Shakespeare's Virginian Masque
[In the essay below, Gillies argues that in the fourth act of The Tempest Shakespeare remoulded contemporary material regarding the Virginia Colony in North America into an Ovidian inspired masque]
It is probably no more than coincidence that Shakespeare's spectacular and exotic play The Tempest was performed at court with Chapman's similarly exotic Memorable Masque for the marriage, in February 1613, of the princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine. But coincidence is sometimes hospitable to design, and we can imagine how interestingly these particular entertainments might have complemented each other. In the first place, each must have seemed to mirror what Jonson would have called their "present occasion," and also, conceivably, its political implications. This would have gratified Chapman, who is careful to assert that "all these courtly and honouring inventions … should expressively arise out of the places and persons for and by whom they are presented." Curiously, much the same assertion is regularly made on behalf of Shakespeare, who is sometimes supposed to have inserted the betrothal masque as his own "courtly and honouring invention" into act 4 of The Tempest. It is easier, however, to imagine the two entertainments having excited notice for the sheer novelty of their Virginian imagery. This might have had the interesting consequence of heightening the audience's response to the Virginian dimension of The Tempest, because what is understated and seemingly peripheral in Shakespeare is bolder and more substantial in Chapman.
The Memorable Masque is self-consciously Virginian. A company of "Virginian knights … altogether estrangeful and Indian-like" (36), arrive at Britain on a floating island under the conduct of Plutus, the god of riches. At first glance, Plutus seems a little out of place in the company of Indians, but as George Sandys (translator of Ovid and resident treasurer of the Virginia Company) was to explain: "Those Westerne climats abounded with gold and silver, wrapt in the secret bowels of the earth." Hence the Western Indies could be as fitting a home for Plutus as the Indies of Donne's "eastern riches." Looked at another way, the domain of Plutus might be either east or west: "both the indias, of spice and mine." Mines, of course, are subterranean. Hence Chapman's Plutus is also an "earthy deity"—but one who wishes to cast off his earthy Virginian ways and become reconciled with "the celestial goddess Honour" (81), who resides in Britain.
The action of the masque proper follows from a satirical anti-masque on the misuse of riches. A company of sun-worshiping "Virginian priests … therefore called the Phoebades" (13-14), command "an artificial rock" to open, at which "the upper part of the rock was suddenly turned to a cloud, discovering a riche and refulgent mine of gold" (150-52), and the company of Virginian "princes" seated inside. The Phoebades then sing praises to the sun (which is shown setting behind the cloud), when their voices are answered by "other music and other voices, directing their observance to the King" (543-44), the British Phoebus who is forever rising. Eventually this potentially inharmonious contest is resolved by "Eunomia" or Law, who orders the Virginians to renounce their "superstitious worship of these suns subject to cloudy darkenings and descents" (595-96), and worship instead the rising sun of Britain.
In this context The Tempest must have seemed almost parodie. Where Chapman's masque is about law, Shakespeare's play is about power. Where Chapman's Britain is visited by a suitably opulent delegation of Virginian priests and knights, Shakespeare's only Virginian intourist is Trinculo's "dead indian." Where Chapman's native knights obligingly hand over their gold-mine, Shakespeare's intractably "salvage and deformed slave" curses his disinheritors with the gift of language. Even when benevolently inclined, Caliban is able to offer nothing more marketable than "young scamels from the rock" or, perhaps, himself, "a plain fish, and no doubt marketable (5.1.264-66). Riches may conjoin briefly with honour in the blessing of Shakespeare's Juno, but more usually in The Tempest they inspire evil courtiers to murder and drunken servants to rebel. Shakespeare even seems to parody Chapman's cloudy gold mine with its El Doradoesque mythology of Indian riches, in Caliban's dream that
The clouds methought would open, and show
riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak'd,
I cried to dream again.
(3.2.139-41)
Finally, the storm imagery of The Tempest contrasts starkly with the placidity of the Memorable Masque. If the play was staged with scenic machinery at court, Shakespeare's shipwreck scene must have been spectacularly realistic compared with the dreamy fantasy of Chapman's floating island. In short, beside Chapman's Utopian masque, the dystopian mood of Shakespeare's play must have seemed especially pointed.
Shakespeare's idea of Virginia should also have seemed far more contemporary than Chapman's. D. J. Gordon has argued [in The Renaissance Imagination, 1975] that Chapman's celebration of Virginia reflects Raleigh's promotion of Guiana in 1596 more than it reflects the Virginia Council's promotion of Virginia in 1613. The theme of conversion may be common to both but the gold mine and the notion of Indian opulence are certainly Guianan, as is the theme of reconciling honour with riches. Moreover, as Gordon suggests, the sun worship is probably more Peruvian than Virginian. It does seem then, that the Memorable Masque is essentially an adaptation of Chapman's earlier celebration of the Guianan venture in De Guiana (1595), which is also inspired by the idea of reconciling English honour with Indian riches. For all its Virginian imagery, it is a little anachronistic for 1613—more Elizabethan than Jacobean.
The Tempest is not only more topical, but more truly engaged with its historical moment. The shipwreck scene, the accompanying scenarios of providential deliverance, and indeed the very title of the play, clearly allude to the wreck of the Sea Adventure in 1609. And, as this event was of more than just topical interest, so the interest of the allusions is more than simply topical. The wreck marked a nadir in the affairs of the Virginia Company and, in the following year, became a focus for debate about the wisdom of the Plantation. It brought to a head "the tide of vulgar opinion" which had been gathering against Virginia. Even before the wreck, events had not been going well. The colonists were starving, disease was rampant, order was disintegrating and the natives were unaccommodating. Now it appeared that the much heralded direct transatlantic route (north of the devil-ridden Bermudas rather than south of them, via the Caribbean) was demonstrably suicidal. Most serious of all, it was becoming clear that "riches," either in the form of gold mines or a quick return on investments, were not to be had from Virginia. The starving and demoralised colonists would need more than Elizabethan "honour" to survive, they would need an iron will, or failing that, the iron discipline embodied in the Company's second charter and its draconian "Lawes divine, morali, and martiall."
With its emphasis on self-discipline, its apparent endorsement of absolute power as a necessary means to general prosperity, and its no-nonsense attitude towards savagery, The Tempest can be seen to reflect not only the events of 1609, but the mood which gave them significance. Initially, therefore, the play may well have been perceived primarily in terms of the polemical milieu of the wreck, rather than the other way around. By 1610, when news of the deliverance of the ship's company had reached England, the Virginia Counsel sought to portray the wreck as providential. Hence, the wreck generated its own canon of texts, and indeed, became a text itself because the Company had ensured that (and how) it would be read: "If any man shall accuse these reports of partiall falsehood … let him now reade with judgement, but let him not judge before he hath read" (255). We can easily imagine, therefore, that the Virginian subtext of The Tempest was legible to contemporary audiences even without the special context of the Memorable Masque.
But to later readers unattuned to contemporary events, and later audiences denied what I have imagined as ideal opportunities to experience the Virginian dimension of The Tempest, that dimension has been all but invisible. It would not even be suspected until 1808, when Edmund Malone discovered the Bermuda documents and proposed them as sources. Even today, the exact nature and significance of the Virginian influence remains an open question. What I will explore here is the possibility that The Tempest is both more profoundly, and more specifically Virginian than is commonly allowed—more so indeed than Chapman's anachronistic celebration of Indian riches. In particular, I want to suggest two things. First, that two important Shakespearean motifs, the ideas of temperance and fruitfulness, are identifiably Virginian. This is to say that the play translates into poetic and dramatic terms a pair of rhetorical topoi that are crucial in forming the official portrait of Virginia. Second, I want to show that these Virginian motifs, culminating in the masque of Ceres, take on a distinctly Ovidian form. Here, I will argue that though Ovid may seem to lead us away from Virginia, he really leads us back to the informing principle of her discursive being—the principle of the moralised landscape.
In the first place, then, I am suggesting that the Shakespearean motifs of temperance and fruitfulness derive from standard topoi in the discourse of Virginia. That discourse began in 1594, when Raleigh successfully petitioned Elizabeth to allow him to rename as "Virginia" an indetermi-nate area of North America then known as "Wingandacoa." The christening was more than a courtly gesture—more even than a shrewd promotion—for it created a potent figure, and therewith a way of imaginatively possessing an area that was virtually unknown but for its Indian name and its compass coordinates. The figure allowed a savage geography to be read as a moral geography (much as the nymph "Irena" in book 5 of The Faerie Queene allows the reader to imagine Ireland as a willing candidate for the civilizing attentions of Allegali and Talus). "Virginia" was a "beautifull daughter of the creation … whose virgin-soile was never yet polluted by any Spaniards lust." [(George Donne, in his Virginia Reviewed, 1638).] She conjured up visions of a land of pristine newness and incredible fertility. She was a tabula rasa awaiting inscription by the bearers of the true word; a savage, yet nubile nymph who longed for the English embrace. In 1609, the Reverend William Crashaw, who "was serving as a sort of director of publicity for the company," imagined "Virginea" as a young woman being schooled by an older and male "England" in the course of a scriptural dialogue appended to the published version of an important sermon to the Counsel. In 1632, Thomas Morton likened Virginia to "a faire virgin, longing to be sped, / And meete her lover in a Nuptiall bed." In 1625, the Reverend Samuel Purchas exhorted his readership of "Christian suters" to
looke upon Virginia; view her lovely lookes (howsoever like a modest Virgin she is now vailed with wild Coverts and shadie Woods, expecting rather ravishment then marriage from her Native Savages) survay her … so goodly and well proportioned limmes and members; her Virgin portion nothing empaired, … and in all these you shall see, that she is worth the wooing and loves of the best Husband.
Such nuptial, not to say prurient, imagery is typical of Virginian apologists from Raleigh to Purchas. The nomen bespoke a kind of coy allure which the propagandists were not slow to exploit. Of course, Virginia's hospitality to wordplay could also be abused (as, for example in the satirical Eastward Ho! of 1605, where the rapacious Captain Seagull rallies his band of adventurers with the cry: "Come boys, Virginia longs til we share the rest of her maidenhead" [3.3.14-15]), but generally it seems to have worked in her favour. Raleigh's choice of name was an inspired act of myth-making, suggesting an attractive combination of innocence, docility and quasi-erotic availability.
But whatever sub- or semi-conscious signals were implicit in her name, Virginia also suggested a more conscious and acknowledged symbolic stratum. The whole elaborate edifice of Elizabeth's mythology of state had rested on the attribute that Virginia celebrated. The American nymph was a fresh sprig of old and familiar stock, which may be why she bears more than a passing resemblance to Elizabeth's favorite mythological identity. This was Astraea, the virgin goddess of justice and patroness of the Golden Age, who on her departure from earth became identified with the heavenly sign, Virgo. During her golden reign, Astraea had reconciled virginity with fruitrulness, spring (the golden season) with August (the month of Virgo), and heaven with earth. On her departure, these contraries split apart and would not be reconciled again until her return, either in the guise of another golden reign (such as Elizabeth's) or of a golden country such as Virginia. (It is worth noting here that the masque of act 4 reconciles spring with August). Conceivably, it may be this figure who is the root of Virginia's virginal character, the messianic hopes she inspired and her golden attributes of temperance and fruitfulness.
Whether Astraean or not, however, temperance and fruitfulness appear as important features of Virginia very early in her history. But they are not coeval. The earliest and most influential of the Virginia voyage narratives, by Arthur Barlowe, stresses fruitfulness rather than temperance. Printed in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations of 1589, it describes the formal possession of "the countrey Wingandacoa, (and nowe by her Majestie, Virginia)," under Raleigh's new patent in 1584. With the probable help of Raleigh and Hakluyt, Barlowe tells of a paradise in which: "the earth bringeth foorth all things in abundance, as in the first creation, without toile or labour" (8). The soil effortlessly yielded three crops in five months, miraculous draughts of fish were there for the taking. A wide range of useful (if not precious) commodities were to be had in plenty. The inhabitants were "most gentle, loving, and faithfull, void of all guile, and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the golden age" (8). Similarly, the narratives of Thomas Harriot, Ralph Lane and John White, also printed in Hakluyt (and also showing signs of editorial guidance) consistently give the impression of a virgin paradise.
Temperance first appears as a Virginian feature in Thomas Harriot's A brief e and true report of the new found land of Virginia. Harriott praised "the excellent temperature of the aire … at all seasons," and "the holsomenesse thereof" (75), which preserved the colonists of 1588 in good health—in spite of a shortage of clothing and lack of shelter during the winter. He then links the two features in what tends to become a rhetorical formula in later accounts: "Seeing therefore the ayre there is so temperate and holsome, the soile so fertile … I hope there remains no cause whereby the action should be misliked" (75-76). The action, however, was "misliked" even as Harriot wrote. His Virginian apologia is intended, at least in part, as a rebuttal of "slaunderous and shamefull speaches bruited abroad by many that returned from thence" (47). Tales of hardship, mismanagement, hostile natives and a dawning awareness that Virginia was no El Dorado were so effective in dispelling the myth of Virginia as to deprive Raleigh of funds for a major venture in 1587 (xiii). The same threat hung over the heads of the Jacobean patentees, the Virginia Company of London; and their propagaganda (like Raleigh's) was obliged to disable the counter-mythology. What was needed was a rhetorical strategy that would confirm the original myth of Virginia while instilling a new and more realistic mood of forbearance in inevitable hardship—along with a (less realistic) willingness to postpone profits indefinitely. Temperance was one answer to this promotional problem because (unlike fruitfulness) it could avail itself of a moral, as well as a geographical, dimension.
Nowhere is the use of temperance as a polemical strategy so evident as in the True Declaration (1610), the most authoritative printed justification of the wreck of the Sea Adventure. The author of this document faced formidable difficulties. To begin with, the problem of disease at Jamestown threatened to disable the myth of a temperate climate, while the experience of "the starving time" in 1609 posed a challenge to the myth of fruitfulness. In a passage thought to be echoed in The Tempest, the issues are put as a rhetorical question: "How is it possible, that such a virgin and tempérât aire, should work such rie effects," and again, how can "plentie and famine, a temperate climate, and distempered bodies, felicities and miseries … be reconciled together" (255)? The answers are as rhetorically ingenious as they are logically absurd. While admitting that "our fort … is most part invironed with an ebbing and flowing salt water, the owze of which sendeth forth an unwholsome and contagious vapour," the writer prefers to blame the disease on the "intemperate idlenes" of the afflicted rather than on the site of Jamestown. This is proved by u "Sir Thomas Gates his experiment: he professeth that in a fortnights space he recovered the health of most of them by moderat labour, whose sickness was bred in them by intemperate idlenes" (255). We are left with the impression that infection from the fens is somehow optional, depending on one's moral fibre and work-rate. In view of the mortality rate and the chronic labour problem at Jamestown, the idea is (to put it mildly) wishful thinking. Nevertheless it is typical of a strategy which found rhetorical solutions for real difficulties; there is no suggestion that Jamestown be resited or the "owze" drained.
As with the problem of disease, the embarrassing topics of shipwreck and starvation are parlayed into the more manageable topos of intemperance. Figuratively speaking, the intemperance of the colonists at Jamestown represents a "tempest of dissension" more dire than the storm that wrecked the Sea Adventure:
The broken remainder of those supplies made a greater shipwrack on the continent of Virginia, by the tempest of dissension: every man overvaluing his own worth, would be a Commander … when therefore licence, sedition, and furie, are the fruits of a headie, daring, and unruly multitude, it is no wonder that so many in our colony perished: it is a wonder that all were not devoured. Omnis inordinatus animus sibi ipsi fit poena, every inordinate soul becomes his owne punishment.
(255)
As well as the idea of intemperance, we might notice the figurative use of the word "fruits" to convey the outcome of intemperance. In spite of the starving time, Virginia had not ceased to be fruitful: the colonists had simply become too lazy to avail themselves of the abundance that surrounded them. The writer relates: "An incredible example of their idlenes … that … some of them eat their fish raw, rather than they would go a stones cast to fetch wood and dresse it" (255).
As this last anecdote implies, Barlowe's idea of Virginia as an earthly paradise could be potentially subversive in its suggestion that "the earth bringeth forth all things … without toile or labour." Hence, if the myth of the earthly paradise was to remain viable for the Jamestown colony, it would require modification, which it duly received: "God sels us all things for our labour, when Adam himselfe might not live in paradice without dressing the garden" (255). In this more market-oriented version of the myth, fruitfulness is linked to temperance by the necessity for labour. The formula took, and from this point onward becomes a fully assimilated and necessary element of the colonial idea of Virginia.
Planting and cultivation would bring forth good fruits while dissent, "dreames of mountaines of gold, and happy robberies" (256), would bring forth evil fruits. There is an intriguing hint that gold-hunger led to the formation of factions, and even mutiny. A "viperous generation" seems to have broken away from the main colony in Raleigh-esque hopes of finding "mountaines of gold," or of thriving by piracy. It is interesting to note that the Guianan incentive ("Golde is our Fate," De Guiana) is now perceived as deviant and that the Guianan imagery of riches becomes a foil to the more agriculturally oriented imagery of Virginia. Both the True Declaration and its companion pamphlet, A True and Sincere Declaration of the purpose and ends of the Plantation begun in Virginia (1610), suggest that by neglecting "the opportunity of seed-time" there is a danger of "everything returning from civili Propryety to Naturali, and Primary Community" (11). Gold-diggers would not only go hungry but would go native as well, and the civilisation they stand for will crumble into the wilderness. If left unsown, the garden ("Virginia's Verger") would not feed the colonists; if left unweeded, the metaphoric garden of "civili Propryety" would grow to seed. Fruitfulness would become rankness: "the fruits of a headie, daring, and unruly multitude."
In all four of the Bermuda documents that Shakespeare is supposed to have drawn on, the influence of these topoi is profound. A True and Sincere Declaration explains that the "distemper" of Virginia proceeds from "such as are the weeds and rancknesse" (25) of England, the original garden from which they have been transplanted. However, it also urges "the fruitfulness and wholesomenesse of this Land, and … the recompense it shall in time bring" (21). The topoi are also to be found in the two documents by, respectively, Sylvester Jourdan and William Strachey, which concentrate on the Bermuda adventure rather than the state of the colony at Jamestown, and do not appear to have been under the direct control of the company. Jourdan's A Discovery of the Barmudas (1610) describes those islands in terms of the Virginian topoi: "yet did we find there the ayre so temperate and the Country so aboundantly fruitful of all fit necessaries, for the sustentation and preservation of man's life" (9). Strachey's A True Reportory Of The Wracke And Redemption Of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight (1610), though by far the most reliable account of the Bermuda sojourn, relies entirely on the True Declaration for its account of Virginia, and as a consequence duplicates its rhetorical strategy. The colonists are "men of such distempered bodies and infected mindes" (294), that their gardens lie unsown while they themselves grow rank with "neglect and sensuali surfer" (293).
For contemporary London audiences who would have known Virginia primarily in terms of her moral geography, the following passage must have been richly ironic:
Adr. Though this island seem to be desert,
Uninhabitable, and almost inaccessible,—
Seb. Yet,—
Adr. Yet,—
Ant. He could not miss't.
Adr. It must needs be of subtle, tender and delicate
temperance.
Ant. Temperance was a delicate wench.
Seb. Ay, and a subtle; as he most learnedly deliver'd.
Adr. The air breathes upon us here most sweetly.
Seb. As if it had lungs, and rotten ones.
Ant. Or as 'twere perfum'd by a fen.
Gon. Here is everything advantageous to life.
Ant. True; save means to live.
Seb. Of that there's none, or little.
Gon. How lush and lusty the grass looks! how green!
Ant. The ground, indeed, is tawny.
Seb. With an eye of green in't.
Ant. He misses not much.
Seb. No; he doth but mistake the truth totally.
(2.1.34-55)
Characteristically Virginian paradoxes—"plentie and famine," the lush paradise which is also a desert, the temperate land of pestilential fens, the inaccessible place which is just around the corner—are wonderfully parodied. So is the credibility gap: "he doth but mistake the truth totally." The "fen" parody is the wittier for also being a theatrical joke at the expense of the audience who "breathe" upon the stage castaways with their collectively "rotten lungs." I am suggesting that what we have here is more than a happily random series of Virginian echoes, but a conscious parody of the discursive portrait f Virginia. This would imply, in turn, that a Virginian subtext was legible as parody to a degree of depth and precision that we have not been used to contemplate. But the importance of Virginia in The Tempest goes far beyond parody. Temperance and fruitfulness provide the play with fundamental structural and thematic motifs—the bedrock of its own moral landscape.
Temperance describes the trajectory of the play's "rarer action," its symbolic axis. The Shakespearean "tempest of dissension" initiates (and is the effect of) a "range" which is first tempered and then chastised in a pair of masque-like displays. To begin with, Ferdinand's intemperate grief is allayed by the song of Ariel as a sea-nymph (1.2.377-406), with its masque-like invitations to curtseying and dancing. Then, the greed and rapacity of the courtier group, the "men of sin," is confronted with its own image in the harpy snatching away the "banquet" offered by the "living drollery." These two devices are complemented by a third, the betrothal masque of act 4 that celebrates the temperate love of Ferdinand and Miranda and stands at the apex of the symbolic trajectory. It celebrates where the previous devices temper or chastise; its "harmonious vision" counters the disharmony of the storm and the varieties of intemperance it generated.
If the logic of The Tempest were as straightforward as that of the Memorable Masque, we might expect the masque of Ceres to conclude (as well as complete) the symbolic design, but it does not. When it dissolves to "a strange hollow and confused noise," the sea comes back. Prospero is "touch'd" by its rage; his mind "beating" with "anger, so distemper'd" (4.1.138-45). The dialectic of temperance and intemperance continues. As a punishment for their intrusion, Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano are soused
I' th' filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell,
There dancing up to th' chins, that the foul lake
O'erstunk their feet.
(4.1.182-84)
They are then hunted by hounds. (In the Ovidian story of Actaeon, hounds typify intemperate desires.) Finally, it is clear that stormy weather and rotten vapours will be just as much the portion of the "brave new world" as they were of the sad old one. Nevertheless, the masque of Ceres stands as the principal symbol of what the play affirms—that renewal can come out of destruction if the infected mind is tempered and the fruitful soil of virtue is cultivated.
We may notice in the "foul lake" an echo of the "fen" imagery mentioned earlier. This cannot be accidental, for fen imagery appears throughout the play and might be thought of as a motif—a ubiquitous mirror of intemperance. The "filthy-mantled pool" mirrors the intemperate language of Caliban, who curses Prospero with "All the infections that the sun sucks up / From bogs, fens, flats" (2.2.60-61). Indeed, fens seems curiously inspirational to Caliban:
As wicked dew as e'er my mother brush'd
With raven's feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both.
(1.2.323-25)
They would also appear to have been of some importance in Sycorax's magic. In a strictly metaphoric sense, they feature in the spells of Prospero, who imagines the dispelling of the brain-boiled courtiers both as a new dawn of awareness in which "the ignorant fumes that mantle / Then-clearer reason" (5.1.67-68) are dispersed, and as a returning tide of understanding that "Will shortly fill the reasonable shore, / That now lies foul and muddy" (5.1.81-82). Thus, fens are present not only as imagined places but also as metaphors, in which form they contribute to a general idiom of disease and distemper. In Prospero's advice to the newly healthy Alonso, "Do not infest your mind with beating on / The strangeness of this business" (5.1.246-47), the fen imagery of disease is linked to the "beating" of "sea-sorrow," thereby combining in one image the two most important symbolic loci of intemperance in the play—fens and sea.
If temperance is the principal means of regeneration, fruitfulness, or "foison," is its symbolic image. The play offers several versions of fruitfulness corresponding to the moral and imaginative capacities of its characters. The degenerate courtiers, Antonio and Sebastian, see only barrenness. They find the island's air foul and its ground "tawny." The island is a mirror, reflecting their sterility; in the ghostly banquet and the ravenous harpy it also reflects their greed. By the same token, the well-tempered courtiers find the desert fruitful. For Adrian and Gonzalo, the air is temperate and the grass astonishingly "lusty" and "green." Just as Arthur Barlowe had imagined Virginia, so Gonzalo imagines the island as an earthly paradise where:
Nature should bring forth,
Of it own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
(2.1.158-60)
But Gonzalo's temperance does not save him from naivety. Nor does the sterility of Antonio and Sebastian keep them from commenting shrewdly on his Utopian "plantation." With some justice, they see his earthly paradise as fruitfulness gone to seed:
Gon. Had I plantation of this isle, my lord,—
Ant. He'd sow't with nettle-seed.
Seb. Or docks, or mallows.
(2.1.139-40)
As we shall see, the idea of rank growth—fruitfulness in malo—becomes a motif defining disordered desires, and thereby coincides with the fen motif. Indeed, in Prospero's forgiveness of Antonio, both motifs are audible in the one word:
For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother
Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive
Thy rankest fault.
(5.1.130-32)
The use of "rankest" in conjunction with "infect" conveys not only an image of the unweeded garden but a whiff of the diseased fen.
The dialectic is not exhausted yet. All these versions of classical "foison"—natural, "rank" and cultivated—are offset against a fourth kind of "foison," represented by Caliban's non-classical wilderness with its "clustering filberts," "pig nuts," "scamels" and "the nimble marmoset." The contrasts here are ambiguous rather than clearcut. Caliban's delight in the fruits of his wild nature is one of several ways in which Shakespeare prefers his vitality over the weary cynicism of Antonio and Sebastian—even, perhaps, over the weary virtue of Prospero. Meanwhile, his association with "bogs" and "fens" allies him with the rankness that characterises the intemperate cynics.
Like temperance, then, fruitfulness is a quality that varies according to the character imagining it. Each kind of image is dialectically constituted as an important symbolic motif and is related to the other in a way that recalls their formation in the Virginia discourses of 1609. In both the play and the propaganda alike, temperance and fruitfulness provide the rhetorical basis of a "poetic geography" comprising the sea, the weather, and kinds of landscape (the earthly paradise, fens, rank wilderness, tawny deserts). The topographical parallels between The Tempest and Virginia are more than simply random. The play is surprisingly insistent on certain specific features of landscape (such as fens) that transcend the commonplace and, especially when the moral significance is taken into account, suggest a unique parallel with Virginia. The difference is that whereas the Virginia discourses employ the topoi (and their derivative settings) as persuasive tropes in a colonial promotion, Shakespeare uses them to construct a dialectic of civilisation and savagery, of art and nature, and so explores the deeper issues implied by the Virginia colony.
We are now in a position to explore the iconography of the masque of Ceres, the symbolic entertainment in which the Virginian motifs of temperance and fruitfulness, along with various kinds of imagined weather and landscape, reach their culmination. The masque works on two levels. At the more literal, it is a celebration of the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda. But Juno, the marriage goddess, also presides over a metaphoric betrothal of the elements. Earth is reconciled with heaven, land with sea, hot with cold, wet with dry, spring with harvest. At both levels, literal and metaphoric, the reconciliations are achieved through temperance and result in fruitfulness. The harvest goddess who presides over a fertile and cultivated landscape represents both fruitfulness and the temperance necessary for the work of cultivation. The rainbow goddess is not only Juno's messenger, but a mythological personification of temperate weather. She also recapitulates and justifies the mythology of the earlier "masques of Ariel" that comprise the structural axis of the motif of temperance. We may begin, then, by sketching the mythological identity of Iris, Shakespeare's personification of temperance.
Iris is an iconographie mirror of the entire symbolscape of temperance in The Tempest. As a winged figure who combines the elements of air and water in her rainbow, she epitomises the ambience of sea and weather imagery. She is weather in bono where the storm is weather in malo. Shakespeare cannot have been unaware of the pun on the Latin word for weather (tempestas) that lurks in the very title of his play, nor the fact that Iris is mythologically related to the Tempestates (the Winds) through her marriage to Zephyrus, the gentle wind of Spring. If Iris is thereby juxtaposed with the storm, she also suggests temperance where the shipwreck suggests intemperance. She invites "temperate nymphs" to the masque's "graceful dance" as if in answer to the shipwreck's rage—the conventional significance of which Shakespeare heightens by a suggestion of drunkenness on board: "We are merely cheated of our lives by drunkards" (1.1.55). Iris also has specifically mythological points of contact with earlier "masques of Ariel." As the daughter of Thaumas (son of Pontus, the sea) and Electra (daughter of Oceanus), she is the sister of the harpies, who are also creatures of the sea and the weather. In Hesiod, the harpies are given "speaking names" that identify them as violent winds. In Homer, they are indentified with "the spirits of the storm." Shakespeare clearly underlines these ideas by introducing his harpy with storm effects: "Thunder and lightning" (3.352-53), and by imagining the harpy's judgment on Alonso as a masque-like storm scene:
O, it is monstrous, monstrous!
Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronoune'd
The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass.
(3.3.95-99)
If Iris is the calm sister of the raging Harpy, she is also temperamentally and functionally allied with the "nymph o'th'sea" who appears briefly (and in terms of plot motivation, inexplicably) when Prospero commands Ariel:
Go make thyself like a nymph o'th'sea: Be
subject to
No sight but thine and mine; invisible
To every eyeball else.
(1.2.301-304)
Ariel's invisible appearance and almost immediate exit has always been something of a mystery. Apart from underlining Caliban's first entry, it seems curiously functionless and messy. A plot motivation is both flaunted and withheld:
(Enter ARIEL like a water-nymph)
Prosp. Fine apparition! my quaint Ariel,
Hark in thine ear.
Ari. My lord, it shall be done. (Exit)
(1.2.318-20)
It is only when we think of the nymph in terms of the iconography linking Iris to the harpy that her function becomes clear. Ariel's entry as an "invisible" water-nymph prepares the audience for his next, and notionally invisible, entry with Ferdinand for the song "Come unto these yellow sands" (1.2.377-406). The stage direction for that entry "Re-enter ARIEL, invisible, playing and singing," 1.2.376-77), has led the Arden editor to suppose that Ariel must be dressed in a property gown "to go invisible" (29, 34). But if he enters as a sea-nymph he will still be "invisible" because the purpose of the earlier entry can only have been to signal the audience that sea-nymphs are invisible in this play and don't need conventional gowns "to go invisible." This should lead us to conclude that Shakespeare went to the trouble of the earlier and apparently unmotivated entry in order to prepare the ground for an appropriate mythological tableau in the sea-change song. Ariel would still be dressed as a nymph, thereby enhancing the imagery of nymphs in the song. The role of the nymph in tempering the rage of "sea-sorrow," will, in turn, underline the later appearance of the harpy who incites the billows, the wind and the thunder to madden Alonso. Both figures anticipate and are balanced by the rainbow goddess—pediments in an iconographie monument to temperance, of which Iris is the crown.
The "daugher of Thaumantes faire," as Spenser refers to her (The Faerie Queene, 5.3.25), also has a special affinity with Miranda in as much as both names signify "wonder." The mythographer Richard Lynche [in The fountaine of ancient fiction, 1599] found that Iris means "wonder" both because "she was the daughter of Thaumante which signifieth admiration," and because of her rainbow, "the strange varietie of the colours [w]hereof possesseth the beholders minds, with a continuing wonder and admiring continuation." Thus, Iris is not only Miranda's mythological double but stands in the same relation to her father (Thaumas) as Miranda stands in relation to hers—the thaumaturge, or wonderworker.
No sooner is Iris onstage than she summons Ceres with an elaborate evocation of her domain:
Ceres, most bounteous lady, thy rich leas
Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats, and pease;
Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep,
And flat meads thatch'd with stover, them to
keep;
Thy banks with pioned and twilled brims,
Which spongy April at thy hest betrims,
To make cold nymphs chaste crowns; and thy
broom-groves,
Whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves,
Being lass-lorn, thy poll-clipt vineyard;
And thy sea-marge, sterile and rocky-hard,
Where thou thyself dost air.
(4.1.60-75)
The function of this verbal landscape is more than merely decorative. As with the play's other symbolic landscapes that it echoes and inverts, the landscape of Ceres is precisely sited and articulated. To begin with, it is comprehensively opposed to Gonzalo's idea of an earthly paradise. Where Gonzalo dreams of a native "foison" exclusive of both agriculture and civilization:
For no kind of traffic
Would I admit, no name of magistrate.
Letters should not be known. Riches, poverty,
And use of service, none, contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none.
(2.1.151-55)
Ceres (who in Golding's Ovid, "first made lawes") boasts just those varieties of industrial foison that Gonzalo for-swears. Her "barns and garners," her "vines with clust'ring bunches growing," her "rich leas / Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats and pease," all affirm agriculture, husbandry, and stewardship (if not direct ownership) of the land. Where Gonzalo's paradisal "plantation" is seen by un-charitable yet shrewd eyes, as choked by weeds, ("nettle-seed. / Or docks, or mallows," 2.1.140), Ceres's "vineyard" is "poll-clipt," her "turfy mountains" are trimmed by "nibbling sheep." The husbandry of Ceres thus contrasts favorably with the incipient "rankness" of Gonzalo's ideal "plantation" in the same way that the True Declaration qualifies Barlowe's myth of a Virginian paradise with a plea for the necessity of labour: "God sels us all things for our labour, when Adam himselfe might not live in paradice without dressing the garden."
The fruitful landscape of Ceres is also in striking contrast to Caliban's wilderness and his non-classical idea of foison, consisting (as it does) of "clustering filberts," "pig nuts," and "scamels." Again, the implied opposition is sharpened by Shakespeare's sense of evocative detail. If Caliban's "young scamels from the rock" are impenetrably American, then Ceres's "banks with pioned and twilled brims" are just as impenetrably English.
Thy banks with pioned and twilled brims,
Which spongy April at thy hest betrims,
To make cold nymphs chaste crowns,
(4.1.64-66)
The most likely reading construes them as embankments for drainage, strengthened by a lattice-work of branches. This would mean that "spongy April" does not soak the land, turning it into a "sponge," but that it merely "bet-rims" the drainage banks with flowers that furnish "chaste crowns" for the "cold nymphs" of the newly channeled water. On this reading, the whole passage is an inverted echo of the unreclaimed "fens" that inspire Caliban with images of disease, and therefore of the fens that, in the True Declaration, are a source of malaise in Jamestown.
Finally, in the mysterious image of Ceres's "sea-marge, sterile and rocky-hard," the landscape of the masque evokes and counterpoints the potent symbolism of the sea in The Tempest. Here, however, the point of both the image and the juxtaposition is obscure. Unlike the other features of Ceres's domain, the "sterile" sea-shore is the antithesis of all that the fertile goddess represents. So why should Ceres be imagined as "airing" herself there? Why should she take a proprietary delight in "her" seamarge, why enjoy her own antithesis? A clue is suggested by a passage from Hamlet where Shakespeare seems to be thinking along the same lines. The image of the "sterile promontory" to which Hamlet gloomily opposes that of "this goodly frame, the earth" poses the same sort of antithesis that the "sterile" sea-shore does to the other-wise fertile domain of Ceres. The difference is that Hamlet gloomily identifies the two images. Hence, the "goodly" earth is "no more" than a "sterile promontory." For Iris, however, the sea-shore is merely part of the domain of Ceres, presumably its boundary. Here, I think, is the key. As a boundary, the sea-shore is properly both "sterile" and "rocky-hard" to ensure the continued separation of fertile land and chaotic sea. The sterility (of "these yellow sands") would symbolise the undesirability of a conjunction between Ceres and Neptune, while the hardness of rock plausibly suggests steadfastness, as opposed to the perpetual motion of the sea.
Ultimately, this kind of opposition derives from Ovid's account of the creation. In Golding's translation for example, "stedfast ground" is opposed to "waving water":
Againe, the waving water
Did chalenge for his place the utmost coast and
bound,
Of all the compassé of the earth, to close the
stedfast ground.
(1.30-32)
It is appropriate, then, that Ceres should enjoy her out-work because, as the steward of the fertile earth and its lawgiver, she should assert her opposition to the ocean that, in the first scene of The Tempest, is shown dissolving the lawful covenants of what Shakespeare had once imagined as "the kingdom of the shore" (Sonnet 64). The shipwreck itself can be read as an Ovidian symbol of primal chaos, one of several Shakespearean versions of Ovid's opposition of sea and land. Hence, the function of the "sea-marge" passage (like the function of the "pioned … brims") would be to insist upon the proper separation of earth and water, a distinction which Ovid represents as being essential to the creation.
The cultivated landscape of Ceres, then, is an echo in bono of the unregenerate landscapes of the play: the tempestuous sea, the unweeded garden and the unreclaimed wilderness with its wild fruits and pestilential fens. It is also, in its temperate conjunction of earth with sky, a trope of marriage. Weather and landscape marry in Ceres's description of a diffusion of "refreshing showers" from the "wings" of Iris. Even though Iris is described as "many-colour'd," her "wings" are described as "saffron"—the colour of Hymen, the marriage god. Hence, the invocation of Iris may be construed as a figure of marriage.
Hail, many-colour'd messenger …
Who, with thy saffron wings, upon my flowers
Diffusest honey-drops, refreshing showers.
(4.1.76-79)
The hymeneal effect is heightened by the accompanying imagery of investiture. Iris "crowns" the "acres" of Ceres with her "blue bow" and dresses the "proud earth" in a "rich scarf" (4.1.80-82). Meanwhile, if we are to take seriously the stage direction "JUNO descends" (4.1.72-73), the marriage goddess herself must appear in the act of physically descending from the stage "heavens" to the stage earth—or "this very place," probably a green carpet as suggested by the image of "this grass-plot." The verbal image, then, of fertilising rain falling on the earth is not only a symbol of marriage but a figure of the transcen-dental union of heaven and earth effected by Juno's descent. Such a reading would correspond with the meaning of rain imagery in Jonson's Masque of Blacknesse (1605), in which two nymphs named "Glycyte" (sweetness or pleasantness) and "Malacia" (soft, gentle, mild) carry a picture of "a clowd full of raine dropping." Here too the suggestion is that of a fertilising union of heaven and earth.…
Only in this context of richly symbolic and resonant "weathers" and "landscapes," where the theme of fertility is figuratively identified with that of marriage, are we invited to contemplate the literal business of the masque:
A contract of true love to celebrate;
And some donation freely to estate
On the blest lovers.
(4.1.84-86)
But just at this penultimate moment, an apparently pointless suggestion of conflict emerges when Ceres insists on excluding Venus and Cupid from the proceedings because of their alleged complicity in the rape of Proserpine. Suddenly the logic of the masque seems to cloud. In view of the fact that we have had no idea of the presence of Venus and Cupid anyway, and in view of Iris's immediate assurance of their departure in disgrace, the whole episode lacks dramatic motivation. Why is it there? Its point becomes less rather than more clear if we note the obvious connection with Prospero's embarrassing insistence on chastity just before the masque. One of the more puzzling aspects of Prospero's behaviour at this moment is the way he so gratuitously insists (twice: 4.1.15-23; 51-54) that Ferdinand refrain from unchastity after having sorely tried him already, and after admitting that he has "strangely stood the test" (4.1.7). Moreover, there seems nothing in Ferdinand's character to have justified such a worry in the first place. His "prime request" on first meeting Miranda had been to determine whether she "be maid or no" (1.2.428-30), and he makes it quite clear that his plans for Miranda depend on her being a virgin:
O, if a virgin,
And your affection not gone forth, I'll make you
The Queen of Naples.
(1.2.450-52)
It might be argued that Prospero's distrust of Ferdinand makes retrospective sense when the plot of Venus and Cupid against the lovers becomes known:
Here thought they to have done
Some wanton charm upon this man and maid,
Whose vows are, that no bed-right shall be paid
Till Hymen's torch be lighted.
(4.1.94-97)
But this isn't good enough. A cardinal rule of dramaturgy has been broken. The dramatist must motivate conflicts in advance; he can't afford to justify them retrospectively. So how do we explain the Venus and Cupid episode? Is the whole business simply insignificant, a diversionary tactic to allow Juno time to complete her descent? Does the suggestion of a plot imply a corresponding action in the play, now lost? Perhaps, but I would suggest another answer. The play is complete as it stands but dramatic logic has been sacrificed in the interests of iconography. The real purpose of the Venus and Cupid episode is not just theatrical, nor can it retrospectively justify Prospero's emphasis on chastity. Instead, the reverse is true. The purpose of Prospero's warnings to Ferdinand is to prepare for the Venus episode in the masque, to serve as its induction. As in a court masque, the dramatic induction prepares the ground for a symbolic action. The Venus episode is essentially symbolic, but its symbolism, like an iceberg, is only partly visible on the surface. The rest of its iconography lies submerged in Shakespeare's source—Ovid.
We can be quite certain that Shakespeare's Ceres is based on Ovid both because the idea that Venus and Cupid "plot" the rape of Proserpine is uniquely Ovidian (Metamorphoses 5.459-80), and because Shakespeare's use of the homely word "stover" (4.1.63) can be traced to Arthur Golding's description of Ceres (5.435). The significance of Shakespeare's debt to Golding's Ovid is profound. Only in Ovid (and his Renaissance moralisers) is it conceivable that Ceres would blame Venus and Cupid for the rape of Proserpine. And only in Ovid and his moralisers are the blessings of fertility and agriculture so closely linked to chastity and temperance—while sterility is linked to un-chastity and intemperance. Hence, Proserpine's eating of the pomegranate in the garden of Dis is commonly moralized as improper sex, and hence the union of Proserpine and Dis is sterile and cursed by Ceres. I am suggesting that the logic of Shakespeare's emphasis on chastity will only be fully apparent when seen in the context of the Ovidian link between unchastity and sterility and the Ovidian enmity of Ceres and Venus.
In Ovid the opposition of Venus and Ceres is systematic rather than accidental. If Ceres represents natural energy controlled by temperance, Venus represents a primal energy that knows no bounds and is potentially disruptive—contradictory rather than reconciliatory. This is why Ovid puts Ceres in the position of restraining the very forces that Venus would unleash. Her isle of Sicily, for example, is presented as imprisoning the rebellious giant Typhon within the earth. When Typhon's struggles threaten to crack the necessary division between the upper world and the underworld, Dis emerges into the light of day (5.439-56). This gives Venus the opportunity to try her power over the king of the underworld and effect the union of Proserpine (or fertility) and Dis (or death)—a union that is contradictory and absurd, chaotic rather than creative. Recognising this, Ceres effectively curses the union with sterility by turning her own favoured land of Sicily into its sterile antithesis (5.594-604). In Metamorphoses 10, Ceres is explicitly identified with chastity (and implicitly contrasted to Venus) in "the yeerely feast / Of gentle Ceres." At this time "the wyves bothe moste and least" are "appareld all in whyght," and chastely abstain from "the use of any man" for "the space of thryce three nyghts" (10.493-98). Again, fertility is linked to chastity and sterility to unchastity.
Shakespeare's opposition of Venus and Ceres is profoundly indebted to Ovid. Iris's description of Venus as "Mars's hot minion" identifies Venus with an excess of heat, re-calling the fundamental Ovidian opposition of hot and cold. The debt to Ovid is also evident in the way that Venus extends her influence from the masque into the play. Ferdinand, for example, appears to be actively resisting venereal heat in assuring Prospero that, "The white cold virgin snow upon my heart / Abates the ardour of my liver" (4.1.54-56). If the "ardour" suggests Ovid's Venus, then the "white cold virgin snow" is consistent with the imagery of chastity in Ovid's feast of Ceres, the celebrants of which were clad in "whyght" and, like Ferdinand and Miranda, had to observe a period of sexual abstinence to ensure their fertility. Again, the Ovidian opposition of "white cold virgin snow" and venereal heat is present in Ferdinand's resolve that "the strong'st suggestion / Our worser genius can, shall never melt / Mine honour into lust" (4.1.26-28).
If Shakespeare's juxtaposition of Venus and Ceres is indebted to Ovid, so too is his systematic posing of weathers and landscapes in bono and in malo. Ovid is quite systematic about such juxtapositions. When Ceres curses her own fertile land of Sicily with sterility, she completely inverts it:
with cruell hand the earing ploughes she brake,
And man and beast that tilde the ground to death
in anger strake.
She marrde the seede, and eke forbade the
fieldes to yeelde their frute.
the corne was killed in the blade:
Now too much drought, now too much wet did
make it for to fade.
The starres and blasting windes did hurt, the
hungry foules did eate
The come in ground: the Tines and Briars did
overgrow the Wheate,
And other wicked weedes the corne continually
annoy,
Which neyther tylth nor toyle of man was able
to destroy.
(5.594-604)
Ovid's idea of sterility, then, is a systematic antithesis of everything Ceres represents. The "fruités" of the land are blasted, the "ploughes" broken and the cultivators ("man and beast") struck down. Drought alternates with "too much wet," and "wicked weedes" choke the ground. All is the result of a failure of temperance, specifically of chastity. Clearly, the Shakespearean strategy of topographical juxtaposition is also Ovidian, especially to the degree that elemental balance and natural fertility are generally seen to depend on human temperance.
But in a more specific sense, Ovid is also behind Shakespeare's idea of chastity. Thus, when Prospero spells out to Ferdinand the sterile consequences of a failure of chastity, his imagery is the antithesis of the fertility celebrated in the masque:
If thou dost break her virgin-knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be minister'd,
No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-ey'd disdain and discord shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both: therefore take heed,
As Hymen's lamps shall light you.
(4.1.15-23)
Here, in the image of a "sweet aspersion" (literally a "sprinkling") of rain, Prospero anticipates the masque's vision of a fertile union of heaven and earth—the "refreshing showers" of the saffron-winged Iris falling upon the "flowers" of Ceres. Even the hymeneal allusion is subtly anticipated. Prospero's "sweet aspersion" suggests not only showers of rain but the marriage "shower," a fertility-gesture which was (and remains) conventionally associated with marriage. However, he also imagines a parody of this gesture—an "aspersion" of "weeds" rather than "flowers." Prospero's threat, then, like the curse of Ovid's Ceres, systematically inverts the symbolism of fertility.
The same is true of Caliban's curses which also parody the gesture of "besprinkling." Thus, like an Iris in malo Caliban "casts aspersions" upon Prospero and Miranda in the form of "infections" drawn by the sun "from bogs, fens, flats" (2.2.1-2), and again, in the form of the "wicked dew" which Sycorax "brush'd / With raven's feather from unwholesome fen" (1.2.323-25). He not only parodies the imagined gesture of Iris but perverts the idea of her "refreshing showers." There is something here of the idea of the antimasque. Prospero's threats and Caliban's curses are mirror opposites of the masque that succeeds them, sterile shadows dispelled by the performance of the betrothal ritual.
Shakespeare's masque of Ceres ends with a typically Ovidian blessing for fertility and a "graceful dance" symbolising a chaste yet fertile meeting of the sexes. In the marriage blessing sung by Juno and Ceres (4.1.106-17) "honour" and "riches" consist not in gold mines but in "earth's increase, foison plenty." Ceres's idea of "increase" complements Juno's blessing of "long continuance and increasing." The fruits of the earth complement the fruits of the body, and in an image such as "plants with goodly burthen bowing" can even mimic the human body's "bur-then" of "increase." The fertility envisaged by Ceres is virtually transcendental, to the degree that winter—or "the season's difference," (which, in the ironically this-worldly pastoral of As You Like It, Duke Senior calls "the penalty of Adam" [2.1.5-6])—is not part of the picture:
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.
(4.1.114-17)
The wording is ambiguous. It may mean that winter is excluded because spring will come again at "the very end of harvest," or it may mean that spring and harvest will resist winter for as long as possible. Either way, the masque strives to be free of "the season's difference" or the penalty of Proserpine, which Shakespeare (like any Renaissance mythographer) saw as equivalent to the Christian idea of the fall, or "the penalty of Adam." It is worth adding that by excluding winter Ceres is also excluding the legacy of sterility that winter symbolises for Ovid, as well as the "winds and tempests" that for mythographers such as Cesare Ripa were identified with winter. Likewise, the almost personified "scarcity" and "want" are ruled out. Again, it is worth noting that these figures are presupposed by Ovid's juxtaposition of Ceres with a personified "famine."
If the blessing amounts to a systematic affirmation of Ceres, so too does the "graceful dance" of "temperate nymphs" and sunburn'd" reapers (4.1.128-39). These nymphs of "crisp'd channels" bear a marked resemblance to the earlier "cold nymphs" of the "banks with pioned and twilled brims." This means mat their month is "spongy April" and that their dance with the "sunburn'd sicklemen of August weary" represents the conjunction of Spring with harvest that is promised in Ceres's blessing. In keeping with the chaste character of Ceres and with Virgo's monm of August, the dance is described as "graceful." It cannot, in other words, represent anything like the primal sexuality of the dance of "saltiers" in the fourth act of The Winter's Tale. It symbolises the decorous containment of sexual energy, not its release. Balance is the keynote. Wet is decorously reconciled to dry, the heat of the reapers is harmoniously complemented by the cold of the nymphs. There is no suggestion of one element pre-dominating, no suggestion of venereal melting or diluvian drowning.
This is why the dissolution of the masque "to a strange, hollow, and confused noise" is such a shock. Harmony gives way to confusion, the "graceful" movements of the dancers become grotesque—as suggested by the direction, "they heavily vanish." The celebration of temperance is followed by an explosion of temper (4.1.139-45; 158-63). Miranda has never seen Prospero "touch'd with anger so distemper'd." Ferdinand is "mov'd" and "dismay'd." The chaotic passion symbolised by the tempest, the land-hungry sea, the harpy and the winter has come back. We feel its presence in the image of Prospero's "beating mind"—and remember how earlier the tempest had made Miranda's mind "beat" with questions (1.2.176).
But if the sudden truncation of the masque is a shock, it is hardly illogical. It is not (as the Arden editor assumes) a by-product of Italian neo-classical dramatic structure (Ixxiv-Ixxvi). In a purely dramatic sense, the moment of dissolution should be unconsciously anticipated by our tendency to expect an equal and opposite reaction for every action. But it is also anticipated in a symbolic sense by the Ovidian iconography of the masque of Ceres that, because it must continually exclude its antitheses, must also continually evoke them in the very act of exclusion. Finally those antitheses, the diluvian imagery of distemper and the wilderness imagery of Caliban's "nature," reassert themselves.
Hence it is no accident that Shakespeare should be at pains to have Caliban instigate the discord with which the masque ends. Caliban may hardly strike us as Ovidian, but he is circumscribed by imagery which echoes the Ovidian iconography of the masque and (to a degree) he can be thought of* as Shakespeare's version of the unre-claimed natural forces that resist the power of Ovid's Ceres. He is unchaste, lawless, a drunkard, an idolator, and a "salvage" incapable of any civilised institution but slavery. He is also a hunter-gatherer of wild fruits rather than a planter of agricultural "foison," and yet—though unbeholden to any of Ceres's gifts—he is constantly identified with the earth. Not unlike Ovid's Typhon he is imprisoned ("stied") within the earth. He is also addressed by Prospero as "earth." He is earth to Ariel's "air," just as Ceres is earth to Iris's air. He represents a primitive nature upon which the nurture of Ceres "can never stick." As well as associating Caliban with an exotic or American idea of wilderness, Shakespeare also associates him with a more Ovidian idea of it. Ariel tells us how just before "presenting Ceres," he had led Caliban and the clowns on an intemperate progress through
Tooth'd briers, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and
thorns,
Which enter'd their frail shins.
(4.1.180-81)
The detail of this suggests an Ovidian picture of primitive (pre-cereal) nature which we can also find in Boccaccio, for example, who explains how Ceres rid the land of "brears and brembles … foule to loke apon." This is because, in keeping with Ovidian tradition, Boccaccio cannot conceive of wilderness in its own terms. Hence, wild land is simply an antitype of cultivated land, "feeldys" that have been taken over by weeds and thorns.
Where does this leave us? I have argued that Shakespeare's masque of Ceres is the culmination of a dialectic between the Virginian motifs of temperance and fruitfulness. I have also argued that the masque is ultimately beholden to Ovid for the iconography of its moral landscape—both for the topographical detail and for the kind of morality that informs it. Can we go one step further and say that Ovid (who, after all, is the original of the Renaissance idea of the paysage moralisé) is also behind the moral topography of Virginia? Just possibly, though we could never be sure that the debt was conscious. But then Shakespeare's masque may not be consciously Ovidian either. The point is that once a landscape is imagined as temperate, fruitful and virginal, once its fruitfulness is supposed to depend somehow on temperance and virginity, then the logic can only be Ovidian. Both The Tempest and Virginia are inevitably Ovidian. Without Ovid's iconography of Ceres it is almost impossible to explain the peculiar emphasis on temperance and chastity in The Tempest. Without the machinery of the moralised landscape, Samuel Purchas could never have imagined [in his 1625 description in Virginias verger] the Virginian massacre of 1622 as the rape of a temperate virgin.
Temperance and Justice had before kissed each other, and seemed to blesse the cohabitations of English and Indians in Virginia. But when Virginia was violently ravished by her owne ruder Natives, yea her virgin cheekes dyed with the bloud of three Colonies … by so manifold losses adding to the price of Virginias purchase: Temperance could not temper her selfe, yea the stupid Earth seemes distempered with such bloudy potions and cries that shee is ready to spue out her Inhabitants.
Acknowledged or not, Ovid certainly was useful to the Virginia Company. As in the True Declaration, this use of the temperance topos heralds a radical shift in colonial policy. The intemperate Indians ("unnaturall Naturalls") had forfeited their birthright to the temperate land, and were about to be given a dose of their own distemper.
But if the Virginian apologists had an interest in representing their landscape in terms of chastity, what is Shakespeare's motive in The Tempest? We have seen that the theme of chastity has no basis in the dramatic (as distinct from iconographie) logic of the play: there is nothing whatever in the characters of Ferdinand and Miranda to justify Prospero's prudishness, nor to motivate the idea of a threat to their chastity in the masque. Nor, of course, is Shakespeare habitually straitlaced. Indeed no other Shakespeare play makes a point of being moral in quite this way. Why then should Shakespeare gratuitously exalt an uncongenial notion of chastity in the context of an Ovidian poetic geography? The answer must be connected with the theme of temperance, but, as we have also seen, the structural link between chastity and temperance is clumsy and tenuous. In fact, it is invisible unless we are thinking of Ovid. We are left to conclude that what inspired the combination of temperance and chastity in The Tempest was external rather than internal to the play's essential nature—an external context in which temperance, chastity and landscape are necessarily combined. This suggests, uniquely, the Ovidian construct of Virginia, the temperate and virginal land whose chastity is threatened by her own "ruder Natives."
If The Tempest and Virginia are cut from the same Ovidian cloth, we might try matching individual threads. We might think, for example, of how each employs a single Ovidian topos: the paradoxical figure of starvation in the midst of plenty. Ovid works the topos into his mythology of Ceres for the Erisichthon episode in Metamorphoses 8, where (as in book 5) the curse of the harvest goddess results in her own antithesis. In this episode Ceres summons the grisly spectre of famine from the stony wastes of Scythia (antithesis of the fertile Sicily) to possess Erisichthon with a never dying hunger in the midst of his plenty.
Shakespeare's version of this is the phantom banquet which is first presented to the greedy and impious courtiers by the masque of shapes, then snatched away by the harpy, a classical personification of greed. The contrast of surfeit with hunger is worked up into a paradox. The harpy describes the sea as "never surfeited" (like Ovid's "famine"), but it surfeits nonetheless, by "belching up" the courtiers on the island. This essentially Ovidian paradox of famine and plenty also emerges in the contrasting ideas of the island held by the good and the evil courtiers. To the good courtiers the island's grass is lush and green, anticipating the "short grassed green" of Ceres in act 4; but the evil courtiers see the same grass as "tawny" and conclude that the island is a "desert" affording no "means to live." Hence a type of the sterile landscape is set against a type of the fertile landscape—just as Ovid's barren Scythia (the domain of "famine") is superimposed on his fertile Sicily.
Ovid's paradox would also appear to have influenced the True Declaration's explanation of famine in Jamestown. In the very passage parodied by Shakespeare, the author asks: "How is it possible that … plentie and famine, a temperate climate, and distempered bodies, felicities and miseries … [can] be reconciled together?" The rhetorical question finds an Ovidian answer: as "famine" is the result of "distempered bodies," it can be eliminated simply by ensuring that the temperance of the colonial "bodies" equals that of the climate. If the colonists are temperate, hard-working, and deserving of food and fertility, they will not be cursed with starvation in the midst of Virginia's natural "plentie." It may be worth noting here that in later years the emblem of Virginia became a woman bearing sheaves of wheat—Ceres rediviva!
Like most of the Virginia Company's propagandist, the author of the True Declaration may have been a clergyman; in any case, he was a professional discourser trained in the art of rhetoric. He was probably not speaking from first hand experience. But even if he had been, the rhetorical and humanist habit of mind must have substantially controlled what he had to say. Strachey, through an eye-witness, is nonetheless guided by rhetorical, polemical and literary considerations. Polemical motives aside, it would have been difficult for a protestant and humanist mind to conceive of "the land vaguely realising westward" [(Robert Frost in The Gift Outright)] in other than classical and moral terms. Belief in England's messianic colonial destiny coupled with knowledge of the rhetorical possibilities of fruitfulness and temperance would thus result in the hard fortune of the Jamestown settlers being interpreted as moral failure, and the hard facts of the enterprise being read as sings of divine providence. Consciously or unconsciously therefore, Virginia would be written as a moral landscape, though the classical debt is obscured beneath the apparent realism of the style and the historicity of the subject.
But Shakespeare understood that the "new world" was essentially a "landscape of the mind." There is little sense of realistic landscape in The Tempest, and that landscape varies according to the mind that perceives it. Finally, The Tempest shows us two landscapes: the moral landscape in its various phases and a physical landscape of unimaginable strangeness and mystery—the landscape of Caliban. This latter landscape is unassimilable: neither moral nor new. The only mind, the only poetry, capable of imagining it is Caliban's. It resists the attempt of the European mind to mythologise and control. Poetically speaking, it is Caliban, not Prospero, not Miranda (and certainly not Ceres) who possesses the island. His is the imagination that we respond to. Though Miranda imagines a "brave new world," she is really inspired by a fresh vision of the tawdry old one. The island itself draws no poetry from her, nor from Prospero, whose most consciously inspired effort, the masque of Ceres, is remarkable for the degree to which it ignores its wild surroundings. It is no accident that Prospero's greatest poetic moment (4.1.146-63) is also schizophrenic, inspired not by the masque but by his failure to assimilate the nature of Caliban into his European idea of a moralised nature.
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