Rough Magic: The Tempest
[In the following essay, Young examines The Tempest as an example of pastoral literature, focusing in particular on the play's theatricality, its emphasis on magic, its dreamlike atmosphere, and its treatment of the themes of art and nature.]
The story of castaways on a desert island is such a familiar and popular narrative design that we are more apt to think of it in terms of its "modern" manifestations (from Robinson Crusoe to The Admirable Crichton to The Lord of the Flies, not to mention innumerable cartoons, films, and jokes) than to trace its literary ancestry back to the Odyssey or to consider its longstanding relation to the pastoral mode. Yet its pastoral character is undeniable. It embodies the same ambivalence between a desire to escape to a simpler form of existence and a fear of being cut off from society, civilization, indeed all human company. It raises the same questions about man's essential goodness or savagery, nature versus nurture. And despite its emphasis on an alien and alternative setting, it often serves mainly as a mirror of society, tracing the formation of a readjusted social microcosm and testing familiar values and customs.
An island may differ very slightly from the more traditional pastoral landscapes, the Arcadias, Ardens, and Bohemias, but it differs in interesting ways. It is apt to be more alien and strange, harder to reach and harder, of course, to escape from. It has a self-contained, consistent quality that makes it easy to present as a utopia, untouched by outside influences, or as a society in miniature, the model of a commonwealth or kingdom. If it is a "desert" island, that is, deserted or nearly so, then it raises the questions of self-sufficiency and survival: how does the castaway procure enough food, shelter, and protection from animals or savages? Many of these features were of course associated with pastoral settings other than islands, but taken together they suggest why a writer of pastoral might choose such a setting and what he might do with it.
It would have been remarkable indeed if Renaissance pastoral, in an age of discovery and exploration, had not resorted to the island setting as a response to popular interest and to the imaginative horizons that were being opened by the tales of mariners and rescued castaways. The pastoral concern with alternatives to urban society and the courts of monarchs expanded easily to a consideration of the distant and unfamiliar places that explorers were finding and colonizers were venturing toward.
But that is not the whole story of the desert island branch of the pastoral. If it were, The Tempest might well be set in the Caribbean or the Pacific. That it is not, is an indication of the continuing strength of the tradition of classical epic and romance. If Shakespeare draws upon the pamphlets of the voyagers for some of the details of his island and refers us to the "still-vex'd Bermoothes," he nevertheless sets Prospero's island in the Mediterranean, amid the currents of older civilizations and literary traditions. The isle is full of noises, and some of them seem to echo Virgil, Ovid, Homer, and the romance tradition stretching back to Longus and Heliodorus. The old and the new, ancient myth and legend on the one hand, and the True Declarations and True Repertories of the pamphlets on the other, are simultaneously invoked.
The islands of the older tradition were as often as not enchanted, the realm of a Circe or a hermetic sorcerer. Perhaps that is why the Bermuda pamphlets had to contradict the rumors that spirits and devils inhabited the islands. The assumption, given the literary tradition, was not unwarranted, and recalling that the islands of epic and romance were sometimes realms of enchantment gives us another way of stressing the fact that the island setting in pastoral was more self-contained, more marvelous, and, often, more terrifying. If one's pastoral sojourn was spent combatting or submitting to the power of a ruler who was also a necromancer, the results were apt to be more spectacular and less peaceful.
Once again, then, Shakespeare has founded a play on the characteristic pattern of pastoral romance, with its story of exile, sojourn, and reunion, and its emphatic use of setting. This time he has ventured into a notable variation, where the setting is an island, and the accelerated sojourn is dreamlike and amazing because it is entirely the product of an enchanter's art—an enchanter who is himself a long sojourner. The result is a play that differs markedly from any of the other pastorals in structure, texture, and tone, a play at once disarmingly simple and bafflingly complex.
While my remarks have thus far suggested that the combination of an enchanted island, ruled by a magician, with the standard pastoral story of extrusion, sojourn, and return was readily available to Shakespeare, given the romance tradition and the natural coincidence of interests and possibilities such materials shared, it is nevertheless necessary to consider carefully whether the combination already existed in some form which may have influenced the character and construction of The Tempest. The answer, which can be confidently put in terms of existence and more cautiously advanced as regards influence, is somewhat surprising. This time we are not concerned with the pastoral novels by writers like Greene, Lodge, and Sidney that were so strong an influence on English stage pastoral in general and Shakespeare in particular. This time the influence, if that is what may be claimed for such a surprisingly close analogue, or group of them, is dramatic and continental: the Commedia dell'Arte. These plays survive only in their rough outlines, the scenari from which the players improvised their performances, using a stock of tried and tested comic bits called lazzi. What the collections of scenari clearly show is that the Italian comedians, combining literary fashions with their sense of what could be made effective for a diverse audience on the stage, worked up their own special genre of pastoral, a combination of horseplay, music, spectacular magic, love interest, and mistaken identity. The enchanted island was a standard setting for such plays, and the action was often initiated by a shipwreck.
These "shipwreck pastorals" had in common with The Tempest the following more or less standard features: characters cast ashore and dispersed to wander on an enchanted island, the domain of a magician who was generally both mischievous—so he could play tricks on the castaways—and benign—so that he could straighten out misunderstandings, prevent tragedy, and neatly resolve complications at the finish; humor based on fearful recognition by survivors who think each other ghosts of drowned comrades; natives so awed by the visitors that they worship them as gods; spirits who make use of invisibility to echo, mislead, and confuse their victims; such standard pieces of stage magic as charmed swords, disappearing food, and spirits in grotesque and frightening guises; and a generous proportion of singing and dancing. None of these features are found all together in one existing scenario, an Ur-Tempest, but they are common enough to the genre that if, as Lea suggests, a scenario of The Tempest were inserted in one of the existing collections of commedia scenari, the resemblance would be remarkable. However we are to account for it, there seems to be something more than coincidence at work.
The obstacles to declaring the pastoral tragicomedies of the commedia players an important source for The Tempest have, however, proved manifold, and the relationship has yet to win wide acceptance. There is, in the first place, the traditional preference of Shakespearean source hunters for non-dramatic as opposed to dramatic sources, and for textual as opposed to nontextual influences. We have traditionally been willing to assume that if a book was in print or even available in manuscript, then Shakespeare had it to hand and read it; textual parallels have always had a comfortable solidity and certainty. We know far less about stage practices and styles, however, both in England and on the Continent. As a result, source studies have shied away from these areas, and what may be a somewhat lopsided picture of Shakespeare as a working dramatist has inevitably emerged. In the case of the corn-media shipwreck pastorals, textual evidence is of course unavailable. What remains? The fact that Italian players had visited England from the 15 70's onward, and possibly as close to the writing of The Tempest as 1610. The additional fact that Englishmen regularly travelled to Italy and brought back detailed accounts of what they had seen, including theatrical performances. And, finally, what seems to me the common sense view that Shakespeare, as a man of the theater as well as the study, had every reason to inform himself, in as much detail as possible and by whatever means, about the resources available to him through theatrical styles and modes in other countries. Judging by its wide influence and great popularity, both in Italy and elsewhere, the commedia dell'arte is scarcely something Shakespeare could have ignored or overlooked. There is evidence in plays as early as The Comedy of Errors and Love's Labour's Lost to suggest his familiarity with it.
Another obstacle to acceptance of the commedia influence on The Tempest has been the peculiarly sacrosanct status of the play itself. There is a question, apparently, of dignity. A lesser play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, for instance, might readily be admitted to have such roots. But The Tempest has a special status—it is the last play, a final statement, a summary and farewell. Commentators have delighted to conclude that, indebted to no source for its story, it shows Shakespeare at his most inventive and ingenious. And those who have found in the play autobiography, profound religious allegory, Neo-Platonic mysteries, and immense erudition, have scarcely wished to connect it with the debased literary values and low improvised theater of the Italian comedians. It would seem rather like saying that Henry James found his inspiration for The Ambassadors by attending the Folies Bergère. Even Frank Kermode, the play's best modern editor and one of its most astute commentators, succumbs to this attitude. Concluding a discussion of the possibility of the commedia as a source, he suggests that "Shakespeare had other and more suggestive materials for speculation. He did not need a jocose pantomime to teach him how to think about it."
We need only recall Shakespeare's deep and fully demonstrated interest in the rudimentary, popular, and supposedly obsolete materials of his art, especially in the late plays, to find this unfair and misleading. Indeed, Ker-mode himself is on much firmer ground when he remarks, earlier on, that "The presence of primitive elements in the deeply considered structure of The Tempest need not surprise us; they are a normal Shakespearean phenomenon.…" It seems a short step from an interest in crude romances, folk tales, and archetypal characters and situations, to an intensely vigorous and highly stylized popular theater using masks and "jocose pantomime." Given Shakespeare's interest in clumsy old plays and crude forms of popular entertainment (e.g., the Whitsun pastoral), there is little that can be called new in the suggestion of the commedia influence but the Continental flavoring, and even that, as I have suggested, was not finding its way into Shakespeare's dramatic repertoire for the first time.
I have put this stress on the question of source materials for The Tempest because I believe, with E. E Stoll [Shakespeare and Other Masters, 1940], that the play "stands like a tub on its own bottom," and that it is important to recognize that bottom for what it is. Once again Shakespeare is revealing rather than concealing the artifice on which his theater is inevitably based; once again he is inviting the audience to join him in considering the nature of art, fiction, fable, tale, and to be conscious of the way in which he is transforming and sophisticating crude and unlikely materials. Such claims could be made for The Tempest even without the recognition of the commedia influence. The magician, the wild man, perhaps even the shipwrecked clowns and courtiers, were scarcely foreign to the English stage. But once one has begun to consider the play in this light, once the psychological barrier to crude theatrical sources has dropped away, the commedia parallels are simply too strong to ignore or make light of. My suggestion, then—and it must remain that in the absence of firmer evidence than is likely to turn up—is that in The Tempest Shakespeare was deliberately resorting to the organization and manner of the pastoral tragicomedies of the commedia dell'arte. Far from attempting to conceal this fact from his audience, he expected from them some measure of recognition, the kind he had relied on, in varying degrees, concerning the antecedents of Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale. Much of the recognition would have come, of course, in extra-textual areas, in the style of playing and general tone. In addition, we need not exclude the possibility of an earlier English play, fairly well-known and closely based on commedia pastoral tragicomedy. Once again there is evidence, but it is too slender to allow us to speak with certainty.
One benefit of this approach to The Tempest, through the "back door" of dramatic resources, is that it allows us to differentiate sharply between this play and the other late romances in the matter of structure. If the other plays were self-conscious attempts to transfer narrative materials to the stage with a minimum of alteration, The Tempest emphatically is not. That, indeed, is what suggests it is built on a dramatic model rather than on a pastoral novel. If Shakespeare knew of the shipwreck pastorals of the commedia, he would immediately have understood how the players had solved the problem of finding dramatic form for the lyric and narrative elements of pastoral. The enchanted island gave a single, highly flexible setting; the shipwreck provided a fortuitous assembling of characters who were to discover their identities and relationships; and the magician's omnipotence excused wild improbabilities of time scheme and resolution. The resulting plots were highly unlikely, but admitted both tight organization and great variety of incident. The comedians had resolved the problem of achieving the neo-classical unities by simply imposing them from the out-side, without regard to the question of improbability. Shakespeare's pleasure in duplicating this design, with the same double-conciousness provided for the audience that was present in The Winter's Tale's treatment of geme, seems a likely explanation for the unusually tight structure of The Tempest. Adhering to the unities becomes a kind of game, with so many references to the exact timing of the action scattered through the play that the spectator begins to feel he can almost set his watch by it.
This point raises the larger question of theatricality and open artifice in The Tempest, a subject generally neglected by interpreters anxious not to detract from the foundations of what they see as an allegorical structure. For if the play, like the other late romances and like the other pastorals, is concerned to point up the fictive and wishful characters of the ideals it advances and explores, then it is markedly different in tone from the play that is so reverently served up to us in most commentaries and stage productions. This is not to deny the ultimate seriousness of The Tempest or, indeed, its complexity of vision; it is rather to suggest that these are accomplished by the playful double-consciousness about the materials being used, in particular their distance from reality, that we found to be so pervasive in The Winter's Tale.
Consider the opening scene. Without questioning its effectiveness in relation to the play as a whole, we can readily admit that it was impossible to stage such a scene realistically in a Jacobean theater—whether the Globe or the Blackfriars. The Tempest opens, then, by putting a strain on the capacities of its medium. Its audience is unlikely to be transported from the theater; they are rather kept highly conscious of it. Within the scene are strongly realistic elements in the behavior and speech of the characters; but the storm itself, and the shipwreck, must remain, as Coleridge suggested, "poetical, though not in strictness natural."
The appropriateness of the artifice is quickly revealed in the following scene, where we discover that the storm was in fact illusory, the product of a magician's art. We now meet the man who is to be not only the principal actor in the events that follow, but their author, director, and stage manager as well. Sharing Prospero's consciousness will in effect keep us "backstage" throughout, with a special knowledge of events, their appearance and their reality, their origins and consequences. Prospero's control of the action, the dramatizing properties of his magic, and his vision of life itself as a gigantic theater of illusion, all contribute greatly to the theatrical atmosphere of The Tempest.
This second scene takes us through the exposition. The one drawback to observing the neoclassical unities, especially in dealing with the time span involved in a romance story like The Tempest, is the necessity for a detailed exposition early in the play. Character X must tell character Y, at some length, what character Y would probably, under normal circumstances, know already. This cumbersome bit of artifice, then, was the necessary prelude to the supposed verisimilitude that the unities were intended to secure. Is it not possible to suppose that Shakespeare is emphasizing this point, in a spirit of playfulness, rather than concealing it? Miranda says Prospero's tale "would cure deafness," but it is in fact a dangerously tedious device to spring on an audience at this point. It has been suggested that Prospero's interruptions to make sure Miranda is paying attention are a clever method for breaking up his long monologue and giving it dramatic interest; I think rather they call attention, not to his state of mind or to Miranda's behavior, but to the strain on the medium that Shakespeare's choice of subject and structure has entailed. The game of observing the unities, as I have called it, really begins here.
As the play moves forward, the theatricality of the opening scenes is carefully sustained. The fact that Prospero's magicianship is a role he plays is emphasized by the special garment it requires, a costume which he dons and doffs, and by special props, his book and staff. With Ferdinand and Miranda he must play a calculated part, that of the jealous ruler and gruff father, and he keeps the audience informed of the fact that he is acting. We are less sure whether the attitudes he assumes with Ariel and Caliban are spontaneous or calculated; some mixture of the two seems most likely. In the last scene we watch him assume his pre-play identity, the one by which most of the characters, with their limited awareness, must know him:
Not one of them
That yet looks on me, or would know me: Ariel,
Fetch me the hat and rapier in my cell:
I will disease me, and myself present
As I was sometime Milan.
[5.1.82-86]
Then, for the audience, who have been privy to all the details of his "project" (see 2.1.294 and 5.1.1 for his use of that term), he makes one last appearance, adopts one final role: in the Epilogue he speaks to us in his identity as actor, an entertainer revealing the special purpose of his "project … which was to please." Which is the real Prospero? The last of these roles only, or the sum of all of them?
Prospero's "art" consists mainly of shows and spectacles. Their purposes are varied—to entertain, to punish, to enlighten, to instruct—and our sense of their reality fluctuates, even as we learn that they have an illusory content in common. Was there, for example, a storm? Ariel "Perform'd" a tempest, "flam'd amazement," simulated lightning and made a storm "Seem to besiege" the sea. But Miranda, an uninformed witness, is convine'd that she saw "a brave vessel … Dashed all to pieces." Prospero's last show, the tableau of Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess, is quite real, although Alonso is justified in questioning it:
If this prove
A vision of the island, one dear son
Shall I lose twice.
[5.1.175-77]
Between these events are a number of "performances" which are, we understand, illusory, since we are told that they consist of "spirits" playing "strange Shapes," mythological figures, and "dogs and hounds." Yet at the interruption of one of these shows Prospero tells Ferdinand that the evanescent character of such "revels," performed by spirits to "enact" the "present fancies" of a magician, reflects the very substance of the world and of human life. Our certainty is once more undermined.
It is ironic, in these circumstances, that theatrical metaphors should be associated with the behavior of the villains. Prospero tells Miranda that his brother was not content to be the acting Duke:
To have no screen between this part he play'd
And him he play'd it for, he needs will be
Absolute Milan.
[1.2.107-09]
Antonio himself, inciting Sebastian to the murder of his brother, argues that they were cast ashore on the island,
… by destiny, to perform an act
Whereof what's past is prologue; what to come,
In yours and my discharge.
[2.1.247-49]
Even Stephano, parodying these illusory conspiracies, tries to sound like a villain out of an old tragedy, and mistakes costume for the reality it is meant to clothe:
Stephano. Give me thy hand. I do begin to have bloody
thoughts.
Trinculo. O King Stephano! O peer! O worthy
Stephano! Look what a wardrobe here is for thee!
[4.1.220-23]
Most of the events of The Tempest acquire a theatrical quality by virtue of the fact that they consist of actors and audience. Miranda witnesses the storm, and she and Prospero discuss the bewildered Ferdinand before he is aware of their presence. Prospero oversees the young couple's courtship as a concealed, appreciative spectator:
Fair encounter
Of two most rare affections! Heavens rain grace
On that which breeds between 'em!
[3.1.74-75]
He later makes them the audience to a betrothal masque in their honor. Prospero also watches from "on the top" the scene of the disappearing banquet, at which the courtly party first think themselves audience ("A living drollery," exclaims Sebastian), then find themselves actors, so that they become a sort of show within a show. In the last scene, nearly everyone is audience to the revelation of Ferdinand and Miranda, where once again, as Ferdinand steps forth to embrace his father, the line between witnesses and performers dissolves.
We may observe, finally, in the very neatness and wholeness of the design of the play an artificial quality that I do not think we are meant to overlook. Everything occurs on schedule, with a clockwork precision that allows Gonzalo to marvel, in the final moments of the play, at the mechanism that has just been revealed to him:
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.
[5.1.205-13]
This is very tidy indeed, perhaps a little too tidy. We have had no concern for Claribel finding a husband, and what Gonzalo seems to see as the operation of destiny we have come to recognize as largely the result of Prospero's theatrical magic. We appreciate the conciseness of it all, but we do not believe in it quite the way that Ganzalo appears to believe in it ("Look down, you gods … For it is you that have chalk'd forth the way / Which brought us hither."). Our sense of its total artifice is very much stronger.
The qualities of artifice and theatricality seem to be the best basis for further exploration of the characters, themes, and atmosphere of The Tempest. I referred earlier to the observation of the unities as a kind of game shared by the playwright with his audience. I have been describing another kind of game as well: that of taking slightly shabby and popularized materials, long associated with the stage and especially with the stock plots of the commedia dell'arte, and restoring their serious artistic purpose, creating from them a fresh new fable with a peculiarly self-contained quality and a profundity and mystery all its own. In a sense, this had been Shakespeare's practice throughout his career as a dramatist. But in The Tempest, as with the other pastorals and the late plays in general, the success of the enterprise depends on the openness with which the materials are employed and the degree to which the fable is seen as fable throughout. As we shall see, Shakespeare's handling of the magician and his magic, the dreamlike and unstable world that is built up, and the treatment of the great pastoral themes of art and nature, are all related intimately to the deliberately unrealistic materials from which the play is shaped.
No one would contest, on the evidence of plays as diverse as Henry VI (parts 1 and 2), A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Macbeth, Shakespeare's interest in magic; but it is just as evident that the presence of magic and the centrality of the magician is one of the features that most clearly distinguishes The Tempest from the other late romances. We have only Cerimon's brief appearance in Pericles and the quasi-magical powers of the Queen in Cymbeline and Paulina in The Winter's Tale as points of comparison. Just why Shakespeare centered this play on the figure of the magician and gave it his point of view, then, is a subject of considerable interest, and an investigation of it should help to understand the uniqueness of Prospero as a dramatic character and his relation to the play as a whole.
I have already suggested that there hung about the familiar figure of the stage magician a certain ambivalence. On the one hand his power made him a fearful figure, not least because he tended to be whimsical and irritable, easily moved to practice his art on helpless victims; on the other hand he was inclined to benevolence, fulfilling the desires of others and helping them out of difficulties. These qualities can be seen in Bacon, the famous conjurer of Greene's comedy, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, who alternates between discomfiting those who cross him, and aiding those who seek him out for help. In Anthony Munday's John a Kent and John a Cumber, each of the rival magicians belongs to an opposing faction, to which he remains loyal. But before the contest is fully under way, we see a mischievous urge to complicate things for his own faction overtake John a Kent. He has no sooner succeeded in uniting the lovers, as instructed, than he is thinking of ways to delay and complicate the resolution:
Heers loove and loove: Good Lord! was nere the
lyke!
But must these joys so quickly be concluded?
Must the first Scene make absolute a Play?
No crosse, no chaunge? What! no varietie?
One brunt is past. Alas! What's that, in loove?
Where firme affection is most truly knit,
The loove is sweetest that moste tryes the wit.
And, by my troth, to sport my selfe awhyle,
The disappoynted brydegroomes, these possest,
The fathers, freendes, and other more besyde,
That may be usde to furnishe up conceite,
He set on woorke in such an amorous warre,
As they shall wunder whence ensues this jarre.
Similar qualities can be found in the tragic figure of Marlowe's Faustus: while a greater proportion of his drama is concerned with the psychology of the magician, personal fulfillment turning to self-gratification, a number of scenes are devoted mainly to his relations with others; once again there is a mixture of punishing and rewarding, most of it in the form of vigorous and farcical horseplay. These scenes have seemed so much at variance with the tragic portions of the play that commentators have questioned both their relevance and authenticity. Yet they do reflect in a crude form the duality of magic, its potential for good and evil, self-realization and self-indulgence, a duality that accounts in part for Faustus' inner struggle. Part of his magicianship is noble: a search for knowledge and truth. Part is ignoble: the desire for superiority and complete power over others. The scenes of practical joking and flashy conjuring dramatize the ignoble side effectively; they are also, whether or not they are Marlowe's, clearly the stuff of rousing popular theater.
If the magician was ambivalent, his art was not less so. Bacon's magic causes inadvertent destruction, and he consequently decides to renounce it, the comic equivalent, roughly, of Faustus' damnation. Prospero is of course a "white" magician, who does not traffic with devils or endanger his soul, but there is a sense in which he can be seen as a kind of cross between Friar Bacon or John a Kent on the one hand, and Doctor Faustus on the other. Like the former he is set in a comic context, where he can practice and ultimately renounce his art with relative impunity. Like the latter he is a serious and complex figure, whose point of view the audience is allowed to share in full. Many of his qualities and characteristics are perfectly familiar in terms of the tradition that Faustus, Bacon, and John a Kent share. His control of his spirits is uneasy (Ariel's restiveness is quite within the tradition). He has a comic, grumbling servant whom he sometimes uses his spirits to torment. He discovers plots against himself and others through an omniscience partly based on his own power of invisibility. He protects himself by charming the swords of potential enemies. And his role disturbs him enough that he is inclined to give it up; Bacon renounces magic and Faustus' last desperate offer is to burn his books, while Prospero promises to drown his book and break his staff. There is much about Prospero, in other words, which Shakespeare's audience would have found recognizable and familiar.
One way of understanding the magician's role is to consider it as an expression of power, and we can accomplish that by comparing Prospero to a king. Shakespeare's audience was well versed in the implications of kingship—its potential for self-indulgence and concomitant need for self-control, its isolating tendencies, and the responsibility for the welfare of others it entailed. A concentration of power in the hands of an individual, they knew, involved unusual psychological stress. And they were often reminded that, in metaphysical terms, the worldly authority of the monarch was an illusion. Pastoral could be used to make such a point, and one of the effects of the storm that opens The Tempest is to assert the relativity and fragility of political power in the face of ungovernable elements:
Boatswain.… What cares these roarers for the name of King? To cabin: silence! Trouble us not.
Gonzalo. Good, yet remember whom thou hast aboard.
Boatswain. None that I love more than myself. You are a counsellor; if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the presence, we will not hand a rope more; use your authority: if you cannot, give thanks you have lived so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if it so hap.
[1.1.16-26]
The reader will recall similar expressions in As You Like It and Lear: the difference here, as we discover in the following scene, is that there does exist someone whose name "these roarers" care for, who can command the elements to silence. As the illusion of political power is stripped away, Prospero steps in to fill the vacancy, not only as ruler of the island, or, ultimately, restored Duke of Milan, but as a kind of meta-king whose power, based on knowledge, extends to nature and is, paradoxically, more real because it is grounded in illusion.
Shakespeare's interest in the character of this magician-king is considerable, and Prospero's speeches and actions are rich in psychological implication. It is important to recognize, however, that Prospero is not a character study in the sense that Lear and Macbeth and Othello are. He is the inhabitant of a fable, a dream vision, a tale which is acknowledged to be a kind of giant hypothesis, combining the ideals of pastoral and magic: what if you had an island all your own, where you were not only lord and master, but had an absolute power, even over the elements, that gave you an astonishing harmony with your environment and complete control over others, including your enemies? The Tempest is the complicated answer to that question, and much of its complexity comes from Prospero. Least surprising, perhaps, is the great satisfaction he takes in the successful exercise of his power:
Now does my project gather to a head:
My charms crack not; my spirits obey; and time
Goes upright with his carriage.
[5.1.1-3]
That this is an unnatural power over others, with selfish implications, does not go unnoticed:
Go charge my goblins that they grind their joints
With dry convulsions; shorten up their sinews
With aged cramps; and more pinch-spotted make
them
Than pard or cat o' the mountain.
… At this hour
Lies at my mercy all mine enemies!
[4.1.258-63]
Prospero, as many commentators have noted, experiences some struggle between the urge to be merciful, playing the role of Destiny rightly and well, and the urge to carry out his unimpeded revenge:
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to
th' 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.
[5.1.25-30]
The immediate result of this decision is Prospero's renunciation of his "so potent Art," a renunciation accompanied by a magnificent catalogue of the wonders he has been able to accomplish. To forego his power to revenge himself is, in a sense, to forego his "rough magic" altogether.
It has also been recognized that the play involves Prospero, and us, in the discovery that his magic, absolute as it seems at the outset, has limitations. It cannot, apparently, alter Antonio's evil nature. It achieves Ariel's cooperation only by a combination of threats and promises. And it has been distinctly unsuccessful with Caliban, a fact that seems to affect Prospero deeply:
Prospero. [Aside.] I had forgot that foul
conspiracy
Of the beast Caliban and his confederates
Against my life.…
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.
[4.1.139-45]
Prospero. 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.
[188-93]
While these touches quicken our interest in Prospero and give him a measure of psychological truth, it would be a mistake to overemphasize them. Little suspense, in light of the overriding hypothesis of the play, can attach to them. To think of The Tempest as in the main devoted to Prospero's discovery of the limitations of his magic and the need for mercy and forgiveness, is to seriously distort it and its central character. Prospero's complexity, ultimately, is based on the fact that Shakespeare has concentrated in him a number of possibilities and themes; if he is a man learning about power and forgiveness, he is also a kind of god, a hypothetically extended consciousness. Shakespeare has brought together in his character the old bald thing, the Time of The Winter's Tale who authors the story and can thus offer us the largest perspective (and a degree of choric detachment), the wronged duke of pastoral romance (here, as in Lear, upstaging the lovers of the next generation), and the mage or sorcerer whose power is such that he can guide events to a succesful, if artificial, conclusion.
To these observations about the magician, it is necessary to add some consideration of his magic. What are its characteristics, and how does it operate? We can begin by noting the natural tendency of stage magic to acquire a theatrical character, introducing spectacle, coups de théâtre, and pageantry. Bacon, Faustus, and the two Johns of Kent and Cumber illustrate this nicely. Bacon's magic mirror, the "glass prospective," becomes the means for presenting dramatic vignettes, little plays within the play, while the conjuring contest involving Bungay, Vandermast, and Bacon gives opportunity to present that familiar Elizabethan stage prop, the magic tree with golden apples, accompanied by a fire-breathing dragon. In Doctor Faustus the tendency toward spectacular theatrical display is especially evident in the pageant of the seven deadly sins, the conjuring of Alexander and his paramour, and the raising of Helen to the accompaniment of music. The rivalry between John a Kent and John a Cumber involves their abilities as conjurers and showmen. John a Cumber, posing as John a Kent, introduces a pageant of supposed "Antiques" who are in fact his faction of lovers, using the device to take over the castle. John a Kent's revenge comes in similar terms; he so confuses shadow and substance during a "show" that John a Cumber is trying to present, that the latter becomes the butt of everyone's humor, and is made to wear the fool's costume in a morris dance. The commedia pastorals are full of similar tricks, pageants, conjurings, and spectacles, and their property lists regularly call for the necessary equipment: "Chains, earthquakes, flames, and a hell to open for Pluto"; "Temple of Bacchus to open, fountain, grotto, fiery gulf to open, meat and drink"; "Tree, rock to explode, whale, fountain, temple"; "a tree with fruit which will disappear into the air."
Shakespeare has, if anything, intensified the theatricality of stage magic in The Tempest. Both the unity and diversity of the play depend in great part on this element, since it provides a variety of events which nevertheless have in common their source in Prospero's art. One way of describing the structure of The Tempest is as a series of magic tricks engineered by Prospero. He begins with the storm, involving all of the visitors to the island, with his daughter as audience and himself and Ariel as producer and chief actor. He then divides the shipwrecked characters into three parties (Ferdinand being a party of one) and disperses them around the island. Ariel figures in the separate adventures of each party—leading Ferdinand to Miranda with music, interrupting Antonio's conspiracy, and tricking the clowns, first into the beating of Trinculo, then into the horsepond near Prospero's cell—and in each case these adventures are climaxed with a show, a phantasmagoric pageant performed by Prosperous spirits. The courtly party are treated to the disappearing banquet and Ariel as a harpy; Ferdinand and Miranda are shown the betrothal masque with the descent of Juno, the appearance of Ceres, and the dance of nymphs and reapers; and the clowns are beguiled by the frippery and set upon by the hunt. In the first and last of these cases, the audience becomes unwilling participants in the show, while Ferdinand and Miranda enjoy a security that allows them to become involved in their pageant only as recipients of the goddesses' blessing. These three shows climax their respective plots, and the play ends with a grand reunion and a final piece of theater: the revelation-tableau of Ferdinand and Miranda at chess.
A great part of Prospero's magic, then, seems to be based on visual deception and display, an art that is plainly analogous to the world of the theater in which it all takes place. The difference, of course, lies in the victimization of the magician's audiences, which can seldom pierce the appearance to discover what lies behind, a difference that is underlined by the open artifice of The Tempest. Even when Ferdinand is allowed to speculate on the true nature of what he is seeing, he does not get very far. "May I be bold," he asks Prospero, "To think these spirits?" Prospero admits that they are, and adds that he has called them from their confines, by means of his art, to enact his "present fancies" (5.1.118-22). This will suffice for Ferdinand, but for us, the audience, it is scarcely so simple, as Tillyard's comment suggests:
When we examine the masque, we find that, though its function may be simple, the means by which it is presented are complicated in a manner we associate rather with Pirandello than with the Elizabethan drama. On the actual stage, the masque is executed by players pretending to be spirits, pretending to be real actors, pretending to be supposed goddesses and rustics.
[E.M. Tillyard in Shakespeare's Last Plays, 1938]
The parallels and contrasts between Prospero's magic and the world of dramatic illusion he inhabits, greatly enlarge the interest of the play.
Another important aspect of Prospero's magic seems to lie in its ability to weaken, to cramp, confine, and imprison its subjects. Prospero's own freedom, which is closely linked to Ariel's ability to be everywhere and to continually change shape and character, exists at the expense of similar abilities in others. In this he is contrasted to Sycorax, "who with age and envy / Was grown into a hoop" (1.2.258-59). She "did confine" Ariel in "a cloven pine" that was his prison for a dozen years. She could not undo her act, but Prospero could. Yet Prospero's service is not enough for Ariel; he seeks complete freedom, a freedom Prospero promises at the same time that he threatens to punish Ariel's disobedience:
If thou more murmur'st, I will rend an oak,
And peg thee in his knotty entrails, till
Thou hast howl'd away twelve winters.
[294-96]
Ariel's previous suffering, spirit though he is, is strangely like Caliban's, who, after his attempt on Miranda, was "Deservedly confin'd into this rock, / Who hadst deserv'd more than a prison" (363-64). Prospero's domination over him is asserted by the kind of pain Ariel felt:
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.
[327-32]
… I'll rack thee with old cramps,
Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar,
That beasts shall tremble at thy din.
[371-73]
Prospero visits exactly this punishment (as Caliban—"he'll fill our skins with pinches"—has predicted) on the clowns, in a speech quoted earlier. And he threatens Ferdinand with servitude ("I'll manacle thy neck and feet together") although Ferdinand, once Prospero's charm has weakened him, becomes a willing prisoner, "Might I but through my prison once a day / Behold this maid" (493-94).
If this pinching, cramping, and imprisoning is a traditional aspect of magic, especially fairy magic, Shakespeare gives it a psychological dimension as well. Ferdinand, whose arms were "in this sad knot" from grief for his father, suffers from near paralysis and physical weakness at the hands of Prospero's enchantment, but can also admit "My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up." And while the clowns are beaten, sinew-shortened, and pinch-spotted for their conspiracy, their courtly counterparts suffer parallel inward tortures:
All three of them are desperate; their great guilt,
Like poison given to work a great time after,
Now 'gins to bite the spirits.
[3.3.104-06]
Thy brother was a furtherer in the act.
Thou art pinch'd for 't now, Sebastian. Flesh
and blood,
You, brother mine, that entertain'd ambition,
Expell'd remorse and nature; whom, with
Sebastian,—
Whose inward pinches therefor are most
strong,—
Would here have kill'd your King.…
[5.1.75-78]
Since even good characters like Miranda, Ferdinand, and Gonzalo, are, if not pinched or confined, at least subjected to the weakness, heaviness, and sleepiness that Prospero's magic sometimes visits on others, and since Ariel, that protean spirit, has been imprisoned in a tree and can be again, Prospero seems the one person in the play who is invulnerable to the effects of the magic he eventually renounces. It is the more surprising, then, when he appears in the Epilogue, claiming the same symptoms as his victims:
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 confin'd by you,
Or sent to Naples.…
Several ideas arise from this passage. One is the reminder that Prospero's renunciation of his magic has made him human and vulnerable; he is not master of illusion now, but its potential victim if his audience is not willing to use its imagination to send him home and applaud his efforts. But we are not listening to Prospero, really, but rather the actor who played him. And he has put us in the place he vacated, where it was necessary to exercise good judgment and mercy if he was not to abuse his power over others or make them suffer unduly. At the same time he has managed to suggest the existence of a curious process whereby confinement, rightly borne, can lead to freedom. We recall that once, while Prospero's brother was allowing his ambition to grow out of all bound, for Prospero "my library / Was dukedom large enough," and that Prospero served a twelve-year confinement on the island. We are reminded that Ferdinand accepted his servitude ("space enough / Have I in such a prison") and thus escaped it, that Ariel too found willing servitude the best means to the absolute freedom he desired. And we compare Caliban, dancing and singing to celebrate an unearned freedom which in fact is taking him into worse bondage. We are in the presence of paradox here, and there is no need to impose allegorical meanings on the play to discover that it suggests, finally, that confinement and freedom, mastery and servitude, are not so much unalterable opposites as they are mutually complementary, aspects of the same thing. The magician who cannot recognize this will be a Faustas, clinging to the illusion of mastery which is in fact his bondage to greater powers; he who can will be a Prospero, setting his servants free and returning to the status of "sometime Milan," whose every third thought, given his age, "shall be my grave." Both Prospero and Faustus embody, in very different ways, a familiar Renaissance insight about men of extraordinary talents and position, an insight expressed in Shakespeare's 94th sonnet:
They that have pow'r to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flow'r is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die;
But if that flow'r with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
I have already described The Tempest as a kind of giant hypothesis, one that gives free reign to the wishes and fancies of its central character while it subjects the subsidiary characters, through a set of fantastic experiences, to his will. The fictive and abnormal state of affairs is, as I have suggested, reflected in the self-conscious theatricality of The Tempest and in the dominance of Prospero's magic. But it is also greatly reinforced by Shakespeare's handling of the setting. An Arcadia may be a fairly rational daydream; but Prospero's island is an Arcadia incantata, a realm more purely composed of imagination and nightmare, of nature at its most unstable and inscrutable. So dense and pervasive is the dreamlike atmosphere of the play that it scarcely needs pointing out. Key words—"dream," "wonder," "strange," "amazement"—recur constantly. At the very outset, a delirium descends on Prospero's victims:
Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad, and play'd
Some tricks of desperation.
[1.2.208-10]
And it persists to the end of the play:
All torment, trouble, wonder and amazement
Inhabits here: some heavenly power guide us
Out of this fearful country!
[5.1.104-06]
These are not natural events; they strengthen
From strange to stranger.
[227-28]
One image of the play is that of the maze, a bewildering artifice imposed on nature:
My old bones ache: here's a maze trod, indeed,
Through forth-rights and meanders!
[3.3.2-3]
This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod;
And there is in this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of.
[5.1.242-44]
An exploration of the setting of The Tempest in terms of its effects on the characters and on the audience should help to clarify our sense of the play and lead us toward some of its major insights.
One characteristic of the island—and it reflects a familiar aspect of dreams—is its tendency to dissolve the normal barriers between the physical and the mental, exterior and interior events. We have already noted that Prospero's magic has psychological equivalents, "inward pinches," to the torment he visits on the clowns. This is but part of a pattern whereby mental experience takes on physical characteristics, and vice versa. Ferdinand's spirits are all "bound up," as the entire court party "are all knit up / In their distractions," their brains "Now useless, boil'd within thy skull!", guilt biting their spirits. Gonzalo's prattle, earlier, has a palpable effect on Alonso:
You cram these words into mine ears against
The stomach of my sense.
[2.1.102-03
Caliban will not take "any print of goodness," because nurture "can never stick" on his devilish nature. The cry of those in the shipwreck, says Miranda, "did knock / Against my very heart!" One of the characteristic verbs in the play is "beat." It is used in familiar physical senses—Ferdinand beats the surges, the clowns beat each other, Ariel beats his tabor—but it is also attached to inward experience, not the physical activity of the heart, but the obsessive tendencies of the mind:
And now, I pray you, sir,
For still 'tis beating in my mind, your reason
For raising this sea-storm?
[1.2.175-77]
#x2026; a turn or two I'll walk,
To still my beating mind.
[4.1.162-63]
Sir, my liege,
Do not infest your mind with beating on
The strangeness of this business.
[5.1.245-47]
The effect of these transfers of physical activity to mental experience is to give such experience an especially vivid character. There is likewise a tendency in the language of the play to give external experience a dreamlike and illusory quality. One form this takes is a confusion between dreaming and waking. People in The Tempest sleep and wake with alacrity and frequency, and they tend to lose track of which is which. The world of dream invades everywhere. For Miranda, her images of the past are "rather like a dream than an assurance," although they are in fact correct, while Ferdinand's subjection to Prospero calls forth the same comparison:
Prospero.… Thy nerves are in their infancy
again,
And have no vigour in them.
Ferdinand. So they are:
My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up.
[1.2.487-89]
Antonio and Sebastian, with unconscious irony, discuss their conspiracy in the same terms:
Antonio.… My strong imagination sees a
crown
Dropping upon they head.
Sebastian. What, art thou waking?
Antonio. Do you not hear me speak?
Sebastian. I do; and surely
It is a sleepy language, and thou speak'st
Out of thy sleep. What is it thou didst say?
This is a strange repose, to be asleep
With eyes wide open; standing, speaking,
moving,
And yet so fast asleep.
Antonio. Noble Sebastian,
Thou let'st thy fortune sleep—die, rather;
wink'st
Whiles thou art waking.
Sebastian. Thou dost snore distinctly;
There's meaning in thy snores.
[2.1.203-13]
Antonio's "sleepy language" is a language of desire and gratification, of the self feeding upon illusions, and Caliban knows it well:
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes
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.
[3.2.135-41]
If Prospero, the most wakeful of the characters, escapes such confusion, then the mariners are his opposite. They sleep out the play under the hatches of their ship, and the Boatswain, whisked to Prospero's cell by Ariel in the last scene, is understandably baffled:
Alonso.… Say, how came you hither?
Boatswain. If I did think, sir, I were well awake,
I'ld strive to tell you. We were dead of sleep,
And—how we know not—all clapp'd under
hatches,
We were awak'd …
… on a trice, so please you,
Even in a dream, were we divided from them,
And were brought moping hither.
[5. 1. 228-40]
These moments recall Shakespeare's playful confusing of dreaming and waking in an earlier magic play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and they point toward their culminating expression in Prospero's famous speech, his contention that "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep." To say that there is a "stuff" of which dreams are made is to give them a certain palpability and substance; to say that all of life is no more than the same substance and character is to radically alter basic notions of shadow and substance, illusion and reality. I shall return to this speech and its astonishing claim in a moment.
As the enchanted island blurs the boundaries of the physical and the mental and confuses the waking and sleeping states, it also besets its visitors with problems of identity and belief. Identity in this case involves both the recognition of others and knowledge of oneself. Miranda first thinks Ferdinand a spirit and "a thing divine"; he in turn takes her for a goddess. Trinculo does not know whether Caliban is a man or a fish, dead or alive:
I do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer: this is no fish, but an islander, that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt.
[2.2.35-37]
Stephano, in turn, runs through a number of possibilities for Caliban-Trinculo—devils, salvages, men of Ind, and "some monster of the isle with four legs"—while Caliban first takes Trinculo for one of Prospero's spirits, then considers Stephano "a brave god" and is easily convinced that he was the man in the moon. When Ariel plays his music to this crew, he is "the picture of No-body" and a man or a devil. Gonzalo is sure that Prospero's spirits are "people of the island," while Sebastian, after Ariel's speech, takes them to be fiends. The same kind of confusion about natural and supernatural, substantial and insubstantial, persists in the last scene, as all the characters are gradually reassembled. It is of course closely allied to the problems of self-knowledge that originally afflicted Antonio ("he did believe / He was indeed the duke"), that are visited upon the innocent Ferdinand ("myself am Naples"), that lead to the two conspiracies, and that are indeed widespread enough that Gonzalo can conclude his summary of resolutions by reference to them:
… Ferdinand … 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.
[5.1.210-14]
Belief poses similar problems for the characters. Its extremes are illustrated in Antonio and Sebastian, who at first, aside from their conviction that Ferdinand is drowned, pride themselves on their skepticism, scoffing at Gonzalo's wondering appraisal of the island. The appearance of the strange shapes and the banquet reverse this dramatically; they begin to vie with each other for the greatest credulity:
Sebastian. Now I will believe
That there are unicorns; that in Arabia
There is one tree, the phoenix' throne; one
phoenix
At this hour reigning there.
Antonio. I'll believe both;
And what does else want credit, come to me,
And I'll be sworn 'tis true: travellers ne'er did
lie,
Thou fools at home condemn 'em.
[3.3.21-27]
Gonzalo joins them—"When we were boys, / Who would believe that there were mountaineers / Dew-lapp'd like bulls, whose throats had hanging at 'em / Wallets of flesh?"—but he also joins Alonso in the last scene in being unable to persuade himself that he is facing Prospero:
Alonso. Whether thou be'st he or no,
Or some enchanted trifle to abuse me,
As late I have been, I not know.…
… this must crave—
An if this be at all—a most strange story.
… But how should Prospero
Be living and be here?
Prospero. First, noble friend,
Let me embrace thine age, whose honour cannot
Be measur'd or confin'd.
Gonzalo. Whether this be
Or be not, I'll not swear.
Prospero. You do yet taste
Some subtleties o' the isle, that will not let you
Believe things certain.
[5.1.111-25]
Caliban is more certain, by the end, that he has misdirected his belief:
What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god,
And worship this dull fool!
[295-97]
The ending contains affirmations of belief as well as doubts. Ferdinand's "Though the seas threaten, they are merciful" when he sees his father, has a calm assurance that is juxtaposed to the greater excitement of Sebastian—"A most high miracle!"—and Gonzalo's "Look down, you gods, / And on this couple drop a blessed crown! / For it is you that have chalk'd forth the way / Which brought us hither." Since our perspective here is that of Prospero, it must be more skeptical about such claims, and it finds expression after Miranda's exclamation—"O brave new world, / That has such people in 't!"—in the curt reply, "Tis new to thee." Our special knowledge and our sense of the artifice of the entire enterprise places us above the fluctuations of belief and disbelief that swirl around the characters. We know there was an auspicious star and a lot of hard work on the part of Prospero and Ariel; and we know it is mostly "rough magic" and an "insubstantial pageant" based on a special knowledge of the insubstantial character of the world.
The problems of identity and belief that the atmosphere of the island seems to produce are closely linked with problems of reality, of "Whether thou be'st he or no," of "Whether this be or be not," of "If this prove a vision of the island, one dear son / Shall I lose twice." "Who am I," "Who are You?", and "What do I believe," easily become "What, if anything, is real here?" But to make it a question of discriminating between the real and the unreal is to simplify too greatly; it is rather a matter of having continually to try to determine levels and kinds of reality. One method Shakespeare uses is to juxtapose two states in order to undermine an accepted notion about the greater reality of one over the other. Thus the play begins with a storm which we subsequently discover was a "spectacle" created by Prospero and Ariel. We have been pulled away from the "reality" of weather and the elements to the "illusory" realms of magic and theater, realms which thereby assert their own greater reality. The storm likewise, as we have noted, subverts the reality of worldly power and authority, the "name of king," and thus sets up Prospero's subsequent account of how he and his brother elected different realities—knowledge, "neglecting worldly ends," versus "th' outward face of royalty" and the chance to be "Absolute Milan." Within that account is the ironic recognition that Antonio's apparent achievement, "so dry he was for sway," was illusory from the start. To achieve the worldly power he coveted, he had to "subject his coronet" to the King of Naples, "and bend / The duke-dom, yet unbow'd … To most ignoble stooping," an irony neatly reflected in Caliban's illusion that he has freed himself by adopting a new form of bondage.
Thus is established a pattern whereby realities are not merely juxtaposed, but tend to give way to one another, creating a world in which we are pulled further and further into an overwhelming sense of the basically illusory character of experience and of firm categories, a reality so shifting and impermanent that only a man who has penetrated and accepted its protean nature, a man like Prospero, can have any mastery of it. This sense of things is greatly supported and intensified by the images of water—fluid states, ebb and flow, melting, dissolving, sea-change, shifting elements, drift of purpose, clouds and mist—which are so ubiquitous and so familiar an aspect of the play. They give a marvelous particularity to what would otherwise remain rather theoretical.
We are now in a position to understand how effectively Prospero's climactic speech unites and summarizes the various qualities that make up the world and atmosphere of The Tempest. The beautiful and highly mannered reality of the masque has had suddenly to give way to the reality of time, as Prospero remembers the clown-conspirators and realizes that "the minute of their plot / Is almost come." His loss of self-control is apparent to Ferdinand and Miranda, and sensing their distress he offers an explanation, one that begins by acknowledging how one thing must give way to another and then, imperceptibly, soars up and out to become a panorama of the experience and language of the play, touching on dreams and fantasies, on the world of theatrical illusion, on inner and outer distinctions, on problems of belief, identity, and reality, on an existence that is fluid, metamorphic, insubstantial:
You do look, my son, in a mov'd sort,
As if you were dismay'd: 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. 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.
[4.1.146-63]
In its very movement—from Ferdinand's dismay and Prospero's revels, out to a sweeping vision of the entire play and to statements that characterize the nature of all existence, back down to Prospero's troubled brain, an old man taking a stroll to calm himself—and in its fluid, continually revelatory language and imagery, the speech acts out its vision of existence. It is the central vision of the play, akin to Time's speech in The Winter's Tale, and its claim that existence is unstable and life illusory is remarkable and moving. Prospero hurries on from the insight, as if it were too much to ask Ferdinand and Miranda to ponder it. But we have been prepared for it by the whole world of the play, and if we begin to assent to it, then we are apt to realize with a start that the dream-like atmosphere and events of The Tempest give a more realistic image of life than the pungent, faithfully detailed comedies of Ben Jonson. Within this speech, this microcosm of the world of The Tempest, lies the justification for the play's style, tone, and structure, the answer to Jonson's charge that Shakespeare was making nature afraid "with tales, tempests, and such like drolleries." It is perhaps the most spacious and visionary moment in all of Shakespeare.
There is scarcely anything in The Tempest that is unrelated to the characteristics and concerns of the pastoral. The open theatricality of the play keeps in view the fictive and theoretical nature of pastoral. Its exploration of the magician and his art presents the pastoral ideal of harmony between man and nature in an extreme and spectacular form. And its dreamlike atmosphere and events provide the familiar pastoral romance experience of dislocation and juxtaposed opposites—emotional states, ideas, environments—again in an especially emphatic fashion. But it is in its treatment of the perennial topics of art and nature that the play reveals most clearly its membership in the literature of pastoral, and it is thus appropriate that we close our consideration of The Tempest by examining its treatment of these twin themes.
We can begin by using The Winter's Tale as a point of comparison. We noted that in the course of that play there grows on the reader or spectator a complex sense of the essential unity, even identity, of nature and art. We noted too that this was not accomplished by mingling the two through such devices as dramatic verisimilitude, but rather by sharply differentiating them, so that we begin with a strong sense of their immediate opposition and end with a stronger sense of their ultimate congruity. No such process is to be traced in The Tempest. The union of art and nature, no less complex and subtle, is present from the beginning, and their similarities and differences hold constant until the end, when the partnership is dissolved, as if to suggest that such ideal conjunction is temporary at best.
The basis for the harmony of art and nature in The Tempest lies of course in the fact of Prospero's magic. It is, we are reminded again and again, an art. To the other characters, its workings can scarcely seem natural:
These are not natural events; they strengthen
From strange to stranger.…
… there is in this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of.…
[5.1.227-28, 243-44]
But to Prospero and to us, his privileged spectators, the magic is not contrary to nature but very much a part of it: a penetration of natural mysteries, an unusual harmony between a human will and natural processes and forces. The storm that opens the play is not a supernatural event, but an all-too-familiar state of nature; Ariel and his cohorts are neither demons nor angels, but spirits of wind, water, earth and fire. They continually express their kinship with the natural world; even when they perform as goddesses in the masque, it is to celebrate the fertility and regularity of cyclic nature.
In more than one sense, then, the maze is an excellent figure for The Tempest: bewildering to those who must pass through; artful and coherent from the point of view of its designer; and completely natural in its substance, a playful trope for the world from which it is formed and of which it forms a part. When Alonso succumbs to terror and despair, the image, as Kermode points out, "is of the whole harmony of nature enforcing upon Alonso the consciousness of his guilt":
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, pronounc'd
The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass.
Therefor my son i' th' ooze is bedded; and
I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded,
And with him there lie bedded.
[3.3.96-102]
This is nature sounding like a consort of musicians, and for us it is juxtaposed to Prospero's backstage congratulations, the director complimenting his actor:
Bravely the figure of the Harpy hast thou
Perform'd, my Ariel; a grace it had devouring:
Of my instruction hast thou nothing bated
In what thou hadst to say: so, with good life
And observation strange, my meaner ministers
Their several kinds have done. My high charms
work.
[83-88]
That so much art was the basis of Alonso's experience does not subvert it as nature; Ariel and the meaner ministers are indeed the billows, winds, and thunder that Alonso recognized. The authority and strength of the "high charms" reside in their natural basis; they seem to be "an art that nature makes." We note that their proper working is intimately associated with natural processes:
The charm dissolves apace;
And as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason.
[5.1.64-68]
Two of the verbs in this passage—"dissolve" and "melting"—are used in Prospero's "Our revels now are ended" speech. They emphasize the intimacy between the natural world of The Tempest—fluid, mysterious, metamorphic—and Prospero's magic, an intimacy that finds full and frequent expression, and that is surveyed and summarized in his final invocation:
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
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.
[5.1.33-50]
The speech has two sections: the invocation of spirits, listing them, and the recital of the accomplishments they have made possible. In each case the list moves from the familiar to the mysterious, from hills, brooks, and lakes to midnight mushrooms and solemn curfew, and from the sun and winds to the raising of the dead. This last achievement might seem to be the one really "unnatural" act of Prospero's magic; but it is surely meant to sound like a rehearsal of the Day of Judgment, an event that for Shakespeare's audience was to be the last chapter in the story of the natural world as they knew it. Prospero concludes by promising to return the instruments of his magic to the infinite and mysterious nature from which they derive their power:
… I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fadoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.
[54-57]
Drowning and burial are two kinds of death (cf. Alonso's "I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded, / And with him there lie bedded."), images of the human return to nature. When he has retired to Milan, Prospero says, "Every third thought shall be my grave." His partnership with nature is to take a different form, his life to be "rounded with a sleep."
This, then, is the framework for nature and art in The Tempest: a temporary, spectacular, successful, and fictive conjunction of opposites. Within this framework we are aware of each as separate entities and of their astonishing variety. Nature has many forms and many versions. The island itself is multi-faceted, a place of deep nooks and odd angles, forthrights and meanders. It can seem fertile and hospitable, with berries, fresh springs, crabs, pig nuts, clustering filberts and young scamels from the rocks, or it can appear barren and hostile, with brine pits, toothed briers, sharp furzes, pricking gorse, thorns, withered roots and husks for diet, and a filthy-mantled pool that smells of horse-piss. It is set, moreover, in a vast universe of sea, thunder, lightning, curled clouds, frost-baked veins of the earth, auspicious stars, the ooze of the salt deep, the dark backward and abysm of time, a universe containing the still-vexed Bermoothes, Arabia with a phoenix throne, unicorns, mountaineers dew-lapped like bulls and men whose heads stand in their breasts. We are continually made aware of a nature that has vast distances and infinite possibilities.
Nature is also various because it is seen from many view-points. Early in the second act we begin to realize that the barrenness or fertility of the island is in the eye of the beholder:
Adrian. The air breathes upon us here most sweetly.
Sebastian. As if it had lungs, and rotten ones.
Antonio. Or as 'twere perfum'd by a fen.
Gonzalo. Here is everything advantageous to life.
Antonio. True; save means to live.
Sebastian. Of that there's none, or little.
Gonzalo. How lush and lusty the grass looks! how
green!
Antonio. The ground, indeed, is tawny.
[2.1.45-52]
Nature here is the same multiple mirror wé have seen in As You Like It, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale. Many of the characters consider it beneficent. Gonzalo founds his imaginary commonwealth on its apparent fecundity:
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 it own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
[2.1.155-60]
A similarly ideal view is expressed in the masque:
Earth's increase, foison plenty,
Barns and garners never empty;
Vines with clust'ring bunches growing;
Plants with goodly burthen bowing;
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.
[4.1.110-17]
We feel no need to choose between such idealized versions of nature and the more cynical responses of Antonio and Sebastian, who see it as a source of disease and discomfort and a neutral backdrop to their evildoing. Nature, we feel from watching the play, is all these things. It is both Ariel—delicate, quicksilver, sympathetic and leaning from the amoral toward the good—and Caliban—heavy, clumsy, grotesque and deformed, given to bestiality and evil. And it is the contradictions in these characters as well: Ariel's restive servitude, Caliban's poetry and occasional good sense.
As nature is shown to be multi-faceted and changeable, we are less and less likely to accept any one view of it. What may seem to one of the characters the whole truth about nature, we are more apt to accept as one-sided and partial. We note that The Tempest is full of versions of nature that seem too confident in their self-projection and wish fulfillment. Caliban is the most obvious example of this tendency. His curses call on nature ("As wicked dew as e'er my mother brush'd / With raven's feather from unwholesome fen," "All the infections that the sun sucks up / From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall") to act out his desires, just as he would have the world made all in his image:
O ho, O ho! would 't had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans.
[1.2.351-53]
Other characters—Gonzalo, Ferdinand, Antonio, Stephano—project their wishes as images of nature in similar but subtler ways. Even Prospero, in the masque, expresses his hope that nature's abundance will consistently serve his daughter and her husband. The difference is that he seems more conscious that it is all his "present fancies" rather than the whole image of nature; the mythic and mannered style of the masque underlines this attitude. Earlier, Prospero spoke to Miranda of the winds "whose pity, sighing back again, / Did us but loving wrong," but he likewise recognizes exactly how intractable to goodness Caliban is, how much the brother whom he describes as "unnatural" is indeed an aspect of the whole truth about nature. Nor does his view of nature as infinite, various, and in flux allow him to assign it universal characteristics with the confidence of others. He is like Lear in knowing what he would like nature to be and do, unlike him, even though he commands the elements, in thinking that his expectations will be automatically fulfilled.
Prospero's overview of the world and action of the play also faces him, as it does us, with the nature-nurture question. It is anything but simple. If we ask where evil resides, then the answer must be: several places. In Caliban, first of all, the "salvage and deformed slave," the wild man who in this play replaces the more characteristic natural men of the pastoral mode, the shepherds, hermits, and savages. Caliban's education has failed. He is "a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick." Is evil a natural thing, then, lower on the scale of being, characteristic of savages and beasts? We might like to think so. But we are confronted with Antonio and Sebastian, handsome and highly civilized Italian aristocrats, who easily match Caliban in evil tendencies. As their mockery of Gonzalo's Utopian talk makes clear, they regard their civilization as perfect and themselves as perfect expressions of it. There are two sides to the coin of evil: what in Caliban is physical, natural, and open deformity recurs as spiritual, acquired, and hidden deformity in Antonio and Sebastian.
Goodness has the same kind of duality in The Tempest. It can reside in Miranda, innocent, natural, unworldly, and in Ariel, presumably a manifestation of the best qualities of the natural world; but it is also present in Ferdinand and Gonzalo, who have lived in the court and tasted civilization without experiencing corruption. Such a precise balancing and distribution of good and evil seems to take us a long way from King Lear. But the distance would scarcely be so great if the island lacked the protection of Prospero's magic, that is, if a more natural state of affairs were allowed to prevail. At any rate, the nature-nurture question, like the "nature of nature" question, has no one answer in The Tempest, but rather a rich complexity that leaves us pondering contradictory but coexisting possibilities.
The nature-nurture question involves art as much as nature. Caliban's and Miranda's tutoring, Antonio's sophistication, Ferdinand's princeliness—these are, or appear to be, human attempts to alter, order, and improve nature. This is but one instance of what must by now be apparent—so closely are nature and art intertwined in The Tempest that to speak of one is to speak of the other. All that has so far been said about nature holds equally true for art. Like nature, art is many-faceted; it is variously linked to music, order, illusion, entertainment, personal wisdom, dreams, and wish fulfillment. Like nature it varies according to viewpoint and situation. And like nature it is again and again a means of self-projection and idealization.
This last point especially deserves attention. Gonzalo idealizes nature in the course of imagining his Utopian commonwealth, but the imagining makes him a kind of artist, designing the "plantation" of the island. Earlier he is teased about his imaginative powers when he tells Adrian that Tunis was Carthage:
Antonio. His word is more than the miraculous harp.
Sebastian. He hath rais'd the wall, and houses too.
Antonio. What impossible matter will he make easy next?.
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.
[2.1.83-89]
But such certainty about the real world and the realm of imagination is dangerous on an island brimming with enchantments; the conspiracy of Antonio and Sebastian will prove no less fanciful under the circumstances. And if all such attempts to manipulate the world by imposing imaginary orders upon it are to be exposed as illusory, then we will prefer the idealistic to the selfish, Gonzalo's commonwealth and Prospero's masque to the plotting of Antonio or Caliban. Moreover, we shall gain some faith in the powers of imagination and art by seeing one such attempt, Prospero's project, successfully sustained through the course of the play and brought to a graceful resolution. The efficacy and variety of art are most of all demonstrated in Prospero's magic, in its music—"Allaying both their fury and my passion / With its sweet air"; in its imposition of order where chaos threatens to reign; in its spectacular devices and shows, both as learning and as sheer entertainment; in the wisdom with which it is exercised, the recognition that it is partially dream and wish fulfillment, easily abused, and that like all things in this world of illusion and flux, it must change. It is through Prospero that we learn the most about the function and value, as well as the limitations, of art.
Any drama can be described as a set of experiences in two distinct ways. On the one hand it is an account of the experience undergone by a group of fictitious characters and held in common by them. In addition, however, as played before an audience, it is also an experience under-gone by a group of real characters, as witnesses, and held in common by them. Often these two senses of dramatic experience are carefully separated; in Shakespeare they are again and again confounded, so that their relationships become astonishingly rich and complex. We recall how Prospero's shows tend to blur the line between actor and spectator. So in fact do his creator's. It is possible to see The Tempest as a sort of huge mirror held up to the audience, a giant metaphor for the value of art constructed by an artist who understood very thoroughly both the strengths and limitations of his craft. The metaphor is worth exploring: all the characters who are washed ashore at Prospero's bidding undergo an experience of self-knowledge, which may or may not change them. Any given audience is in a sense washed ashore too, to accompany the cast on their adventures. In both cases the experience will be illusory—the result of art, shadowy, an insubstantial pageant—but that will not make it any less valuable. On the contrary, it will make possible events and recognitions not otherwise attainable. Some of the people in both groups will be there just for a good time, like Trinculo. Others may find lasting happiness, like Ferdinand. Some will come to new knowledge and self-recognition. Evil will not be changed or dismissed—that is beyond art's power—but it will be located and described for a clearer understanding, and momentarily subdued that the good and the beautiful may shine more clearly. Listen to Prospero:
Here in this island we arriv'd; and here
Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit
Than other princess' can, that have more time
For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful.
[1.2.171-74]
Or listen to Gonzalo:
Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue
Should become Kings of Naples: Oh, 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
Where no man was his own.
[5.1.205-13]
Not quite accurate, but then what account of a play ever is? If gold on lasting pillars is not Shakespeare's medium, he understands Gonzalo's impulse perfectly and views it with compassion. Listen finally to Prospero's alter ego, the actor who appears before us in the epilogue:
Now I want
Spirits to enforce, Art to enchant;
And my ending is despair
Unless I be reliev'd 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.
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