SOURCE: "Dream, Vision, Prayer: The Tempest" in Shakespeare's Use of Dream and Vision, Rowman and Littlefield, 1977, pp. 173-202.

[In the following essay, Arthos examines the metaphysical and spiritual principles implicit in the dramatic action of The Tempest. He looks closely at aspects of the play that compare life to a dream in which the dreamer is powerless and uncomprehending, and concludes that of all the characters only Prospero accepts the reality that freedom is an illusion and that the mysterious forces which redeem humankind are inef fable.]

From the first, watching the spectacular storm and the crazed behavior of those aboard the ship, we are not moved as we might expect to be by drama in which the representation is so vivid. There is a great 'noise' that should be drowning every voice, yet as the sailors and passengers curse and pray and even jest their words come through as it were unweakened, and there is as much of the ridiculous as the desperate in what we hear. Then, when the storm subsides and we join the two who have watched it from the shore, going over with them all that has been happening, we learn how little there was indeed to fear. The cracks of sulfurous roar, Jove's lightnings, Neptune's boldness were no more harmful than the St. Elmo's fire that was not even that but the guise Ariel had taken to bring it all about. And in the words that tell the real enough distress of those who thought God was punishing them we come to recognize the act of a power moved as much by concern as anger.

Brought into the quiet where Prospero and Miranda are watching, we are hardly surprised to hear music, whether from the air or earth, leading a young prince out of the sea to before the feet of these two.

Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands.
Curtsied when you have and kissed,
The wild waves whist,
Foot it featly here and there;
And, sweet sprites, the burden bear.

(I.ii. 375-80)

We have learned of powers effecting wonders at sea, at the same time lightening fear and gracing the terrible, and now there are signs of what might be still others, loving and gentle and humorous. A young fellow rescued from the very heart of a tempest finds his spirits suddenly rapt with beauty.

Where should this music be? I' th' air or th' earth?
It sounds no more; and sure it waits upon
Some god o' th' island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the King my father's wrack,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air.

(I. ii. 387-93)

It is not Ferdinand's bemusement that suggests divinity at work in this disembodied music so much as the words with which Ariel embodies it. In their simplest sense they are wonderful enough—bearing an invitation and promising an unthought of satisfaction, blessing a betrothal more kindly than even the magnificent songs ending Love's Labour's Lost. But the words are also prophetic, and it is in this character that they are the strangest for they speak as if present and past and future were in a single moment, leading Ferdinand on step by step while telling of something that is yet to happen as by one who has already seen it come to pass. The words seem to belong outside time.

To add to what Prospero tells us about Ariel we are being led to think of him as someone like a sorcerer's medium who knows more than anyone possibly could unless consciousness inhabited the very nature of things and took a voice. But the most provocative indications that Ariel has commerce with another, mysterious realm of being are in the song he next addressed to Ferdinand:

Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

(I. ii. 396-402)

This is mockery—Ferdinand's father is alive, still walking the earth. No one rings his knell, least of all the nymphs that never were. And Ariel himself, 'beginning it', ringing the bells, is enjoying this playful way of leading Ferdinand on, persuading him he is surviving and is his father's heir, and that in a little while he will be making Miranda his queen, death leading to this joy too. Ariel is taking delight in the idea, in the fancy and fun, in the deceit, and in the happiness he foresees for the young prince. He is also celebrating a most wonderful power and act, imagining transfigurations in which a body and a skeleton by the grace of the all-sustaining sea have become jewels and marvellous sea-growths. Besides the mockery and the fun, besides the fancifulness and the factuality—that in the course of nature death distributes its mortal objects among the other forms of the world—there is the astonishing clarity of his perception. In the mere naming of eyes and pearls and bones and coral he endows them with such beauty and strangeness as we would not have known the objects of sense possess. It is this clarity Milton responded to so directly in picturing the jewel-paved streams of Paradise, water and stone becoming turkis-blue and emerald-green and azure, the lucidity all things own when honored rightly. All is seen by such a light as Ariel says will be his forever after he has left Prospero's service—

Where the bee sucks, there suck I,
In a cowslip's bell I lie,
There I couch when owls do cry,
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now,
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

(V. i. 88-94)

As Prospero prepares to give over his last responsibilities, thinking of his grave, he imagines a time when all else will have disappeared in a rounding sleep. His sense of things now is the opposite to the burden of Ariel's song that death is the means of transformation into the rich and strange, and in that 'nothing' he speaks of in the dead, that nothing that will fade, we also read, endless, ceaseless change. It is Prospero who is speaking at the end, and we may think the play is concluding in pressing his assertion of the vanity of all things even though his words are not unambiguous.

But the irony in his conclusion is sharp enough, as it also is in the epilogue, to keep us from forgetting the continuing existence Ariel was planning, an almost impish defiance of any constraining power whatever—

Merrily, merrily shall I live now,
Under the blossom that hangs on the bow.

Earth's increase, revels, marriages and christenings may all be done with, now and forever, when the globe is gone, but from the time of that first sight of Ariel's work and his first singing we are kept mindful of an illimitable spirit, a capacity whose limits are unknown. His strange knowledge, the resonance of his words, his power not only over the forms of matter but in penetrating minds, all seem to say he could do what he would—we cannot perceive what limits there would be for him beyond that vague contract with Prospero. And when Prospero with his gloriously beautiful words allows us to think there might be an end to all that humans have ever known he but re-invokes our wonder at what we have come to think is unconstrained. Ariel is no more to be bound, as unconstrained now as that power that transfigured a dead man, quick with what freedom makes possible, a power never to be a party to obliteration.

It is not only with the flowers of summer, or when freed from a curse, no longer subject to the pinchings of a master or the harassment of Caliban and the imps of the earth that Ariel, a delicate spirit, will joy in his liberty. He is assured he will be everywhere always, partaking of existence in every form nature and time and understanding take.

Prospero has used Ariel to perform miracles, to introduce dreams and madness into men's fancies, to chastise, to condemn, to guide, and Ariel has of himself conceived and devised what he needed in managing these most difficult matters. And like the songs he ornaments his work with, all he does pays as full respect to the way things are as it does to the playing of the imagination. He will be as free and immaculate as light and will thereby honor thought and being as much as nature.

As the drama moves towards its end, and the Milanese and Neapolitans prepare to return to the mainland, Caliban is being left behind to whatever his lonely future, and Ariel has disappeared. But nothing leads us to think he is vanishing into any such darkness as Prospero prophesies for humans. He has simply been let go, to exist as he knows existence—wherever it is, however to be thought of, it is inseparable from light.

A magician avenged himself and arranged a decent future for his daughter. Approaching the end of his life he began to prepare for it. He looked back upon it all as the evanescent thing it was, as all earthly life, full of illusion, passing traceless from all knowledge.

His own labors had been finally successful, partly fortuitously, partly through real spiritual insight and the power that had been lent to him, provisionally as it were. He had pursued justice, and executed it upon the wicked and the shameless, he was returning Milan and Naples to order and the promise of a decent future. The usual uncertainties were to be anticipated but meanwhile he had been just and merciful. And even though in the course of his precarious and difficult undertaking he had brought forward the most sustained and searching reasonings to support his faith in a God of justice and mercy, he knew well enough he had accomplished no more than any proper magistrate would have. And so it is that I think we are to take his valedictory as one might take anyone's—an affirmation that he has done as well as he could, it was not good enough, he has not effected what divinity itself would have, and with his own passing all may foresee their own.

But his language remains pretentious, it is full of the metaphysical affirmations he and much of his enterprise had depended on. So we must accept his declaration as much as ever as by his lights, and not identify it as the burden of the play—he is a bilked old man who succeeded in settling a claim and thinks he has earned a rest.

He may of course have been as capable of divine intimations as anyone, as his author, and his author may not too ironically for a moment or two allow himself to be brought forward in Prospero's words as someone whose life was also writ on water. But there is also the author who more obviously introduces himself in the Epilogue as someone not identical with Prospero, offering a belief to take the place of Prospero's philosophy. This figure suggests that the end of life may be another life. Prospero may have believed, until he was disabused, that for faithful and perfect service salvation was to be his reward. But the words of the epilogue say something else—the soul devoted to thought, to the service of philosophy and justice, is still imprisoned, and the freedom that is eternal life thought itself cannot earn. Prospero has done well, the dream of efficacious power was rightly enchanting, but it was a dream, the idea that he could do God's work. The suggestion has been denied that virtue would take him beyond the sphery chime. If he is to wake it will be through God's free act.

But how is it
That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time?

(I. ii. 48-50)

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

(IV. i. 156-8)

The words 'dark backward and abysm of time' and 'rounded with a sleep' invite speculation upon realms of being 'outside' that the senses and even thought know. The very word 'outside' is paradoxical, since it signifies normally what is accessible to experience. Yet the language and matter of the play themselves compel us not only to treat with paradox but to accept what the paradox is founded on, the notion of a realm of unchanging being, the only basis that can be suggested as contrast to the world of change and time, a realm of the changeless and timeless. 'Certainly through Prospero's speech on the vanishing of the globe Shakespeare is not affirming that we last forever, but rather the exact reverse. Yet the nature of the denial is metaphysical in its assumption of pathos. It only makes sense in the context of immortal longings.'¹ Leaving aside whether it is Shakespeare or Prospero who is thought to be affirming this, the question persists—in this conception, in these dim figurings of 'abysm' and 'darkness' and 'roundness' is there a power the poetry and the play sustain deriving from an assured metaphysics?

The subject and the question were with Shakespeare from the beginning. They took a charming form in the humor of the Princess of France when she repelled the too importunate pleas of the suitors, deferring an answer, this being

A time . . . too short
To make a world-without end bargain in.

(Love's Labour's Lost, V. ii. 774-5)

In the Sonnets, as Mr. J. W. Lever so well rehearsed it, human love has truly deific power:

'. . . the co-existence of beauty and corruption, of truth and mutability, and the universal tyranny of Time, which were the issue of Shakespearean drama, became in the sonnets the issue of personal integrity; and through the prepotency of human love, on a plane customarily reserved for divine grace, a poetic resolution was affirmed for the antinomies of life.'²

Something very close to the wonder in the conception underlying these images in The Tempest is at the heart of the magnificence of Antony and Cleopatra:

O sun,
Burn the great sphere thou mov'st in, darkling stand
The varying shore o' th' world!

(IV. xv. 9-11)

The darkening shore, the determining centre of the world dissolved, the obliteration of all that gives distinction and difference, so that the moon must look in vain for anything to invest with mystery, abundance surfacing from the containing medium—all this poetry has for its basic idea, not a particular bounding line, but in widest conceivable terms the border between the formed and the formless, that alien region with which a great part of the poetry of the last plays occupies itself.'³

In Sonnet LX we read what we may take to be almost an outline of the conclusion Prospero has been led to:

Nativity once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
Crooked eclipses gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave, doth now his gift confound.

The question arises—in such words as these, are we being presented with metaphysics proposed responsibly, or are these merely playful figurings, useful simply for teasing thought? And then, since we meet with the same suggestions again and again in the poems and plays, in an almost infinite sounding, even sometimes developed into arguments, is there some constancy in the repetitions that would indicate a fixed disposition and cast of mind if not belief of the author's? Or are these ideas that go to the heart of Platonic and Christian philosophy being allowed to dissolve in ambiguity? Professor Nuttall thinks that in The Tempest scepticism took on a new life:

'It is as if a second wave of scepticism has passed over the poet. It is quite different from the coprologous indignation of Troilus and Cressida. He no longer, for the sake of one transgression, denies the authenticity of love itself. But a reservation as to the truth-value of the assertions love provokes seems to have reappeared. Time, the old grey destroyer of the Sonnets, was not, after all, put down by love. After the enthusiastic reaffirmation of the later Sonnets and the first three Romances, a sadder and more complex reaction has set in, slightly ironical perhaps, but not at all cynical. The world has not been wholly redeemed by love; look at it. The subjective vision of the lover may transcend objective facts, but it does not obliterate them. The lover has one level, the hater another; perhaps there are a thousand more such levels, each as unreal as the rest.'⁴

It is clear that throughout The Tempest we meet with many indications that the ultimate triumph of good is far from certain, for no more than in the tragedies is there any scanting of the power of evil and of death. Yet I do not think the ending effect is simply ironic or sceptical, or that the prayer of the epilogue is but the recognition of defeat in the face of the conclusion that all we love is doomed. Nor does Professor Nuttall think this is the conclusion we must certainly draw. The wonder suffusing the entire work is so powerful we must be sure we have made all the discriminations we can before unresolved doubt is accepted as the final suggestion the play is making.

For one thing, we must discover if anywhere in the play, or elsewhere in Shakespeare's writings, there are matters that not only bring us to a still closer comprehension of what we would judge to be not merely metaphysical speculations but religious commitments; if here and there arguments are so resolved that il gran rifiuto should seem inconceivable. Do the poetry and drama, through images and symbols, ever develop meanings that the arguments do not include? In short, are there conceptions evidently so religious that contradiction would leave them unaffected?

The 'dark backward and abysm of time' is paradoxically an image of space in which we are led to negate the idea of duration. The bottomless pit of the abyss, or else the formlessness of chaos, suggests endlessness in the other sense: our imagination, our memory, our sight, looking back to that dimly sensed time before thought came to life and light lost itself in the notion of endless space. And as the images of space and duration become confused we are compelled to try to conceive at once of nothingness and of the timeless, and of how there could be such a thing as coming-into-being—out of 'the jaws of darkness'.

'Rounded with a sleep' presents us also with opposites. The globe and all that inhabited it having vanished, life and consciousness are said to end. Yet that which we can only know as waking is said to be in sleep, and we are bound to infer, such sleep out of which waking has taken its life. Consciousness is ended as a circle ends, and that completion which is ending one thing is continuing that very thing; the annhilation of what we have taken to be life is yet the continuance of a sort of life. We vanish and yet sleep.

The reasoning underlying these paradoxes opposes on the one hand duration to timelessness and space to nothingness, and on the other, being to non-being. This reasoning is, I think charmed with the notion of perfect being (ens perfectissimum), the reality underlying all change.⁵

But it is not the abstractions of thought, or the appeal of metaphysics that are finally holding us through these words of Prospero's but rather the sense they establish of persons searching the abyss, or waking from sleep, images of particular persons taking the form of life. Miranda, of course, and Prospero, or ourselves, what it is that gives particularity to persons treating with each other and with reality. What holds us above all and will not let go is the sense that such words are saying as much as can be said of being born into the world of sight and touch and breath. We are drawn to wonder not at truths about Being but about the survival or disappearance of individuals, and, as some of the key devices of the play will make clear, about the nature of our own coming into being and passing away. The metaphysical substance is here but it is not without reference to the concern for individuals peculiar to religion.

Mr. D. G. James had this in mind when he wrote of what it was that Miranda remembered when her father appealed to her:

'Canst thou remember
A time before we came unto this cell? . . .
Of anything the image tell me that
Hath kept with thy remembrance.

(I. ii. 38-9, 43-4)

We see the mind fetching out of its past some fragment of our infant dream—"of anything the image tell me"—stumbling in the vast darkness of what lies behind us, in the immeasurable depths which lie beneath us; a sense of the incalculable immensity out of which our lives appear and with which they are continuous, which we know, but cannot contain, within ourselves. (We think of the second of those last chapters of St. Augustine's Confessions which M. Gilson has called the Paradiso of the Confessions, and the words: "Great is this force of memory . . . a large and boundless chamber. Who ever sounded the bottom thereof? Yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto nature; nor do I myself comprehend all that I am.") Out of this vast darkness, Miranda brings the image of herself, royally attended.'⁶

Mr. James has taken the paradoxes—'immeasurable', 'incalculable', and yet to be known—and thinks it right to equate Prospero's notion of the abysm of consciousness and Miranda's summoning of her first remembrances with Augustine's abyssum humanae conscientiae (Confessions, X, 2), carrying forward what else the play has suggested of the Platonic metaphysics into Augustine's Neo-Platonizing and Christianity. I think we may agree that much in the play supports him in this although the dialogue itself may be thought to stop short. What gives his paraphrase the authority it does obtain is all that in the play is likening life to a dream. The subject is not only the relation of images coming out of the memory to the truth of things, or the likenesses of memory to the kind of thought that is called dreaming, it is also all that the play in telling of dreams and of truth, of illusions and reality, is treating with the authority by which an individual judges himself to be dreaming.

Prospero is to speak of life as a pageant, which signifies somewhat dimly but clearly enough a patterned procession of humans across time and space. The substance of the notion was his at the beginning when he was explaining to Miranda how those returning from the wedding in Tunis had come into his power. The moon, the tides, the plans of many persons, the coming of age of his daughter, all as it were conjoined.

By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune
. . . hath mine enemies
Brought to this shore.

(I. ii. 178-80)

What in his later perspective is a pageant is to those caught up in it a troubled sleep, a driven motion whose direction they cannot know. Prospero will also say that life in the pageant is an insubstantial stuff, that most if not all of the actors are dully sensitive, their reason muddy where it should be clear. (V. i. 82). Even 'things certain' (V. i. 125) they disbelieve. Yet knowing neither themselves nor what is driving them they are all too sure of suffering and confusion, of sorrow and loss, of hate, of crime, of being strangely manipulated.

All torment, trouble, wonder, and amazement
Inhabits here.

(V. i. 104-5)

Prospero can look upon the pageant and the dream as if detached from it, although he concludes he is not, but the others never gain his wisdom. They are told of truth and the work of Providence, they did what they could to master confusion, but all they ever came to know was that they were powerless before mysterious impulsions, some learned they were being brought to judgment, and even to a beginning knowledge of themselves. (V. i. 212-213). All sensed the intrusion of mysterious forces.

As Ferdinand, Alonso, Gonzalo searched for clues to their predicaments we see in their uncertainty just such obscurity as faced Miranda. Confronting experience they cannot account for or comprehend, their memory itself confused, even what is before their eyes is 'rather like a dream than an assurance.' (I. ii. 45) Alonso, when told Prospero is his brother, hardly dares acknowledge what he might be expected to know if he knew anything:

Whe'r thou be'st he or no,
Or some enchanted trifle to abuse me,
As late I have been, I not know. Thy pulse
Beats as of flesh and blood; and, since I saw thee,
Th'affliction of my mind amends, with which,
I fear, a madness held me. This must crave
(An if this be at all) a most strange story.

(V. i. 111-17)

But it is of course Caliban's confusion as he recalls the celestial music that seemed to him the very rain of grace, when if ever it was truth, not a dream, that held him, causing him to pray to dream again. It is this that says most plainly of all how far everyone but Prospero is from what he will call understanding. Prospero's assurance, and, at the end, his serenity rest on his acceptance of the paradox, that we know change for what it is from knowing of changelessness. Miranda probably rests in wonder—which may be a deeper understanding still, and Ferdinand may learn to. The others must take on trust that what they do become assured of is for their good. They must believe it is right that they should become themselves again, but they will have no inkling of how it all began or ends, where it ends, or how the parts they played became theirs even though they themselves had chosen them like Plato's souls in choosing good or evil.

The strange necessities that brought these dim images into Miranda's remembrance were at work in what one after another took to be his dreaming. It was these same necessities in their apparent incoherence that Prospero solicited with his magic. We sense them in what we learn. of the origins of Caliban, in the purposes of his terrible parent, in Ariel's history. There is an indication of the same strangeness in Prospero's likening the whole earthly existence to a pageant, a procession whose commencement is as undefined as its conclusion, though its existence and its passing are evidence of indeflectible compulsions. What all attempt to do is to take these strange stirrings to be life—their remembrances of the past that is the prologue, their existence which seems no existence, their annhilation which they do not succeed in imagining. So it is, I think, that we may not take Prospero's wonderful summing up of his conclusions as the play's, for what he says is but another dimly recognized shape taking form out of the abysses in his understanding, and the light by which we are to perceive this is not to take form until the epilogue. Other words of Augustine in the passage Mr. James pointed to apply as well to Prospero as to the others—'the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely.' (X, 8).

In speaking of the end as a rounded sleep Prospero is in one sense using words to point to what may not be possible even to conceive of. In another sense he is applying to death a characterization one after another in the play was applying to his present life. Paradox, absurdity—whatever—the words signify limitation and constraint, the loss of consciousness, of the power to act, of freedom. Many in the play had been led to think their waking life not unlike this, and their acting as their inaction like somnolence. On occasion a charm transfixed them, but even without a charm there were occasions when they felt the helplessness men know in dreams. And in likening what they continued to think of as their waking state to this they felt they had lost possession of themselves, the dream no longer evanescent but, rather, all there was. However lightly sketched much in the play is, the import of this fear, and desire, was developed to the limit, to the conclusion Prospero drew. Powerlessness, confinement, the loss of consciousness. If there was illusion in all this it would have been chiefly in the thought that freedom had been wholly taken from the living. On the other hand, the fundamental irony of The Tempest is in precisely this, that it is not an illusion.

Sometimes one or another had an intimation of another existence entirely, apparently not transient but enduring, through hearing celestial music, or through a vision, or in the sight of what appeared to be gods. Sometimes circumstance, sometimes a succession of events seemed to testify to the reality of fortune and destiny and providence. But unless it was Ariel, no one was to rest for long in the assurance of anything other than bondage. Until at the end they were returned to themselves—as Gonzalo said, 'no man was his own.' (V. i. 213). Prospero alone entertained the thought of lasting non-existence—when his understanding had gone as far as it could he found a paradox to account for the time when he, too, would no longer be his own. Each thought of his confinement differently, and the conditions were indeed different, but on one matter all agreed, no challenge would disturb the rule of what was fated.

Long before the audience supposes anything like this to be the burden of the play we are presented with a number of indications, apparently trivial in themselves, that are preparing for it. As the storm rages the boatswain curses the passengers who are getting in his way. Gonzalo reproves such insolence, offering the old joke that the rascal is clearly destined not to drown but to be hanged. Fate, if not society, he is suggesting, has ways of correcting license. There are other such instances of insubordination. We are reminded of the worst by Prospero's presence on the island, expelled from Milan by his brother. One reference after another establishes the very action of the play within a history of rebelliousness—Ariel had been locked into a pine tree because he would not comply with all that Sycorax required; Sycorax had been driven from Argier for outrages; her god, Setebos, would have been the most incorrigible of all—Caliban but inherited his and his dam's disposition. Never content they were all seeking to break free from the conditions life had set for them.

As such indications were multiplied we are bound to notice a certain consistency in the fortunes of the visitors to the island as they continue in the ways of insubordination and rebellion. Conspirators, having been successful in bringing down a duke, set out to kill a king. Confounded once, they set to again, they become desperate when they are thwarted this time, and imagine it is a legion of devils they must hereafter fight against. Seeking to free themselves from the limitations imposed by another's sovereignty they end in the prison of hysteria. Caliban and his new friends enjoy a wonderful exhiliration in their drunkenness, they think the island is to be theirs almost for the asking, and yet they end by being hounded as never before, and are returned to the same galling servitude.

There had been irony in Antonio's 'What's past is prologue', suggesting that the dispossession of Prospero was but an act in a drama leading to the removal of the King of Naples, a drama already written. He spells it out, this is destined—

And, by that destiny, to perform an act
Whereof what's past is prologue, what tó come,
In yours and my discharge.

(II. i. 245-7)

The nature of that destiny may not be what he supposes—Ariel saw it differently: destiny caused the sea to belch Antonio and his companions upon the island, caused them to go mad, even arranged for their perdition. Ambition in truth was everlastingly promising rewards for those who would overthrow authority in seeking more and more scope, and it appeared that it was in the nature of things for such attempts to lead but to other restraints. Such ambitions were misconceived, the world was inhospitable, and every success bore within itself the requirement of its own frustration.

What was true for the noble conspirators was also true for the others, each undertaking was self-defeating. Caliban's rebellions led to more scourging. Moreover, had he succeeded, Miranda ravished would have no more been won than Milan conquered was possessed. The ambitions of the good and the just were conceived in deeper respect for the ways of nature and destiny, but these too would fall short and discover their limits. Whatever promises love and the service of justice made, or seemed to make, the way of the world was still unfathomable, there was much no one could give direction to. Ferdinand and Miranda understood that in some sense they were discovering freedom in devotion, but for them, too, there was the long future with its mysteries that Juno and Ceres were to celebrate. Not only death but time itself would see to it that Prospero should put down his task. Ariel alone was assured of complete emancipation, but through means no human could even know of.

Who it is Prospero serves may not be named. It is certainly not a person, and not love, if that could be thought of as a power in nature or as a goddess. He can reasonably enough refer what happens to fortune and providence, even as if they were deities, yet we shall not find him using such words as those on the ship who pray when they see death coming near; or such as Ariel spoke in reminding the wicked of the need for contrition and satisfaction, words that point unmistakably to the traditional observances of Christians and even to sacramental doctrine. He hardly ever allows himself such language as Ferdinand, that all the devils have left Hell in order to people the storm; nor is he ever to suppose, as the young prince does, that he has come into the presence of a deity. Prospero, of course, has summoned up spirits who take the form of Juno and Ceres—(Ariel represented Iris)—and in making it clear these are not the goddesses themselves he but continues his consistent reticence. He has proof enough of the reality of spirits, of the hierarchy of demons, of the terms on which spirit and matter treat with each other according to the complex of emanations in which all eventually derives from a single source. This everlasting, divine power he continually consults and obeys, and within the limits of his understanding he is able to conspire with it in effecting good. But whatever he himself brings about is only what force could have effected—transformations of mind and the growth of love he may encourage, but that is all, these proceed according to other necessities.

Prospero also knows how limited his understanding is. He may speak of the thoughts of others as 'muddy' (V. i. 82) and even promise their ultimate enlightenment, but he can only dimly apprehend his own future. His reason has in every respect informed him that there are abysses reason will never sound. No god—Eros or Chronos or any—will for him ever take form out of the abyss of being, no object will through the power of love inspire in him such promises as Ferdinand and Miranda treasure.

It was left to Ariel to delineate and celebrate all that Prospero holds in honor even if he himself is imprecise—the idea of a transcendent power that is also immanent, that shows the means of redemption and indeed authorizes them, that transforms the dead, that is assured of the existence of perfect freedom. But even Ariel does not give this power a name.

The idea that there might be something more to human existence than conforming to the obligation of command and service, to law in whatever form, was first put forward in the loveliest of senses when Ferdinand knew himself enthralled to Miranda. Being goddess-like she drew his entire devotion, and so he took joy in the menial tasks Prospero set for him in order that he might not think he had gained this wonder too easily:

There be some sports are painful, and their labour
Delight in them sets off; some kinds of baseness
Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters
Point to rich ends. This my mean task
Would be as heavy to me as odious, but
The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead
And makes my labors pleasures.

(III. i. 1-7)

The piling of logs—'this wooden slavery' (III. i. 62)—thousands of them—becomes a patient nothing done in her service. It becomes a game, and more, a means of gaining heaven's favor—

The very instant that I saw you, did
My heart fly to your service; there resides,
To make me slave to it.

(64-6)

And Miranda, supposing the worst—that she will not become his bride—swears she will become his servant. (85). The two of them never tire of playing upon the idea of servitude—and so, finally, Ferdinand proposes marriage,

with a heart as willing
As bondage e'er of freedom.

(88-9)

The language has made the meaning all but explicit—love transforms subjection into the enjoyment of power that ambition was always seeking—possession, union, exultation. Constraints cease to be known as constraints when content promises to follow upon content. All the insubordinate motions that looked towards power mistook their ends as they mistook their means. Instead of honoring what they would possess, they treated it with dishonor, seeking mere domination—reducing Miranda to an object, kingship to tyranny, loyalty to manipulation. Ambition, ever restless, never satisfied, was its own confinement. Even dedication to the work of justice could but set the stage for the correction of wrong since the unregenerate were free to remain so. Love, however, endowed humans with the conviction of power extending limitlessly, even though much of what was to come would be unforeseen. In the ceremony blessing the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda, Juno and Ceres tell them that such affection as theirs nature itself blesses. Nature, bringing offspring, causing the earth to flourish, forwards what divinity blesses, what love has indeed prophesied. Those who love well are being told their faith is sound whatever is to happen in the course of time.

This sense of being moved about despite themselves is in part the recognition that particular efforts fail in their intent and have disappointing consequences. In part, also, it follows from the recognition that forces the characters are more or less ignorant of are intruding in their affairs. Prospero himself acknowledges the activity of powers he may be aware of only intermittently but that he must believe are ever-present—the bountiful fortune that has brought the ship to the island when he is able to make the most of the opportunity to effect his purposes; the fortune, also, that takes on the attributes of providence. There is the sense of an even more instantly directing power in the consciousness of what time brings about—the education of Miranda, the maturing of Ferdinand, the period allotted for Ariel's service and the fixing of the time for his emancipation. As impressive a witness of the power of time as anything else is in our notice of the vision Caliban has had of a celestial life, for in this we believe there to be inherent the suggestion of a fulfilment possibly yet to come. There is above all the ceremony of the goddesses, Juno and Ceres, looking towards the fruition of nature through the years.

The sense of time passing and in its passing bringing to birth is pressed upon us insistently, in innumerable circumstances, and just as in Prospero's soliciting of Miranda's memories and the sense his words there give of the womb of time, so the plotters against his life express the same all-encompassing meaning—'What's past is prologue' (II. i. 257). Even as it were in incidental remarks the pervasiveness of the idea is made known to us, as when Antonio speaks to his accomplice, suggesting the murder of the sleeping king—

O, that you bore
The mind that I do! What a sleep were this
For your advancement!

(II. i. 259-61)

In whatever circumstances, and with whatever emphasis or reference, this sense of powers and of powerlessness is but the extension into philosophy and superstition and religiousness of the theme struck in the first scene of subordination and insubordination, of the cost of responsibility, of the vexation of the ruled, of the desire for emancipation. Almost everyone is chafing at the bit—Prospero with his impatience, Alonso with his grief, Antonio and Sebastian like the boatswain and the drunken butler and Caliban himself in their self-willed ambitions. The desire for emancipation is conceived of not as freedom from the demands of power, but from the demands of authority. The slaves will become slave-owners, the lieutenants kings. Antonio's words fit them all—all except Ariel—

My brother's servants
Were then my fellows, now they are my men.

(II. i. 266-7)

Subject to the circumscriptions of existence, life and the dream as the images of fatality, in another dimension are images of the misery of the ruled—of servants and children and ministers, of all subordinates, of the dissatisfaction inherent in mortal life. As of Prospero himself before his expulsion—

Which first was mine own king.

(I. ii. 342)

Even in humor Prospero returns to the theme, teasingly rebuking Miranda—

What, I say,
My foot my tutor?

(I. ii. 468-9)

In the dream all are stupefied, in society all are goaded. Which is to say, for all that thoughts are free (III. ii. 118), for all—with spirits bound up—that minds may hold fast to visions or to truths or to justice or to enmity and hatred and rebelliousness, all in nature is confinement.

The world of master and subject, of nature and husbandman, the only world we do know, can be nothing else than one in which men accommodate themselves to each other and to the universe either in strife or in cooperation. It is folly to dream to escape to some state in which rulers are accountable to no one or any thing. The thirst for power can no more be freed from the constraints of power than the creatures of dreams may escape dreaming. The point is extended, and the question becomes from every viewpoint, is liberty an illusion?

The play begins in violence and with the threat of catastrophe, it ends in stillness, in happy and decent prospects, calm seas and auspicious gales. After the spectacular beginning there was an elaborate, even a drawn-out setting of the scene, renewing what the audience as well as Miranda need to know. We were then shown newcomers to the island devising conspiracies almost immediately, and we witness marvellous, even miraculous happenings. We were initially impressed with hints of what Prospero was planning to do, particularly as we learned of his extraordinary powers, but as the scenes succeed each other it is not this that focuses our interest so much as a series of encounters—Ferdinand meeting Miranda; the reuniting of the passengers from the foundered ship; Caliban's joining up with Stephano and Trinculo. We become interested in what these meetings are leading to, what enterprises are under way and how they may affect each other, and largely independently of our concern for Prospero's ultimate success.

Some of the encounters had been arranged, others had come about by chance. Sometimes they seem to have been the work neither of humans or spirits but of invisible influences that suggest the manipulations of fortune or destiny or providence. But in their succession there is so little to be thought of as a plot, the entanglements are so little constraining, that we see that in this play the imitation of the action is as Aristotle conceived of it—an imitation of the energy in life that moves towards fulfilments, or, when perverted, towards frustration. And so when Ferdinand comes upon Miranda, when Antonio and Sebastian and Alonso are reunited, when the clown and the drunken butler join up with the monster, we are but lightly held by such a knitting of interests that constitute a plot, and we are more held by what we see to be at work in the lives of those before us. By the growth of love in Ferdinand and Miranda ('It works'—I. ii. 493); by the energy and inventiveness of malice as well as by the limitations that show themselves to be inherent in evil (Prospero's foes hysterically pursuing legions of fiends); by the words of Ariel that for a moment we may take to be those of an avenging angel ('You are three men of sin.' III. iii. 53). Prospero, of course, has a plan he has plotted, and much comes about as he wishes, but there is so much more that is at work that we are prevented from identifying what he is devising as either the plot or the action of the drama. We are more held in discovering how love and the directions of nature conspire, how dreams may claim authority, how character as well as magic perform charms ('They are both in either's pow'rs'—I. ii. 450) and, above all, we are held by our developing sense of something not to be defined that may be giving direction to all this.

In the various meetings now one now another moves to advance his purpose. Prospero sets Ferdinand tasks that will teach him to value what he hopes to gain, Antonio and Sebastian grab at the chance to murder Alonso and Gonzalo. Successes and failures alike require other undertakings, and the actions in their various stages are as it were punctuated either by apparitions or an account of what might be at their root, as when Ariel sings fancifully of the death of Ferdinand's father, and when Caliban remembers a vision. The apparitions themselves—a banquet appearing and vanishing, evocations of harpies and hounds, goddesses performing a ritual—cap as it were this or that incident with a symbolic reference that attests to the moral and spiritual issues that have arisen in the course of the action. In their sum they attest to still something else, to the continuous presence of the powers ultimately responsible for the existence of what is appearing before us, being themselves translations of the events of the play into expressions of another order of existence. They illuminate the nature of the action of the play, what it is that is giving the lives of the characters their directions, what makes of it all, in Prospero's term, a pageant.

Prospero instigated several of the ghostly appearances and, knowing we may suppose, their import, but what is said by the figures in the apparitions would seem to have gone beyond what he could have conceived. Ariel, most especially, carrying out his orders, speaks as from someone within the vision, addressing sinners as if possessing divine authority, while Prospero can at most, and from the outside, approve. And what Juno and Ceres do in blessing is beyond what even a magician could hope to perform. Then, too, these marvellous sights, accompanied so often as they must have been by music from unseen instruments—as it was when Ariel with her singing led Ferdinand to Prospero and Miranda—would seem to have taken form in another world. By that very suggestion the import they bear would seem to possess something of the character of the chorus in ancient drama, not submerged in the circumstances of the drama's action but granted the special power that belongs to truth itself—comprehending, judicial, serene.

In addition to their spectacular nature many of these marvels hold us with the sense of the same mysterious and fascinating power of so many of the images of the play, the same strangeness that stirs us in Prospero's words asking Miranda to search her memory, and in what goes so far beyond the commonplace when he recalls the infant's smile that encouraged him when the two were adrift—

O, a cherubin
Thou wast that did preserve me! Thou didst smile,
Infusèd with a fortitude from heaven,
When I have decked the sea with drops full salt,
Under my burden groaned; which raised in me
An undergoing stomach, to bear up
Against what should ensue.

(I. ii. 152-8)

But nothing, probably, speaks more for the importance of this power in defining the interest that holds us in the unfolding of the action than Ariel's song to Ferdinand telling what has happened to the dead.

The words begin in tolling, 'Full fathom five,' and then out of the fearful beat there arises a strange beauty. We are struck with the preposterousness of so swift a change of bones and eyes to among the loveliest of sea-growths. But in the startling we recognize too the truth of what we have always known, that in death as in life there are continuous transformations, all is to be wondered at, all changes being preposterous, always to be expected and always surprising. And in these lines there is the promise of the most astonishing marvel of all, that the man himself will take another form, and not merely his bones and eyes. With such apparent guilelessness promised such beauty, such marvels, led into still more expectation, and especially of the strange, the words inevitably strike us with the suggestion of a mystery in what is being done, in the course of things, and in what it all is to end in. In what might have been simply a beautiful mocking song, some celebration of something like the jewel-paved streams of Paradise, we are held by the sense of power at work, transforming and transfiguring the remnants of a man and the man himself.

Nothing is more important to the marrying of the marvellous and the natural than what the production of the play would owe to spectacle and music. The storm scene with its great 'noise' is succeeded by the sight of a young prince rescued from the sea and led to safety by music that enraptures him. Music and singing interrupted a murder—to Gonzalo asleep it was a strange humming, to the murderers the sound of an earthquake and the roaring of lions. Solemn and strange music, then thunder and lightning, then soft music and dancing shapes accompany the magical appearance and disappearance of a banquet. The most glorious effects would have supported the enactment of the ceremony in which the images of Juno and Ceres blessed the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda.

I believe it is agreed that in no other play of Shakespeare's is music so vital to the conception although of course we do not have enough to help us re-create the original productions. It is, I think, a misconception—or at least, the argument is unsatisfactory—that speaks of The Tempest as a form developing out of masque into opera, but this I think we may say, that spectacle and music are as integral to the conception of the work as are the representation of persons and the movement of verse and meanings. And the marvels we behold together with music that would have been worthy of the songs would give the finally lasting impress to the metaphysical and religious postulates that underly the action. Mr. J. H. Long could not have worked out all that would finally substantiate his judgment but I think we must generally agree with his idea of the play as a sustá ined musical movement ending in rhythmic and harmonic resolution.⁷

The notion of a single, completed movement led Prospero to liken the existences of humans and of the world to a pageant, but Shakespeare's perspective of the form of the play is not precisely this. Prospero had acted in bringing certain matters to a conclusion, and in laying down his task he is preparing for death. He has hopes for those who are succeeding him and for those who are yet to come, but his own perspective is that of one whose power is now gone and whose life shortly will be. It is his work and life that is vanishing. Much has been as he planned, and he has looked upon all that has happened as one apart from it. Ariel, by contrast, time and time again speaks as from within the very processes of things, as at the source of the power Prospero has solicited and depended on. The form of the play is established in relating the realm in which Ariel has his being to that of Prospero. It is accordingly not defined as a journey or a procession that is over with but as a celebration of what is and what is to come. The climax of the play is in the ceremonial in which images of goddesses bless the future.

Prospero in arranging to right wrongs and provide for Miranda and in coping with his unwilling minister and servant and those who plot against him submitted himself to an order in things he had learned something of. His magic, his solicitation of memory, and his prescience all attest to his respect for a special hierarchy of demonic powers that he had come to understand at least partly. But he was equally respectful of powers he made no claim to fathom—fortune, the ways of time, destiny, providence. He deferred to all these, indeed he honored them, and he used enough of the language of orthodox Christian doctrine to make it certain he had no interest in going beyond the prerogatives of humans. He could only solicit, not govern. He did not even claim the authority of a priest, blessing, pardoning. He was far from being the intermediary of grace. At most he prays:

Fair encounter
Of two most rare affections! Heavens rain grace
On that which breeds between 'em!

(III. i. 74-6)

The ways of fortune and destiny he knew were beyond his comprehension, and that he must work with them—it was through these his enemies were brought within his power, and it was through destiny and providence that this should be at a time when there could be a betrothal for his daughter. He knows himself to be subject to the laws that put spirits to the service of men as well as to something he cannot define that he yet recognizes to be at work in the ways in which time brings things to pass. His effectiveness depends upon obedience, his doing right depends on it, his freedom is in choosing to obey the right. And then he must resign his power, leave to nature and fortune and destiny the future of those he has so cared for. He had fostered the union, he had, so to speak, offered to the gods. Now he would depart, the task never to be finished by him, he returning to that death in which fish might feed upon his flesh, and his bones, too, might become coral, all that was certain would be that he would be ending in the fated ways of all things, lifeless, powerless.

In a certain obvious respect Prospero acted to obtain what King Lear dreamed of, the consolation that redeems suffering, and his conception of what the gods wanted led him to act out the vision suffering engendered. The authority of the idea of blessedness in Lear is in the power of the representation of human suffering and how in such as the king it is instrumental in purification and in ennoblement. But in The Tempest all that is in the abyss of the past, and Prospero is not among the sainted, as Lear madly imagined he might be, he is alive and sane and burdened. He cannot afford the illusion of believing he and another Cordelia might pass eternity in God's kind nursery, he must merely make the best of things.

If one wishes to call this motive love, and to agree that here as in so many of the sonnets and in King Lear Shakespeare is allowing it such power as the gods possess, yet one must say that the governing conception of The Tempest is not in the celebration of love as such, whatever its authority, but of what has brought life into being and consigned it to the care of humans. What governs the play, I think, is the conception of being that Shakespeare earlier sounded in The Phœnix and Turtle. For such a conception the idea of love which perhaps inevitably carries with it a personal and human character is too limiting.⁸

Notes

¹ A. D. Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory, A Study of Shakespeare's The Tempest and the Logic of Allegorical Expression, London, 1967, p. 147.

²The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, London, 1956, p. 276.

Professor Nuttall, in the most adept philosophical treatment we so far have of The Tempest, has taken up the meanings that Mr. Lever has analyzed so finely and extended them: 'The concept of extended duration at last gives way to the frankly metaphysical concept of eternity when the two strands of the Sonnets—the intricate love story and the horror of mutability—are joined in the third remedy, love. It was not the poet's verses that should free his friend from the tyranny of time, but rather his love. Love itself (the now-familiar locution is forced upon us) is timeless and invulnerable.' (Two Concepts of Allegory, p. 122).

In The Tempest itself, with its insistent suggestions of the metaphysical, Mr. Nuttall continues, 'Love is conceived as a supernatural force, and any number of protestations of metaphor and apologetic inverted commas cannot do away with the fact that a sort of deification, and therefore a fortiori reification has taken place. Whether these concepts should be allowed to be meaningful, or whether they should be permitted only a "merely aesthetic" force (and that presumably spurious) I do not know. The unassertive candour of Shakespeare's imagination has left the question open.' (p. 160).

We have long understood that it is not only in The Tempest we must come to terms with what Shakespeare is doing with the suggestions of supernatural power and benevolence. Sooner or later we arrive at whatever conclusions we judge proper when it is proposed that Shakespeare is depending upon Christian faith. For my part I believe that the effects of the poetry itself—this communication of the quality I have spoken of as stillness and serenity—should initially be referred to that state the ancients spoke of as close to the divine. This is a character I think we must allow such expression in Shakespeare whether or not we are drawn to other conclusions as well. On this matter we may be grateful for the summary M. Ragnar Holte provides: 'Si l'on cherche à condenser en une formule générale ce que signifie ευδαιμονία pour un Grec, on peut dire—nous laissons ici de côté les sens affaiblis, secondaires—qu'il désigne un idéal de vie amenant les hommes aussi près de la vie des dieux qu'ils peuvent en avoir le désir sans pour autant se rendre coupables de démesure, ύβρις. . . . L'ευδαιμονία est l'état de l'homme ou l'élément divin n'est ni affaibli ni étouffé, mais se trouve au contraire actualisé avec son maximum de plénitude et de force, les autres puissances vitales étant soit déracinées soit soumises à sa direction. Cet état est toujours conçu comme dépendant de la vertu, άρε γη, surtout de la plus haute des vertus, la sagesse, φοφία, ou comme s'identifiant avec elle.' (Béatitude et Sagesse, Saint Augustin et le problème de la fin de l'homme dans la philosophie ancienne, Paris, 1962, pp. 14-15.

³ John Armstrong, The Paradise Myth, London, 1969, p. 46.

⁴Two Concepts of Allegory, pp. 156-7.

⁵ The Aristotelean sense here agrees in important respects with the Platonic: '"To be" anything, in the world of natural processes, means "to be something that comes into being and passes away", something that is subject to change. In this sense, anything that is, any ousia, is anything that is what it is as the result of a process, a kinesis.' (J. H. Randall, Aristotle, New York, 1960, p. 111).

This is the argument of the Metaphysics, and here as well as in On Philosophy Werner Jaeger believes that Aristotle carries on the Platonic notion that the best (ariston) and the purest reality (ousia) coincide. (Aristotle, Oxford, 1948, p. 222).

In The Tempest Shakespeare does not of course introduce either the terms or the arguments that would point us towards certain refinements of speculation, nor does he, as Marston and Jonson on occasion do, supply footnotes in reference. Nor, however carefully articulated we judge the reasoning of The Phœnix and Turtle or any other work to be, may we refer to that for precise corroboration when any number of modifications would be possible from moment to moment. One is merely required to refer to what in traditional thought is coherent with conceptions developed in the particular work.

⁶The Dream of Prospero, Oxford, 1967, p. 39.

⁷Shakespeare's Use of Music: The Final Comedies, Gainesville, 1961, p. 96: 'Let us consider the play as some great piagai cadence whose passing chords are resolved by the soul-satisfying completeness and finality of the tonic chord.'

⁸ The integrity of this composition is such one is bound to relate the political and ethical matters that arise in representing the claims of liberty and subordination to the more general matters that come to mind in reflecting upon Prospero's abjuring of power and upon the temper with which the play ends. This calls for still other perspectives one is obliged to take account of in any effort at a summary.

It is of course impossible to identify the state of mind the play leads to in its conclusion with any other than the author's own resolution of the issues that arose in handling his material. But where so much has to do with obedience and with the recognition of divine powers it would be remiss to exclude from any summary estimate the consideration of a certain Christian perspective upon such matters. I have already cited words of M. Ragnar Holte in characterizing the serenity within the grasp of the ancients to help us in assessing not only Prospero's quietness at the end, but elsewhere, such as Hamlet's also, when he speaks of the felicity he credits Horatio with, and Horatio's state, also, in commending the soul of his friend to the care of angels. The traditional Christian view may offer even more light in helping us reflect upon the conclusion of The Tempest, particularly as we keep in mind that this is looking towards the celebration of a marriage with all that that implies. In exploring such a perspective, M. Holte's further observations can be of great help: '. . . les deux traits de l'amour, la joie et la subordination, ne peuvent entrer en conflit, si l'homme se conduit bien. Ils forment un tout, fondé sus la structure ontologique de la charité (conçue selon le couple participatio-imago). Cette unité est déjà exprimée dans la notion Deo propter seipsum frui, laquelle signifie un don du sujet à un objet situé en dehors de lui. Sans doute le moi ne cesse jamais d'être sujet de l'amour—comment cela serait-il possible?—et jamais non plus l'amour ne peut oublier qu'il s'adresse à celui dont il attend tout bien—sinon il se rendrait coupable d'un péché grave d'ingratitude. . . .

'Nous comprenons maintenant comment Augustin peut identifier le désir de la béatitude avec la recherche de Dieu. Dieu est beata vita, il y a plaisir et joie à l'aimer: Dieu est volonté, l'aimer c'est lui obéir. Si cette unité est fondée philosophiquement sur la structure ontologique de la charité, elle a en même temps son fondement dans la théologie chrétienne de la création. L'homme est créé, pour vivre dans la béatitude, soumis à la volonté de Dieu. Augustin marque particulièrement qu'il n'est pas destiné à une béatitude exempte de soumission. Un degré aussi parfait de béatitude n'appartient qu'à celui qui possède son être et sa béatitude en soi, per se, à savoir Dieu lui-même. Les "notions" que possède l'homme même déchu, constituent des exhortations à realiser sa vocation, qui lui est donnée dans sa création même. Mais l'homme dans l'état déchu ne prend point plaisir à la volonté de Dieu, il est au contraire dominé par le désir d'être son propre maître (superbia). Alors qu'il était créé pour la béatitude sous la souverainté de Dieu, voilà qu'il ne cherche plus que le plaisir à l'exclusion de la soumission. Mais Dieu ne lui permet pas d'y réussir. En effet même lorsqu'il se tourne vers les choses sensibles pour en jouir avec un amour qui vise à la fruitio propter seipsam rei, cet amour le pousse à une subordination qui va à l'encontre de ses intentions. Il devient l'esclave du sensible, il perd la maîtrise de soi-même. En prenant un être autre de Dieu pour objet de fruitio, il a transgressé l'ordo. Suivant une logique inexorable, la sanction se trouve déjà dans la structure ontologique de cet amour faux, laquelle est semblable à celle de l'amour vrai. Fruì comporte dans les deux cas un abandon de soi et une soumission; mais, si la subordination à Dieu est liberté et béatitude, la subordination au sensible est au contraire esclavage, avilissement profond et malheur.' (Béatitude et Sagesse, pp. 230-1).

'L'immutabilité ne désigne pas pour Augustin un état statique, mort, mais au contraire un état de plénitude ontologique et de force, source d'une activité dynamique qui, lois d'ébranler la consistance propre de l'être, met en mouvement une existence ontologiquement inférieure. Constantia est une notion relative, qui n'est pas réservée à Dieu seul. L'âme aussi possede une certaine 'consistance' par comparaison avec le corps, laquelle croît si l'âme acquiert la virtus proprement dit, la vertu.' (pp. 233-4).

It has been observed that 'essentialism' rather than 'existentialism' provides the base for Shakespeare's conceptions, and in the Scholastic sense, being implying essence. (G. C. Herndl, The High Design, Lexington, 1970, pp. 50-1).