonialist discourse” and about what, if anything, might count as a relevant “difference.” Thus, for example, any attempt to cast Prospero and Caliban as actors in the typical colonial narrative (in which a European exploits a previously free—indeed a reigning—native of an unspoiled world) is complicated by two other characters, Sycorax and Ariel. Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, through whom he claims possession of the island, was not only

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a witch and a criminal, but she came from the Old World herself, or at least from eastern-hemisphere Argier.45 She is a reminder that Caliban is only half-native, that his claim to the island is less like the claim of the Native American than the claim of the second generation Spaniard in the New World.46 Moreover, Caliban was not alone when Prospero arrived. Ariel either came to the island with Sycorax or was already living on the island—its true reigning lord47—when Sycorax arrived and promptly enslaved him, thus herself becoming the first colonialist, the one who established the habits of dominance and erasure before Prospero ever set foot on the island. Nearly all revisionists note some of these differences before disregarding them, though they are not agreed on their significance—on whether they are “symptoms” of ideological conflict in the discourse, for example, or whether Shakespeare’s “insights exceeded his sympathies.”48 But however they are explained, the differences are discarded. For the critic interested only in counteracting earlier blindness to potentially racist and ideological elements in the play, such ignoring of differences is understandable; for his or her purposes, it is enough to point out that The Tempest has a “political unconscious” and is connected in some way to colonialist discourse without specifying further. But if the object is, rather, to understand colonialism, instead of simply identifying it or condemning it, it is important to specify, to notice how the colonial elements are rationalized or integrated into the play’s vision of the world. Otherwise, extracting the play’s political unconscious leads to the same problems Freud faced at the beginning of his career when he treated the personal unconscious as an independent entity that should be almost surgically extracted from conscious discourse by hypnotizing away the “defenses.” But, as is well known, Freud found that the conscious “defenses” were as essential—and problematic—as the supposedly prior unconscious “wish,” and that they served purposes other than containment.49 Indeed, in most psychoanalytic practice since Freud, the unconscious—or, rather, unconscious mentation—is assumed to exist in texts rather than existing as a reified “id,” and interpretation must always return to the text. As in the case of the personal unconscious, the political unconscious exists only in texts, whose “defenses” or rationalizations must be taken into account. Otherwise interpretation not only destroys the text—here The Tempest—as a unique work of art and flattens it into one more example of the master plot—or master ploy—in colonialist discourse; it also destroys the evidence of the play as a unique cultural artifact, a unique voice in that discourse. Colonialist discourse was varied enough to escape any simple formulation, even in a group of texts with apparent thematic links. It ranged from the lived Spanish colonialist practice of hunting New World natives with dogs to Bartholomew Las Casas’s “factual” account lamenting and exposing the viciousness of that hunt,50 to Shakespeare’s possible allusion to it in The Tempest, when Prospero and Ariel set spirit dogs on Caliban, to a still earlier Shakespearean allusion—or possible allusion—in

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the otherwise non-colonialist A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Puck (who has come from India himself ) chases Greek rude mechanicals with illusory animals in a scene evoking an entirely English conflict. The same “colonialist” hunt informs radically different fictions and practices, some of which enact colonialism, some of which subvert it, and some of which require other categories entirely to characterize its effect. It is not easy to categorize the several links between The Tempest and colonialist discourse. Take the deceptively simple example of Caliban’s name. Revisionists rightly emphasize the implications of the cannibal stereotype as automatic mark of Other in Western ethnocentric colonialist discourse,51 and, since Shakespeare’s name for “Caliban” is widely accepted as an anagram of “cannibal,” many read the play as if he were a cannibal, with all that the term implies. But an anagram is not a cannibal, and Shakespeare’s use of the stereotype is hardly automatic.52 Caliban is no cannibal—he barely touches meat, confining himself more delicately to roots, berries, and an occasional fish; indeed, his symbiotic harmony with the island’s natural food resources is one of his most attractive traits. His name seems more like a mockery of stereotypes than a mark of monstrosity, and in our haste to confirm the link between “cannibal” and “Indian” outside the text, we lose track of the way in which Caliban severs the link within the text.53 While no one would deny some relation between Caliban and the New World natives to whom such terms as “cannibal” were applied, what that relation is remains unclear. To enumerate differences between The Tempest and “colonialist discourse” is not to reduce discussion of the play to a counting contest, pitting similarities against differences. Rather, it is to suggest that inherent in any analysis of the play as colonialist discourse is a particular assumption about the relation between text and discourse—between one man’s fiction and a collective fiction—or, perhaps, between one man’s fiction and what we take for “reality.” This relation matters not only to New Critics trying to isolate texts from contexts but to new historicists (or just plain historicists) trying to put them back together. The relation is also vital to lived practices like censorship and inquisitions—and there are differences of opinion about what counts in these cases. Such differences need to be acknowledged and examined, and the method for reading them needs to be made more explicit before the implications of The Tempest as colonialist discourse can be fully understood.

II Similar problems beset the definition of the “discourse” itself, the means of identifying the fictional—and the “lived”—practices constituting “English colonialism” in 1611. Given the impact of English colonialism over the last 350 years, it may again seem perversely naive to ask what colonialist discourse was like in 1611, as opposed to colonialism in 1911 or even in 1625, the year when Samuel Purchas asked, alluding to the “treachery” of the Virginian

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Indians, “Can a Leopard change his spots? Can a Savage remayning a Savage be civill?” Purchas added this comment when he published the 1610 document that Shakespeare had used as his source for The Tempest, and Purchas has been cited as an example of “colonialist discourse.54 Purchas does indeed display the particular combination of exploitative motives and self-justifying rhetoric—the “effacement of power”55—that revisionists identify as colonialist and which they find in The Tempest. But, one might reasonably ask, was the discursive context in 1611, when Shakespeare was writing, the same as it would be fourteen years later, when Purchas added his marginal comment?56 There seems, rather, to have been in 1611 a variety of what we might call “New World discourses” with multiple points of view, motives, and effects, among which such comments as Purchas’s are not as common as the revisionist emphasis implies. These are “colonialist” only in the most general sense in which all ethnocentric cultures are always “colonialist”: narcissistically pursuing their own ends, oblivious to the desires, needs, and even the existence of the Other. That is, if this New World discourse is colonialist, it is so primarily in that it ignores Indians, betraying its Eurocentric assumptions about the irrelevance of any people other than white, male, upper-class Europeans, preferably from England. It thus expresses not an historically specific but a timeless and universal attitude toward the “stranger,” which Fiedler described in so many of Shakespeare’s plays. We might see this discourse as a precondition57 for colonialism proper, which was to follow with the literal rather than the figurative colonizing of New World natives. But to assume that colonialism was already encoded in the anomalous situation in 1611 is to undermine the revisionist effort to understand the historical specificity of the moment when Shakespeare wrote The Tempest. It is not easy to characterize the situation in 1611. On the one hand, Spain had long been engaged in the sort of “colonialist discourse” that revisionists find in The Tempest; and even in England at the time there were examples of colonialist discourse (in the rhetoric, if not yet often in the lived practices) produced by those directly involved in the colonialist project and expecting to profit from it. The official advertisements in the first rush of enthusiasm about Virginia, as well as the stream of defenses when the Virginia project began to fail, often have a euphemistic ring and often do suggest a fundamental greed and implicit racism beneath claims to be securing the earthly and spiritual wellbeing of the Virginia natives.58 (“[We] doe buy of them the pearles of earth, and sell to them the pearles of heauen.”59) These documents efface not only power but most practical problems as well, and they were supplemented by sermons romanticizing hardships as divine tribulation.60 Scattered throughout this discourse are righteous defenses of taking land from the Indians, much in the spirit—and tone—of Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy defending his need to eat pig. (This was also the tone familiar from the anti-theatrical critics—and, indeed,

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occasional colonialist sermons included snipes at the “Plaiers,” along with the Devil and the papists, as particular enemies of the Virginia venture.61) On the other hand, even in these documents not only is the emphasis elsewhere but often there are important contradictory movements. For example, “A True Declaration,” the official record of the Bermuda wreck, refers once to the Indians as “humane beasts” and devotes one paragraph of its twenty-four pages to the “greedy Vulture” Powhattan and his ambush. It notes elsewhere, however, that some of the English settlers themselves had “created the Indians our implacable enemies by some violence they had offered,” and it actually spends far more time attacking the lazy “scum of men” among the settlers, who had undermined the colony from within, than demonizing the less relevant Indians.62 And on the whole, the exploitative and self-justifying rhetoric is only one element in a complex New World discourse. For much of the time, in fact, the main conflict in the New World was not between whites and Native Americans but between Spain and England. Voyages like Drake’s (1577–80) were motivated by this international conflict, as well as by the romance of discovery and the lure of treasure—but not by colonizing.63 Even when Raleigh received the first patent to settle and trade with the New World (1584), necessitating more extended contact with Native Americans, the temporary settlements he started in the 1580s were largely tokens in his play for fame and wealth rather than attempts to take over sizable portions of land from the natives.64 Only when the war with Spain was over (1604) and ships were free again did colonization really begin; and then “America and Virginia were on everyone’s lips.”65 But this New World discourse still reflects little interest in its inhabitants. Other issues are much more widely discussed. For example, what would the New World government be like? Would James try to extend his authoritarianism to America? Could he? This was the issue, for example, most energizing Henry Wriothesley, Shakespeare’s Southampton, who led the “Patriot” faction on the London Virginia Council, pushing for more American independence.66 (As for James’s own “colonial discourse,” it seems to have been devoted to worries about how it would all affect his relations with Spain,67 and to requests for flying squirrels and other New World “toyes.”68) Of more immediate interest, perhaps, to the mass of real or armchair adventurers were the reports of New World wealth that at first made Virginia known as a haven for bankrupts and spendthrifts, as well as for wild dreamers—followed by the accounts of starvation, rebellion, and hardship brought back by those who had escaped from the reality of colonial existence. Now the issue became “Is it worth it?” The official propaganda, optimistic about future profits, was soon countered by a backlash from less optimistic scoffers challenging the value of the entire project, one which sent money, men, and ships to frequent destruction and brought back almost no profit.69

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Even the settlers actually living with the natives in the New World itself were—for entirely non-altruistic reasons—not yet fully engaged in “colonialist” discourse as defined by revisionists. In 1611 they had not managed to establish enough power to euphemize; they had little to be defensive about. They were too busy fighting mutiny, disease, and the stupidities of the London Council to have much energy left over for Indians. It is true that no writer ever treated Native Americans as equals—any more than he treated Moors, Jews, Catholics, peasants, women, Irishmen, or even Frenchmen as equals; travellers complacently recorded kidnapping natives to exhibit in England, as if the natives had no rights at all.70 And it is true that some of their descriptions are distorted by Old World stereotypes of wild men or cannibals—though these descriptions are often confined to earlier pre-colonial explorers’ reports.71 Or, far more insidiously, the descriptions were distorted by stereotypes of unfallen innocent noble savages— stereotypes that inevitably led to disillusionment when the settlers had to realize that the Indians, like the land itself, were not going to fulfill their dreams of a golden world made expressly to nurture Englishmen. The “noble savage” stereotype thus fueled the recurring accusation of Indian treachery, a response to betrayal of settlers’ fantasies as well as to any real Indian betrayal,72 and one to which I will return in discussing The Tempest. But, given the universality of racial prejudice towards New World natives along with all “Others,” in this early period the movement was to loosen, not to consolidate, the prejudices brought from the Old World. The descriptions of these extended face-to-face encounters with Native Americans were perhaps even more varied than contemporary responses to Moors and Jews, who were usually encountered on the white man’s own territory, where exposure could be limited and controlled. The very terms imported from the Old World to name the natives—“savages” or “naturals”—began to lose their original connotations as the differing descriptions multiplied and even contradicted themselves. The reports range from Harriot’s widely republished attempt at scientific, objective reporting (1588), which viewed natives with great respect, to Smith’s less reliable adventure stories (1608–31), disputed even in his own time by Purchas. And although these do not by any means live up to our standards for non-colonialist discourse, their typical attitude is a wary, often patronizing, but live-and-let-live curiosity, rather than the exploitative erasure which would later become the mark of colonialist discourse. So long as the conflicts remained minimal, Native Americans were seen as beings like the writers;73 further, tribes were distinguished from one another, and recognition was granted to their different forms of government, class structure, dress codes, religion, and language.74 And when conflict did trigger the recurring accusation of “treachery,” the writers never presented the Indians as laughable Calibans, but rather as capable, indeed formidable, enemies whose skill and intelligence challenged that of the settlers.

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Horrors had already been perpetrated by the Spanish in the name of colonialism; not learning from these—or perhaps learning all too well—the English would soon begin perpetrating their own. But that lay in the future. When The Tempest was written, what the New World seems to have meant for the majority of Englishmen was a sense of possibility and a set of conflicting fantasies about the wonders to be found there; these were perhaps the preconditions for colonialism—as for much else—but not yet the thing itself. To place colonialist discourse as precisely as possible within a given moment (like stressing the differences between The Tempest and colonialist discourse) is not to reduce the discussion to a numbers game. What is at stake here is not a quibble about chronology but an assumption about what we mean by the “relevant discursive context,” about how we agree to determine it, and about how we decide to limit it. Here too there are differences of opinion about what counts, and these differences need to be acknowledged, examined, and accounted for.

III My point in specifying Shakespeare’s precise literal and temporal relation to colonialist discourse—in specifying the unique mind through which the discourse is mediated—is not to deny that the play has any relation to its context but to suggest that the relation is problematic. In the effort to identify Caliban as one more colonialist representation of the Other, we fail to notice how remarkable it is that such a Caliban should exist. In 1611 there were in England no literary portrayals of New World inhabitants and certainly no fictional examples of colonialist discourse.75 Insofar as The Tempest does in some way allude to an encounter with a New World native (and I will for the remainder of this essay accept this premise), it is the very first work of literature to do so. There may be Indians, more or less demonized, in the nonliterary discourse. Outside of Shakespeare, however, there would be none in literature until two years after The Tempest, when they began to appear—feathers and all—in masques.76 And Shakespeare went out of his way to invent Caliban: Strachey’s account of the wreck on the uninhabited Bermuda islands—Shakespeare’s main New World source—contains, of course, no island natives.77 For these Shakespeare had to turn elsewhere in Strachey and in others who described the mainland colony in Virginia. Shakespeare was the first to show one of us mistreating a native, the first to represent a native from the inside, the first to allow a native to complain on stage, and the first to make that New World encounter problematic enough to generate the current attention to the play. To argue for Shakespeare’s uniqueness is not to argue that as fiction The Tempest is above politics, or that as a writer of fiction Shakespeare transcended ideology. It does imply, however, that if the play is “colonialist,” it must be seen as “prophetic” rather than descriptive.78 As such, the play’s status immediately raises important questions. Why was Shakespeare—a man who had no direct stake in

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colonization—the first writer of fiction to portray New World inhabitants? Why then? Shakespeare had shown no signs of interest in the New World until The Tempest, despite the fact that there had been some colonial activity and some colonialist rhetoric for several years among those who did have a stake in it. How did the colonialist phenomenon spread? To hasten over Shakespeare’s relation to colonialism as if it were not a question but a conclusion is to lose one of the most important bits of data we may ever have about how such things as colonialism—and discourse—work. Problematic as it may be to speculate about an individual mind, it is even more problematic to speculate about the discourse of an entire nation or an entire period. One way to give substance to such large generalizations is to trace, in as much detail as may be available, the particulars on which they are based. Here the particulars include the individuals who produced, as well as reproduced, the larger cultural discourse—especially individuals like Shakespeare, who, more than almost any other, both absorbed and shaped the various conflicting discourses of the period. To do this, as I have been arguing, it is necessary to consider the entire play, without deciding prematurely what is “only a distortion” or “only an irrelevance.” In addition, however, we must also look to a context for The Tempest that is as relevant as colonialist discourse and perhaps even more essential to the presence of colonialism in The Tempest in the first place—that is, to the context of Shakespeare’s own earlier “discourse.” Only then can we see how the two fields of discourse intersect. In making use of the New World vocabulary and imagery, Shakespeare was in part describing something much closer to home—as was Jonson when he called the London brothel district “the Bermudas,”79 or as would Donne when he found his America, his “new founde land,” in the arms of his mistress. Or as was Dudley Carleton in a gossipy letter from London about Lord Salisbury enduring a “tempest” of reproof from a lady; or Sir Ralph Winwood in trying to “begin a new world by setting himself and his wife here at home.”80 Long before writing The Tempest, Shakespeare had written another play about a ruler who preferred his books to government. Navarre’s academy in Love’s Labor’s Lost was no island, but, like an island, it was supposed to be isolated from territorial negotiations. And Navarre, oblivious to colonial issues, though certainly not exempt from timeless aristocratic prejudice, brought his own version of Ariel and Caliban by inviting Armado and Costard to join him. Like Prospero, he asked his “Ariel” to make a pageant for him, and he imprisoned his “Caliban” for trying to “do” a wench. His relation to the two is not a matter of colonization but rather of condescension and ironic recognition, as Navarre is forced to see something of himself in the conflict between fiery Armado’s overactive imagination and earthy Costard’s lust.81 Only much later did this pattern come to be “colonial.”

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The Tempest is linked in many other ways not only to Love’s Labor’s Lost but also to the rest of the canon, as continued efforts of critics have shown,82 and it is revealing to see how, in each case, the non-colonial structures become associated with colonialist discourse. Indeed, the very details of The Tempest that revisionists see as marking the “nodal point of the play’s imbrication into this discourse of colonialism”83 are reworkings of similar moments in earlier and seemingly precolonial plays. The moment I will focus on for the rest of this paper is the one that many revisionists take as the strongest evidence in the play for the falseness of Prospero’s position—the moment when the hidden colonialist project emerges openly,84 when the “political unconscious” is exposed.85 It occurs when Caliban’s plot interrupts the pageant Prospero is staging for Ferdinand and Miranda, and Prospero is so enraged that Miranda says she has never seen him so angry. The explanation, it has been suggested, is that if psychology matters at all, Prospero’s anger here, like his anger earlier when Caliban tried to rape Miranda, derives from the politics of colonialism. It reveals Prospero’s political “disquiet at the irruption into consciousness of an unconscious anxiety concerning the grounding of his legitimacy” on the island.86 But the dramatic context counters the assumption that politics is primary in this episode. Like Caliban, Prospero differs in significant ways from the stereotyped “real life” characters in colonial political drama. Unlike the singleminded colonial invader, Prospero is both an exile and a father; and the action of the play is initiated when both these roles are newly activated by the arrival of Prospero’s old enemies, those who had exiled him as well as his daughter’s husband-to-be. At the moment of Prospero’s eruption into anger, he has just bestowed Miranda on his enemy’s son Ferdinand87 and is in the midst of presenting his pageant as a wedding gift, wrapped in a three-fold warning about chastity.88 If Prospero is to pass on his heritage to the next generation, he must at this moment repress his desire for power and for revenge at home, as well as any sexual desire he feels toward Miranda.89 Both desires are easily projected onto the fishily phallic Caliban, a walking version of Prospero’s own “thing” of darkness. Not only has Caliban already tried to rape Miranda; he is now out to kill Prospero so that he can turn Miranda over to Stephano (“she will give thee brave brood”); and Caliban does not even feel guilty. Caliban’s function as a walking screen for projection may help explain why Caliban’s sin does not consist in cannibalism, to which, one assumes, Prospero was never tempted, but rather in Prospero’s own repressed fantasies of omnipotence and lust.90 Of course Prospero is also angry that Caliban is now threatening both his authority on the island and his justification of that authority; but the extraordinary intensity of Prospero’s rage suggests a conjunction of psychological as well as political passion. This conjunction of the psychological and the political not only appears here in The Tempest but also characterizes a surprising number of Prospero-like characters in Shakespeare’s earlier plays who provide a suggestive context for The

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Tempest. All through the canon one finds characters who escape from active lives to some kind of pastoral retreat, who step aside from power and aggression—and usually from sexuality as well—and from all the forbidden fantasies in which these are enacted. But while each adopts a disinterested stance, as if having retired behind the scenes, each sees life as a play and manipulates others still on stage in a way that suggests a fascination with what he has rejected and assigned to the “Others.” And each of these has his “Caliban” and his moment of sudden, irrational anger when his “Caliban” threatens to overstep the limits defining him as “other” and separating him from “Prospero.” At this moment of confrontation, boundaries threaten to disappear and hierarchies are menaced. And in each of the earlier plays, this moment is indicative of inner conflict, as the earlier “Prospero” figure confronts someone who often has neither property nor power to colonize, and whose threat is largely symbolic. In all these plays Shakespeare is dealing not just with power relations but also with the psychology of domination, with the complicated ways in which personal psychology interacts with political power. As early as the mid-1590s, two figures show some resemblance to Prospero. Antonio, the merchant of Venice, sees the world as “A stage where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one” (1.1.78–79). Almost eagerly accepting his passive lot, he claims to renounce both profit and love. But, as Marianne Novy suggests, a repressed self-assertion is hinted at in the passive/aggressive claims he makes on Bassanio and comes out clearly when he lashes out at the greedy and self-assertive Shylock with a viciousness like Prospero’s toward Caliban, a viciousness he shows nowhere else.91 He admits calling the Jew a dog and says, I am as like to call thee so again, To spet on thee again. . . . (1.3.130–31)92 A related and similarly problematic exchange occurs in the Henry IV plays, written a year or so later, where role-playing Prince Hal, during his temporary retreat from power, had found a version of pastoral in Falstaff ’s tavern. After reclaiming his throne, when he finds that Falstaff has also come from the tavern to claim a role in the new kingdom, Hal suddenly repudiates Falstaff with a cruelty as cold as Prospero’s anger at Caliban—and equally excessive: “I know thee not, old man.” In both these cases, though the resemblance to Prospero is clear, the relation to an historically specific colonialism is hard to establish. Then in As You Like It (1599) and Measure for Measure (1604) come the two exiled or self-exiled Dukes who leave home—one to “usurp” the deer in the forest (2.1.21–28), the other to “usurp” the beggary in the Vienna streets (3.2.93)—and who most resemble Prospero. Duke Senior in As You Like It is banished to the pastoral forest of Arden, where he professes himself utterly content to live a life notable for the absence of both power and women (a “woeful pageant,” he calls it cheerfully [2.7.138]). He is saved from having to fight for power when his evil

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brother (unlike the one in Shakespeare’s source) conveniently repents and hands back the dukedom; but an ambivalence about sexuality is at least suggested when this mildest of men lashes out at Jaques, precisely when Jaques returns from melancholy withdrawal and claims the fool’s license to satirize society’s ills—to “cleanse the foul body of the infected world.”93 “Fie on thee!” says the Duke, . . . thou thyself hast been a libertine, As sensual as the brutish sting itself, And all th’ embossed sores, and headed evils, That thou with license of free foot hast caught, Wouldst thou disgorge into the general world. (2.7.65–69) Jaques seems to have touched a nerve. Elsewhere Jaques makes a claim on behalf of the deer in the forest rather like the claim Caliban makes for himself on the island, complaining that Duke Senior has “usurped” these “velvet friends”; he even makes it “most invectively,” having, like Caliban, learned how to curse. Just as in the case of Caliban, we cannot laugh away the claim the way the Duke does. But Jaques’s complaint seems intended more as an insight into the Duke than a comment on the deer—whom Jaques later kills anyway. The touchiest of these precursors, Vincentio in Measure for Measure (1604), is the one who most closely resembles Prospero. He too prefers study to government, and he turns over his power to Angelo, claiming “[I] do not like to stage me to their eyes” (1.1.68)—but then he steps behind the scenes to manipulate the action. Like Prospero, Vincentio sees his manipulation as an altruistic means of educating his wayward subjects into chastity, repentance, and merciful mildness; but it seems to serve more private needs of self-definition as well. For it first allows him, as “ghostly father,” to deny any aggressive or sexual motives of his own, and then allows him to return at the end to claim both power and sexual rewards as he resumes his dukedom and claims Isabel.94 Vincentio’s “Caliban” is the libidinous and loose-tongued Lucio, who not only indulges his own appetites but openly accuses the Duke of indulging his, so that it is unusually clear in this case that the “Caliban” figure is a representation of the Duke’s own disowned passions. Lucio’s slanders include the claim that the Duke has “usurp[ed] the beggary he was never born to,” but, like Jaques speaking for the deer, he is more concerned with revealing the Duke’s contradictory desires here than with defending beggars’ rights. Goaded by Lucio’s insubordination, the Duke lashes out at him as he does at no one else and threatens a punishment much worse than the one he assigned to the would-be rapist and murderer Angelo or to the actual murderer Barnardine. In the case of all of these “Prosperos,” it is hard to see the attack on “Caliban” as part of a specifically colonialist strategy, as a way of exploiting the Other or of rationalizing illegitimate power over him rather than over what he represents

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in “Prospero” himself. To a logical observer, the Prospero-attack seems at best gratuitous—and the more frightening for being so. It has no political rationale. The “political” attack always takes place outside the play’s old world, after the characters’ withdrawal to a second world that is not so much a new world as one that projects, exaggerates, turns upside down, or polarizes the conflicts that made the old world uninhabitable. In the case of each earlier “Prospero,” the conflicts seem internal as well as external, so that when he moves out to meet his “Caliban,” he is always meeting himself. Political exile is also presented as selfestrangement, a crisis of selfhood expressed in social and geographical divisions. And in each case, Shakespeare exposes the fragility of such arrangements, whether they take the form of the pastoralization of the forest of Arden, or of the scapegoating of Shylock in Venice, or of Falstaff ’s carnival misrule in the tavern, or of the theatricalizing of the prison in Vincentio’s Vienna, or of Prospero’s “colonizing” of a utopian island. Whatever varying political role each earlier “Caliban” plays as inhabitant of his second—or second-class—world, each seems to embody a similar psychological quality. In each case he displays the overt self-assertion that the retired or retiring “Prospero” cannot—or wishes not to—muster for himself, and that for Shakespeare seems to be the mark of the Other. Each is an epitome of what Shakespeare (perhaps in his own punning ambivalence about acknowledging it as his own) elsewhere calls “will.”95 This “will” includes a range of forbidden desires and appetites often attributed to the Other and always associated with the “foul body,” as Jaques calls it; or with the fat appetitive body, as in Hal’s picture of Falstaff; or with the body as mere pounds of flesh and blood; perhaps with what we might call, after Bakhtin, the “grotesque” body. And it is defined in opposition to the ethereal, or ariel, virtues such as “mercy,” “honor,” and “chastity” characterizing the various “Prosperos.” The “will” of these “Calibans” can carry suggestions of primitive oral greed, as in Shylock’s desire to “feed fat” his revenge with a pound of human flesh, in Falstaff ’s voracious appetite, or in Caliban’s name. Or it emerges in a rampant sexual greed, as in Falstaff, in Jaques’s past, in Lucio, perhaps even in Shylock’s reproductive miracles with sheep, and of course in Caliban himself. But the most alien aspect of self-assertion or “will” in these plays emerges in a primitive vengefulness. This vengefulness is associated with an infantile need to control and dominate and with the scatological imagery of filth—with a disgust at the whole messy, physical world that always threatens to get out of control. Thus Shylock’s drive for revenge is linked to his Jonsonian “anal” virtues (“fast bind, fast find”), to his fecal gold, and to his tightly locked orifices (“stop my house’s ears, I mean my casements” [2.5.34]). Thus, too, Duke Senior’s description of Jaques “disgorging” his “embossed sores” suggests that he is projecting onto Jaques his disgust at the idea of “the foul body of the infected world”—and his fear that Jaques will “disgorge” and overflow his boundaries rather than cleanse; Jaques’s very name

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associates him with this scatological vision. Caliban, very much concerned with revenge, also takes on a taint of anality through the words of Trinculo and Stephano. The latter sees Caliban hiding under his gabardine with Trinculo and takes Caliban for a monster whose first act is to “vent” a Trinculo—a Gargantuan act of defecation; Trinculo elsewhere complains that Caliban led them to a “foul lake” that o’erstunk their feet till they smelled “all horse-piss.”96 Thus, although Caliban is like the New World natives in his “otherness,” he is linked at least as closely to Shakespeare’s earlier “Calibans.” What is interesting in any attempt to understand The Tempest’s uniqueness in other aspects is that in Caliban for the first time Shakespeare shows “will,” or narcissistic self-assertion, in its purest and simplest form as the original “grandiosity” or “megalomania” of a child;97 for the first time he makes the representative of bodily existence a seeming child whose ego is a “body ego,” as Freud said, a “subject” whose “self ” is defined by the body. There is a childishly amoral—and almost asexual—glee in Caliban’s sexuality (“O ho, O ho, would’t had been done!” he says of the attempted rape [1.2.349]) and a childish exaggeration in his dreams of revenge (“brain him / . . . or with a log / Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake, / Or cut his wezand with thy knife” [3.2.88–91]).98 Like a child he thinks often about his mother,99 and now that she is gone, he dreams of riches dropping from heaven and cries to dream again; like a child he was taught language and shown the man in the moon.100 And like an imperious child he is enraged when his pie in the sky does not appear. If he rebukes Prospero for first stroking and then disciplining him, if he objects to being made a subject when he was “mine own king” (1.2.342), this is the rebuke made by every child, who begins life as “His Majesty the Baby,” tended by his mother, and who is then subjected to the demands of the community,101 represented by the father. Childhood is the period in which anyone—even the most powerful Elizabethan aristocrat—can experience the slave’s side of the master/slave relation, its indignities, and the dreams of reversal and revenge it can imbue. Appropriate and acceptable in a baby, all these traits (like Caliban himself ) “with age [grow] uglier” (4.1.191)— and far more dangerous. Caliban’s childishness has been dismissed as a defense, another rationalization of Prospero’s illegitimate power.102 But if it is a defense, it is one which itself is revealing. Caliban’s childishness is a dimension of the Other in which Shakespeare seems extremely interested.103 It is a major (not peripheral) source both of Caliban’s defining characteristics and of what makes his relation to Prospero so highly charged. Caliban’s childish innocence seems to have been what first attracted Prospero, and now it is Caliban’s childish lawlessness that enrages him. To a man like Prospero, whose life has been spent learning a self-discipline in which he is not yet totally adept, Caliban can seem like a child who must be controlled, and who, like a child, is murderously enraged at being controlled. Prospero treats Caliban as he would treat the willful child in himself.

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The importance of childishness in defining Caliban is suggested by the final Tempest precedent to be cited here, one that lies behind Prospero’s acknowledgement of Caliban as his own thing of darkness—and in which the Caliban figure is literally a child. This figure is found in Titus Andronicus, where a bastard child, called “devil” and “slave,” is cast out by his mother but rescued by his father, who promises—in language foreshadowing Caliban’s imagery in The Tempest—to raise him in a cave and feed him on berries and roots.104 Here the father is black Aaron the Moor, and the childish thing of darkness, whom Aaron is at some pains to acknowledge his, is his own literally black son. What is remarkable about this portrait of a barbarian father and son is that Aaron’s is the only uncomplicated parental love in a play-world where civilized white men like Titus kill their own children on principle. It is a world, by the way, which contains the only literal (if unwitting) cannibal in Shakespeare’s plays, the child’s white mother. Unlike Titus, Aaron can love his child because he can identify with him; as an “uncivilized” black man, he can accept the greedy, sensual, lawless child in himself: “This is my self, the vigor and the picture of my youth,” he says (4.2.108). This love, which comes easily to Aaron in acknowledging his own flesh and blood, is transformed in The Tempest to Prospero’s strained and difficult recognition of a tribal Other whose blackness nonetheless figures his own. The echoes of Aaron not only suggest the family resemblance between Prospero and Caliban. They also suggest that here Shakespeare is changing his earlier vision of authority. In the earlier play it is white Titus who—like Prospero—gives away his power and is betrayed; but it is black Aaron who is stigmatized as the vengeful villain. And Titus maintains this black-and-white distinction even while savagely carrying out his own revenge. But distinctions in The Tempest have become less rigid. By merging his fantasy about a “white” (but exiled and neurotically puritanical) duke with his fantasy about a villainous (but loving) “black” father, Shakespeare for the first time shows, in Prospero, a paternal leader who comes back to power by admitting rather than denying the “blackness” in himself. Prospero may not, as several revisionists point out, physically do much for Caliban at the end; however, what he says matters a great deal indeed, for his original transgression, when he first defined Caliban as the Other, was intellectual as well as physical. When Prospero finally acknowledges Caliban, although he is a long way from recognizing the equality of racial “others,” he comes closer than any of Shakespeare’s other “Prosperos” to acknowledging the otherness within, which helps generate all racism—and he comes closer than anyone else in colonialist discourse. Prospero acknowledges the child-like Caliban as his own, and although he does not thus undo hierarchy, he moves for the first time towards accepting the child in himself rather than trying to dominate and erase that child (along with random vulnerable human beings outside himself ) in order to establish his adult authority.

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Thus, although Shakespeare may, as the revisionists claim, to some degree reproduce Prospero’s colonialist vision of the island, the play’s emphasis lies not so much in justifying as in analyzing that vision, just as Shakespeare had analyzed the origins of dominance in the earlier plays. The play insists that we see Prospero’s current relation to Caliban in terms of Prospero’s own past; it contains the “colonial” encounter firmly within the framing story of his own family history. And though that history does not extend backward to Prospero’s own childhood, it does begin with family ties and Miranda’s memory of “the dark backward and abysm of time” (1.2.50), before either she or Prospero had known the Other. Prospero was then, he thought, in total harmony with his world and himself, happy in his regressive retreat to his library-Eden; he was buffered from reality, he thought, by a “lov’d” brother so linked to himself and his own desires that Prospero had in him a trust with no “limit, / A confidence sans bound” (1.2.96–97), like the trust that Miranda must have had in the women who “tended” her then. Only when Antonio’s betrayal shattered that trust and Prospero was ousted from Eden—newly aware of both the brother as Other and of himself as a willful self in opposition—did he “discover” the island and Caliban. In a sense, then, Caliban emerged from the rift between Prospero and Antonio,105 just as Ariel emerged from Sycorax’s riven pine. Once the brother has shown that he is not identical to the self, reflecting back its own narcissistic desire, then he becomes the Other—and simultaneously rouses the vengeful Other in the self. In The Tempest the distance that a “colonialist” Prospero imposes between self and Other originated in a recoil from the closest relation of all; it was a recoil that in fact defined both the “distant” and the “close,” the public and the private—the political and the personal—as separate realms. When Prospero acknowledges Caliban, he thus partly defuses an entire dynamic that began long before he had ever seen the island.

IV When Shakespeare created a childish “Caliban,” he was himself rounding out a dynamic process that had begun as long ago as the writing of Titus Andronicus. We will never “know” why Shakespeare gave to this final version of his exile story a local habitation incorporating aspects of colonialist discourse. But the answer lies not only in that discourse but also in him and in what was on his mind. Some of the most “specious” speculations about Shakespeare’s mind have been stimulated by his presumed resemblance to Prospero at the end of the play: past his zenith, on the way to retirement, every third thought turned to his grave. Without trying speciously to read minds, however, it seems safe to say that to some degree Shakespeare had been for several years concerned with the aging, loss, mortality, and death that recur in so much of what we know he was writing and reading at the time. To this degree, both the play and its context deal with the end of the individual self, the subject and the body in which it is located. It is the

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end of everything associated with the discovery of self in childhood, the end of everything Caliban represents—and thus the greatest threat to infantile narcissism since His Majesty the Baby was first de-throned. John Bender has noted that the occasion of the play’s presumed court debut in 1611 was Hallowmas, the feast of winter and the time of seasonal celebrations figuring the more final endings and death associated with winter.106 As part of the celebrations, Bender suggests, the play might have served to structure a communal response to the recurring “seasonal mentality” brought on by the reminder of mortality. Whether or not this is true, that which “recurs” in seasons and communities comes only once to individuals; and as the final stage in Shakespeare’s own “seasonal” movement from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to The Winter’s Tale, the play can be seen as staging a final “crisis of selfhood” and of betrayal like those in the earlier exile plays—but this time a far more extreme one.107 For those who rage against the dying of the light, it is a crisis that awakens the old infantile narcissistic demand for endless fulfillment and the narcissistic rage and vengefulness against a world that denies such satisfactions.108 To one on the threshold of retirement from the Old World, the New World is an appropriate stage on which to enact this last resurgence of the infantile self. We take for granted the historical conditions generating utopian visions in the voyagers’ reports outside the play. What the example of Caliban’s childish presence in the play suggests is that for Shakespeare the desire for such utopias—the golden worlds and fountains of youth—has roots in personal history as well as in “history.” The desire has been shaped by the most local as well as by the largest, collective, material constraints: by being born small and weak in a world run by large, strong people with problems of their own; by being born in “a sexed and mortal body”109 that must somehow become part of a social and linguistic community. Caliban’s utopia of sweet voices and clouds dropping riches (3.2.137–43) draws most directly on the infantile substratum that colored Columbus’s report when he returned from his third voyage convinced “that the newly discovered hemisphere was shaped like a woman’s breast, and that the Earthly Paradise was located at a high point corresponding to the nipple.”110 But the play’s other “utopias” draw on it too. Gonzalo’s utopia is more socialized (“nature should bring forth, / . . . all abundance, / To feed my innocent people” [2.1.163–65]); Prospero’s pageant utopia is more mythic (a world without winter, blessed by nurturing Ceres); but, like Caliban’s, their utopias recreate a union with a bounteous Mother Nature. And, like every child’s utopia, each is a fragile creation, easily destroyed by the rage and violence that constitute its defining alternative—a dystopia of murderous vengeance; the interruption of Prospero’s pageant is only the last in a series of such interruptions.111 Each is the creation of a childish mind that operates in binary divisions: good mother/bad mother, love/rage, brother/Other.

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That Shakespeare was drawn to the utopian aspects of the New World is suggested by the particular fragment of New World discourse that most directly precipitated (Kermode’s suggestive term) the play—the Bermuda pamphlets, which record what was “perhaps he most romantic incident associated with America’s beginnings.”112 What attracted Shakespeare, that is, was the story in which a “merciful God,” a loving and fatherly protector, rescued a whole shipload of people from certain death; it was a story that countered thoughts of winter with reports of magical bounty in the aptly named “Summer Islands.” The concerns that made Shakespeare’s approach to colonialist discourse possible may have been operative later in other cases as well. In analyzing the colonialist discourse growing out of political motives, it is important not to lose touch with the utopian discourse growing out of a different set of motives. Without reducing colonialism to “the merely subjective and to the status of psychological projection,”113 one can still take account of fantasies and motives that, though now regarded as secondary, or as irrelevant to politics, may interact with political motives in ways we have not yet begun to understand—and cannot understand so long as we are diverted by trying to reduce psychology to politics or politics to psychology. The binary dynamics of infantile utopian fantasies can, for example, help explain why frustrated settlers succumbed so easily to the twin stereotypes of the Native Americans as innocent primitives who would welcome and nurture the settlers, and as hopelessly treacherous Others. They can serve as a reminder that the desire for friendship and brotherhood can be as destructive as a desire to exploit. Reference to irrational, outdated infantile needs can help explain why the settlers, once they actually did begin colonizing, set out with such gratuitous thoroughness to “reduce” the savage to civility. As James Axtell describes the process, “In European eyes, no native characteristic was too small to reform, no habit too harmless to reduce.”114 Such behavior seems to go beyond any immediate political or material motive and seems rather to serve more general psychological needs stirred up by conflict with the natives. The recent emphasis on the colonists’ obvious material greed and rational self-interest—or class-interest—has unnecessarily obscured the role of these less obvious irrational motives and fantasies that are potentially even more insidious. Shakespeare’s assimilation of elements from historical colonialist discourse was neither entirely isolated from other uses or innocent of their effects. Nonetheless, the “colonialism” in his play is linked not only to Shakespeare’s indirect participation in an ideology of political exploitation and erasure but also to his direct participation in the psychological aftereffects of having experienced the exploitation and erasure inevitable in being a child in an adult’s world. He was not merely reproducing a preexistent discourse; he was also crossing it with other discourses, changing, enlarging, skewing, and questioning it. Our sense of The Tempest’s participation in “colonialist discourse” should be flexible enough to take account of such crossings; indeed our notion of that in which such

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discourse consisted should be flexible enough to include the whole of the text that constitutes the first English example of fictional colonialist discourse.115 NOTES 1. Two of the earliest of these critiques were actually written, although not published, by 1960: George Lamming, “A Monster, a Child, a Slave” (1960) in The Pleasures of Exile (London: Allison and Busby, 1984); James Smith, “The Tempest” (1954) in Shakespearian and Other Essays, ed. E. M. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 159–261. Two more articles, less politicized, followed in the sixties: Philip Brockbank, “The Tempest: Conventions of Art and Empire” in Later Shakespeare, eds. J. R. Brown and B. Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), pp. 183–201; and D. G. James, “The New World” in The Dream of Prospero (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 72–123. The recent group, returning to the political perspective of the first two, includes: Stephen Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century” in First Images of America, ed. Fredi Chiappelli, 2 vols. (Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1976), Vol. 2, 561–80; Bruce Erlich, “Shakespeare’s Colonial Metaphor: On the Social Function of Theatre in The Tempest,” Science and Society, 41 (1977), 43–65; Lorie Leininger, “Cracking the Code of The Tempest,” Bucknell Review, 25 (1980), 121–31; Peter Hulme, “Hurricanes in the Caribbees: The Constitution of the Discourse of English Colonialism” in 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century, Proceedings of the Essex conference on the Sociology of Literature, eds. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: Univ. of Essex, 1981), pp. 55–83; Paul N. Siegel, “Historical Ironies in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 119 (Weimar: 1983), 104–11; Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Contexts of The Tempest” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 191–205; Terence Hawkes, “Swisser-Swatter: Making a Man of English Letters” in Alternative Shakespeares, pp. 26–46; Paul Brown, “ ‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 48–71; Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 89–134; Thomas Cartelli, “Prospero in Africa: The Tempest as Colonialist Text and Pretext” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, eds. Jean Howard and Marion O’Conner (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 99–115; I would include two essays by Stephen Orgel somewhat different in their focus but nonetheless related: “Prospero’s Wife” in Rewriting the Renaissance, eds. Margaret Ferguson et al. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 50–64, and “Shakespeare and the Cannibals” in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, ed. Marjorie Garber (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 40–66. 2. Hulme, Colonial Encounters, p. 94. 3. See, for example, Paul Brown, “This Thing of Darkness,” p. 48. 4. In fact Edward Pechter, in one of the earliest of such scrutinies, cited several of the recent Tempest articles as especially problematic. See “The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama,” PMLA, 102 (1987), 292–303. See also Howard Felperin, “Making It ‘Neo’: The New Historicism and Renaissance Literature,” Textual Practice, 1 (1987), 262–77; Jean Howard, “The

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New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986), 13–43; and Anthony B. Dawson, “Measure for Measure, New Historicism, and Theatrical Power,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 39 (1988), 328–41. 5. The Tempest, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Methuen, 1954), p. xxv. For an account of the work of earlier scholars exploring the connection between the play and these documents, see Kermode, pp. xxv–xxxiv, and Charles Frey, “The Tempest and the New World,” SQ, 30 (1979), 29–41. 6. E. E. Stoll and Northrop Frye are the only exceptions I have seen cited. 7. Recently there has been a renewed emphasis on the romance elements. See Gary Schmidgall, “The Tempest and Primaleon: A New Source,” SQ, 37 (1986), 423–39, esp. p. 436; and Robert Wiltenberg, “The ‘Aeneid ’ in ‘The Tempest,’” Shakespeare Survey, 39 (1987), 159–68. 8. See, for example, Harry Berger’s important essay, “Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest,” Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), 253–83. 9. Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969); Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972); Leo Marx, “Shakespeare’s American Fable,” The Machine in the Garden (London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 34–72. 10. O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. Pamela Powesland (1950; rpt. New York: Praeger, 1964). 11. Hulme, Colonial Encounters, p. 133. 12. Hulme, Colonial Encounters, p. 115; Barker and Hulme, p. 201; Orgel, “Prospero’s Wife,” pp. 62–63. 13. Orgel, “Shakespeare and the Cannibals,” p. 55. 14. As Paul Werstine wrote in the brochure announcing the NEH Humanities Institute on “New Directions in Shakespeare Criticism” (The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988), “To appreciate The Tempest . . . today . . . we must understand discourses of colonialism, power, legitimation.” 15. Barker and Hulme, p. 198. 16. Hawkes, “Swisser-Swatter,” p. 28. 17. Thus stereotypes, for example, served as part of a “discursive strategy . . . to locate or ‘fix’ a colonial other in a position of inferiority . . .” (Paul Brown, modifying Edward Said on orientalism, p. 58). 18. Actually, this point too is a matter of emphasis. R. R. Cawley (“Shakspere’s Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest,” PMLA, 41 [1926], 688–726) and Kermode, among others, had noted in passing some similarities between the play’s view of Caliban and the distortions of colonialist self-serving rhetorical purposes; but revisionists take this to be the important point, not to be passed over. 19. Leininger, “Cracking the Code of The Tempest,” p. 122. 20. Paul Brown, pp. 64, 66. Brown also contends that The Tempest “exemplifies . . . a moment of historical crisis. This crisis is the struggle to produce a coherent discourse adequate to the complex requirements of British colonialism in its initial phase” (p. 48). 21. Hulme, Colonial Encounters, p. 93. Later he does grant a little ground to the psychological critics in allowing that their “totally spurious” identification of Prospero with Shakespeare yet “half grasps the crucial point that Prospero . . . is a dramatist and creator of theatrical effects” (p. 115).

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22. “From the point of view of a political hermeneutic, measured against the requirements of a ‘political unconscious,’ we must conclude that the conception of wish-fulfillment remains locked in a problematic of the individual subject . . . which is only indirectly useful to us.” The objection to wish-fulfillment is that it is “always outside of time, outside of narrative” and history; “what is more damaging, from the present perspective, is that desire . . . remains locked into the category of the individual subject, even if the form taken by the individual in it is no longer the ego or the self, but the individual body. . . . the need to transcend individualistic categories and modes of interpretation is in many ways the fundamental issue for any doctrine of the political unconscious” (The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981], pp. 66, 68, italics added). 23. Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, eds. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), 210–24. 24. Jameson, p. 12. So, too, Freud’s “hermeneutic manual” can be of use to the political critic (p. 65). 25. “Norman Holland’s suggestive term,” Jameson, p. 49. 26. Jameson, p. 67. Cf. Paul Brown, “My use of Freudian terms does not mean that I endorse its ahistorical, Europocentric and sexist models of psychical development. However, a materialist criticism deprived of such concepts as displacement and condensation would be seriously impoverished . . .” (p. 71, n. 35). 27. Jameson discussing Althusser (p. 30) and Greimas (p. 48). 28. The Crown of Life (1947; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966), p. 255. 29. See Trevor R. Griffiths, “ ‘This Island’s mine’: Caliban and Colonialism,” Yearbook of English Studies, 13 (1983), 159–80. 30. Griffiths, p. 166. 31. Virginia Mason Vaughan, “ ‘Something Rich and Strange’: Caliban’s Theatrical Metamorphoses,” SQ, 36 (1985), 390–405, esp. p. 390. 32. Erlich, “Shakespeare’s Colonial Metaphor,” p. 49; Paul Brown, p. 48. 33. Even St. Paul in his travels (echoed in the play) met natives who—like Caliban—thought him a god. 34. Hulme produces as evidence against Shakespeare these four words from the cast list, which Shakespeare may or may not have written (“Hurricanes in the Caribbees,” p. 72). 35. Alden T. Vaughan, “Shakespeare’s Indian: The Americanization of Caliban,” SQ, 39 (1988), 137–53. He argues that the intention miscarried not only at the time but also for the three centuries following. He adds, “Rather, from the Restoration until the late 1890s, Caliban appeared on stage and in critical literature as almost everything but an Indian” (p. 138). 36. Hulme, while noting Caliban’s “anomalous nature,” sees the anomaly as yet another colonialist strategy: “In ideological terms [Caliban is] a compromise formation and one achieved, like all such formations, only at the expense of distortion elsewhere” (“Hurricanes in the Caribbees,” pp. 71, 72). This begs the question: Caliban can only be a “distortion” if he is intended to represent someone. But that is precisely the question—is he meant to represent a Native American? Sidney Lee noted that Caliban’s method of building dams for fish reproduces the Indians’; though he is often cited by later writers as an authority on the resemblance, the rest of his evidence is not convincing (“The Call of the West: America and Elizabethan England,” Elizabethan and Other Essays, ed. Frederick S. Boas [Oxford: Clarendon

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Press, 1929], pp. 263–301). G. Wilson Knight has an impressionistic essay about the relationship between Caliban and Indians (“Caliban as Red Man” [1977] in Shakespeare’s Styles, eds. Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank, and G. K. Hunter [London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980]). Hulme lists Caliban’s resemblances to Caribs (“Hurricanes in the Caribbees”), and Kermode cites details taken from natives visited during both the Old and the New World voyages. 37. The Indians who would appear in Chapman’s 1613 masque would be fully equipped with feathers. See R. R. Cawley, The Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama (Boston: D. C. Heath; London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1938), p. 359, and Orgel, “Shakespeare and the Cannibals,” pp. 44, 47. 38. Shakespeare had apparently read up on his monsters (R. R. Cawley, “Shakspere’s Use of the Voyagers,” p. 723, and Frey, passim), but he picked up the stereotypes only to play with them ostentatiously (in Stephano’s and Trinculo’s many discredited guesses about Caliban’s identity) or to leave them hanging (in Prospero’s identification of Caliban as “devil”). 39. Hulme, “Hurricanes in the Caribbees,” p. 74. 40. Lamming (n. 1, above), pp. 98–99. 41. Lamming, p. 97; Erlich, p. 49. 42. The play also seems anti-colonialist because it includes the comic sections with Stephano and Trinculo, which show colonialism to be “nakedly avaricious, profiteering, perhaps even pointless”; but this too can be seen as a rationalization: “This low version of colonialism serves to displace possibly damaging charges . . . against properly-constituted civil authority on to the already excremental products of civility, the masterless” (Paul Brown, p. 65). 43. Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse,” pp. 570–71; Leininger (n. 1, above), pp. 126–27. 44. Leininger, p. 127. 45. As Fiedler’s book implies (n. 9, above), she is less like anything American than like the Frenchwoman Joan of Arc, who also tried to save herself from the law by claiming she was pregnant with a bastard; Joan simply wasn’t as successful (see pp. 43–81, esp. p. 77). 46. See Brockbank, p. 193. Even these details can be discounted as rationalizations, of course. Paul Brown, for example, explains Sycorax’s presence as a rationalization: by degrading her black magic, he argues, Shakespeare makes Prospero seem better than he is (pp. 60–61). Hulme notes that Sycorax may be Prospero’s invention, pointing out that we never see any direct evidence that she was present (Colonial Encounters, p. 115). Orgel links Caliban’s claims of legitimacy by birth to James I’s claims (“Prospero’s Wife,” pp. 58–59). 47. See Fiedler, p. 205. 48. Erlich, “Shakespeare’s Colonial Metaphor,” p. 63. 49. The trend, moreover, is to move away from anthropomorphic terms like “repression” or “censorship,” themselves inherited from the political terminology on which Freud drew for his own. Like the vocabulary of “scientific” hydraulics on which Freud also drew for his notions of libido flowing and damming up, the older terms are being replaced by contemporary terminologies more appropriate to describing a conflict among meanings or interpretations, rather than between anthropomorphized forces engaged in a simple struggle “for” and “against.” 50. Spaniards, he writes, “taught their Hounds, fierce Dogs, to teare [the Indians] in peeces” (A Briefe Narration of the Destruction of the Indies by the Spaniards

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[1542 (?)], Samuel Purchas, Purchas: His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. [Glasgow: Maclehose and Sons, 1905–1907], Vol. XVIII, 91). This was apparently a common topos, found also in Eden’s translation of Peter Martyr’s Decades of the Newe Worlde (1555), included in Eden’s Historie of Trauaile (1577), which Shakespeare read for The Tempest. It was also used by Greene and Deloney (Cawley, Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama, pp. 383–84). 51. Hulme, “Hurricanes in the Caribbees,” pp. 63–66; see also Orgel on this “New World topos” in “Shakespeare and the Cannibals,” pp. 41–44. 52. Neither was Montaigne’s in the essay that has been taken as a source for the play. Scholars are still debating about Montaigne’s attitude toward cannibals, though all agree that his critical attitude toward Europeans was clear in the essay. 53. This blend of Old and New World characteristics, earlier seen as characteristic of New World discourse, is acknowledged in many of the revisionist studies but is seen as one of the rhetorical strategies used to control Indians. 54. William Strach[e]y, “A True Reportorie . . . ,” Purchas, Vol. XIX, p. 62. For the citation of Purchas as colonialist, see Hulme, “Hurricanes in the Caribbees,” p. 78, n. 21. 55. Paul Brown, p. 64. 56. This is an entirely separate question from another that one might ask: How comparable were Purchas’s remarks, taken from the collection of travelers’ tales which he edited, censored, and used to support his colonialist ideal, on the one hand, and a play, on the other? In Purchas, Richard Marienstras argues, “the multiplicity of interpretations modulates and reinforces a single ideological system. The same can certainly not be said of . . . The Tempest” (New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, trans. Janet Lloyd [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985], p. 169). This entire book, which devotes a chapter to The Tempest, is an excellent study of “certain aspects of Elizabethan ideology and . . . the way these are used in Shakespeare” (p. 1). 57. See Pechter (n. 4, above). This kind of “condition,” he argues, is really a precondition in the sense that it is assumed to be logically (if not chronologically) prior. It is assumed to have the kind of explanatory power that “the Elizabethan world view” was once accorded (p. 297). 58. See, for example, the following contemporary tracts reprinted in Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of . . . North America, ed. Peter Force, 4 vols. (1836–47; rpt. New York: Peter Smith, 1947): R. I., “Nova Brittania: OFFERING MOST Excellent fruites by Planting IN VIRGINIA. Exciting all such as be well affected to further the same” (1609), Vol. 1, No. 6; “Virginia richly valued” (1609), Vol. 4, No. 1; “A TRVE DECLARATION of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia, With a confutation of such scandalous reports as haue tended to the disgrace of so worthy an enterprise” (1610), Vol. 3, No. 1; Sil. Jourdan, “A PLAINE DESCRIPTION OF THE BARMVDAS, NOW CALLED SOMMER ILANDS” (1613), Vol. 3, No. 3. In The Genesis of the United States, ed. Alexander Brown, 2 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), see also: Robert Gray, “A GOOD SPEED to Virginia” (1609), Vol. 1, 293–302; “A True and Sincere declaration of the purpose and ends of the Plantation begun in Virginia of the degrees which it hath received; and meanes by which it hath beene advanced: and the . . . conclusion of His Majesties Councel of that Colony . . . untill by the mercies of GOD it shall retribute a fruitful harvest to the Kingdome of heaven, and this Common-Wealth” (1609), Vol. 1, 337–53;

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“A Publication by the Counsell of Virginea, touching the Plantation there” (1609), Vol. 1, 354–56; R. Rich, “NEWES FROM VIRGINIA: THE LOST FLOCKE TRIUMPHANT . . .” (1610), Vol. 1, 420–26. 59. “A Trve Declaration,” p. 6. 60. Alexander Brown, in The Genesis of the United States, reprints extracts from the following pertinent documents: William Symonds, “VIRGINIA: A SERMON PREACHED AT WHITECHAPPEL . . .” (1609), Vol. 1, 282–91; Daniel Price, “SAVLES PROHIBITION STAIDE . . . And to the Inditement of all that persecute Christ with a reproofe of those that traduce the Honourable Plantation of Virginia” (1609), Vol. 1, 312–16; and, most important, William Crashaw’s sermon titled “A Newe-Yeeres Gift to Virginea,” and preached, as the title page announced, before “Lord La Warre Lord Governour and Captaine Generall of Virginia, and others of [the] Counsell . . . At the said Lord Generall his . . . departure for Virginea . . . Wherein both the lawfulnesses of that action is maintained and the necessity thereof is also demonstrated, not so much out of the grounds of Policie, as of Humanity, Equity and Christianity” (1610), Vol. 1, 360–75. 61. In Alexander Brown, see William Crashaw for two of these references (in “A Newe-Yeeres Gift to Virginea” [1610], and “Epistle Dedicatory” to Alexander Whitaker’s “Good Newes from Virginia” [1613], Vol. 2, 611–20); and see Ralphe Hamor in A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginea (1615), Virginia State Library Publications, No. 3 (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1957). 62. Pp. 16, 17. 63. For the general history of the period, see David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974); Alexander Brown’s Genesis identifies similar shifting motives in the history of colonization. Such voyages were made famous by often-reprinted accounts, especially in collections by Richard Eden and Richard Hakluyt, both of whose anthologies Shakespeare would consult for The Tempest. In the introductory material in these collections, as in the voyages themselves, the self-interest is obvious but so mixed with excitement and utopian hopes, and so focused on competition with Spain, that the issue of relation to Indians was dwarfed by comparison. 64. If he didn’t succeed in establishing a settlement, he would lose his patent. His interest in the patent rather than the colony was shown by his apparent negligence in searching for his lost colony (Quinn, n. 63, above, p. 300). He could hold onto his patent only so long as there was hope that the colonists were still alive; clearly the hope was worth more to Raleigh than the colony. 65. Matthew P. Andrews, The Soul of a Nation: The Founding of Virginia and the Projection of New England (New York: Scribner’s, 1943), p. 125. An entire popular literature developed, so much so that the Archbishop of York complained that “of Virginia there be so many tractates, divine, human, historical, political, or call them as you please, as no further intelligence I dare desire” (quoted in Andrews, p. 125). 66. It is this issue rather than colonialism that stimulated an earlier period of political commentary on the New World material in The Tempest: Charles M. Gayley, Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America (New York: Macmillan, 1917); A. A. Ward, “Shakespeare and the Makers of Virginia,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 9 (1919); see also E. P. Kuhl, “Shakespeare and the Founders of America: The Tempest,” Philological Quarterly, 41 (1962), 123–46.

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67. Contributing to the welter of contradictory discourses was the Spanish ambassador’s flow of letters to Spain insisting, not irrationally, that the whole purpose of maintaining a profitless colony like Jamestown was to establish a base for pirate raids against Spanish colonies. 68. Letter from Southampton to the Earl of Salisbury, 15 December 1609, in Alexander Brown, Vol. 1, 356–57. 69. The quantity and quality of the objections, which have not on the whole survived, has been judged by the nature of the many defenses thought necessary to answer them. See notes 58, 60, 61. 70. A practice that Shakespeare did not admire if Stephano and Trinculo are any indication. 71. As are the two monsters cited as possible prototypes for Caliban by Geoffrey Bullough (Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958], Vol. 8, 240). There were exceptions, of course, as in George Percy’s Observations . . . Of the Plantation of . . . Virginia (1606), in Purchas, Vol. XVIII, 403–19. 72. See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580–1640 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), pp. 127–29. The origins of this nearly universal belief in Indian treachery are of course multiple, ranging from the readiness of the English to project their fears onto any available victim, whether Indians or mariners (who were also regularly accused of treachery in these narratives), to the prevailing stereotypes of the Other, to specific English acts of provocation, to the general tensions inherent in the situation. Without arguing for any one of these, I merely wish to suggest that the notion of “colonialist discourse” simplifies a complex situation. 73. Even as proto-white men, their skin as tanned rather than naturally black, etc. See Kupperman, and Orgel, “Shakespeare and the Cannibals.” 74. Greenblatt, in his study of the ways in which white men verbally “colonialized” Indians, emphasizes the degree to which whites assumed that the Indians had no language. Although he notes that there were exceptions, he makes it sound as if these exceptions were rare and were largely confined to the “rough, illiterate sea dog, bartering for gold trinkets on a faraway beach,” rather than to the “captains or lieutenants whose accounts we read” (“Learning to Curse,” pp. 564–65). On the contrary, even the earliest travelers had often included glossaries of Indian terms in their reports (e.g., the Glossary in the introductory material of Eden’s translation of Martyr’s Decades [1555], as well as in various later English reports reprinted in Purchas: His Pilgrimes [1625]); and in reading through Purchas’s helter-skelter collection, one is struck by the number of writers who grant automatic respect to the Indians’ language. A possibly figurative rather than literal force for comments on the Indians’ “want of language” is suggested by Gabriel Archer’s account of a 1602 voyage. Here it is the English, not the Indians, who are deficient in this respect: they “spake divers Christian words, and seemed to understand much more then we, for Want of Language, could comprehend ” (“Relation of Captain Gosnold’s voyage,” Purchas, Vol. XVIII, 304, italics mine). 75. See R. R. Cawley, Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama, passim, and Unpathed Waters: Studies in the Influence of the Voyagers on Elizabethan Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1940), pp. 234–41. Neither of R. R. Cawley’s two books about the voyagers’ influence on contemporary English literature cites any pre-1611 passage of more than a few lines. It is true that in the 1580s Marlowe’s

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plays took off from the general sense of vastness and possibility opened up by voyages to the New as well as to the Old World. In addition Drayton wrote an “Ode to the Virginia Voyage,” perhaps expressly for the settlers leaving for Jamestown in 1606; and one line in Samuel Daniel’s “Musophilis” has a colonialist ring: he speaks of “vent[ing] the treasure of our tongue . . . T’ inrich unknowing Nations with our stores.” True, too, that in a quite different spirit Jonson, Marston, and Chapman collaborated in Eastward Ho (1605) to make fun of gallants flocking to Virginia with expectations as great as those bringing foolish victims to Face and Subtle’s alchemical chimeras. But while Marlowe participates in the spirit of romantic adventure associated with voyaging and treasure-hunting, and Eastward Ho satirizes it, neither deals at all with the New World or with the New World natives. 76. The three brief exceptions are references to Spanish cruelty to Indians, all published before the truce with Spain. The Stationers’ Register lists “The crueltie of ye Spaniardes toward th[e] Indians, a ballad” (1586) and “Spanishe cruelties” (1601), now lost. Robert Greene notes in passing that the Spaniards hunted Indians with dogs, while by contrast the English treated the natives with “such courtesie, as they thought the English Gods, and the Spaniardes both by rule and conscience halfe Devils” (The Spanish Masquerado [1589], Life and . . . Works, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 15 vols. [London and Aylesbury: privately printed, 1881–86], Vol. V, 282–83). See Cawley, Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama, pp. 385–86. 77. When Strachey finishes with his account of the Bermuda episode and turns to a description of Virginia, he does devote one sentence to the Indians’ treachery. 78. See Frey, p. 31. 79. In his edition of The Tempest, Kermode notes this parallel with Bartholomew Fair (2.6.76–77), “Looke into any Angle o’ the towne, (the Streights, or the Bermuda’s) . . .” (p. 24, n. 223). 80. Letter from Carleton to Chamberlain, August 1607, in Alexander Brown, Vol. 1, 111–13. 81. Many other similarities link The Tempest to the earlier play, including some which might have been taken to suggest The Tempest’s focus on the New World. Thus, for example, Stephano cries out when he first sees Caliban, “Do you put tricks upon’s with salvages and men of Inde, ha?” (2.2.58–59). But Berowne, though rooted in the Old World, resorts to similarly exotic analogies to describe the passion which Rosaline should inspire in his colleagues. Who sees her, he says, That, (like a rude and savage man of Inde), At the first op’ning of the gorgeous east, Bows not his vassal head . . . ? (Love’s Labor’s Lost, 4.3.218–20) See Kermode’s note on the line in The Tempest. 82. Specific resemblances between subplots here and the plots of other plays have been noted (between the plot to murder Alonso and Macbeth, between Ferdinand’s courtship of Miranda and Romeo and Juliet, etc.). See Alvin B. Kernan, “The Great Fair of the World and the Ocean Island: Bartholomew Fair and The Tempest,” in The Revels History of Drama in English, 8 vols., eds. J. Leeds Barroll, Alexander Leggatt, Richard Hosley, Alvin Kernan (London: Methuen, 1975), Vol. III,

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456–74. G. Wilson Knight has described the place of The Tempest in Shakespeare’s overarching myth of the tempest. Even more suggestive, Leslie Fiedler has traced the less obvious personal mythology that provides a context for the play. Drawing on marginal details, he shows the play’s concern with themes that pervade the entire canon, such as the interracial marriage that here, not accidentally, initiates the action of the play. His work is the starting point for mine. 83. Barker and Hulme, p. 198. 84. Hulme, Colonial Encounters, p. 133. 85. Paul Brown, p. 69. 86. Barker and Hulme, p. 202. 87. The last time Prospero got so angry that Miranda had to apologize was when Ferdinand began to court Miranda. 88. See A. D. Nuttall’s discussion of the blend of colonialist and sexual tensions in The Tempest, “Two Unassimilable Men,” in Shakespearian Comedy, Stratfordupon-Avon Studies 14 (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), pp. 210–40, esp. p. 216. 89. The incestuous impulse implicit in the situation is even clearer in Shakespeare’s own earlier romances; both Fiedler and Nuttall, among others, have explored these in the context of the vast literature of romance that lies behind the play. See also Mark Taylor, Shakespeare’s Darker Purpose: A Question of Incest (New York: AMS Press, 1982). 90. Fiedler, p. 234. 91. Marianne Novy, Love’s Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill and London: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 63–82. 92. All Shakespeare quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). The earlier group of critics who had pointed out the racist assumptions in Antonio’s behavior made many of the same points recently made on Caliban’s behalf. The two cases are indeed similar, and although both can be seen as examples of “colonialism”—with the word “colonialism” used very loosely as it is today for any exploitative appropriation—the more historically specific “colonialist discourse” does not seem to be the appropriate context for Shylock. 93. Nuttall (n. 88, above) notes the strangeness of the Duke’s explosion and the fact that Jaques’s request for a fool’s license “has shaken Duke Senior” (p. 231). 94. See Richard P. Wheeler’s analysis in Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1981). 95. Primarily of course in the sonnets, but in the plays as well. See Novy’s discussion of self-assertiveness in Shylock. 96. Caliban later joins the two courtly servants in appropriately scatological double entendres. 97. Norman Holland, “Caliban’s Dream,” The Design Within: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare, ed. M. D. Faber (New York: Science House, 1970), pp. 521–33. 98. Compare Antonio’s cold calculations as he plans to kill Alonso. 99. Albeit in a “My mommy is going to get you” fashion. 100. Nuttall, p. 225. 101. So, too, any child might complain that he was taught to speak and now his “profit on ’t” is to be trapped in the prison house of language.

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102. See Leininger, p. 125, for the most effective presentation of this view; also Paul Brown, p. 63. 103. Here, too, Shakespeare seems unusual. Not until our child-centered, post-Freudian age do we find writers so directly representing the aliens on our galactic frontier as children—whether as innocents like Steven Spielberg’s E.T. or as proto-savages like his Gremlins. Others had associated the primitive with metaphorical childhood: De Bry’s 1590 edition of Harriot’s Briefe and True Report and, later, Purchas’s version of Strachey associated the primitive Indians with the childhood of the English nation, and writers spoke of the Indians as “younger brethren” (Kupperman, n. 72, above, p. 170). What is unusual in Shakespeare is the emphasis and the detailed portrayal of emotional as well as cognitive childishness. Leah Marcus argues, in another context, that the English in the chaotic and disorienting intellectual context of the seventeenth century were especially susceptible to dreams of the golden age—and to sympathetic portrayals of childhood wholeness (Childhood and Cultural Despair [Pittsburgh, Pa.: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1978]). Most of the instances of such portrayals did not appear until later in the century, however. 104. Edward A. Armstrong, Shakespeare’s Imagination (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1963), p. 52. 105. Might the brothers’ definition by opposition perhaps have influenced Shakespeare’s choice of names: Prospero and Antonio? 106. John B. Bender, “The Day of The Tempest,” English Literary History, 47 (1980), 235–58. 107. It also marks Shakespeare’s return to the pattern of withdrawal from active life used in Love’s Labor’s Lost—but this time with a difference. The earlier play had shown young men hoping to conquer death by forswearing the body and what it represents. The Tempest shows an old man coming to terms with death by acknowledging the body and what it represents. 108. Elliot Jacques offers a related account, in Kleinian terms, of the role of infantile demands and emotions in the effort to come to terms with death in “Death and the Mid-life Crisis,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 46 (1965), 502–14. 109. John Forrester, “Psychoanalysis or Literature?” French Studies, 35 (1981), 170–79, esp. p. 172. 110. Cited in Levin (n. 9, above), p. 183. 111. See Bender (n. 106, above) on the way dreams are always followed by violence in the play; the violence is not a cause of the problem on the island but rather an effect. 112. Andrews (n. 65, above), p. 126. 113. Jameson cites as being “very much in the spirit of [his] present work” the concern of Deleuze and Guattari “to reassert the specificity of the political content of everyday life and of individual fantasy-experience and to reclaim it from . . . reduction to the merely subjective and to the status of psychological projection” (The Political Unconscious, n. 22, above, p. 22). 114. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in North America (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), p. 54. 115. The original version of this essay was presented at a session on “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance History,” chaired by Richard Wheeler at the 1987 MLA

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annual meeting. The current version has greatly benefited from careful readings by Janet Adelman, Anne and Rob Goble, Carol Neely, Marianne Novy, Martin Wiener, and several anonymous readers.

QQQ 1992—Harold Bloom. “Introduction,” from Caliban (Bloom’s Major Literary Characters) Harold Bloom (1930– ) is a professor at Yale University. He has edited dozens of anthologies of literature and literary criticism and is the author of more than 30 books, including The Western Canon and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

We are now in the age of Caliban rather than in the Time of Ariel or the Era of Prospero. Our archetypal, politically correct article on Shakespeare these days is likely to be called “Caliban and the Discourse of Colonialism,” or else “Ariel and the Economy of Exploitation,” or even “Prospero and Mercantilism.” The Tempest is an uncanny play; nothing much happens after that opening storm that rather inappropriately gives the drama its title. Try to write a plot summary of The Tempest and you will begin to grimace almost immediately. The last Tempest I saw in New York City pretended that there was a plot, with unhappy consequences for Frank Langella, who acted Prospero with an apologetic air, as if he wanted us to know how much happier (and better) he would be as Count Dracula. He was not helped much by an inscrutable Ariel, who seemed to want his freedom so as to escape from the stage to an appropriate dive, or by a hulking Caliban who assumed he was the mainstay of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Shakespeare’s mysterious Orphic drama is never easy to perform, and is more difficult to understand now than it ever was. What is the genre of The Tempest? We have agreed to call it a romance, which is useful enough, since its protagonist is a magus, and his chief aide is a spirit, perhaps even an angel. Caliban, his slave, probably is not to be thought of as wholly human. There is something amphibian about him, something that suggests the sea-world. It is, after all, his island, as even the most politically incorrect among us would acknowledge. Shakespeare has so capacious an imagination of justice and of injustice that we scarcely comprehend why he does not conclude The Tempest with Caliban left alone upon the island, perhaps to await the female survivor of another shipwreck, with whom he could people the isle with Calibans. The possibility of Caliban being consigned to his native place is never entertained by anyone, Caliban included. It is as though the island, being magical, must cease to exist after Prospero renounces his art and

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leaves the theatre of his exile. More hurtful is a deeper matter; Prospero and Caliban have too intimate, too familial a relation for it to be dissolved. They loathe and fear one another; Caliban has plotted to murder Prospero; they have, in different ways, and from radically different perspectives, betrayed one another. Most profoundly, they have hurt one another intolerably; each suffers from the pride of wounded and abrogated affection. Each sees the other as having forsaken trust. Yet Prospero finally acknowledges Caliban as being his, almost as though Caliban was Adam to the magus’s Yahweh. The attempted rape of Miranda was almost an incestuous offense, for in many respects Prospero and Caliban are father and son. If you are politically correct you will see this very differently, and will dismiss the quasi-Oedipal complication as paternalistic colonialism. But Shakespeare is not politically correct, even if he is no more Prospero than he is Caliban. The art itself never becomes nature in The Tempest. Prospero is subdued, almost ruined, by his total victory; Caliban is merely subdued by his defeat, and is on the verge of a kind of victory through grace, just beyond the drama’s conclusion. Of all Shakespeare’s plays that are not tragedies, this one trails off in the subtlest and most intense of sadnesses. Part of our difficulty in absorbing Caliban is his originality, even in Shakespeare’s cosmos of characters. He is in the tradition of Shakespeare’s displaced spirits, of figures who seem to have wandered in from the wrong play: Shylock, Barnardine, Lear’s Fool, Malvolio. Yet to associate Caliban with displacement is a peculiar irony; only he, in the play, is where he belongs. A Hermetic sage is an absurd educator for Caliban; it is the education that constitutes the displacement. Everything that we like best in Caliban precedes his education. The aesthete in Caliban owes nothing to Prospero, whose music is never natural. Caliban before Prospero was the wordless poet of his own climate; after Prospero, Caliban knows language, largely to curse and to proclaim his sufferings, and his resentment But not entirely; Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, That if I then had wak’d after long sleep, Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming. The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I wak’d I cried to dream again. The endowment for apprehending natural music is Caliban’s, and the pathos is also his own, each by birthright. What is most moving is the opening

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signature: “Be not afeard,” for the deformed Caliban is essentially timid, and scarcely partakes of the terrible nature of his late mother, the blue-eyed hag and sorceress, Sycorax. Caliban’s father is never revealed; we have only Prospero’s angry surmise: “got by the devil himself / Upon thy wicked dam.” As a “freckled whelp,” uniquely born upon an uninhabited island, Caliban is now a hero of our contemporary School of Resentment, who convert him into an anti-imperialist allegory. Here is the spokesperson for the New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt, raising up Caliban as a beacon for Cultural Criticism: Caliban, of course, does not triumph: it would take different artists from different cultures—the postcolonial Caribbean and African cultures of our own times—to rewrite Shakespeare’s play and make good on Caliban’s claim. But even within the powerful constraints of Shakespeare’s Jacobean culture, the artist’s imaginative mobility enables him to display cracks in the glacial front of princely power and to record a voice, the voice of the displaced and oppressed, that is heard scarcely anywhere else in his own time. If it is the task of cultural criticism to decipher the power of Prospero, it is its task to hear the accents of Caliban. Confronted by this, I begin by murmuring that we have been hearing the accents of Caliban for some centuries now, and without the necessity of confusing them with the accents of Malcolm X. But then, the Cultural Critic Greenblatt deciphers the power of Prospero by telling us that: “As magician Prospero resembles no one in the play so much as Sycorax,” a judgment that might have mystified Shakespeare himself, not to mention Ariel, or even Caliban. Caliban, however you historicize him, is not going to turn into a classic object of the imperialistic drives of all the Dead White European Males, among whom Shakespeare reigns supreme. The pathos of Caliban centers his dramatic power, but it is not the pathos of victimage, as conveyed by Stephano-like cultural historicists. It belongs instead to a greater pathos of displacement, which is one of Shakespeare’s unique originalities. Like Shylock, Malvolio, and Lear’s Fool, Caliban suffers an uncanny fate, in which the virtues of one mode of being are likely to become self-destructive when transferred to another context. Shylock, for all his dignity, becomes a hideous comic villain, and the devoted Malvolio becomes a grotesque comic butt. Lear’s Fool, the damage already being done, does not rally the old king, but drives him on to madness. Caliban, not a natural man, but rather the natural child of an unnatural hag, has sustained three shocks before the play even commences: education by a magus; rejection after his attempted rape of Miranda; total powerlessness in relation to Prospero’s domination over

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him. Alone on the island, Caliban would have become the island, without violating his own nature. Prospero’s Hermetic art is white magic, and has nothing in common with the horrors of Sycorax. Prospero’s true resemblance is to his favorite spirit, Ariel, who shares both Prospero’s delighted pride in his art, and also Prospero’s coldness. Caliban and Prospero are antithetical to one another, as they desperately discover. It is Caliban’s island, but Prospero’s play, and any critic who tries to displace Prospero will become only another Stephano. Poor Caliban follows Stephano, and lives to learn that freedom would not have ensued for him, even had Prospero been murdered. No one is free in The Tempest, where only time triumphs, victor even over the Hermetic art of Prospero. Renunciation of his magic does not redeem Prospero from the harmonies and discords of time. The play does not idealize the magus, even as it refuses to idealize the only semi-human Caliban, who is a murderous coward, the most timorous of monsters. Earth and water together are only half of nature, or of imagination, even as air and fire together give us only the other half, Ariel. Shelley, as extreme a revolutionary as Trotsky, shrewdly identified with Ariel, a far better candidate for Marxist exaltation than the wretched Caliban can be. Like our contemporary academic lemmings, Caliban is an inauthentic rebel, a parody of the exploited, the insulted, the injured. In this again, he curiously shares with Shylock and with Malvolio. Yet they have no Prospero, who at last will confront the truth of relationship: “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine.” A failed teacher (rather than a cultural imperialist), Prospero asserts something well beyond ownership. Caliban’s initial reaction is a hopeless misunderstanding: “I shall be pinched to death.” But this is now the Prospero who will retire into mortality: “where / Every third thought shall be my grave.” The rarer surprise comes from Caliban: “I’ll be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace.” Above all poets, even Ovid, Shakespeare’s center is the representation of change. His great topos is changeability. Those who cannot change never can abide Shakespeare, even as they cannot survive in his scenes. Caliban can change, and will, though I am not certain that we fully understand how and why this can be. I return, as I close, to the mutual bitterness between Caliban and Prospero, that begins to soften only as the drama ends. Prospero’s failure as an educator takes its force only from the Orphic context of Renaissance Hermeticism: It is the failure of Ficino, Bruno and Pico della Mirandola, and not the failure of Shakespeare. Caliban’s pragmatic refusal to transcend his own nature does not disturb us, even if we are politically incorrect to the highest degree. But for the great Hermeticist Prospero, it is the first intimation of those recalcitrances that at last will animate his rejection of his own art. As a redeemed Demiurge, Prospero has been as inadequate as Caliban’s first maker. Adding to the pain of defeat is the poignance of Caliban’s own sense of loss:

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When thou cam’st first, Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me Water with berries in’t, and teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night; and then I lov’d thee . . . I suppose that if you believe ideology is everything, and personal relations are nothing, then the accents you overhear in this are those of a native victim of paternalism and colonialism. But what, all too briefly, allied Caliban and Prospero was an absolutely personal relationship. The accents I hear are those of a mutually failed love, of an adoption slain, as William Blake would have said, upon the stems of generation.

QQQ

THE TEMPEST IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY q

Much of the response to The Tempest in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century was influenced by what can broadly be called “postcolonialism.” Postcolonial criticism is concerned with European colonization of other nations and with the colonial relations of domination and submission, especially with regard to race and gender. Such criticism has tended to approach The Tempest as a work reflecting the prejudices of its historical period rather than expressing essential truths. Thus many readings of The Tempest in this period attempted to reveal imperial or colonial habits of mind and notions of relationship. Critics and theatrical productions often achieved this by deconstructing earlier readings of The Tempest that had come to be regarded as imperial, racist, or patriarchal and then reconstructing the text so that it might contribute to a decolonializing project. Recent critics, however, have used postcolonial approaches as strategies to explore The Tempest rather than as absolutes able to discredit and dismantle the play. Tom McAlindon distanced himself from orthodox postcolonial readings in 2001, when he thus evaluated the “colonization” that Prospero and Miranda undertake: “[T]he conception of Prospero as colonist loses much of its persuasiveness . . . when we perceive that his every word, prayer, and act is designed to effect the escape of his daughter and himself from a place they never chose to inhabit.” It is difficult to predict how critical readings and critical theories will shape The Tempest during the twenty-first century. The play’s past attraction for critics, however, suggests that scholarly interest in The Tempest will continue as time goes by and new critical ideas arise.

2001—Tom McAlindon. “The Discourse of Prayer in The Tempest,” from Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 Tom McAlindon (1932– ) is professor emeritus of English at the University of Hull. He has written critical studies on topics ranging 247

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from Greek and medieval romance to the poetry of Yeats, but his main interest is in Renaissance drama. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos.

Ferdinand. My language! Heavens! (I.ii. 431) Caliban. You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language! (I.ii. 365–7)

I Few critics today would attach special significance to Ferdinand’s mildly pious little exclamation. For many, however, Caliban’s outburst is highly significant, and its meaning more or less fixed. They see it as the most important utterance in a play whose dominant discourse seeks to euphemize colonialist oppression, yet fails to suppress contradiction. The protest of reality itself, the curse produces a moment of absolute moral victory for the enslaved native of the island and is so potent in its devastating justness that it casts a shadow over the final scene, determining, in effect, our overall conception of the play. In some of the more persuasive colonialist interpretations, Caliban’s curse on his language teacher is taken as proof that language functions in the play in exact accord with the alleged pronouncement of the bishop of Avila in 1492: “Language is the perfect instrument of empire.” Such readings, however, do not consider the play’s many other allusions to language and how they might strengthen or weaken the colonialist interpretation of Caliban’s curse. These allusions function as part of a specific discourse: the language of prayer; it is to this context, I believe, that Caliban’s curse (like Ferdinand’s pious exclamation) belongs, and from which we must derive its significance. The discourse of prayer, it must be said, is fairly conspicuous in all the romances: it is inter-involved with their providentialist ideology, their special fondness for the numinous, and an idealist mode of characterization that habitually associates noble characters (the heroines especially) with sainthood and divinity. But, although important in this context, the discourse of prayer as used in Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale differs considerably from its role in The Tempest, where it is distinguished by its paradoxical and dialectical character and its central involvement in the play’s meanings. In fact, a more illuminating comparison for The Tempest would be with the contribution made by the discourse of prayer to the dramatic character and thematic bias of King Lear. By analysis of the way in which prayer functions in The Tempest I hope to challenge not only the claim that language functions on the island as a colonialist tool but also the notion of an essentially egoistic and tyrannical Prospero and a finally unreconciled Caliban; no less controversially, I would also hope to show

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that instead of legitimizing an intrinsically oppressive hierarchical order, the play, while not dispensing with the hierarchical model of society, advances a leveling, horizontal ethic of interdependence and reciprocity. Although my method is primarily one of close reading, it will entail reference to the way in which the text encodes certain aspects of early modern culture hitherto ignored by critics, and is, in that sense, firmly historicist. Nevertheless, I shall be implicitly endorsing humanist conceptions of The Tempest as a work that is intentionally and effectively of trans-historical as well as contemporary significance. Moreover, although I would not deny that it is deeply engaged with problems of power, authority, and subjectification, my extra-textual move will not be toward political but rather toward religious, affective, and rhetorical aspects of Tudor and Jacobean culture. Since politics and religion were so intimately related in the period, this distinction might seem problematic, but I do not accept the assumption that religion should be understood solely in terms of power.

II I shall begin by noting that the root context of Caliban’s curse is a conceptual antithesis that runs throughout The Tempest, an antithesis in which the other term is blessing. Curse and blessing are intimately related and unstable opposites, since each is a form of prayer, and since in religious and popular thought, what begins as a curse often becomes a blessing, and vice versa. Blessing and curse, however, are not the only forms of prayer in The Tempest. There is petitionary prayer and the prayer of worship or adoration. Prayerful and prayer-like forms of expression were classified as figures of speech in rhetorical tradition. In the 1593 edition of Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence, “the most extensive and accurate treatment of the figures in English,” the curse (ara or imprecatio), the blessing (eulogia or benedictio), and the petitionary prayer (obtestatto) are grouped among the so-called “Figures of Exclamation,” those “used most commonly to utter vehement affections in vehement formes.” A figure in the same group closely related to ara, and one to which Prospero is often inclined, is cataplexis or comminatto, in which the speaker “denounceth a threatening against some person, people, citie, common wealth or country, declaring the certaintie or likelihood of plagues, or punishments to fall upon them for their wickednesse” (Peacham gives a biblical example). And a figure closely related to eulogia is paenismus, where the speaker expresses joy that some good has been obtained or some evil avoided: not necessarily a prayer, but yet an utterance in which the speaker might feel, or seem to feel, that he or she is blessed, that something providential has occurred (the paean was originally a thanksgiving chant for deliverance addressed to Apollo or Artemis). Peacham’s example is from the Virgin Mary’s “Magnificat,” in which Mary rejoices beyond a common joy on hearing that she is to be the mother of the Redeemer: “From henceforth all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke 1.47–8).

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In Shakespeare’s language of prayer, it is undoubtedly the curse that modern audiences and readers will remember best. Both formal and informal, calculated and impulsive, curses abound in the histories and tragedies. Shakespeare’s curses are the language of fury, hatred, helplessness, and despair wrought to its uttermost. But the language of prayer continuously, if less audibly, highlights contrary aspects of human feeling and experience. It is used in expressions of love, kindness, and gratitude, in outbursts of joy and wonder, and in countless eloquent pleadings for mercy, forgiveness, and compassion. Although his plays are essentially secular, Shakespeare drew upon the language of prayer and religion as a storehouse of emotion and symbol to which his audience was readily responsive, using it as a mode of intensified expression for the feelings and values that were of greatest concern to him. The religious symbology of Petrarchan tradition no doubt contributed to this habit of fusing secular and religious expression. It came easily, however, in a culture where “God buy you” (i.e., “God redeem you”) was a common variant for “God be with you,” and neither had yet been contracted to “goodbye.” Of special significance in The Tempest (as in Lear) is the parental blessing and its opposite, the parental curse. The parent’s blessing, for which the child customarily knelt, was a familiar and cherished ritual in the Tudor and Stuart period, one which extended into the adulthood of both son and daughter. Richard Whytforde, an early Tudor authority on child rearing, advised that “chylder [should] use and accustome theme selfe dayly to aske theyr fathers and mothers blessynges,” and he explained that “the blessyng of the parents doth fyrme and make stable the possession and the kynred of the childe.” Recalling how he was brought up to revere his father, Roger North wrote in the later seventeenth century that “the constant reward of blessing, which was observed as sacred, was a petit regale in his closet.” Thus, in the most emotionally charged moments in the romances, a daughter or son kneels and a parent blesses (Pericles, V.i.212; Cymbeline, V.vi.266–9; Winter’s Tale, V.iii.120–4; Tempest, V.i.180–4 ). In Cymbeline too, the brothers Arviragus and Guiderius beg their “father” Belarius’s blessing before going to war, feeling that without it they will perish in battle; at the end Belarius restores them to their true father thus: “The benediction of these covering heavens / Fall on their head like dew” (Cymbeline, IV.iv.44–50; V.vi.351–3). But the parental curse was deemed no less powerful than the blessing; indeed, it seems to have been regarded with special dread and awe: “the curse of the parents doth eradicate and . . . utterly destroy” the possessions and the kindred of the children, asserted Whytforde. Such a curse was thought to have blighted the House of Percy in the seventeenth century. In 1628, the ninth earl of Northumberland’s eldest son married the granddaughter of Robert Cecil. Northumberland was bitterly opposed to this union, for Cecil had been largely responsible for his sixteen years in the Tower of London. But there were no

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children to the marriage, and superstitious gossip long afterward maintained that this was due to a curse laid by the angry earl on his son’s union. The childlessness of his beautiful daughter Lucy, who married an untitled favorite of James I despite his strenuous opposition, was similarly ascribed to the paternal curse. The tragedy of King Lear and his daughters is comparable, beginning as it does with the bride-to-be departing from her father’s kingdom “stripped” of his “benediction” and “dowered” with his “curse” and moving swiftly to another terrible crisis in which he puts the curse of barrenness on her sister (King Lear, I.i.203, 265). As we shall see, too, the possibility of a father’s curse initially shadows the impending union of Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest.

III The most offensive curse in The Tempest, however, is arguably neither Prospero’s nor Caliban’s. In the opening scene, the word “plague” in the boatswain’s outburst, “A plague upon this howling” (i.e., the cries of the courtiers) is followed in the Folio by a long dash; this must have replaced a blasphemous oath or string of oaths which was heard on stage (I.i.35). The boatswain is immediately condemned as a “blasphemous, incharitable dog,” an “insolent noisemaker” (I.i.39–43); and when he reappears in the last scene in a dumbstruck condition he is greeted ironically as a loud-mouthed blasphemer chastened by experience: Now, blasphemy, That swear’st grace o’erboard: not an oath on shore? Hast thou no mouth by land? (V.i.221–3) But the boatswain’s outburst was forgivable, since he was being obstructed and distracted by the passengers in his attempts to keep the chain of command between the master and the men (“I pray now, keep below,” he had said politely enough to the courtiers [I.i.10]); and it is clear at the end that he is well-intentioned, dutiful, and beyond serious reproach. Although blasphemous, his execrations are comparable to Prospero’s cataplectic outbursts against the rebelliousness of Caliban, Ariel, and Ferdinand. But it should be observed, too, that in this opening scene the boatswain’s blasphemies are eclipsed by the desperate pieties of others: “All lost! To prayers, to prayers!” shout the Mariners; Gonzalo cries, “The King and Prince at prayers! Let’s assist them, / For our case is as theirs”; and Gonzalo brings the scene to an end, as Prospero will end the play, with an echo of the Lord’s Prayer: “The wills above be done” (I.i.49–52, 63). From the start, the discourse of prayer embodies a sense of the interdependence of human beings as well as of their common dependence on powers they cannot control. It conspires thus with the emblematic nature of the opening scene to reinforce the universal implication of the play: the imperiled ship, with its fearful

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and fractious passengers, recalls not only the ship of state, any state, but also “human nature,” which, says Francis Bacon in his essay “Of Adversity,” “saileth in the frail bark of the flesh through the waves of the world.” [13] The long and complex second scene (I.ii) includes Caliban’s first curses and a wide range of prayers, together with references to unsolicited blessings or graces. Miranda, one of the play’s two main voices of charitable compassion, pleads on the voyagers’ behalf with Prospero, the surrogate deity who commands the storm. Her prayers are answered because she is addressing someone in whom “the very virtue of compassion” outweighs the desire for vengeance (I.ii.27): “Tell your piteous heart / There’s no harm done” (I.ii.14–5). Echoing the Rheims translation of the Bible and its account of St. Paul’s miraculous voyage from Palestine to Rome, Ariel reports that everyone on board, like everyone on Paul’s ship, has survived shipwreck and landed on the island with “not a hair perished” (I.ii.218; Acts 27:34). At the end of the scene, however, Prospero plays the implacable god in response to Miranda’s triple appeal for pity on Ferdinand’s behalf: “Speak not you for him!” (1.11.463; also 1.11.478, 504). The reason for his harshness, however, is that he has a blessing in store for Miranda; that reason is buried in his cryptic but noticeably emphatic, if not impassioned, response to her question as to why he raised the storm: “I have done nothing but in care of thee, / Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter” (I.ii.16–7). (I shall return to this important explanation later.) However, like any powerful ruler, white magician, or saint, Prospero is no deity but a dependent mortal, and he knows it. As told in this second scene, his own story of survival duplicates the experience of the first scene. He was, he tells Miranda, “blessedly” helped hither “by Providence divine” (I.ii.63, 160). And Providence operated first through Gonzalo, who “out of his charity” supplied him with the material necessities for the journey as well as his books (I.ii.163); and, secondly, through Miranda herself, who was to her despairing father what the comforting angel was to the storm-tossed Paul: O, a cherubin Thou wast that did preserve me. Thou didst smile, Infus’d with a fortitude from heaven, When I have deck’d the sea with drops full salt which raised in me An undergoing stomach, to bear up Against what should ensue. (I.ii.152–8) Also in the second scene are Ariel’s angry protest and Prospero’s cataplectic responses. It might reasonably be said that Prospero’s outbursts at this point are hardly distinguishable from Caliban’s. His angry words, however, are not curses,

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in the true sense, but threats. And although they undoubtedly suggest furious severity and a harsh, inflammable nature, there are mitigating circumstances here, which too often are ignored. In the first place, Prospero is working desperately against time when his two servants erupt rebelliously (see I.ii.36–7, 179–89). More important, perhaps, is the way in which Ariel, being reminded that Prospero freed him from an eternity of pain, acknowledges his own ingratitude, begs “pardon” for his outburst, and promises to complete his tasks (I.ii.297). Caliban, who also stands accused of ingratitude, will require more than threats before he will ask for pardon and grace, but he will, as will others, his irascible master included (I.ii.347–50). The second scene also contains the lovers’ expressions of mutual wonder and worship. It has long been observed that in Ferdinand’s first words to Miranda there is an echo of Aeneas’ address to Venus in book 1 of the Aeneid (“o dea certe!”). But it was commonplace in Greek romance and its medieval and Renaissance derivatives for the hero to mistake the heroine for a supernatural being (goddess, angel, or fairy) at first encounter. Moreover, this familiar motif (and the Virgilian echo) is assimilated here to a complex system of religious metaphor. Each lover is divine to the other, the divine symbolizing humanity in its ideal form. To Miranda, who carries wonder and admiration in her name, Ferdinand is “a thing divine” (I.ii.421). To him she is “Most sure, the goddess / On whom these airs attend,” and he prays to her for “some good instruction” on how he should conduct himself on the island: “Vouchsafe my prayer” (I.ii.424–8). Worship is thus the play’s metaphor for love and admiration; it is what makes service acceptable, even desirable. So it is relevant also to Caliban, who figures as Ferdinand’s antithesis in one of two juxtaposed, semi-emblematic scenes: the truculent logman who curses his master (“All the infections that the sun sucks up / From bogs, fens, fiats, on Prosper fall” [II.ii. 1–21) is contrasted with the “patient log-man” (III.i. 67) who blesses and feels blessed by his mistress in his menial task: I do beseech you— Chiefly that I might set it in my prayers— What is your name? (III.i. 34–6) Caliban once loved, and is still in awe of, his master; but such now is his hatred of Prospero that he loses what judgment he has, accepts Stephano as master, and kneels in idolatrous admiration of a gross fool, his man in the moon: “I do adore thee . . . I prithee, be my god . . . I’ll swear myself thy subject” (II.ii. 139, 148, 151). No more maledictions then for the time being: “whilst thou liv’st, keep a good tongue in thy head” is his new master’s injunction (III.ii. 113). Also antithetical to Caliban is “holy Gonzalo,” as Prospero calls him (V.i. 62). Throughout the

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long scene where he is ridiculed by Antonio for being “spendthrift . . . of his tongue,” he is motivated in almost everything he says (including his notorious utopian fantasy) by a compassionate desire to distract his master from despairing thoughts about his son’s possible death (compare with Miranda’s role as the smiling cherubim who saved her father from despair) (II.i. 25). Correspondingly, Gonzalo criticizes Sebastian for feeding Alonso’s gloom by suggesting that he is responsible for his son’s death: My lord Sebastian, The truth you speak of doth lack some gentleness And time to speak it in. You rub the sore When you should bring the plaster. (II.i. 141–4) It becomes apparent at this point that speech is being thematized in the play. Thus, Antonio’s attempt to seduce Sebastian into a usurpation plot focuses attention on a courtly perversion of speech’s archetypal, rhetorical function. “He’s a spirit of persuasion, only / Professes to persuade the King . . . his son’s alive,” comments Antonio sarcastically on Gonzalo’s benevolent chatter, precisely when he himself is trying to talk Sebastian into murder (II.i. 240–1). Set thus against Antonio’s evil persuasions, the naive-sounding speech of garrulous Gonzalo is rendered doubly positive by its prayerful dimension. His abrupt waking from the sleep shared by himself and Alonso saves both of them from death, and his first words on waking, almost as if the exclamatory words themselves had wakened him, are: “Now good angels / Preserve the King!” (II.i. 311–2). His last words in the scene are a prayer for the missing son designed to lift the father’s still sinking spirits: “Heavens keep him from these beasts! / For he is sure i’ th’ island” (II. i. 322–3). [20] Implicit here is a recognition, conspicuous in King Lear (where Shakespeare plays on the synonymy of “blessing,” “benediction,” and “benison”), that to bless is to speak well (bene dicere).

IV In the mysterious spiritual economy of the island, the fate of the king and his missing son is wholly dependent on Prospero’s prayer for his daughter. Prospero watches, unobserved, the blossoming relationship between Miranda and Ferdinand that he appeared to oppose and exclaims: “Heavens rain grace / On that which breeds between ’em” (III.i. 75–6). With this prayer, I would suggest, we begin to see much of what the play is centrally about: a father’s blessing for a daughter who is herself a blessing. This claim might seem as large as it is novel, but consider Prospero’s name in relation to the following affinities (all emphases will be mine). Sebastian comments sardonically on the marriage of Alonso’s daughter in Tunis: “’Twas a sweet marriage, and we prosper well in our return”

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(II.i. 77)—meaning that it was a bitter marriage and that they are cursed on the return voyage; for he adds accusingly: “you . . . would not bless our Europe with your daughter” (II.i. 129–30). Then, in Prospero’s wedding masque Juno says to Ceres: Go with me To bless this twain, that they may prosperous be, And honoured in their issue. (IV.i. 103–5) Reflected here is the fact that, in Shakespeare’s time, the word “prosper” (and its derivatives) was so commonly attached to the idea of blessing as to be almost synonymous with it. To pray for someone’s well-being—to bless that person— was to ask that he or she would prosper; and to be blessed by heaven or the fairies was to be prospered by them (like the Latin prosperare, “to prosper” meant both to flourish and to cause to flourish). This near synonymy of the two concepts and terms is commonplace in the Old Testament, where it probably originates, but numerous examples of it can be found in the Shakespeare canon too: “God and St. George . . . prosper our colours in this dangerous fight!” (The First Part of Henry the Sixth, IV.ii. 55–6); “bless it [the marriage] to all fair prosperity” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, IV.i. 8990); “The Lord bless you; God prosper your affairs” (The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, III.ii. 289); “leave we him to his events, with a prayer they may prove prosperous” (Measure for Measure, IV.i. 496–7); “Kind gods, forgive me that, and prosper him” (King Lear, III.vii. 90); “Fairies and gods prosper it with thee . . . O you mighty gods . . . If Edgar live, O bless him!” (King Lear, IV.v. 29–40). [21] OED provides pertinent extracanonical instances in Thomas Nashe’s “God cherrist and prosperd them with all the blessings he could” (1598) and Thomas Cromwell’s “a people so prospered, and blessed” (1651). And since it is close in spirit to the paradoxical temper of The Tempest, this from Bacon’s Essays should be noted: “Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New; which carrieth the greater benediction, and the clearer revelation of God’s favour.” [22] What I am suggesting, then, is that the name of Prospero, a name historically associated with the dukedom of Milan, but that here, on four occasions, becomes “Prosper,” is so deployed by Shakespeare as to signify blessing. Above all, it signifies the blessing of marriage and children. And toward the end it seems also to suggest another kind of blessing, one which is auxiliary to the first. Prospero’s last-act promise of “calm seas, auspicious gales” and “expeditious” sail (V.i. 317–9) evokes the conventional description of favorable winds and trouble-free voyages as “prosperous” (The Comedy of Errors, I.i. 40; All’s Well That Ends Well, III.iii. 7; The Winter’s Tale, V.i. 160). This identification of “the name of Prosper” with the idea of blessing suggests that Caliban’s much discussed name may have been affected by the play’s

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discourse of prayer and its antithetical and ultimately paradoxical principle (III. iii. 99). In the most thorough examination to date of the various theories that have been advanced to account for this name, Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan have cast doubt on the “cannibal” etymology. They have found the “carib” / “Caribana” etymology quite persuasive, and more persuasive still the claim of Albert Kluyver (made in 1895) that the name derives from the gypsy word for “black”—cauliban or kaliban (they note that the gypsy language flourished in sixteenth-century England). I, too, find Kluyver’s theory persuasive, not only because of the structural identity of the name and the adjective but also because Prospero calls Caliban a “thing of darkness” and a “demi-devil” (V.i.278, 275) (we might recall Lear’s execration, “Darkness and devils!” [24]). But I would suggest, too, that the name has another, closely related meaning that is unfolded to us on the principle of in vino veritas. II.i ends with Gonzalo’s prayer for his master’s son; II.ii opens with Caliban’s fit of cursing against his master and ends with his drunken, word-playful song: “’Ban, ‘ban, Cacaliban / Has a new master” (II.ii. 183–4). We are alerted thus to the fact that cursing is part of Caliban’s name: pertinent here are Edgar’s reference [in King Lear] to Bedlam beggars “roaring . . . sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,” and York’s response [in Henry VI, Part 1] to Joan’s curses: “Fell banning hag, enchantress, hold thy tongue.” Caliban also prefixes the word “ban” with an appropriate echo of the Greek word for “bad” or “evil” (“kakos”). A common enough prefix in English, it occurs elsewhere in Shakespeare only in relation to the much cursed “cacodemon” of Richard III, another character who is deformed both physically and spiritually. [26]

V Even their names, then, indicate that Prospero and Caliban are involved in a dialectic of blessing and curse; and at the heart of this relationship is the fate of Miranda. Looking into “the dark backward and abysm of time,” Prospero tells Miranda that her presence on their dangerous voyage turned foul play and trouble into a blessing. But her future on the island can hardly seem auspicious to him; he can only assume that after his death her fate will be rape and motherhood to a brood of little Calibans (I.ii.349–53). Hence the shipwreck and his cryptic but earnest explanation that it was all done “in care of thee, / Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter” (my emphasis). By his “prescience,” Prospero saw who was on the passing ship, saw that the voyage home and the future for Miranda would be prosperous only if a genuine peace were established between himself and his old enemy, and saw too that the best way to such a peace would be to unite the two kingdoms through marriage (I.ii.181). Everything he does on the island once he has secured the safe landing of the shipwrecked voyagers—separating the mariners and servants from the royal party, isolating Ferdinand from the rest of that party and engineering his “fair

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encounter” with Miranda, bringing Alonso through despair and remorse to say, “I . . . do entreat thou pardon me my wrongs” (V.i.120–1): all these fall into place as being subordinate and auxiliary to the plan for Miranda’s salvation. Thus it is surely as incorrect to say that “Miranda’s marriage . . . is designed by Prospero as a way of satisfying himself,” “a means of preserving [his] authority,” as it is to claim that the storm was part of a “revenge plan” abandoned only in a “fifth-act conversion” inspired by Ariel (V.i. 16–30). [27] Perhaps the most important aspect of Prospero’s plan is his tacit acknowledgement that the first prerequisite for a blessed marriage is mutual attraction and choice; he knows he cannot enforce this, and he clearly sees himself blessed when it happens spontaneously as his “soul prompts it” (I.ii.423). Another and complementary prerequisite that he has in mind, which he considers to be necessary to society as a whole, and which he articulates very explicitly, is restraint, the willed curtailment of freedom, something he himself has to practice when he has his enemies in his power and could well become the tyrant Caliban holds him to be. Without evidence of restraint, he believes, Ferdinand’s attraction to Miranda will not be a love based on respect, but rather tyrannous, Calibanesque lust. Hence his insistence that if Ferdinand seeks to consummate his union before “All sanctimonious ceremonies” and “full and holy rite” are ministered, it will be cursed with sterility and conflict: “No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall . . . but barren hate, / Sour-eyed disdain, and discord . . . with weeds so loathly” (IV.I.15–21). Given Ferdinand’s solemn assurance that his passion is under control, almost all the emphasis in the betrothal masque and its aftermath is on blessing. In the “Solempnizacion of Matrimonye” as established in the Elizabethan Prayer Book, the following blessings (borrowed from the Psalms) are conferred upon the wedded couple: Blessed are all they that feare the Lorde, and walke in his waies. For thou shalt eate the labour of thy handes, O wel is thee, and happy shalt thou be. Thy wife shal be as the fruitfull vine vpon the walles of thy house. Thy children like the Oliue braunches rounde about thy table . . . thou shalt see . . . prosperitie, al thy life long: Yea . . . thou shalt see thy children’s children, and peace . . . Then shall the earthe bryng furthe her encrease, and God . . . shal geue vs his blessyng. Prospero’s wedding masque translates these blessings into a classical idiom complicated with suggestions of an English climate and landscape in a Mediterranean world (IV.i.60–6, 128–38). Passing Cyprus en route, Iris arrives to inform Ceres, goddess of earth’s plenty, that she has been called “some

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donation . . . freely to estate / On the blessed lovers” (IV.i.85–6). Juno, goddess of marriage, tells Ceres, “Go with me to bless this twain, that they may prosperous be,” and sings: Honour, riches, marriage-blessing, Long continuance, and increasing, Hourly joys be still upon you! Juno sings her blessings on you. (IV.i. 106–9) Her companion sings of “Earth’s increase” and “vines with clust’ring bunches bowing,” and ends her song: “Ceres’ blessing so is on you” (IV.i.103–17). In the last scene, Alonso and Gonzalo add their voices to the prosperous marriage theme and, implicitly, to the ancillary theme of the prosperous voyage. Believing Ferdinand is dead, and hearing Prospero has lost a daughter, Alonso exclaims: “O heavens, that they were living both in Naples, / The King and Queen there” (V.i. 149–50). His discovery that this despairing prayer is to be answered gives an ecstatic quality to the blessings uttered by himself and Gonzalo, adding paenismus to benedictio: Gonzalo. Look down you gods, And on this couple drop a blessed crown; For it is you that have chalked forth the way Which brought us hither. Alonso. I say amen’, Gonzalo. Gonzalo. Was Milan thrust from Milan that his issue Should become kings of Naples? O rejoice Beyond a common joy! And set it down With gold on lasting pillars: in one voyage Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis, And Ferdinand her brother found a wife Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom In a poor isle; and all of us ourselves, When no man was his own. (V.i.204–16) Gonzalo here reinforces a paradoxical idea already made explicit in the first exchange between the reunited Ferdinand and Alonso: “Though the seas threaten, they are merciful, / I have cursed them without cause,” said the son; to which the father responded antiphonally: “Now all the blessings of a glad father compass thee about!” (V.i. 181–3). The same paradox was operative earlier when Alonso’s “great guilt,” provoked by the tempest that followed the vanishing

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banquet, prompted him to think that he was cursed forever by Prospero when in fact he had been subjected to an experience designed by Prospero to lead him through “heart sorrow” to “a clear life ensuing” (III.iii.81–2). Asked by Gonzalo —“I’ th’ name of something holy”— why he stood in a “strange stare,” Alonso replied (with an acute sense of the sacred and its different languages): O, it is monstrous, monstrous! Methought the billows spoke and told me of it, The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced The name of Prosper. It did bass my trespass. Therefore my son i’ th’ ooze is bedded, and I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded, And with him there lie mudded. (III.iii.93–102) Symmetrically, the notion of a curse transformed to a blessing first appeared in Prospero’s account of his own and his child’s exposure to the elements in their terrible voyage; it is manifestly basic to the meaning of the play. And yet even the blessing celebrated at the end is qualified by Shakespeare’s inescapably dialectical sense and by the pressure of the scene’s ceremonial and literary intertexts. The contingent nature of the lovers’ happiness is acknowledged within the masque by reference to the myth of Proserpina and Pluto (“dusky Dis”) and without by its abrupt termination by the “thing of darkness” and his plot (IV.i.89, V.i.278). This recalls the Prayer Book’s marriage ceremony, in which the central blessings are followed by reminders of Satan and the Fall in prayers, shared between minister and congregation, for the Lord to “deliuer us from euil” and “euermore defende” the wedded pair “From the face of their enemie” (p. 126); it recalls too the warning motif of epithalamic tradition enumerating the perils that threaten the marriage being celebrated. Furthermore, Prospero confesses that the blessed marriage of his daughter is a “dear loss” which he can only endure—convert to another resolved paradox—by praying to Patience for her “soft grace” and “sovereign aid” (V.i.144–50). Prospero’s concluding speech (“my ending is despair / Unless I be relieved by prayer”) extends the discourse of prayer into the life of the audience. An epilogue’s conventional appeal for a gracious response blends artfully with a variation on the Lord’s Prayer, a humble acknowledgement that Prospero is dependent on sinful others for pardon and prosperous winds if he is not to remain unredeemed, accursed, and imprisoned. Prospero has said that he must acknowledge Caliban as his own, and indeed there is a curious parallelism between the two at the end (V.i.278–9). Caliban admits that he was an ass to worship a dull fool and decides to “seek for grace” and “pardon” from his master (V.i.279, 298–301); Prospero

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buries the book that he once prized above his dukedom, reduces himself to a common player, and prays to common mortals like ourselves (I.ii.169). Caliban’s curses, we may conclude, are as integral to the dialectical structure and the discourse of prayer in the play to which they belong as are the cataplectic threats of Prospero and the execrations of Lear, the dragon king who kneels for pardon. They are part of a structure of thought that insists on human limitation and interdependence and on the consequent need for self-restraint, self-knowledge, repentance, forgiveness, generosity, and cooperation: “Let’s assist them, / For our case is as theirs!”

VI There is, then, an abundance of textual evidence in The Tempest to suggest the presence of a playwright fully in control of his material and to question the essentially negative accounts of Prospero and his actions that political critique so often abstracts from the play by means of strategic quotation and deconstructive allegations of textual self-contradiction. Some perhaps might claim that the discourse of prayer, elegant and artful though it may be, is simply further evidence of an attempt to euphemize colonial domination of the island. But this argument, I believe, would be hard to sustain. Comparable with its deployment in Lear and in the other romances, the language of prayer in The Tempest is overwhelmingly focused on the travelers’ consciousness of their creatural weakness and dependence and on their desire to overcome misfortune—shipwreck on an island that none of the nobility wants to colonize: “Some heavenly power guide us / Out of this fearful country!” (V.i. 107–8). Because it contains undoubted echoes of the New World in its richly allusive, symbolic, and universalizing design, and because it is clearly concerned with government and control (as well as self-control), one can easily understand why the play has been appropriated as a colonialist allegory, especially by inhabitants of the Caribbean islands. But I would contend that the conception of Prospero as colonist loses much of its persuasiveness—has to be located near the periphery of the play’s range of semantic possibilities—when we perceive that his every word, prayer, and act is designed to effect the escape of his daughter and himself from a place they never chose to inhabit. This is not to say, however, that my own and the colonialist reading of The Tempest are mutually exclusive, that one must see the play from the point of view of either Prospero or Caliban. I have already alluded to the harshness in Prospero’s exercise of power. I would have to concede further that his punitive treatment of Caliban has a distinctly vindictive and personal edge to it, and that Caliban’s position after the attempted rape differs not at all from that accorded by their colonial masters to the Amerindians and the Irish in the seventeenth century. It should be remembered, however, that Prospero’s harshness extends to his own kind, that it varies from the seemingly involuntary to the carefully calculated, and that it is never without reasonable or benevolent intent. Caliban

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is gleefully unrepentant about the attempted rape and clearly signals that he would try again if he had his freedom; Ariel is being held to his side of a bargain at a time of desperate need; Ferdinand is being tested in self-control and in his respect for Miranda; Prospero’s enemies are subjected to corrective punishments designed to bring them through suffering to self-knowledge and a change of heart; and all these intents, as I have argued, are part of an overall plan for Miranda’s happiness in a world elsewhere.

QQQ

BIBLIOGRAPHY q Bloom, Harold. “The Tempest.” In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 662–684. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. Brown, Paul. “ ‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism.” In Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, 48–71. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Cobb, Noel. Prospero’s Island: The Secret Alchemy at the Heart of “The Tempest.” London: Coventure, 1984. Hamilton, Donna B. Virgil and “The Tempest”: The Politics of Imitation. Ohio State University Press: Columbus, 1990. Hollander, John. The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500–1700. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961. Hunt, Maurice. “Shakespeare’s ‘Still-Vexed’ Tempest.” Style 39 (2005): 299– 317. Martz, William J. The Place of “The Tempest” in Shakespeare’s Universe of Comedy. Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado Press, 1978. McFarland, Thomas. “So Rare a Wondered Father: The Tempest and the Vision of Paradise.” In Shakespeare’s Pastoral Comedy, 146. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972. Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de. “Of Cannibals.” In The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne, edited by Donald M. Frame, 150–159. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958. Novy, Marianne. Women’s Revisions of Shakespeare. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Nuttal, A. D. Two Concepts of Allegory: A Study of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and the Logic of Allegorical Expression. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967. Orgel, Stephen, ed. Ben Jonson: Selected Masques. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

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Palmer, D. J., ed. Shakespeare: “The Tempest,” A Casebook; Edited by D. J. Palmer. London: Macmillan, 1968. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edward Hubler, ed. New York: New American Library, 1963. ————. Henry V. John Russell Brown, ed. New York: New American Library, 1965. ————. The Tempest. Robert Langbaum, ed. New York: New American Library, 1964. Smith, Hallett. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest.” In Shakespeare’s Romances, 121–144. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1972. Taylor, Gary. Reinventing Shakespeare. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983. Traversi, Derek. “The Tempest.” In Shakespeare: The Last Phase, 193. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1953. Tribble, Evelyn B. “ ‘The Dark Backward and Abysm of Time’: The Tempest and Memory.” In College Literature 33 (2006): 151–169. Vaughan, Alden T., and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS q

Twentieth Century Tillyard, E. M. W. “The Tragic Pattern: The Tempest.” In Shakespeare’s Last Plays. London: Chatto and Windus, 1938. Van Doren, Mark. “The Tempest.” Chapter in Shakespeare. New York: Henry Holt, 1939. © 1939 by Mark Van Doren. Auden, W. H. “The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” © 1944 by W. H. Auden. Knight, G. Wilson. “The Shakespearian Superman: A Study of The Tempest.” In The Crown of Life. 1952 reprint. London: Methuen & Co., 1952. © 1947 by G. Wilson Knight. Traversi, Derek. “The Tempest.” Scrutiny (June 1949): 140–149. © 1949 Scrutiny. Goddard, Harold C. “The Tempest.” Chapter XXXVI in The Meaning of Shakespeare. Volume II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951. © 1951 by the University of Chicago. Frye, Northrop. “Introduction.” In The Tempest, by William Shakespeare, edited by Northrop Frye. The Pelican Shakespeare series. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1983. © 1959, 1970. Penguin Books, Inc. Empson, William. “Hunt the Symbol.” In Essays on Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Pages 238–249. © 1986 by the estate of William Empson. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Fiedler, Leslie A. “The New World Savage as Stranger.” In The Stranger in Shakespeare. Pages 232–240, 247–250. New York: Stein & Day, 1972. © 1972 by Leslie A. Fiedler. Skura, Meredith Anne. “Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40:1 (1989): 42–69. © Folger Shakespeare Library. Reprinted with the permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Twenty-first Century McAlindon, Tom. “The Discourse of Prayer in The Tempest.” In Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 41 (2001): 335–355. © 2001 by Rice University.

INDEX q

Characters in literary works are indexed by first name (if any), followed by the name of the work in parentheses Adrian (The Tempest), 28, 180 Alexander, Peter Shakespeare’s Life and Art, 1 All’s Well That Ends Well, 158, 255 Bertram in, 183 Claudio in, 183 Helena in, 183 Alonso (The Tempest), 81, 101, 110, 138 conspiracy against, 8–9, 18, 24, 73, 81, 103, 114, 133–135, 163, 169, 189–190 conspiracy with Antonio, 5, 27, 103, 114, 133, 139, 156 daughter, 7–8, 17, 27, 140, 254, 258–259 madness, 9, 11, 20, 22, 143, 154, 171, 184, 192, 198, 203 military power of, 176 son, 6–7, 9, 12, 18, 134, 140, 188, 254, 258 American Sublime, xi Anatomy of Criticism, The (Frye), 187 Anthony and Cleopatra, 2, 124, 148, 182 Anthony in, 182–183

Cleopatra in, 151, 155, 182, 184 feasts in, 156 Antonio (The Tempest), 89 banishment of Prospero, 5–8, 11–12, 27–28, 95, 133, 139–140, 148, 229 conspiracy with Sebastian, 8–9, 18, 24, 73, 81, 103, 114, 133–135, 148, 155, 163–164, 188–189, 191, 197, 254 cynicism, 155 madness, 9, 11, 20, 22, 137, 143, 154, 156, 180, 187, 190 military power of, 176 self-centeredness, 18 Approach to Shakespeare, An (Traversi), 162 Arcadia (Sidney), 133 Ariel (The Tempest), xi, 32, 146 loyalty, 190 magic of , 7–12, 20, 22, 27, 51–53, 62–63, 66–67, 73–74, 79–81, 83, 86, 91, 95, 101–102, 145, 147, 150–153, 158, 176–178, 180–182, 184, 186, 191, 204, 215–216, 222, 229, 245 songs of, xi, 7, 9, 56, 85–87, 91, 100–101, 114, 116, 140, 151, 156–157, 175–176, 179, 188, 193–194, 208 267

268

Index

speeches, 80, 134–135, 169–170, 178, 187, 190, 252 wish for freedom, 6–7, 14, 26–27, 55, 68, 72, 80, 99, 106–107, 144, 159, 161–162, 171, 174, 176–177, 179, 186, 206, 242, 251, 261 Aristotle work of, 35, 59–60, 133, 196 As You Like It, 2 action of, 148 Duke in, 147, 182, 190, 224–226 Forest of Arden in, 182, 224, 226 Jaques in, 225–226 Orlando in, 114 Rosalind in, 114 songs of, 148 Athenaeum, The (magazine) review of The Tempest in, 71, 94–96 Auden, W.H. “The Sea and the Mirror,” 120, 146 Axtell, James, 231 Bacon, Francis, 252, 255 Bender, John, 230 Bible, 43, 192 Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 74 Blake, William, 246 Bloom, Harold, 120, 187, 196 on Caliban and Prospero in The Tempest, 120, 242–246 introduction, xi–xiii, 203–209 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 203, 242 The Western Canon, 203, 242 Boatswain (The Tempest), 28 language, 75, 115, 145, 173, 187, 251 Bridge, The (Crane), xi Browning, Robert “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” 96 “My Last Duchess,” 96

poetic monologue of The Tempest, xii, 72, 96–99, 120, 204–205 Caliban (The Tempest), xi, 32–33, 95, 98, 242–246 as an archetype of the American Indian, 193, 196–203, 214, 216– 217, 220–221, 224 childishness, 226–230 conspiracy, 136–138, 142–143, 153, 157–158, 161, 167–168, 188, 205, 223, 243, 245, 253 cowardice of, xii curse, 248–249, 251–252, 255–256, 259–260 drunkenness, 7–10, 12, 28, 66, 73, 85, 159, 180, 191, 194–195, 201, 208 enslavement of, 6, 8, 12, 15, 17, 20, 27–28, 68, 99–100, 105–107, 109, 144, 161–162, 165–168, 174, 182, 195–196, 199, 201–209, 211–212, 214, 222, 224–226, 242–246, 251–253 ignorance, 16, 109, 154 language, 56, 248 and Miranda, 6, 9, 15–17, 28, 61, 65, 105, 158, 188, 208, 211, 215, 223, 243–244 natural simplicity, 164–168, 175, 188–190, 213, 245 pain, 6, 8, 28, 101, 109, 135, 152, 159, 195 reflection on Setebos, 72, 96–99 sleep, 176, 180, 202 speeches, 18–19, 80, 140–141, 146, 193, 200 ugly and deformed, 6, 19, 28, 53–54, 60, 63–64, 73–74, 80–81, 83–84, 86, 142, 150, 152–153, 159, 203–204, 208, 244

Index Campbell, Thomas, 71 Capell, Edward, 55–56, 69 Ceres (The Tempest), 230 wedding masque, 10, 18, 28, 57, 110, 137–138, 142, 255, 257–258 Cervantes, Miguel de, 163 Chambers, E.K., 119, 136 Charles II, King of England, 45 “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (Browning), 96 Christian themes discourse of prayer in The Tempest, 248–255, 260 overtones in The Tempest, xii, 185, 214 Claribel (The Tempest) marriage, 7–8, 17, 25, 27, 140, 154–155 Clash of animal passion theme in The Tempest, 16 Clemen, Wolfgang, 119 Coleridge, Hartley, 107 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 71 Biographia Literaria, 74 Lyrical Ballads, 74 “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 74 on The Tempest, 74–83 Colonialism in The Tempest, 120, 209–242, 247 Comedy of Errors, The, 2, 255 action in, 147 Comus (Milton), 194 Condell, Henry, 3, 31 Coriolanus, 152, 160, 182 Cotton, Charles, 33 Crane, Hart, xii The Bridge, xi “To Shakespeare,” xi Crane, Ralph, 31 Cromwell, Thomas, 255 Cupid (The Tempest)

269

wedding masque, 10 Cymbeline, 3, 115 discourse of prayer in, 248, 250 Imogen in, 102–103, 114, 151, 160 Jupiter the Thunderer in, 146, 157, 160 Posthumus in, 102 tragic pattern of, 132–133, 148, 150, 157–158, 182 Dante, Alighieri, 74 poems of, 74 Davenant, William The Enchanted Island, 32–33, 47–48, 55–58, 71 memory of, 46–47 on The Tempest, 48–53 De Arte Poetica (Horace), 32 Destruction theme in The Tempest, 132–133, 136, 139 in The Winter’s Tale, 136 Diary of Samuel Pepys, The (Pepys), 32, 45 Discovery of the Barmudas, otherwise called Ile of Divels, A ( Jourdain), 32, 192 Dowden, Edward Shakespeare, his Mind and Art, 101 Shakespeare Primer, 101 Studies in Literature, 101 on The Tempest, 72, 101–113 Dryden, John, 89 from the preface to Troilus and Cressida, 53–54 The Enchanted Island, 32–33, 47–53, 55–59, 71 on The Tempest, 48–53 Duffet, Thomas The Mock Tempest, or The Enchanted Castle, 33 Dunciad, The (Pope), 60–61

270

Index

Eden, Richard, 193 Eliot, George, 104 Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land, 194 Emerson, Ralph Waldo style, xi, 110 Empson, William Seven Types of Ambiguity, 194 Some Versions of Pastoral, 194 on The Tempest, 120, 194–196 Enchanted Island, The (Davenant and Dryden), 56 character changes in, 32–33, 55, 57–58 criticism, 71 from, 48–53 prologue to, 47–48 Erasmus, 119 European Renaissance, 33 Ferdinand (The Tempest), 87 consciousness, 160 curse, 248, 251 father’s fear for, 6–7, 9, 12, 18, 27, 134, 140, 191, 258 and Miranda, 7–10, 12, 14, 17, 19, 21, 24, 27–28, 57, 66, 73, 82–83, 88, 90, 92–93, 95, 104, 107, 109– 110, 136–138, 142–144, 152, 159, 177, 188, 190, 223, 252–254, 261 wedding masque, 10, 18, 28, 57, 73, 110, 137, 142, 185, 223, 251 Fiedler, Leslie, 218 on Caliban, 120, 196–203 Love and Death in the American Novel, 196, 210–211 Florio, John translation of The Tempest, 32–33, 37, 197, 214 Francisco (The Tempest), 7 Freud, Sigmund theories, 204, 212, 216, 227

Frye, Northrop, xiii The Anatomy of Criticism, 187 introduction to The Tempest, 119, 187–194 Garden of Eloquence, The (Peacham), 249 Gildon, Charles, 56, 68 “Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare,” 58–60 Globe theater, 2 Goddard, Harold C. The Meaning of Shakespeare, 119, 172 on The Tempest, 119, 172 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 107 Gonzalo (The Tempest), 8, 115 help to Prospero, 6–7, 11, 28, 73, 108, 148, 178, 197, 201 optimism, 12, 25, 164, 176, 185, 187–188, 203 simplicity, 164, 192 speeches, 17–18, 75, 89, 133–134, 140, 143, 154–155, 163, 173, 189, 195–197, 251–254, 258–259 utopia, 230 weariness, 9, 23, 81 Greene, Robert A Groatsworth of Wit, 1 Groatsworth of Wit, A (Greene), 1 Hamlet, xii, 2, 57, 115, 129, 185 Hamlet in, 148–150, 159–162, 174, 182, 187 insight in, 203 Ophelia in, 90 Hazlitt, William, 71 Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, 83 on The Tempest, 83–89 Hemings, John, 3, 31

Index Henry IV, 2 Falstaff in, 126, 148, 151, 157, 224 Prince Hal in, 224 Henry V, 2, 147, 150 Henry VI, 152, 159, 182, 255–256 Henry VIII, 2, 103, 161–162 colonialism, 214–215 Homer, 100 Horace De Arte Poetica, 32 Illusions in The Tempest, 11 hounds, 188, 215–216 magical, 13, 90, 187, 191 of a sea storm, 5–6, 13, 133, 140, 170–173, 187 Iris (The Tempest) wedding masque, 10, 28, 142, 257 Irving, Henry, 115–116 James, Henry “Introduction to The Tempest,” 119–132 The Portrait of a Lady, 120 The Wings of the Dove, 120 James, William, 173 Jameson, Anna Brownell, 71 on Shakespeare’s heroines, 90–93 Jameson, Frederick, 212 Johnson, Ben, xii, 3, 114 Johnson, Samuel, 56, 61 on The Tempest, 67–69, 103, 106 Jourdain, Sylvester A Discovery of the Barmudas, otherwise called Ile of Divels, 32, 192 Julius Caesar, 148, 152 tragedy of, 160 Juno (The Tempest) wedding masque, 10, 28, 57, 142, 255, 258

271

Kemble, John, 55 Kermode, Frank historical context of the New World, 195–196, 210, 231 King John, 2, 148, 150, 173 King Lear, 2, 79, 96, 119, 180 Cordelia in, 172, 183 discourse of prayer in, 248, 254– 255, 260 Edgar in, 256 Kent in, 158 King Lear in, 171–174, 177, 182–184 mad Tom in, 152, 158, 177, 182 tragic action of, 148, 152, 154, 160, 172–173, 187, 251 Knight, G. Wilson Lord Byron: Christian Virtues, 146 Shakespearian Production, 146 on The Tempest, 119, 146–162, 213 The Wheel of Fire, 146 Knopf, Fernard, 116 Lamb, Charles, 90, 181 on The Enchanted Island, 71 Tales from Shakespeare, 89 Lamb, Mary, 89 Langella, Frank, 242 Lawrence, D. H., 202 Levin, Harry, 210 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 198 Life of Augustus (Suetonius), 43 Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process, The (Skura), 209 Lord Byron: Christian Virtues (Knight), 146 Love and Death in the American Novel (Fiedler), 196, 210–211 Love’s Labor’s Lost, 2 charity in, 151 Navarre’s academy, 222–223

272

Index

Lyrical Ballads (Coleridge and Wordsworth), 74 Macbeth, 2, 57, 119 Duncan in, 153–154 feasts in, 156, 159 Lady Macbeth in, 154 Macbeth in, 124, 150, 154, 159 magic in, 74, 152–153, 172, 201 power quest in, 158, 160 witches in, 190 Malone, Edmond, 56 Mansfield, Katherine, 172 Marlowe, Christopher, xii, 157 Marx, Leo, 210 McAlindon, Tom on the discourse of prayer in The Tempest, 247–261 Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos, 248 Meaning of Shakespeare, The (Goddard), 119, 172 Measure for Measure, 150, 182, 224, 255 Duke of Vienna in, 149, 160 Jove in 160 Master Barnardine in, 86, 173, 204 problem of liberty in, 168 Vincentio in, 225 Melville, Herman, 161 Merchant of Venice, The, 2, 99 criticism, 126 Launcelot Gobbo in, 151 plot of, 147, 153 Prince in, 155 productions of, 122 Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 148, 152, 157 fairies in, 159 Falstaff in, 158 feasts in, 156 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 2, 57, 105, 230

Hercules in, 159 magic in, 74, 88, 139, 147–148, 151–152, 156, 172, 255 productions of, 122, 124 Puck in, 217 scenery in, 116 Milton, John, 74, 132 Comus, 194 Paradise Lost, 62, 136, 190, 209 poems of, 78–79 Simon Agonistes, 133 Miranda (The Tempest), xi, 32, 96, 127, 176 banishment, 6, 27–28, 83, 102, 133, 184, 197, 247 and Caliban, 6, 9, 15–17, 28, 61, 65, 105, 158, 171, 188–89, 199, 205–208, 211, 223, 243–244 characteristics, 13, 56, 83, 91–93, 100, 136–137, 146, 254 confidence in Prospero, 5, 71, 76– 78, 147, 152, 161, 172, 174, 204 description of shipwreck, 5, 14, 140 fate of, 256 and Ferdinand, 7–10, 12, 14, 21, 24, 27–28, 57, 66, 73, 82–83, 88, 90, 92–93, 95, 100, 104, 107, 109– 110, 136–138, 143–144, 152, 159, 177, 188, 190, 223, 252–254, 261 fertility symbolism of, 137–138 independence, 13 memory, 5, 77–78, 229 speeches, 13, 15, 24, 48–50, 61, 79, 180, 191 wedding masque, 10, 18, 28, 57, 73, 110, 137, 142, 185, 223, 251, 257 Mock Tempest, or The Enchanted Castle, The (Duffet), 33 Montaigne, Michel de essays, 188–189, 195, 197, 203 on The Tempest, 33–45 Morris, William, 114

Index Much Ado About Nothing, 2, 148 Claudio in, 183 Don John in, 147 Friar Francis in, 150, 183 humor in, 152 “My Last Duchess” (Browning), 96 Nashe, Thomas, 255 Nietzsche, 209 Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck), 242 Othello, 2, 116 Desdemona in, 161, 183 hostile in, 155, 160 Iago in, 103 Othello in, 124, 130, 148, 183, 196 tragedy of, 171, 173, 201 Ovid, 192, 245 Paradise Lost (Milton), 62, 209 Eden in, 190 Satan in, 136 Pater, Walter, 187 Peacham, Henry The Garden of Eloquence, 249 Pepys, Samuel The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 32, 45 Pericles, 3, 182 Cerimon in, 149 discourse of prayer in, 248, 250 feasts in, 156 Marina in, 170 resurrections of, 160–161 Phoenix and the Turtle, The, 151 Plato theories, 32, 37, 99, 111, 173 Pope, Alexander, 58, 56, 81 censure of, 82 The Dunciad, 60–61 The Rape of the Lock, 55 Portrait of a Lady, The ( James), 120

273

“Prayer for My Daughter, A” (Yeats), 21 Preface to The Tempest, 45–47 Prologue to The Tempest, 47–48 Propertius, 37 Prospero (The Tempest), 96, 110 and Ariel, 6–7, 55, 67, 80, 86, 106, 146, 151–153, 162, 180, 186, 190, 204, 206, 216 badgered stage-manager, xii banishment, 5–8, 12, 14, 27–28, 66, 83, 102, 132–133, 140, 149, 171, 184, 197, 211, 223, 229, 247 commands of, 7, 9–10, 14, 16–18, 20–22, 27, 31, 57, 72–73, 82, 107, 110, 137, 159, 162, 177, 179, 187, 190–191, 201, 223, 254–259 destiny, 164, 211 enemies, 56, 66–67, 101–102, 133– 135, 138–139, 160, 187, 194–195, 205, 209–210, 260–261 enslavement of Caliban, 6–8, 14, 20, 27–28, 61, 63, 68, 100, 135, 142, 154, 158, 161–162, 165–168, 188–189, 195–196, 199, 204–209, 212, 215–216, 222–224, 227–228, 242–246 failure as an educator, xii, 172, 209 forgiveness, 101, 103–105, 114, 127–128, 133–135, 178, 203–205, 209–210 goodness, 5–6, 58–59, 76, 108, 143–144, 147–148, 150–151 ironies of, xii, 24 melancholy, xii, 67, 90 narrative, 5, 62, 81, 88, 160, 169, 186, 194, 212–213 plans, 7 powers of, 5–6, 11–14, 20, 23, 25, 27–28, 48–53, 56, 61–64, 73, 77–78, 84, 86, 88, 93, 95, 101, 103, 105–106, 127, 134, 138, 145,

274

Index

160, 168, 173–174, 176–177, 180, 188–192, 198, 200–201, 208–209, 212, 214–215, 227, 230, 244 rage of, 20–21, 136, 171, 178, 208, 223–226, 244, 251 rapacious colonialist, xiii, 252–253 studies, 5–6, 9, 14–15, 27, 73, 105– 106, 109, 145, 209 suffering, 22, 102–103 uncanny serenity, xi–xii Purchas, Samuel and the Virginian Indians, 217– 218, 220 Rape of Lucrece, The, 2 Rape of the Lock, The (Pope), 55 Rea, John, 119 “Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare” (Gildon), 58–60 Renan, Ernest, 72 Richard II tragedy of, 2, 147–148, 160, 178 Richard III, 2, 152 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The” (Coleridge), 74 Romantic movement, 61, 194 critics, xi–xiii, 31, 204, 210, 242 English, 74 German, 72 Greek, 133, 248 Romeo and Juliet, 2, 122 feasts in, 156 Friar Laurence in, 150 Juliet in, 92, 124, 183 Mercutio in, 151 Romeo in, 124, 183 Rossetti, D.G., 114 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 109, 189, 197 Rowe, Nicholas, 56 The Tragedy of Jane Shore; Written in Imitation of Shakespeare’s Style, 57 Ruskin, John on The Tempest, 72, 99–101

Sandison, Helen, 119 Schlegel, August William, 84 on The Tempest, 71–74 “Sea and the Mirror, The” (Auden), 120, 146 Sebastian (The Tempest), 27 conspiracy with Antonio, 8–9, 17– 18, 24, 27, 73, 81, 89, 103, 114, 133–135, 148, 154–155, 188–189, 191, 197, 254 madness, 9, 11, 20, 22, 156, 180, 191 speech, 25, 190 Seven Types of Ambiguity (Empson), 194 Shadwell, Thomas, 33 Shakespeare the Actor and the Purpose of Playing (Skura), 209 Shakespeare, Anne Hathaway (wife), 1 Shakespeare, Hamnet (son), 1 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Bloom), 203, 242 Shakespeare, John (father), 1 Shakespeare, Judith (daughter), 1 Shakespeare, Mary Arden (mother), 1 Shakespeare, his Mind and Art (Dowden), 101 Shakespeare Primer (Dowden), 101 Shakespeare: The Roman Plays (Traversi), 162 Shakespeare’s Life and Art (Alexander), 1 Shakespeare, Susanna (daughter), 1 Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos (McAlindon), 248 Shakespeare, William, xi acting company, 31 biography, 1–3 birth, 1 characters, 2, 61, 63–65, 69, 71–72, 75, 83–84, 90, 109, 124, 127, 133, 147, 150, 154, 181, 183, 188, 191, 193, 199

Index death, 3, 122 imagination, 57, 61, 74, 79, 84, 184 Shakespearian Production (Knight), 146 Shaw, George Bernard on The Tempest, 72, 114–117 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, xi, 111, 162, 245 Shipwreck in The Tempest, 119 enemies on, 6, 133 Miranda’s description of, 5, 13, 173 survivors of, 7–8, 12–13, 27–28, 47, 59, 140, 147, 160, 187, 209 Sidney, Philip Arcadia, 133 Simon Agonistes (Milton), 133 Skura, Meredith Anne on colonialism in The Tempest, 120, 209–242 The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process, 209 Shakespeare the Actor and the Purpose of Playing, 209 Some Versions of Pastoral (Empson), 194 Steinbeck, John Of Mice and Men, 242 Stephano (The Tempest), 95, 188 and Caliban, 8–10, 12, 28, 64, 73, 85, 142–143, 158, 165, 167–168, 194–195, 202, 208, 223, 227, 245, 253 greed, 106–107, 157, 159, 187, 191 promises to, 19, 158 Stevens, George, 56 Stevens, Wallace, xi Strachey, William, 192, 215, 221 Studies in Literature (Dowden), 101 Suckling, John, 46 Suetonius Life of Augustus, 43 Swift, Jonathan, 58

275

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 72, 114 Sycorax (The Tempest), 32, 55, 110 and Ariel, 176, 178, 229 power, 189–190 son, 6, 27–28, 64–65, 80, 85, 154, 156, 199, 204, 206, 209, 215–216, 244 Tales from Shakespeare (Lamb), 89 Taming of the Shrew, The feasts in, 156 Katharina in, 158 Tempest, The Act I summary, 5–7 Act II summary, 7–8 Act III summary, 8–9 Act IV summary, 10–11 Act V summary, 11–12 character list in, 27–28 discourse of prayer in, 247–261 epilogue, 12, 189, 192 imagery in, 146, 152, 228 irony, 143 key passages in, 13–26 mystery of, 119 performances, 31, 33, 46, 74, 94–96, 120–121, 127, 247 plot, 31, 46, 56, 58, 75–76, 133, 140, 147, 214, 242 tragic pattern in, 132–138, 146– 147, 160, 171, 175, 179, 184 versions of, 32 Theobald, Lewis, 56, 60–61 Tillyard, E.M.W. on the tragic pattern of The Tempest, 119, 132–138 Timon of Athens, 182 feasts in, 156 Timon in, 102, 148, 153, 159, 161–162, 183 tragedy of, 171 “To Shakespeare” (Crane), xi

276

Index

Tragedy of Jane Shore; Written in Imitation of Shakespeare’s Style, The (Rowe), 57 Traversi, Derek An Approach to Shakespeare, 162 Shakespeare: The Roman Plays, 162 on the themes of The Tempest, 120, 162–172, 194–195 T. S. Eliot: The Longer Poems, 162 Trinculo (The Tempest), 95 and Caliban, 8–10, 12, 28, 66, 73, 85, 143, 165, 167–168, 194–195, 202, 208, 227 greed, 106–107, 159, 188 Troilus and Cressida action of, 147–148, 151–152 Agamemnon in, 149 Ajax in, 153 preface to, 53–54 True Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia, The (Virginia Company), 32 T. S. Eliot: The Longer Poems (Traversi), 162 Twain, Mark, 203 Twelfth Night, 2, 157 action of, 147 Andrew in, 158 Olivia in, 147 Sebastian in, 147 Viola in, 90 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2 criminal action of, 148 Proteus in, 147 Valentine in, 147

Venus and Adonis, 2, 151 tragic pattern of, 159 Virginia Company The True Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia, 32

Van Doren, Mark on The Tempest, 119, 138–145 Venus (The Tempest) boar of, 153 wedding masque, 10

Yeats, William Butler, 248 “A Prayer for My Daughter,” 21

Warton, Joseph, 56 on The Tempest, 61–67 Waste Land, The (Eliot, T.S.), 194 Western Canon, The (Bloom), 203, 242 Wheel of Fire, The (Knight), 146 Whitman, Walt style of, xi, 201 Whytforde, Richard, 250 Wilde, Oscar, 187 Wilson, Daniel, 109 Wilson, Dover on The Tempest, 132–136 Wings of the Dove, The ( James), 120 Winter’s Tale, The, 3, 182, 204, 230 colonialism, 214 discourse of prayer in, 248, 250 feasts in, 155–156, 190 image of life in, 121 Mamillius in, 114 pastoral scene in, 164 Perdita in, 90, 170 Pericle in, 146 religious implications in, 170 theme of destruction in, 136 tragic pattern of, 132–133, 148, 158, 160, 255 Wordsworth, William, 161 Lyrical Ballads, 74