The Shapeliness of The Tempest | The Shapeliness of The Tempest
The Shapeliness of The Tempest
Peter Holland, Cambridge
When in 1667 Sir William Davenant turned his attention to adapting Shakespeare's The Tempest, he found a play that seemed to him in need of something more. The story is familiar: the addition of Hippolito to balance Miranda, Dorinda to balance Hippolito, Caliban's sister Sycorax to balance both the others and, to crown it all, Ariel's sweetheart Milcha to balance all the others. The process even involved the doubling of authorship as Davenant called in Dryden to balance himself.
What Dryden and Davenant did to The Tempest was a response, however excessive, to something about the nature of the play, an implication of mirroring and reflection, a suggestion of pattern and parallel, an understanding of the peculiar dramatic form of the play they are transforming. They took much further the play's own possibilities of mirroring, implied by such well-recognised...
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