[In the following essay, Nuttall provides an analysis of allegorical elements in The Tempest, arguing that the suggestiveness of the play is "metaphysical in tendency," since it conceives of love as a supernatural force.]

One of the reasons why The Tempest is hard to classify lies in its parentage. It has two sets of sources, first a body of romantic, fairy-tale literature and second a collection of travellers' reports. If its mother was a mermaid, its father was a sailor. It must be acknowledged that on the fairy side there is no story which we can point to as a direct influence on Shakespeare, but Iakob Ayrer's Die Schöne Sidea (published posthumously in his Opus Theatricum) and the story of Dardano and Nicephorus in the fourth chapter of Antonio de Eslava's Noches de Invierno show, besides a strong similarity of plot, an occasional correspondence of detail, as in the episode of the log-carrying. The late date at which Ayrer's play was published makes it very unlikely that it was Shakespeare's source, but there is just enough similarity between the two plays to let us postulate a common origin. Some close analogues have been found in the scenari for Italian corn-media dell' arte but Kermode observes [in his Arden edition] that all extant scenari postdate Shakespeare's play. Other analogues are Diego Ortunez de Calahorra's Espejo de Principes y Caballeros, and Fiamella, a pastoral comedy by Bartolomeo Rossi. Here, at all events, are hints of a story available to Shakespeare, and very amenable to the Romantic style of composition he had learned in company with Beaumont and Fletcher.

On the other side of the family correspondences are more striking, and we can speak of direct influences. There is no doubt that the Bermuda pamphlets describing the wreck of the Sea-Adventure on her way to Virginia were known to Shakespeare. Sylvester Jourdain's Discovery of the Barmudas (1610), the Council of Virginia's True Declaration of the State of the Colonie in Virginia, with a confutation of such scandalous reports as have tended to the disgrace of so worthy an enterprise (1610), and William Strachey's True Reportory of the Wrack, first published in Purchas his Pilgrimes, 1625, but accessible to Shakespeare from 1610, have all left traces in The Tempest.

The peculiar wedding of the marvellous and the circumstantial which we find in The Tempest may thus be attributed, in some measure, to the stuff of which it is made. But, nevertheless, we must be careful not to make too much of the contrast between the documentary naval reports and the fabulous tales of princes and sorcerers. Purchas his Pilgrimes, though not so extravagant and romantic as it appeared to the author of The Ancient Mariner centuries later, was nevertheless not entirely innocent of the marvellous. Geography itself was still soaked with imaginative significance, for the Royal Society had not yet done its judicious work of scientific desiccation. Spatial conceptions of Paradise, unacknowledged allegories, and 'tall stories' were all a normal part of the literature of travel. In the sixth century the monk Cosmas had, as Raleigh noted, laid down the object of many a later quest.

If Paradise were really on the surface of the world, is there not a man among those who are so keen to learn and search out everything, that would not let himself be deterred from reaching it? When we see that there are men who will not be deterred from penetrating to the ends of the earth in search of silk, and all for the sake of filthy lucre, how can we believe that they would be deterred from going to get a sight of Paradise? [quoted in W. Raleigh, The English Voyages, 1928]

Columbus (quite seriously) took the mouths of the Orinoco for the threshold of Paradise, and in 1512 the Governor of Puerto Rico landed in Florida while sailing in search of a miraculous Fountain of Youth. It is hard to know whether to call George Chapman's De Guina Carmen Epicum (1596) a Utopian or a Paradisal account of that place. It is well known that Spenser places his fairyland at once in England and in the human heart. But there is another place, the prologue of the second book of the Faerie Queene, where he suggests, more than half seriously, that explorers may at any time discover Fairyland in some other part of the Globe.

The interesting thing is that none of these three suggestions is felt to be incompatible with the other two, just as no conflict was recognized between Paradise as a lost primal state of felicity and Paradise as a place somewhere out in the unknown Atlantic seas. Marlowe seems to see no important distinction between geographical exploration and philosophical inquiry-at least, he speaks of them in one breath in Doctor Faustus:

Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,
Resolve me of all ambiguities,
Performe what desperate enterprise I will?
He have them flye to India for gold,
Ransacke the Ocean for orient pearle,
And search all corners of the new found world
For pleasant fruites and princely délicates:
Ile have then reade mee straunge philosophie,
An tell the secrets of all forraine kings …
              (11. 107-15, my italics in 11. 112-14)

All the same, the distinction between frank fancy and documentary report remains, and if fabulous elements appear in naval records they merely gain a more startling appearance of factual truth thereby. And there is no doubt that The Tempest owes much of its power to an air of circumstantial actuality. Nothing could be more different than The Tempest from the Gothic ghost stories of the earlier Shakespeare, all graveyards and darkness. The spectres of the Enchanted Isle move in the daylight, and are for that reason twice as frightening. The Jacobeans were after all much more ready to credit the actual existence of the supernatural than are we. There are no sorcerers of repute in England now, but an historical Prospero can easily be found-Dr. John Dee for example. Lytton Strachey's astonishing statement-'to turn from Theseus and Titania and Bottom to the Enchanted Island, is to step out of a country lane into a conservatory'-is almost the flat opposite of the truth.

Yet there is no doubt that The Tempest is a queer play. The strangeness of the island, the sounds in the air, the unnatural languor that intermittently envelops the characters, have the sinister quality of Phaedria's Isle in the Faerie Queene. Though the strange events of the play are in large measure accounted for by the arts of Prospero, certain things remain odd to the end. Playgoers are fairly well accustomed to that sane and purposive magic which saves a drowning man or refreshes him with sleep, but the music in the air, the voice crying in the wave, the 'strange, hollow and confused noise' which accompanies the vanishing of the reapers and nymphs at the end of the masque, the somnolence of Miranda-these gratuitous paranorma are more disturbing. Ariel mocking the drunkards by playing the song back to them on the tabor and pipe does not really worry us; we have seen similar things before in A Midsummer Night's Dream. But these causeless and capricious portents propel the sensibility into an unfamiliar region, and adandon it to uneasy speculation.

At the same time, the miracles and prodigies of the En-chanted Isle are related in a curiously intimate way to our experience. The hearing of strange sounds which are never properly identified, the swift recourse to useless weapons in the moments between sleep and waking-these things are especially alarming because especially near the bone. We have all lain in a twilight of inarticulate apprehension through the moments of waking. We have all known times in our everyday lives when our inattentive faculties have been surprised by confused noises, or the sound as of a name being called. E. R. Dodds in The Greeks and The Irrational observes that dreams are a fertile source of inference to another world in primitive thought. In Shakespeare's hands, these half-glimpsed sights, half-heard sounds, this [a porta] felt by men surprised by the nameless, become once more a means of alerting apprehensive speculation. And in the unpredictable island of The Tempest, we are denied that prosaic awakening which vividly refutes the night. It seems as if the poet is bent on drawing from us a different sort of credence from that ordinarily given to plays-perhaps a more primitive sort. At HI.iii.83 the Shapes (we are given no clearer stage direction) carry out the banquet 'with mops and mows', and we never learn what they are or what their dance is about. At V.i.231 we are told how the sleeping sailors awoke to hear strange and horrific sounds and we are never told what made them. Yet to call these things loose ends would be foolish criticism. They are there to heat our imaginations. One feels that one can hardly call the metaphysically speculative reaction inappropriate.

Shakespeare has another instrument for piercing to the more primitive levels of our consciousness in the un-pleasing shape of Caliban. Caliban, though horribly unchildlike, belongs to a world most of us have known as children. He lives in an intellectual half-light of bites, pinches, nettle-stings, terrors, cupboard-love, glimpses of extraordinary and inexplicable beauty. These things play a negligible part in the society of adults, but most of us remember a society in which they were intensely familiar. It was Caliban who, like a child, 'cried to dream again', was taught how to talk, and shown the Man in the Moon. The character of Caliban shows us objects which are too close to be seen in the ordinary way of things. His world is near-sighted, tactile, downward-looking, lacking in distant prospects.

But, despite the probing imagery of Caliban, the island itself seems very remote. We are given the feeling of immense distances, enforced by many images: 'Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground; long heath, brown furze, anything', 'Canst thou remember A time before we came unto this cell? … 'Tis far off; and rather like a dream than an assurance', 'What seest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time?' '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' th' moon's too slow—till new-born chins Be rough and razorable: she that from whom We all were sea-swallowed …', 'A space whose every cubit Seems to cry out…' 'In this most desolate isle', together with the use of far-away place-names like Arabia, Tunis and Angier.

The combination of a feeling of remoteness with an equally strong feeling of nearness, of intimacy, is an ambiguity characteristic of dreams, and of things half perceived in the instant of awaking. There are several wakings from sleep in the play, all drawn with an emphasis on the equivocal character of perception in such circumstances—Gonzalo and others in ILL, the sailors in v.L, and Caliban's

  … and sometime voices,
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again …
                                            III. ii. 144-6

Miranda compares her dim memory image of the ladies who attended her in her infancy to a dream (I.ii.45). To these we may add the wonderful description in the minutest terms of an image glimmering upon the sight—'The fringed curtains of thine eye advance' (I. ii. 405). There is another reference to eyelids at IV.i.177.

The nature poetry of the play (much of it Caliban's) is extremely interesting. It, too, is full of minute observations and gigantic distances, with a strange salt-sweetness hardly to be found elsewhere. We may skim the play, creaming off images which illustrate its special flavour—'the ooze of the salt deep … the veins of the earth when it is baked with frost', 'unwholesome fen … berries… brine-pits', 'yellow sands … the wild waves whist', 'sea-water … fresh brook mussels, withered roots and husks, wherein the acorn cradles', 'bogs, fens, flats', 'a rock by the seaside', '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', 'Where crabs grow … pignuts', 'the quick freshes'—and the nature hymn at IV.i.60 ff, bristling with grain and grasses, wet with rain and dew. It is strange that this great nature poem is not better loved. It may be that the focus is too clear for our post-romantic eyes. Perhaps most of us would prefer 'showery April' to Shakespeare's more intimate, tactile 'spongy April'. This truthful clarity in the natural imagery, like the circumstantial elements in the plot, helps to draw from us that special credence, at once lively and in a state of suspense, which is proper to the play. When the picture blurs we look for the emergence of bright, if unfamiliar, realities, not Gothic spectres. While the smoky ghosts of the old Histories seemed to repel our gaze, the supernatural in The Tempest seems to invite our minute attention or even to arise from it.

Once charmed into such an expectant frame of mind, we are quick to speculate, to postulate new 'planes of being' and vague spiritual hierarchies. The play begins with a desperate storm and shipwreck, and then the scene shifts abruptly to Prospero's cell. The crackling oaths of the rough-lunged castaways give place to the tranquil discourse of two angelic beings who might have stepped out of Blake's illustration to his Songs of Innocence. No sound of tempest now, the father and daughter talk together in an elaborately beautiful language, the sense variously drawn out from one line to another, which is very difficult to describe. They talk as no human beings ever talked and yet seem all the closer to our humanity for it. The difference between the diction of the castaways and that of Prospero and Miranda, like the different systems of perspective which Michelangelo gives to his Ignudi and his Biblical personages in the Sistine Chapel, prompt us to assign to them different 'orders of being'.

But we are also informed that Prospero is an Italian, an old acquaintance of the castaways, sometime Duke of Milan. His discontents and ambitions are extremely worldly. He is to be given no dramatic walk-over as a type of Spiritual Virtue. Again we wish to use the prefix 'half-', as often in discussing this play, and say that Prospero and Miranda are half-dipped in another world. This recurrent sense of ambiguity and suspension is extremely potent dramatically.

In the first scene of Act II we have an excellent specimen of this dramatic avoidance of the univocal. In it the 'honest old Counsellor' Gonzalo is baited by the wicked plotters. The dialogue in which this is carried out is not to be understood or enjoyed by a lazy mind. Let us not deceive ourselves, Antonio and Sebastian are truly witty; Gonzalo really does talk like an old fool. But Antonio and Sebastian are themselves both foolish and wicked, while Gonzalo is not really a fool at all. Had Shakespeare made Gonzalo's discourse less ponderous and the witticisms of the rest feebler, instead of allowing merit to prevail by its own sinews, the scene would have had one-tenth of its present power. As it stands, it is taut as a bowstring. As the scene proceeds the laughter of the plotters, and our own laughter also, grows harsher in our ears. Between interruptions, Gonzalo makes several pertinent observations: that they are better off than they had reason to expect, that though the island seems to be uninhabited the necessities of life are all to hand. He also remarks the disturbing state of their garments, dry and unstained by the sea. The others laugh on, and their laughter seems an echo of another laughter, in a Flemish tavern, where other similarly jovial fellows gaily proposed to slay Death—the riotoures of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale.

In turning to this scene, we passed over the meeting of Ferdinand and Miranda, which is oddly colourless and at the same time entirely glorious. Prospero, a little less than omniscient, directs the course of the encounter. Miranda glimmers upon Ferdinand's sight like something divine (as he says). The haunting image of Adam's dream ('he awoke and found it Truth') seems strangely relevant. Samuel Pepys (who seems to have seen The Tempest at least six times) called it 'the most innocent play that ever I saw'. This is perhaps the first meagre hint of the imagery of Eden which was to gather round the play in the writings of Coleridge, Lamb, Meredith and others. Miranda speaks the forthright language of the late-Shakespearean heroine, without coquetry or irony, yet full of humanity. Ferdinand is, I feel, the lesser creature of the two. He has the air of youthful nobility which allows Miranda to take him for a spirit, yet at the same time he has something in common with other young pup heroes (to whom Shakespeare is strangely indulgent) such as Posthumus, or even Claudio. He is a flawed object, uncertainly idealistic, and lacks the sweet earth-bound candour of his lady.

As the play unfolds the character of Caliban is introduced, and, a little later, the comedians, Trinculo and Stéphane The marvellous animal poetry of Caliban contrasts strangely with the myopic inebriation of Stephano and the folly of the fool. We feel a slight shiver when Caliban deifies the drunken butler. Long ago Schlegel and Hazlitt pointed out the vulgarity of the comedians and the utter absence of it in Caliban, who is without convention. One is reminded of E. M. Forster's distinction [in The Longest Journey, 1907] between coarseness and vulgarity, the first revealing something and the second concealing something. Caliban belongs to one order, the comedians to another, Prospero to another and Miranda perhaps to yet another. The play begins to shimmer and the allegorist critic is 'amazed with matter'.

The beginning of Act III is in symmetrical contrast with the beginning of the previous scene. There we had the brutish Caliban bearing wood for his master. Here we have Ferdinand bearing wood for his lady. Ferdinand, like Caliban, is given a soliloquy. But this is no animal poetry. We hear nothing now of stings or hedgehogs. Instead we have a rounded little philosophical discourse, and breathe the upper air of the polite Renascence intellect. Yet he is not entirely satisfactory. We feel that where the play requires him to be luminous he is merely grey. It seems hard that Caliban should so engross the nature poetry of the play, for if a little were given to Ferdinand (as it is given to Florizel in The Winter's Tale) he might gain in radiance.

The crazy plot of Caliban and the comedians against Prospero is carried forward with great dramatic dexterity. We are never allowed to abandon ourselves to unreserved laughter, largely because of the character of Caliban. On the one hand his sheer nastiness (notice that he merits the conceptually primitive charge of 'nastiness' rather than the fully-fledged moral opprobrium of 'wickedness') as in his plans for Prospero—

    I'll yield him thee asleep,
Where thou tnay'st knock a nail into his head.
                                           III. ii. 65-66

Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,
Or cut his wezand with thy knife.
                                          III. ii. 95-96

—and, on the other hand, his glimpses of inexplicable beauty leave the scene with an uneasy status. Caliban's description of his hearttearing visions creates a perfect suspension in time, to which the illogical tense-sequence may be allowed to contribute.

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.
                                   III. ii. 141-9

The effect is increased a few lines later when Stephano suddenly sees all that they have been doing and plotting for the immediate future in the light of a tale told to him long ago—

That shall be by and by: I remember the story.
                                          III. ii. 153

The bewilderment grows in the next scene, where Alonso, Sebastian and the rest find that they are lost. Gonzalo describes the island as a maze (III. iii. 2-3), an image which is to recur at v. i. 242. As they talk, the sound of music comes to their ears. As before, when each saw the island with different eyes, so now their perceptions diverge in the presence of the supernatural. Gonzalo is at first content with the mere beauty of it—'marvellous sweet music!' (III. iii. 19). Sebastian and Antonio are flippant. Prospero watches, invisible, and approves Gonzalo. He mocks them with the banquet, snatched from them by Harpies. Ariel appears and denounces the villains. They draw, only to be mocked by Ariel, who all but says to them, in the best Oxford manner, 'You have made a category mistake.' Again the feeling of [a poria] … of utter helplessness is conveyed to us. There is nothing remote from our experience in this, despite the elaborate apparatus of sorcery and fairies with which it is presented. There must be few people who have never awoken from a night-mare still grappling with an insubstantial enemy—attempting to bring physical slings and arrows to subdue a 'mental phenomenon'. Less closely connected but not irrelevant is the feeling which accompanies the making of a category mistake, or an attempt to yoke incomparables; as P. G. Wodehouse would say, the mind boggles. The villains boggle.

Ariel vanishes in thunder, the 'Shapes' carry out the table, and Alonso tells how he heard the name 'Prosper' in the withdrawing roar of the waves, and then in the wind and thunder. Again, the empirical character is strong. Experience will supply many such false configurations which have left us momentarily in doubt whether to form a natural or a supernatural interpretation. The play, with its life-size magician and veritable bombardment of miracles, determines us in favour of the supernatural. Sebastian and Antonio, still bemused by their own folly, cry out in hysterical defiance of the spirits that they will 'fight their legions o'er' (III. iii. 103).

Act IV opens with the sweet and orderly betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda. Prospero, a heavyish father, en-joins the observance of the sacrament of marriage. Ariel is dispatched to invite the rabble to the ceremony, the crown of the play, where all are to be joined. It is the turning point of the plot, where [desis] … gives place to [lusis] …—though with this particular story it is tempting to reverse Aristotle's metaphor, and refer to the end as the [desis] … or binding up of the play. The betrothal is attended by a masque, and therefore, we may suppose, by elaborate music and décor. Juno and Ceres come, heralded by the rainbow messenger Iris—represented by players, it is true, but then the players are spirits—and the play seems to move into yet another dimension. The transformation is almost worth calling a change of medium, and is comparable in its effect to the introduction of human voices in the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Goddesses, nymphs and sunburned reapers (in addition to the other characters) all come to the betrothal. The blessings of plenty are called down upon the future bride and bridegroom.

But the masque ends abruptly in a chaos of discords—'a strange, hollow and confused noise'. Prospero at once attributes this to the conspiracy against his life. We find ourselves being propelled into the mental entertainment of a cosmic harmony, in which an impulse of ill will entails a physical dislocation elsewhere in the system. It is uncertain whether the disturbance we are watching is deemed to have taken place in objective reality or in Prospero's mind alone, of which the masquers are mere figments. Really, at this stage of the game, it seems to matter very little. Prospero sorrowfully meditates that we, too, shall pass like spirits. Here occurs the finest sleep image of a play filled with sleepers,

 We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
                                   IV. i. 156-8

The ground is cut from under our feet and we are left with the intuition of a regress of fictions. The note has already been heard faintly in the play—at II. i. 253-4, where Antonio speaks as though he and his companions were characters in a play, but this has little effect on us.

It has too much Fancy and not enough Imagination about it. Stephano's relegation of his own recent actions to a story heard long before (III. ii. 153) touches us more nearly. The idea is, of course, a Shakespearean common-place, frequently appearing at poetic high-points, anthology pieces, ranging from Jaques's 'AH the world's a stage' through Lear's 'When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools', to Macbeth's 'tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'. The history of this metaphysical idea and its derivation from Plato have been briefly discussed in an earlier chapter. It is perhaps worth adding that something very like this idea can be found in the Greek poets who lived before Plato; for example, Pindar, Pythian, VIII. 137 sq.; Aeschylus, Prometheus Vinctus, 547-50; Sophocles, Ajax, 125-6. I hope it will not be thought perverse if I describe this poetry as metaphysical. Certainly Shakespeare is not affirming that we last for ever, but rather the exact reverse. Yet the nature of the denial is metaphysical in its assumption of pathos. It only makes sense in the context of immortal longings. The man who has never felt, however faintly, the tug of everlastingness will find little to admire in these lines—a pleasing description of cloudy towers, perhaps, but nothing more; the observation that things decay shrinks into triviality; what else should they do? Such a man will have no need, in the face of such thoughts, to take a turn or two 'to still [his] beating mind'.

The fundamentally metaphysical status of Prospero's lines emerges very clearly if we compare them with the epilogue to A Midsummer Night's Dream, spoken by Puck. Indeed, the comparison will be found to have a certain property of reverberation, for each passage is in a way typical of the play in which it appears. It is necessary to give the two speeches in full:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I'm an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call:
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.
     A Midsummer Night's Dream, V. ii. 54-69

And now Prospero:

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.—Sir, I am vex'd:
Bear with my weakness; my old brain is
  troubled.
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity.
If you be pleas'd, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
To still my beating mind.
                      The Tempest, IV. i. 148-63

Puck's speech is ingenious, delightful and undisturbing. If anything, it is reassuring. Common sense is not unseated by this play with reality and unreality, for the simple reason that the normal scope of the terms has suffered no metaphysical revision. It is the players who are 'shadows', the play which is 'a dream'. The audience is allowed to be utterly real. The speech is designed to end with applause. Plainly, after such a preparation, the sudden clapping from hundreds of hands will sound very human and solid. The epilogue carefully leads the audience back to a consciousness of its own ordinary humanity, before sending it home in happy complacency. The ending is wholly appropriate to the play. A Midsummer Night's Dream is, no doubt, a miracle of expressionist grace and ingenuity, a gossamer construction of fictions within fictions, dreams within a dream. But when we compare it with The Tempest it seems virtually innocent of any metaphysical impact. In it Shakespeare is almost as far removed from Plato as is Pirandello. I say 'almost' because I have no doubt that any Elizabethan regress of fictions will have some smell of Plato about it. But A Midsummer Night's Dream is singularly down to earth in its conceptual structure. There is one place only where the play seems likely, for a moment, to take on another dimension—a brief exchange between Demetrius and Hermia:

DEMETRIUS. These things seem small and
    undistinguishable,
 Like far-off mountains turned into clouds.
 HERMIS. Methinks I see these things with parted
    eye,
  When everything seems double.
                                                  IV. i. 189-92

Curiously, these are, of all the lines in the play, the most reminiscent of The Tempest. They begin to 'get at' the intimate experience of the audience in a way which is untypical of the play as a whole. But the idea is not developed.

Now turn to Prospero's lines. Where Puck's speech was comfortable, Prospero's is uncomfortable. Where A Mid-summer Night's Dream, at the last, assured us of our reality, The Tempest deprives us of that assurance. Observe how the thing is done: Prospero begins with what appears to be a consoling speech, addressed to Ferdinand, explaining the disruption of the masque. But the audience knows from the start that it is an odd sort of consolation, delivered not from a mood of easy benevolence, but from anger. Before he actually speaks, Ferdinand and Miranda watch him in consternation:

FERDINAND. This is strange: your father's in some
     passion
  That works him strongly.
  MIRANDA. Never till this day
  Saw I him touch'd with anger so distemper'd.
                                           IV. i. 143-5

It is something of a surprise to find Prospero addressing Ferdinand at all. The opening of the speech is probably best played abruptly. Further, as the speech unfolds we find that the comfort offered at the beginning is in no way realized. At the end Prospero turns his back on Ferdinand and Miranda, in order, as he says, to settle his disturbed thoughts. It is worth while reminding ourselves of the occasion of the speech as a whole. We suspect that the conspiracy of Caliban and the rest is the cause of the break-up of the masque, but this is rather suspicion than knowledge. Certainly we are quite unable to explain how the behaviour of the conspirators has led to this result. The whole episode is extremely odd, and the oddity is never cleared up. It belongs with all those other examples of the imperfectly explained supernatural which were discussed at the beginning of this chapter. In A Midsummer Night's Dream we may be cheated for a moment by the intricacy of the plot, but we know what form an explanation would take—for example 'You see, he has just used the love-philtre', or something of that sort. But in The Tempest we are led into a wilderness where we have lost even the proper form of explanation. Hence, even before Prospero begins his 'explanation in which nothing is explained', we are, so to speak, disorientated. As we have seen, Prospero's speech does nothing to cure this.

In Puck's speech it was quite easy to see what was supposed to be real, and what unreal; easy, because the un-real things were things which in any case everyone knows to be unreal—a simulated Duke of Athens, a personated Queen of the Amazons, the King and Queen of the Fairies—while the real things were, simply, ourselves. But in Prospero's speech the area of unreality has ceased to be constant and familiar. In a way it has got out of control. He begins by talking about the actor-spirits (themselves a regress of fictions). So far there is nothing absolutely unprecedented. Puck himself was capable of stepping outside the play in order to discuss it. But the circle of darkness, of unreality, continues to widen, passing over the audience itself, beyond the walls of the theatre, to engulf palace and church, and, at last, the whole world. From making the stage shimmer before our eyes Prospero passes on to cast the same spell of doubt on the earth itself. Words alone retain a vivid life, cutting deep at our inmost memories and perceptions.

Act V opens with the entry of Prospero, attired, as the Folio stage-direction tells us, in his Magicke robes. Ariel reports that the King and his followers are thoroughly distracted. Prospero announces that he will break his charms, so that all 'shall be themselves' once more. We have a sensation as of passing from the inner world to the outer. In a great speech the spirits are dispelled and we feel ourselves falling back into Italy, into things civil and political (though, in a way, the play is all about politics). The sleeping sailors are awakened by Ariel. Assorted [anagnorises] … follow. In the interview between Alonso and Prospero we feel the link with the other late plays, with their theme of children lost in tempest and found to the playing of sweet music. We remember Perdita and Marina.

ALONSO. When did you lose your daughter?
PROSPERO. In this last tempest.
                                                       V. i. 152-3

As the play closes the theme of reconciliation and restoration grows stronger still, until at last all set sail for home with the 'calm seas' and 'auspicious gales' that Ariel gives them for his last service.

This play is obviously not an explicit allegory in which both the figure and its significance are clearly expressed in the text, in the manner of the Psychomachia of Prudentius. This can be shortly proved by pointing to the names of the personages in either work. The names Prospero, Miranda, Ariel might be held to be faint hints towards allegorical significance, but they are faint indeed compared with die strident labels which Prudentius has pasted on the brows of all his characters—Patientia, Ira, Sodomita Libido, and so on. The Winter's Tale might be thought more explicit, since scholarship has shown that Hermione was in the seventeenth century identified with Harmonía. Yet both were the names of a person, associated with the Theban Cycle long before Shakespeare appeared. So even here we hardly have a clear case of an abstraction personified.

But if The Tempest is not explicit, formal allegory, cannot it be allegorised? Of course, it can; but anything can. No one has yet written a story which is utterly proof against the efforts of a determined allegorical exegete. If a character exemplifies any quality (and all characters do) he may be said to figure that quality. This is the mere licence of ordinary linguistic usage; the 'semantic areas' of 'exemplify' and 'figure' overlap.

It remains to ask whether The Tempest can be shown to be allegorical; whether the basic logical structure which is explicit in the Psychomachia can be shown to be implicit—that is less obviously present but present all the same—in The Tempest. The various attempts to do this, have been, almost without exception, metaphysical in character. In my second chapter I argued at some length against the crude opposition of allegory and transcendentalism, and suggested that allegory was, in fact, a very frequent medium for the expression of transcendentalist metaphysics. But this habit of viewing the whole world as an allegory, and then expressing the fact allegorically, can lead, as one might expect, to some tricky situations. Where allegory becomes, as it were, the natural habit of the mind, it is often difficult for the more literal-minded person to satisfy himself as to what exactly is being asserted at all. A good example of the anima naturaliter allegorica in modern times is Professor J. R. R. Tolkien. He says (describing the dragon in Beowulf) [in "Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics", PBA, XXII (1936)]

There are in the poem some vivid touches of the right kind—as pa se wyrm onwoc, wroht wees geniwad; stone after stane … in which this dragon is real worm, with a bestial life and thought of his own, but the conception, none the less, approaches draconitas rather than draco: a personification of malice, greed, destruction (the evil side of heroic life) and of the undiscriminating cruelty of fortune that distinguishes not good or bad (the evil aspect of all life).

It is clear that Tolkien is telling us something about the structure of the universe, as well as about the Beowulfian dragon. The Old Worm, merely by becoming indeterminate, is transformed into draconitas. The metaphysical opinion that malice is something active, operating in the world like an interpenetrating spirit, and that 'dragonishness' is a sort of huge, diffused, dragon, infused like a gas through the universe, denied idiosyncratic shape and thoughts but still having the authentic dragon stench about him—this metaphysical opinion is not so much the concomitant of Professor Tolkien's observations as the very condition of them. And now we may ask the question. Does Professor Tolkien suggest that Beowulf is an allegory? It is almost impossible to answer. If we say yes, we must allow that, for such a sensibility, all undifferentiated, morally simple characters will be allegorical, since they will resemble more closely (while never expressing literally) the great archetypal Exemplars which properly enjoy the name of universals. Otherwise we may say 'No, clearly he doesn't mistake it for a Prudentian formal allegory; it's just his manner of speaking.' But this will blind us to the fact that Tolkien's poem is different in kind from the literal-minded man's poem.

To bring the argument back within the pale of Shakespearian criticism, we may take a passage from the critical writings of Professor Nevill Coghill [in "The Basis of Shakespearian Comedy", E & S, NS III (1930)]:

If I use the word 'allegory' in connection with Shakespeare I do not mean that the characters are abstractions representing this or that vice or virtue (as they do in some allegories, say the Roman de la Rose or The Castle of Perseverance itself). I mean that they contain and adumbrate certain principles, not in a crude or neat form, but mixed with other human qualities; but that these principles, taken as operating in human life, do in fact give shape and direction to the course, and therefore to the meaning of the play.

How, then, is this special sort of allegory, in which principles are contained and adumbrated, to be distinguished from any other play, from which principles can be extracted? Apparently, in virtue of the activity of those principles. They operate 'in human life', and 'give shape and direction to the course … of the play'. I do not understand how a 'principle' is to do this unless it is turned into a spirit, that is, into an active, influential individual. I think we can conclude that Professor Coghill is not so much suggesting that Shakespeare's comedies are allegorical as proposing a metaphysical view of virtues and vices as active (a view authorized by much Christian religious language) and suggesting that this view was shared by Shakespeare and expressed in his plays. And indeed, he may be right.

For the nineteenth-century critics of our first chapter, proving The Tempest an allegory and proving it meta-physical were very nearly the same thing. It might be objected that if only we would revive the much-despised opposition between allegory and metaphysics we might be lifted out of this confusing state of affairs; either a poem is allegorical—that is, a fictitious reification of qualities, etc.—or else it is metaphysical, in which case the reification, since it is ontologically asserted, must be taken as literal; hence a poem must be described as either metaphysical or allegorical, certainly not both. Unfortunately, this lucid distinction proves to be of little use when applied to actual specimens of metaphysical/allegorical poetry, since, when the metaphysician wishes to make an ontological assertion, he is seldom able to make it literally at all. It is evident that almost all those who have wished to call The Tempest allegorical have done so on the ground that it represents metaphysical truths about the world allegorically.

That Shakespeare's poetry betrays a tendency towards metaphysics is, I think, impossible to deny.…

Allegoristic criticism was almost normal in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth, though still vigorous, it has come to be considered eccentric. But one good result of the general retreat from enthusiastic allegorizing is that when a critic does brave disapproval, and allegorize, we can be tolerably sure that he is describing the play, and not just indulging in verbal high flights of his own.

The twentieth-century arguments for describing The Tempest as a metaphysical allegory may be classified under two heads; first those drawn from a comparison of the story-patterns of the late Romances with one other and with the plots and imagery of the earlier Tragedies; second, arguments drawn from the internal character of The Tempest itself, its characterization, treatment of morality, use of the supernatural. The first class may be represented by G. Wilson Knight and E. M. W. Tillyard and the second by Derek Traversi and Patrick Cruttwell.

The former critics point out that the late Romances, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, are all concerned with restoration and reconciliation of persons thought to be dead. The recurring feature of the storm is associated with their loss, and music with their reconciliation. This pattern may be compared with another pattern, discernible in the tragedies, in which the break-down and death of a man is externally reflected in violent storm, and a hint of reconciliation beyond the grave is held out in the metaphors used by the heroes in their 'moments of fifth act transcendental speculation' [G. W. Knight, The Crown of Life, 1948]. It is thus argued that the Romances in their veritable reconciliation after tempests represent an acting out of those metaphors. It is therefore suggested that they are symbolic of a theological after-life in which all manner of things shall be well. The necessity of supposing that Shakespeare intends a life beyond the grave may well be questioned, particularly since the most explicit metaphysics in The Tempest is to be found in the speech in which Prospero stresses the transitoriness of this life which is rounded with a sleep (IV. i. 146-63). So long as eternal happiness is conceived in terms of extended duration, it will be difficult to find unequivocal Shakespearian support for it.

But the relation of the story-pattern of the Romances to that of the Tragedies could be accounted for with a more modest set of presumptions. For example, one might suggest that Shakespeare thought what a wonderful wish-fulfilment type of play could be written if one gave these tragic heroes their whole desire, in this world; if, after all, the beloved person were shown never to have died at all. The dramatic use of the delightfulness of reconciliation after all hope has been lost does not necessarily imply a theological belief in resurrection. If The Tempest is really to be taken as an account of survival after death, since it certainly is not literal it must undoubtedly be allegorical. However, I should be much happier with the alternative suggestion, hazier and perhaps unpalatable to Christian sensibilities, that the 'story' of life after death and the story of The Tempest both stand as myths of some mysterious state of affairs, closely connected with moral questions, which may elude literal description together.

This approach is extremely unmanageable and vague, and perhaps it is for that very reason that it admits more readily an alliance with the second approach, the approach by way of the nature of characterization and treatment of ethics in the last plays. There are indeed certain features in the Romances which are easily connected with the separation and 'eternizing' of love-value which we found in the Sonnets and elsewhere. D. A. Traversi says [in Shakespeare: the Last Phase, 1954], of Florizel's comparison of Perdita to a wave of the sea in The Winter's Tale (IV. iii. 140 ff.):

This image, like the speech of which it forms a part, is, of course, much more than a beautiful piece of decorative poetry. It is rather the particular expression of a vital theme of the play … the relation between the values of human life which postulate timelessness, and the impersonal, 'devouring' action of time which wears these values ceaselessly away. The wave image conveys perfectly the necessary relation between the mutability of life and the infinite value of human experience which it conditions, but which is finally incommensurate with it.

Traversi is quick, too, to point out the association in The Tempest of supernatural imagery with intuitions of value. Yet the task is less easily performed for The Tempest than it is for The Winter's Tale. What we may call the Affirmation of Paradise has in The Tempest a far less confident tone. Miranda's first perception of the 'noble vessel' has a visionary quality, yet it is belied, as Traversi acknowledges, by the presence of the plotters in the ship. In The Tempest alone of the Romances the divine masque is broken up in confusion. The whole play, as compared with The Winter's Tale, is strangely perverse, like a piece of flawed glass. Bonamy Dobrée, in a brilliant essay ['The Tempest', E & S, NS V (1952)], pointed out the unique flavour of The Tempest, more shimmering, less full-blood-edly confident in its paradisal intuitions that its immediate predecessors; the wooing of Ferdinand, though piercingly ideal, is less warm than the wooing of Florizel; the forgiveness of Prospero has a touch of the priggish Senecan.

It is as if a second wave of scepticism has passed over the poet. It is quite different from the coprologous indignation of Troilus and Cressida. He no longer, for the sake of one transgression, denies the authenticity of love itself. But a reservation as to the truth-value of the assertions love provokes seems to have reappeared. Time, the old grey destroyer of the Sonnets, was not, after all, put down by love. After the enthusiastic reaffirmation of the later Sonnets and the first three Romances, a sadder and more complex reaction has set in, slightly ironical perhaps, but not at all cynical. The world has not been wholly redeemed by love; look at it. The subjective vision of the lover may transcend objective facts, but it does not obliterate them. The lover has one level, the hater another; perhaps there are a thousand more such levels, each as unreal as the rest.

Thus the quasi-mystical ethical intuitions are undermined by a doubt about reality, about the comparative status of different kinds of perception. My summary of the play in the first half of this chapter was, of course, selective. It may be as well to proclaim here the principle of selection involved. I was concerned to show Shakespeare's preoccupation, throughout the play, with the more nearly subliminal aspects of perception. It is as if Shakespeare himself became concerned, as I was in the third and fourth chapters of this book, to retreat into the preconceptual area of the mind. The chapters and the play have, in a sense, very similar subject-matter. Certainly, The Tempest is not related to that psychological theorizing in just the same way as the poetic specimens I cited were related to it. Those poems exemplified the indeterminate, configurative imagination. The Tempest is, for much of its length, about people configurating, imagining without actualizing, and so on. Patrick Cruttwell argues [in The Shakespearean Moment, 1954] that Shakespeare in his last plays began to take seriously the allegorical/transcendental images of his youthful poetry. In The Winter's Tale, indeed, it may be that an ontological force is given to such imagery. But in The Tempest the prominence given to the ambiguous lower reaches of our conceptual and perceptual apparatus infects all ontological dogmatism with un-certainty. Shakespeare repeatedly restricts his characters to the primitive stages of perception in their apprehension of the island and its denizens. In this way he builds up a sense of a shimmering multiplicity of levels, which, together with the gratuitous operations of the supernatural, produce in the audience a state of primitive apprehension similar to that in which the characters find themselves. We are given the impression that the island may, after all, belong wholly to the unassertive world of dreams and ambiguous perceptions. Such material is naturally baffling to the critic who wishes to sort out symbol and statement. The allegorical exegete feels he has been cheated of his proper prey.

But we have also to reckon with the intuitions of value which are expressed in the meeting of Ferdinand and Miranda, and also (possibly) in the masque. That value is in these passages supernaturally conceived according to the logic treated in the earlier chapters of this book, I have little doubt. But it is somewhat puzzling to encounter these intuitions in a context so instinct with the atmosphere of ambiguous imagery. The proper relation of these ethical intuitions to the more elusive intuition that the island is only a dream or figment of the configurative imagination is difficult to determine. Certainly there is no sign of any attempt on Shakespeare's part to postulate a genetic relationship, to suggest that primitive configurations are the psychological parents of intuitions of value. After all, the two elements are presented in a totally different manner, the first involving the use of metaphor, the second dramatically. The imaginary status of the island is hinted by the behaviour of the characters, sometimes baffled, sometimes inconsistent. The value-intuitions are explicitly stated, by certain characters in theological imagery, and also (possibly) in the terms of a mythological spectacle. Yet it is easy to feel that some part of the vague scepticism created by the recurrence of half-subliminal perceptions has attached itself to the lovers and the persons of the masque. The differing visions which the castaways have of the island may be held to throw a pale cast of doubt on the vision of Ferdinand when he falls in love with Miranda. We must allow that Shakespeare's motive in associating perceptual ambiguity with supernatural encounters is quite different from the motives behind chapter III of this book. He is not concerned to provide an instantial correlative for universals. But in our inquiry into perceptual imagery we discovered the peculiar indulgence of that area of the mind to the combining of things incompatible and the admission of things impossible. It is surely this character which it is Shakespeare's object to exploit. That property of the imagination which makes possible the instantial 'universal' is the same property as that which gives The Tempest its peculiar atmosphere of ontological suspension. This Shakespeare effects by giving the imaginative 'limbo of possibles' a dramatic impulse in the direction of reality, that is, by backing up the glimpses enjoyed by his characters with just enough magical apparatus to determine us in favour of a supernatural explanation without losing our sense of the 'internal' flavour of the experience. The truth is that these ambiguities have at least two functions. If they make the reports of the characters dubious, they make the playwright convincing. We cannot trust characters who contradict one another and continually stumble in their encounters with the supernatural. But we must trust the playwright who shows us both their insights and their stumblings.

Shakespeare has, in a perfectly legitimate manner, contrived to have his cake and eat it. He gives us the heart-tearing intuitions of heavenly value, but in a radically empirical and undogmatic way which disarms the cynical critic. He seems to say, 'I have seen this, and this, and this. You receive it as I found it. The interpretation I leave to you.' Certainly, the challenge has been accepted!

Is The Tempest allegorical? If I have done my work properly, the question should have shrunk in importance. The principal object of this book has been to show that allegorical poetry is more curiously and intimately related to life than was allowed by the petrifying formula of C. S. Lewis [in The Allegory of Love, 1936]. One result of this is that the question 'Is this work allegorical?' ceases to have the clear significance it would have for a man to whom allegory, as the most ostentatiously fictitious of all literary forms, is directly opposed to a serious preoccupation with the real universe. Nevertheless, I am willing to give a few arbitrary rulings. The simplified characters of the play are not ipso facto allegorical, but it is no great sin to take them as types. The sense that beauty and goodness and harmony are ontologically prior to their subjects does not become fullbloodedly allegorical until the masque, where the spirits, nymphs, etc., may without straining be taken as a mythological acting out of the mystery of the betrothal. It is hardly worth while to call the island itself allegorical ('the mind of man' and so on). Certainly it shimmers between subjectivity and objectivity, presents itself differently to different eyes, yet it will not keep still long enough for one to affix an allegorical label. For the island, as for most of the elements of the play, I should prefer to coin a rather ugly term -'pre-allegorical'. Ariel and Caliban of all the characters in the play come nearest to being allegories of the psychic processes, but it would certainly be a mistake not to realize that they are very much more besides. If the suggestion of the unique authority of love and value were only a little more explicit, we might allow the word 'allegorical' for the play as a whole, and consider the restoration of the supposedly dead as a myth of this ethic, but, as things are, we cannot.

The minutely perceptive scepticism of The Tempest defeats the stony allegorist and the rigid cynic equally. The mystery is never allowed to harden into an ontological dogma to be reduced to symbols or rejected with contempt. Instead we have an extraordinarily delicate and dramatic play, which, until the Last Day makes all things clear, will never be anything but immensely suggestive.

One important claim can be made. The suggestiveness of The Tempest is metaphysical in tendency.… Love is conceived as a supernatural force, and any number of protestations of metaphor and apologetic inverted commas cannot do away with the fact that a sort of deification, and therefore a fortiori reification has taken place. Whether these concepts should be allowed to be meaningful, or whether they should be permitted only a 'merely aesthetic' force (and that presumably spurious) I do not know. The unassertive candour of Shakespeare's imagination has left the question open. But the nineteenth-century allegorists were at any rate concerning themselves with the right (i.e. the peculiar) sort of concept. Their heresy is less than that of the hard-headed, poetry-has-nothing-to-do-with-ideas school. Their claims to have found the exclusive allegorical interpretation may be left to their foolish internecine strife, but their noses told them truly that the smell of metaphysics was in the air. If we look upon their effusions less as appraisals of the play than as reactions to it, they will be more acceptable. We may think of them as we think of the women who miscarried on seeing the Eumenides of Aeschylus: as critics they may have been injudicious, but as an audience they were magnificent—though perhaps a little too lively.