SOURCE: "Fantasy and History in The Tempest," in The Tempest, edited by Nigel Wood, Open University Press, 1995, pp. 127-64.

[In the excerpt below, Wheeler focuses on Prospero's aggressive dominance of others and on Caliban's passive dream of sensual opulence. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the critic calls attention to the similarities between this pair and others in the Shakespearean canon—Bottom and Oberon, Richard II and Bolingbroke, Falstaff and Henry V—who represent the opposition of narcissistic eloquence and theatrical control]

The story Prospero tells Miranda about their past, whatever its claim to historical veracity, contains a simple and important truth at the heart of his post-Milan life. Once when he gave his brother his trust he lost his inherited political power; now that he has found another source of power he will trust no one. Prospero's power over the action of The Tempest is unparalleled in Shakespeare's drama—control by physical coercion over the worker Caliban; control by contractual agreement backed by physical threat over Ariel; control through Ariel over the men who took away his dukedom and over all the other visitors Prospero brings to his island; control over every condition of his daughter's courtship by and marriage to Ferdinand.

As Prospero tells of Antonio's treachery, a rather startling metaphor stands out. Antonio transformed the loyalties of the Milanese subjects, turning their hearts where he pleased, creating a situation in which, Prospero says, 'now he was/The ivy which had hid my princely trunk,/And sucked my verdure out on't' (I.ii.85-7). Antonio was the parasitical ivy wrapped around and sucking the living substance out of Prospero the ducal tree.

Perhaps the vine/tree metaphor seems startling here because it links two brothers in a figure often gendered female and male. In benign forms, the vine is a grapevine associated with fruitfulness and nurture. An apparent biblical source—'Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thy house' (Psalms 128: 3)—links wife/vine/fruitfulness, though without situating the husband as tree. In proverbial uses, vine and the tree unite in harmony: 'The Vine and Elme, converse well together', or 'As we may see of the Vine, who imbraceth the Elme, ioying and reioycing much at his presence' (Tilley 1950, V: 61). In Ovid, the female vine and the male tree are joined to mutual benefit in a story used in an attempt to seduce Pomona, a garden-tending nymph who has spurned many suitors. Pointing to an elm supporting vines loaded with grapes, the satyr Vertumnus (disguised as an old woman promoting his own cause) observes that if the vine did not grow round it the beautiful tree would be barren of fruit, and that if 'the vyne which ronnes uppon the Elme had nat/The tree too leane untoo, it should uppon the ground ly flat' (Ovid 1961: 183). Here form, strength and uprightness gendered male and fruitfulness gendered female combine in an image of two joined in one to mutual benefit and to the benefit of others. In Prospero's image, the male ivy hides the male tree and drains its strength to the detriment of a dukedom thus bent 'To most ignoble stooping' (I.ii.116).

Shakespeare uses the vine/tree metaphor in two earlier comedies in which magic is a preoccupation. In Comedy of Errors, benign and parasitical forms indicate alternative fates for the man Adriana thinks is her husband.

Thou art an elm, my husband, 1 a vine,
Whose weakness, married to thy stronger state,
Makes me with thy strength to communicate.
If aught possess thee from me, it is dross,
Usurping ivy, briar, or idle moss,
Who, all for want of pruning, with intrusion
Infect thy sap, and live on thy confusion.

(II.ii.165-72)

Adriana, as a vine who shares in and is strengthened by her husband's strength, does not offer her own fruitfulness in the metaphor, but neither does her sharing of the husband's strength diminish its source. She is pleading her need, flatteringly, not her bounty. The invasive ivy (or briar or moss) alternative—the other woman Adriana suspects—is parasitical growth out of control, which contaminates the man/tree's strength and thrives on the destruction resulting from her 'intrusion'. The ivy/sap/intrusion link here closely parallels the ivy/verdure/extrusion link in The Tempest; the breakdown of the parallel—female ivy that invasively corrupts the manly substance rather than sucks it out—adds to the interest. 'Usurping ivy' certainly would seem to connect with the usurpation of Prospero's place and power by his ivy-like brother. But the female ivy Adriana refers to suggests a sexual threat to her husband. Is there any relation here to Prospero's metaphorical rendering of his brother's past crime?

Titania speaks the most eloquent and moving instance of the ivy/tree metaphor in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.

So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist; the female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.
O, how I love thee! How I dote on thee!

(IV.i.37-42)

Here what is expressed is not the woman's bounty nor her need but her satisfaction. Enchanted Titania finds the fulfilment of her desire in her embrace of ass-headed Bottom.

Although Bottom is powerless to escape Titania's attentions—'Out of this wood do not desire to go:/Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no' (III.i. 126-7)—her power over him hardly seems to be the contaminating power Adriana imagines for 'usurping ivy', much less the eviscerating power Prospero claims his brother exercised over him. And as the object of her desire, Bottom does not seem to figure male strength either as complemented or diminished by female ivy. As with an infant, Bottom's dependence creates a situation in which he seems to be magically empowered; he will come to experience omnipotence of mind, a magical responsiveness of the world to wish, defined for him by Titania's bounty:

I'll give three fairies to attend on thee,
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,
And sing, while thou on presséd flowers dost sleep;
And I will purge thy mortal grossness so
That thou shalt like an airy spirit go.

(III.i.131-5)

For Bottom the demands of maintaining a masculine identity in opposition to the otherness of female sexuality—the demands that structure Oberon's world—are suspended. Without ever ceasing to be 'bully Bottom', the centre of his experience is 'translated' back into the realm of infantile at-oneness with comfort, pleasure, fantasy, and conflict-free sensuality. The sight of the sleeping pair appears pitiful and hateful to Oberon, but Bottom awakens to recall 'a morare vision', a 'dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was', indeed, a dream that 'shall be called "Bottom's Dream", because it hath no bottom' (IV.i.200-9).

Bottom's dream can point us back to The Tempest, but not directly to Prospero's curious use of the ivy/elm figure. Titania promises to purge Bottom's 'mortal grossness', letting him 'like an airy spirit go', but the figure in The Tempest who recalls Bottom's experience is not the airy spirit Ariel but the unpurged monster Caliban. As with Bottom, Caliban's monstrousness is clearly connected to sexuality and taboo. But whereas Bottom is for a brief time transported into a magical realm defined in part by a temporary suspension of taboo, for Caliban, a past, failed effort to break taboo has radically and permanently altered the world he inhabits. Bottom, ass-headed only for the night he spends in Titania's arms, regains his non-monster status as soon as Oberon reclaims his sexual partner. Caliban's irredeemable monstrousness, 'Which any print of goodness wilt not take' (I.ii.351), is represented most vividly by his early effort to rape Miranda. Bottom's night of pleasure is licensed by Oberon, who uses the occasion to recover his status as Titania's lover. Caliban has failed to overcome the taboo on Miranda's sexuality enforced by her father, who is also subject to it.

Caliban's account of his island's magical bounty, however, provides a curious parallel to the enchanting presence Bottom recalls. 'Be not afeard', Caliban comforts the frightened Stephano and Trinculo:

the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when 1 waked
I cried to dream again.

(III.ii. 133-41)

Caliban, too, has had a most rare vision, one of sublime, passive fulfilment—though with Caliban it seems to be fulfilment always just out of reach, something lost to the new order Prospero has brought to the island, particularly since the failed rape of Miranda. Bottom awakens to recall, as if in a dream, a world in which wish and reality corresponded, where one's complete dependence on the other was experienced as magical omnipotence. His emergence from this dreamlike world is experienced as a gain—it has given him something he can bring into the world he reenters upon awakening, his characteristic zest for life renewed and enriched. For Caliban, by contrast, the sounds and sweet airs, the twangling instruments, the lulling voices, the riches poised to drop from the clouds of his dream, all are experienced as utterly alien to his everyday life of subjection.

The pleasures Caliban knows through a dreamlike rapport with the island's mysterious musical and sensual abundance have no place in his present reality. Something of the tenderness of the experience he describes to Stephano and Trinculo seems to have had a place in social reality in the distant past of his earliest relationship to Prospero:

When thou cam'st first,
Thou strok'st me and made much of me;
wouldst give me
Water with berries in't, and teach me how
To name the bigger light and how the less,
That burn by day and night; and then I loved thee,
And showed thee all the qualities o'th' isle,
The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile

(I.ii.332-8)

Something of this readiness for adoring submission emerges again in Caliban's response to Stephano and the fantasy he brings of a future released from subjection to Prospero. But in his ongoing reality, there is no place for the responsiveness he brings to the island's bounty, or which that bounty elicits in him. Bottom wakes to bring a sense of dreamlike wonder back into his world, but Caliban cries to dream again.

I have moved from Prospero's ivy/elm metaphor describing his brother's treachery to Titania's use of that metaphor to describe her embrace of Bottom, then moved from Bottom's recollection of that embrace as a dream back to The Tempest and Caliban's experience of dreamlike riches. But whereas the two moments from A Midsummer Night's Dream provide two vantage points on the same blissful encounter, the two instances from The Tempest are quite remote from one another: Prospero tensely reconstructing the past treachery of his brother; Caliban, his slave, poignantly describing the near escape into dreamlike bliss the island can provide for him with its music. Can the connections to and within A Midsummer Night's Dream I have been trying to make illuminate the relationship between these two moments in The Tempest?

The psychological connection that has presented itself so far sees Bottom's account of his dream and Caliban's of his dreamlike relation to the island's musical abundance as fantasies deriving from early infantile relations to a nurturing Other, relations that provide the field upon which later fantasies are articulated. The early nurturing environment, if it is sufficient to ensure the infant's survival, will countenance the emergence of polarized fantasies of omnipotence and of total helplessness; of fusion with a benign, nurturant world and of annihilation by a hostile, rejecting world; of good objects and of bad objects located indeterminately inside and outside of a subjectivity still establishing its boundaries; of being loved unconditionally, and returning it in bliss, and of being hated without limit, and of returning that in rage. Introjection and projection—taking bits of the world in and making them parts of one's experience of one's person and taking parts of one's person and casting them into a world of notself—are dominant psychic mechanisms, shaping a sense of one's person along the coordinates of need, satisfaction/frustration, pleasure/unpleasure, security/distress, bliss/rage.

Bottom's and Caliban's lyrical dreamlike riches share a base in the sensual and nurturant qualities of this level of psychic experience. Prospero's image of the ivy that hid his princely trunk and sucked out his vital spirit suggests a base in the negative register of early infantile experience. If we look just at the action components of the metaphor—the ivy embraces the elm, hiding it, and sucks the verdure from it—the connections come into focus. Holding and sucking, the principal actions conveyed in Prospero's metaphor, are basic to the formative beginnings of an individual. D.W. Winnicott gives the name 'holding phase' to the very earliest stage of infantile existence: the physical experience of being held is central to and prototypical for the infant's relations to an environment that attends to all its needs (Winnicott 1965, 44-50). Freud calls 'sucking at his mother's breast, or at substitutes for it', the 'child's first and most vital activity' (Freud 1953-74, VII: 181). In the action of sucking, sexual pleasure originates and is split off from need satisfaction: when the sucking that seeks to satisfy the infant's hunger produces pleasurable sensations desirable in their own right, 'the need for repeating the sexual satisfaction now becomes detached from the need for taking nourishment' (Freud 1953-74, VII: 182). With the activity of sucking, the infant is initiated into human sexuality. As it negotiates experience within what Winnicott calls the 'holding environment', the infant 'comes to have an inside and an outside, and a body-scheme' (Winnicott 1965, 45).²

Psychic manoeuvres that characterize fantasies and dreams account for the transformations necessary to get from the infantile situation to Prospero's metaphor. Whereas the holding environment locates the infant in a world in which the subject can begin to know itself through the attention the world returns, Prospero speaks of the ivy that 'hid' him (or at least hid that part of him designated by 'princely trunk') from the world. The holding is malevolent rather than facilitating—a withholding. Its action is generated by projection and reversal: the sucking fundamental to the infant's hold on life becomes the action of the ivy that 'sucked my verdure out'. Angry, destructive feelings, associated with frustrations of sucking and feeding, are projected into a fantasied attack by the other.

In Prospero's metaphor for Antonio's ill-doing, two kinds of threat coalesce, mingling two kinds of relation (brother to brother, infant to mother) and two kinds of past (the fictionalized recollection from what the play ascribes to Prospero's young manhood and an infantile past lent to Prospero by his creator). That we can think about the maternal threat being submerged in the sibling threat seems richly suggestive in thinking about this play in which the role of women is so generally suppressed or restricted and in which the only strongly evoked maternal presence is the dead but sinister Sycorax, Caliban's mother and Prospero's predecessor. But now it is less important to pursue a subordinating structure than to note that the two threats point to a single infantile prototype: a male child for whom an apparently exclusive claim on the love of his mother is disrupted, not by a father, but by the arrival of a younger brother and by what appears to be the withdrawal of the mother's attention away from him into her preoccupation with the newborn son. Not surprisingly, Shakespeare's drama never represents this situation directly—that is, in the experience of very young children. But the basic structure—a male's love for a female is disrupted by a second male—is pervasive and powerful.

Oberon is in a situation like this when Titania's devotion to the Indian boy disrupts his sexual bond to her. Oberon disposes of his problem by passing on his situation to the Indian boy, whose claim on Titania's love is displaced by Bottom's, who can then be displaced by Oberon. The task is easy enough for Oberon, supernaturally secure in his own exotic manhood, and with a strong prior sexual bond to Titania to renew. The disruption of Prospero's bond to Miranda by the appearance of a young suitor is of a different sort. The Tempest must dramatize, not the comic renewal of a sexual bond that has been interrupted, but a father's relinquishing to another, younger man, the daughter upon whom his life has been centred ever since his exile to the island, and whose entry into adult sexuality must be her exit from his world.

As with King Lear, the jealous intensity of a father's investment in his daughter shapes the bond the younger man will interrupt. Like Lear, Prospero has gone to elaborate lengths to control the conditions of the marriage. Lear, however, tries to use the ritual division of his kingdom to ensure that Cordelia will go on loving her father all, even after her dynastic marriage to another man about to be ritualistically chosen by him; her refusal to cooperate in his plan sets in motion the play's tragic action. Prospero arranges to bring Ferdinand to his island as his chosen husband for Miranda, and he oversees a courtship between them that follows exactly his plan for it; their complicity and his willingness or capacity to make a gift of his daughter to the younger man make possible the play's comic outcome. But what enables Prospero to do what Lear could not? Or, what enables Shakespeare to move from the destructive exploration of Lear's love for Cordelia to the comic outcome of Prospero's love for Miranda?

There are certainly signs that Prospero is not wholly free of what drives Lear to act so tyrannically at the prospect of giving up Cordelia. Though he assures the play's audience that he could not be more pleased to welcome Ferdinand into the family, Prospero renders the young man powerless, threatens him with violence, mocks him in his apparent loss of a father, enslaves and imprisons him, and finally, when making a gift of his daughter, puts a curse on their relationship should they have sex before he binds them in marriage. And Shakespeare seems to want to make things as easy as possible for Prospero, on this count at least: Ferdinand is clearly a right-thinking young man, susceptible to the pieties Prospero enforces, chaste and worshipful in his love for Miranda, and appropriately awed by her magician father. But if one assumes the action of The Tempest opens on to the destructive potentiality realized in King Lear, it is not yet clear how these measures can protect the movement towards marriage from comparable violence.

Caliban's function as a nasty double to Ferdinand provides one way of defusing the anxieties in the marital situation: it lets Prospero disown and repudiate his own incestuous longing for Miranda and lets him expend his rage against a potential usurper on a vilified embodiment of brute sexuality. I think even more important, however, are the ways in which the play provides multiple situations shaped by the structure that organizes the comic movement toward marriage. Usurpation, of course, is everywhere in The Tempest: Antonio's past treachery when he stole Milan from Prospero; Caliban's conviction that Prospero has robbed him of an island properly his by inheritance from his mother; Prospero's charge that Ferdinand usurps his father's place as king of Naples; the plot to kill Alonso and make Sebastian king of Naples; the plot to murder Prospero, which would give Stephano both the island and Miranda. The two I want to focus on, and which I think are most crucial to the action, concern Prospero's charges against his brother and Caliban's experience of losing the island's bounty—Prospero's ivy/elm metaphor and Caliban's 'cried to dream again' situation.

Although Prospero condenses fantasies of maternal threat and sibling threat into a single metaphor, the action of the play for the most part separates them out again—into Antonio's treachery, which points back especially to the extensive sibling violence of the very early histories, and into the evil legacy of Sycorax, the mother as powerful witch and Satan's partner in sex, heir to Joan de Pucelle, Queen Margaret, and Lady Macbeth. Here separation serves a double function of isolation: by keeping the threat posed by Antonio's betrayal separate from that posed by Sycorax's legacy of malevolent female power and debased sexuality, and by keeping both separate from the romance of Ferdinand and Miranda, it protects the marriage plot from the explosive violence engendered by the actions of Othello or Antony and Cleopatra or The Winter's Tale, where brothers or friends come to be seen as usurping enemies and beloved women are repudiated as whores.

I think, however, that the play's most complex, cruel and tender development of a pervasive Shakespearian structure of usurpation and betrayal is in the presentation of Caliban. Caliban's experience of betrayal closely parallels Prospero's story of an inherited claim usurped by someone he trusted and treated generously: 'This island's mine by Sycorax my mother,/Which thou tak'st from me' (I.ii.331-2). Caliban's relation to the island's bounty has been interrupted by the usurper Prospero. But Caliban's story of his past introduces a period between Prospero's arrival and Caliban's effort to rape Miranda in which the intruder Prospero has been the object of his love. In this interim period, the fantasy of maternal bounty is located in the relationship to the intruder, who stroked Caliban, made much of him, taught him how to read and how to name his world. Indeed, Caliban's story of trust and reciprocity recalls the infantile roots common to his situation and Prospero's more directly than anything Prospero says.

The generosity of Caliban's initial response to Prospero dramatizes a procedure, which Anna Freud called altruistic surrender, that compensates with exaggerated tenderness for resentment toward a rival for parental love; the subject seeks his own fulfilment in his service to another; the usurper is embraced and adored (Freud 1966: 123-34). Altruistic surrender is built deeply into the extravagant generosity and adoration that Shakespeare the poet lavishes on the fair friend of the Sonnets, and into the poet's inclination towards extreme and sometimes almost savage self-effacement when that seems the only way to sustain his love. Caliban keeps the impulse towards adoration and generosity alive in The Tempest, not only through his recollection of his once worshipful regard for Prospero, but in his readiness to bring adoration and allegiance to Stephano: 'Hast thou not dropped from heaven?' 'I do adore thee.' 'I'll kiss thy foot. I'll swear myself thy subject' (II.ii.131, 134, 146). But where the Sonnets poet debases himself to celebrate the glory of the friend, 'Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss' (Sonnet 35, 1. 7), the play debases Caliban, makes a monster of him.

On this island where Prospero subordinates everything to his power, and trusts no one, attitudes of trust and worshipful regard are given extensive thematic development. Gonzalo's fantasy of a sovereignless utopia on the island assumes that trust can replace power as society's basic mode of relating. Ferdinand believes Miranda must be the goddess the island's spirits attend, and he quickly devotes himself to a worshipful love for the sake of which he is happy enough to endure enslavement and imprisonment by Prospero. Miranda thinks Ferdinand must be 'A thing divine' (I.ii.419); at the end, she sees her famous 'brave new world' in the tarnished old order Prospero has reconstituted on the island. In these instances, Prospero's hard-nosed distrust is played against forms of sentimentality or naïveté that manage to ennoble, even while identifying the limits of, the characters who express them. Prospero's relationship to the debased Caliban is more complex. Caliban's pathetic tendency to enslave himself in the service of self-liberation is played against Prospero's wise but tough mastery. But Caliban's openness to, and need for, trust, joy and self-surrender can be set against Prospero's willed estrangement from that part of a human life brought into existence through the nurture of a trusted Other. Slave Caliban dreams about riches ready to drop upon him; master Prospero dreams about an 'insubstantial pageant faded' (IV.i.155), a world that recedes into dreamlike emptiness, and about death. Caliban embodies not only the lust and crude violence, but also the access to trust and spontaneity Prospero has repudiated in himself.

Having waded far enough into the troubled waters of authorial allegory to identify Caliban partially with the impulse toward adoration and subjection in the Sonnets, I find it tempting to situate Caliban's powerful lyricism against the aggressive theatricality by which Prospero manipulates the action of the play as if it were his play to write. I believe it makes sense to think of the astonishing, distancing control Shakespeare achieves through the drama as crucial to protecting his temperament from the potentiality for adoring self-surrender that many of the sonnets embody. Prospero uses his magic art to manifest that kind of dramatic control from within his position as character/on-stage director; he controls Caliban, and distances himself from him, with particular brutality.

I think, however, the play makes this distinction only to collapse it in the end. If Prospero in some fashion represents Shakespeare's power as dramatist, Caliban represents an impulse as basic to his theatrical art as Prospero's executive power. Where Prospero accomplishes sharply defined social and political purposes in the drama he stages through his magic, Caliban seeks his fulfilment in showing his world to others and sharing it with them. 'I loved thee,/And showed thee all the qualities o'th' isle' (I.ii.336-7), he reminds Prospero. 'I'll show thee every fertile inch o'th' island', he assures Stephano: 'I'll show thee the best springs'; 'Show thee a jay's nest'; 'Wilt thou go with me?' (II.ii.142, 154, 163, 166). Caliban, in short, seeks himself in the pleasure he gives others; gives fundamentally by showing and surrendering to others the world he has a special claim to; and takes pleasure for himself in a kind of worshipful abjection that accompanies the giving: 'I'll kiss thy foot' (II.ii.146). It is an impulse built into Shakespeare's relation to the theatre. As the character Prospero dissolves into the actor who speaks the Epilogue, begging forgiveness and indulgence, it is the impulse that needs to find its recognition and reward in the audience's applause, 'or else my project fails,/Which was to please' (Epilogue, V.i.330-1).

W.B. Yeats once described his 'fancy that there is some one myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought' ('At Stratford-on-Avon', in Yeats 1961: 107). Yeats's notion is an extreme version of the sameness and difference issues raised in the first section of this essay: it makes everything each of us does into a variant or elaboration of a core theme. Indeed, Norman Holland has put Yeats's formulation to very interesting psychoanalytic use in developing his own claim that a core identity or identity theme, developed in an infant's early relations to a maternal provider, acts as a kind of master key to any individual's thought and behaviour.³ I do not wish to make a claim for the comprehensive interpretative power of a single myth or theme in the manner of either Yeats or Holland. But I think that Yeats's formulation of a unifying myth that controls variation in Shakespeare points to a pattern that links up suggestively with patterns I have been discussing in moving from A Midsummer Night's Dream to The Tempest.

Yeats (1961: 107) wrote: 'Shakespeare's myth, it may be, describes a wise man who was blind from very wisdom, and an empty man who thrust him from his place, and saw all that could be seen from very emptiness.' Yeats sees this myth being worked out in the succession of Hamlet, 'who saw too great issues everywhere to play the trivial game of life', by the soldier Fortinbras. But his chief instance, in this essay prompted by his having just viewed six of the English history plays acted 'in their right order' (Yeats 1961: 97), is 'in the story of Richard II, that unripened Hamlet, and of Henry V, that ripened Fortinbras'. Yeats's clear sympathies are with the otherworldly Richard II, whom he situates on one side of this opposition, and not with the all-too-worldly figure who occupies the pragmatic side:

instead of that lyricism which rose out of Richard's mind like the jet of a fountain to fall again where it had risen, instead of that fantasy too enfolded in its own sincerity to make any thought the hour had need of, Shakespeare has given [Henry V] a resounding rhetoric that moves men as a leading article does today.

(Yeats 1961: 108)

Yeats's curious celebration of Richard the poet-king as 'lovable and full of capricious fancy' (Yeats 1961: 105) but blinded by an excess of wisdom, along with his strong distaste for Henry V as a heartless and ultimately inconsequential politician, sentimentalizes the English history plays. It also introduces an evaluatory register into the myth Yeats associates with Shakespeare that greatly diminishes its interpretative power. If we pull that evaluative register out, the opposition between Richard and Henry V looks rather like the opposition between Caliban's lyricism and Prospero's aggressive theatricality, mentioned earlier.

I do not wish to claim that Caliban is a 'wise man who was blind from very wisdom'—although a powerful trend within criticism of The Tempest has long been occupied with a recognition that there is something in Caliban's way of relating to the world that is both precious and incompatible with the sort of order Prospero brings to the island, variants of the mix of attitudes built into the Renaissance notion of the noble savage.⁴ Nor do I wish to argue exactly that Prospero, who 'thrust [Caliban] from his place' on the island, is 'an empty man, and saw all that could be seen from very emptiness'. I do, however, find Yeats's use of the idea of emptiness here quite resonant, especially so since he makes it central to Shakespeare's own vantage point on human life: 'He meditated as Solomon, not as Bentham meditated, upon blind ambitions, untoward accidents, and capricious passions, and the world was almost as empty in his eyes as it must be in the eyes of God' (Yeats 1961: 106-7).

To formulate his Shakespearian myth in terms of an opposition between Richard II and Henry V, Yeats, of course, elides two crucial figures. Richard II is not thrust from his position by Henry V, but by Henry Bullingbrook, who thus becomes Henry IV. In order for his son Hal to become Henry V, the figure who must be thrust aside is Falstaff. If the figures missing from Yeats's account are restored, this opposition is worked out doubly in the movement from Richard II to Henry V: Richard II/Bullingbrook-Henry IV and Falstaff/Prince Hal-Henry V. In both cases, the dominating figure is the one with the superior power to manipulate history theatrically. Richard II is, of course, theatrical to the point of histrionics, but it is Bullingbrook who has the controlling theatrical imagination, who uses theatricality, not for expressive, but for political purposes. And although nobody loves play-acting more than Falstaff, it is Prince Hal who uses theatre for effective political purposes, who makes Falstaff an actor in the political scenario he orchestrates throughout both parts of Henry IV to validate his power when he becomes King Henry V.

Both Richard II and Falstaff, like Caliban, are subdued by superior masters of theatre. Do they have anything else in common? I think what they share is a psychological heritage I tried to associate with Bottom and Caliban, a psychological rootedness in themes characteristic of very early phases of infantile development. These connections can be clarified by returning briefly to Bottom and Caliban.

Bottom, too, wants to be an actor; he, too, is manipulated by a man of superior theatrical power when Oberon casts him in the role of Titania's beloved; he, too, will be thrust from his place in Titania's arms after he has served the theatrical effect Oberon seeks by making the Queen of Fairies fall in love with an ass. Bottom's extraordinary good fortune is to inhabit an unusually benign version of this situation. It is as if Bottom recovers in Titania's doting, nurturant love a symbolic replication of the infantile past that would account for the buoyant narcissism of his grown-up character, whereas Caliban can know those nurturant riches only in the longing created by their failure to survive the realm of dream. Bottom's ready self-love is complemented and completed in Titania's. adoration of him; Caliban's need to know himself through his surrender of self to a worshipped other who will accept his service reflects his situation in a world where he can only know his place through the hatred and contempt of others. Only in Bottom's hunger for playacting do we get any hint of the neediness that will drive Caliban to seek recognition through a new and adored master in Stephano. But if bully Bottom is ultimately empowered by his experience, others who share his slot in the opposition I am tracing are not.

Bottom's robust egotism is completed through his inadvertent stumbling into the magical world of Titania; Richard's grandiose but brittle egotism is grounded on a magical identification of his person with a mystical conception of kingly omnipotence. It is an identification in which even Richard can never quite believe, except in so far as he can play the role of omnipotent king before an audience eager to validate his illusion. Because he has no identity apart from this identification, he seeks out those who will sustain his illusion with flattery. When the inevitable crisis approaches, he swings wildly back and forth between assertions of himself as the invulnerable because 'anointed king' (Richard II, III.ii.55) and approaches to what finally is completed in his knowledge of himself as 'nothing' (V.V.38) when the grandiose illusion has been shattered by Bullingbrook. What reaches from one extreme to the other is Richard's language, which he uses for purposes quite different from those of any other character in Richard II. The 'lyricism' that Yeats associates with Richard springs from his use of language, not to negotiate a world, but to constitute a self, alternatively through illusions of omnipotence and through a kind of masochistic cherishing of every nuance of his psychic distress.

Richard's necessary failure to merge with an ideal of kingly omnipotence engages the same level of psychic development as is invoked by the happy fantasy Bottom enacts in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Bottom's rough and ready narcissism rests on a deep trust of self and world that enables him both to inhabit the seeming omnipotence of his position within Titania's dreamworld and to sustain himself when the dream is over. Richard's inability to know himself apart from his identification with his dream of kingly omnipotence represents a failure to carry a securely internalized sense of trust into and through the individuation process.

'I have long dreamt of such a kind of man', says the newly crowned Henry V to Falstaff, 'So surfeit-swelled, so old and so profane,/But being awaked, I do despise my dream' (2 Henry IV, V.v.45-7). But the prince has been dreaming with his eyes open, always shaping the dream to his own shrewdly conceived and theatrically executed political purpose. That is what he does best. It is Falstaff who has been blinded to reality by his own dream of the prince as king and himself as the king's beloved favourite. Like Caliban, who welcomed the exiled Prospero to his world and 'showed [him] all the qualities o'th' isle' (Tempest I.ii.337), Falstaff has welcomed the self-exiled prince to his tavern world and shared it with him. 'When thou cam'st first,/Thou strok'st me and made much of me', Caliban reminds Prospero, 'and then I loved thee' (I.ii.332-3, 336). The wonderfully childlike situation evoked here by Caliban's recollection of Prospero's arrival on the island could hardly be more different from the sophisticated and sometimes rather savage give and take that has long marked the curious bond of Falstaff and Hal. But different as their relationship has been, Hal has, in his own way, made much of Falstaff as well, and Falstaff has, in his own way, responded with love: 'My king, my Jove, I speak to thee, my heart' (2 Henry IV, V.v.42).

Like Richard and Falstaff, Caliban plays a part in a script controlled by another, but he brings to that part a spontaneous expressiveness he shares with no one else in The Tempest. Characters who open themselves most fully to those inner dimensions of psychic experience often speak the most widely and vividly expressive poetry in the plays, the poetry that conveys the texture of joy or agony, of rage or bliss, of a self fulfilled or left desolate. They also make themselves vulnerable to those who distance themselves from, or carefully mediate their relationship to, the force of such inner impulses.

Such a distancing process is exactly what Prospero narrates to Miranda as his past history at the opening of The Tempest. For him it is a movement from trust through betrayed trust to the assertion of power and control. Prospero, overthrown by his brother when he was himself lost in his imaginative engagement with magic, 'transported/And rapt in secret studies' (I.ii.76-7), his library a 'dukedom large enough' (I.ii.110), has made himself over as a figure of power. His power is that of a dramatist who has waited for years for those characters to arrive whom he needs to act his script.

One Shakespearian genealogy for Prospero would emerge from the theatrical manipulators of those figures I have tried to link to the lyrical impulse manifest in Caliban: Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bullingbrook and Henry V in the history plays. It would be a group that emphasizes, whether for good or for ill, the effective integration of psychic components in selves geared towards accommodation of, and action taken to, shape social reality. Instead I would like to look briefly at a group of speeches, spread out over a wide range of Shakespeare's work, including a speech by Prospero, in which the immediacy of social accommodation and mastery recede behind the trope of life as a dream, or as theatre, or as both. In these speeches, theatricality does not represent manipulative mastery and dream does not represent longing or desire.

'All the world's a stage', says Jaques in As You Like It, 'And all the men and women merely players' (II.vii.139-40). 'Thou hast nor youth, nor age', Duke Vincentio counsels Claudio in Measure for Measure, 'But as it were an after-dinner's sleep/Dreaming on both' (III.i.32-4). 'Life's but a walking shadow', Macbeth says to no one in particular, 'a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/And then is heard no more' (V.v.24-6). Prospero explains to Ferdinand, after the wedding masque is interrupted by his recollection of Caliban's conspiracy:

Our revels now are ended.
These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

(IV.i.148-58)

These speeches do not demonstrate theatrical control over an action, but something of how the world looks from the vantage point of Shakespearian drama when it is fully theatricalized. Each is spoken by a character who has rigorously distanced himself in one way or another from direct engagement in human intimacy and from direct responsiveness to powerful inner feelings. Of course, each of these speeches plays a complex dramatic function in the action to which it belongs. What is important to note here, however, is that all these very different characters, in their very different dramatic situations—in a comedy, a problem comedy, a tragedy and a romance—are making the same kind of point: they see life as merely theatre, as no more substantial than a dream.

Jaques, the melancholy satirist who covets the fool's role; Duke Vincentio, the disguised ruler who has stepped out of his political role and is playing at being priest; the murderous tyrant Macbeth, who has cut all close ties to the living and has 'almost forgot the taste of fears' (V.V.9); and Prospero, who has just married off his daughter—all become, in these speeches, poets of desolation. These are not versions of the 'empty man' Yeats believed Fortinbras and Henry V to be, but their haunting expressions of a fundamental emptiness in human life recalls Yeats's claim that 'the world was almost as empty in [Shakespeare's] eyes as it must be in the eyes of God' ('At Stratford-on-Avon', in Yeats 1961: 107).

The emptiness evoked in Jaques's summary of the seven ages of man lies at the centre of his melancholy; it reflects the distance imposed between himself and the world by his satiric spirit. Duke Vincentio's 'absolute for death' speech expresses the emptiness of a character whose most compelling motive for action is to distance himself from what makes the other characters of Measure for Measure human, vulnerable, and flawed. Macbeth's 'walking shadow' is split off from the futile hysterics of his engagement with the enemy; the remote and hollow theatricality of his meditative voice and the desperate violence of his actions present themselves as the double legacy of the disintegration of his merger with Lady Macbeth.

What about Prospero? What can account for the sudden retreat from the immediacy of action in this character who has controlled, with astonishing precision, the minute-by-minute activities of every other notable character in the play?

Prospero's great speech emerges from the only moment in the play when he is not actively controlling the lives of all the other characters in it. He speaks it when he has been startled to realize that, having allowed himself to become absorbed in the wedding masque, he has forgotten to attend to 'that foul conspiracy/Of the beast Caliban and his confederates/Against his life' (IV.i. 139-41). He offers the speech to Ferdinand, who with Miranda has been startled by his agitation, as reassurance:

FERDINAND This is strange. Your father's in
some passion
That works him strongly.
MIRANDA Never till this day
Saw I him touched with anger, so distempered.
PROSPERO You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir;
Our revels now are ended. . . .

(IV.i.143-8)

After he has brought his vision of life as the stuff dreams are made on to completion, Prospero himself comments on his 'distempered' state:

Sir, I am vexed.
Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled.
Be not disturbed with my infirmity.

Gently and humbly, he offers Miranda and Ferdinand the use of his cell for rest:

If you be pleased, retire into my cell,
And there repose.

But he still feels the aftermath of his strange agitation:

A turn or two I'll walk
To still my beating mind.

(IV.i.158-63)

This lingering distractedness that completes Prospero's speech presents yet a new voice. He has himself demanded rapt attentiveness of Miranda and Ferdinand at the beginning of the masque: 'No tongue! All eyes! Be silent!' (IV.i.59). The only other interruption of the masque comes when Ferdinand questions him about the nature of the actors: 'May I be bold/To think these spirits?' (IV.i. 119-20). Prospero explains: 'Spirits, which by mine art/I have from their confines called to enact/My present fancies' (IV.i. 120-2). After Ferdinand rejoices at the paradisal prospect of spending his life where 'So rare a wondered father' (IV.i. 123) resides, Prospero again calls for silent attentiveness, this time with just a touch of anxiety that something could go wrong:

Sweet, now, silence!
Juno and Ceres whisper seriously.
There's something else to do. Hush, and be mute,
Or else our spell is marred.

(IV.i. 124-27)

Then, within the masque, Iris summons 'temperate nymphs . . . to celebrate/A contract of true love' and 'sunburned sickle-men' to join them 'in a graceful dance' (IV.i.132-3; 134; 138 s.d.). A particularly elaborate stage direction describes what happens then:

Enter certain Reapers, properly habited. They join with the nymphs in a graceful dance, towards the end whereof Prospero starts suddenly and speaks, after which, to a strange hollow and confused noise, they heavily vanish.

What precipitates the rapid decay of the dance is Prospero's sudden recollection: 'I had forgot that foul conspiracy/Of the beast Caliban . . .' (IV.i. 139-40). When Miranda and Ferdinand are alarmed by Prospero's agitation, he tries to calm them with the eloquent nihilism of 'Our revels now are ended'. Then immediately we hear this master of energy and execution sounding old, out of control, weak and infirm—'vexed' and 'troubled'.

Critics have understandably found it difficult to understand either why Prospero should be so agitated by the thought of Caliban and company,⁵ since Ariel clearly has those pathetic conspirators under firm control, or exactly why the serene nihilism of this speech should be designed to bring cheer to the newly-wed couple. But perhaps the nature of the recollection that has broken Prospero's absorption in the masque is less significant than the uniqueness of Prospero's discovery that he has indeed been so absorbed, that for the first time in the play he has forgotten to attend to his plans. Or perhaps Caliban springs to mind here for some other reason than the danger he and his fellows pose to Prospero's life. And perhaps the purposes the speech accomplishes for its speaker are more prominent than its intended effect on Prospero's immediate audience.

The interrupted masque culminates the marriage plot, which drives the overall action of the play. Miranda has arrived at sexual maturity on an island in which the only two-legged males are her father and Caliban. Neither is an appropriate mate. Caliban has earlier posed a sexual threat to Miranda. As Prospero puts it: 'thou didst seek to violate/The honour of my child' (I.ii.347-8). Caliban is hardly repentant about this thwarted transgression:

O ho, O ho! Would't had been done!
Thou didst prevent me—I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans.

(I.11.349-51)

In his hopeful new servitude, Caliban concedes Miranda to Stephano: 'she will become thy bed, I warrant,/And bring thee forth brave brood' (III.ii. 102-3). But Caliban remains powerfully associated in Prospero's mind with the sexual threat to Miranda. This threat has defined the social structure of the island ever since it was made. Expelled from Prospero's cell and 'confined into this rock' (I.ii.360), Caliban's enslavement dates from and perpetually punishes his aborted rape of Miranda.

Prospero replaces Caliban, a 'thing most brutish' who tried to rape Miranda, with Ferdinand, a 'thing divine' (I.ii.356, 419) who sees Miranda as the goddess of the island. Caliban's degraded sexuality gives way to the idealized and idealizing Ferdinand, all by Prospero's careful design. The psychoanalytic allegory that is being worked out here looks something like this: Prospero's repressed sexual desire for his daughter is purged by his projection of it on to the loathsome Caliban; Ferdinand, ritualistically identified with Caliban by being temporarily imprisoned and enslaved as Prospero's log-carrier, is both punished in advance for the sexuality he brings to Miranda and ritualistically purged of the identification with Caliban's degraded sexuality when he has, with appropriate humility, 'strangely stood the test' (IV.i.7); Prospero maintains his control over Miranda's sexuality with his management of the steps leading to a marriage in which he gives her to the young suitor.⁶

The processes of control by splitting off and projection at work here are characteristic of Prospero, and they are turned towards what is, for him, the central issue in the play and in his life—the sexual maturation of Miranda and the impossible situation this creates for the two of them on the island. But these defensive processes cannot simply erase the deep connections that underlie them, nor can they undo what the passage of time has done to bring Miranda into young womanhood. Prospero sees the circumstances that allow him to bring the Italian ship to the island as depending on an 'accident most strange', 'bountiful Fortune' and a 'most auspicious star' (I.ii.178, 182). But the deeper necessity for the events of the play is Miranda's maturation. Prospero dramatizes the urgencies of this most time-conscious play in terms of his astrological art, but the clock that ultimately drives the play is a natural one, the biological clock in Miranda's body. And if Ferdinand is going to be the solution to the problem, he must, for all the idealizing that is going on, be a sexual solution; he must enact a desire that corresponds to the repressed desire in Prospero, earlier played out in degraded form in Caliban's attempt to rape Miranda.

Prior to the masque, Prospero is still struggling to control the conflicts deriving from his recognition of the need to marry Miranda to an appropriate mate and his repressed desire to keep his daughter for himself. He controls entirely the circumstances of the marriage, offering Miranda as 'a third of mine own life', 'my rich gift', 'my gift', 'my daughter', possessing her in his language even while making her Ferdinand's 'own acquisition/Worthily purchased' (IV.i.3, 8, 13-14). Should Ferdinand 'break her virgin-knot' (IV.i.15) prior to the ceremony Prospero has arranged, however, the marriage will be destroyed by the father's curse:

barren hate,
Sour-eyed disdain, and discord shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both.

(IV.i.19-22)

Ferdinand provides the appropriate reassurance that nothing can convert 'Mine honour into lust' (IV.i.28), and, when warned again a few moments later about 'th' fire i' th' blood', insists that 'The white cold virgin snow upon my heart/Abates the ardour of my liver' (IV.i.53, 55-6).

The marriage masque is itself constructed to dramatize an idealized image of marriage as a perfect harmony that somehow elides the sexual dimension.⁷ The famous exclusion of Venus and Cupid from the ceremony explicitly averts 'Some wanton charm' (IV.i.95), but the effect is to exclude sexuality altogether, which can only, in Prospero's controlling imagination, be imaged as degraded.

What is presented, in Ferdinand's language, as 'a most majestic vision, and/Harmonious charmingly', does, as Prospero says, 'enact/My present fancies' (IV.i. 118-19, 121-2). This majestic vision, however, expresses only part of Prospero's present fancies, the idealized part, whereby he can keep at a distance the repressed desires for Miranda that form the unconscious dimension of his fancies. When the 'graceful dance' of the reapers and nymphs is violently interrupted, when Prospero 'starts suddenly and speaks' about 'that foul conspiracy/Of the beast Caliban and his confederates/Against my life' (IV.i. 139-41), and the dancers, 'to a strange hollow and confused noise, . . . heavily vanish' (IV.i. 138 s.d.), what is dramatized is the disruptive convergence of what Prospero has worked so hard to keep separate. Prospero's sudden memory of Caliban's plot against his life represents the intrusion of Prospero's own repressed desires into the idealizing process of the marriage masque.

The masque itself provides the verbal cue for Prospero's response. After 'certain nymphs' have entered, Iris calls forth their dancing partners, rustic field-workers:

You sunburned sickle-men, of August weary,
Come hither from the furrow and be merry;
Make holiday; your rye-straw hats put on,
And these fresh nymphs encounter every one
In country footing.

(IV.i.134-8)

Iris calls for a rustic dance, described as 'graceful' in the subsequent stage direction. But the language calling for that action provides the link to the underside of Prospero's imagination: 'encounter . . . /In country footing' gives us a remarkably dense, redundant, sexual pun, recalling some of the most famous punning moments in Shakespeare.

One is Hamlet's bawdy exchange with Ophelia prior to the play within the play about 'country matters' (III.ii.108). In Partridge's (1968:87) reckoning, 'country matters' here means 'matters concerned with cu*t; the first pronouncing-element of country is coun'. 'Coun', or 'count', of course, is given its most notorious independent exercise in Henry V, with the English lesson Princess Katherine gets from Alice her gentlewoman:

KATHERINE Comment appelez-vous les pieds et la robe?
ALICE De foot, madame, et de cown.

KATHERINE De foot et de cown? O Seigneur Dieu! Ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d'honneur d'user. . . . Foh! De foot et de cown!

(Henry V, III.iv.44-51)

Here 'foot' for French 'foutre'—'to copulate with' (Partridge 1968: 108)—is added to the pun on 'count'.

As it is, indeed, in The Tempest. For all the effort to dissociate sexuality from the marriage masque, Iris's instructions to the reapers—'these fresh nymphs encounter every one/In country footing' —release into the masque the debased sexuality associated with Prospero's repressed desire, and with Caliban. Caliban here represents the return of the repressed for Prospero, and the intractable permanence of the repressed as well, its resistance to the demands of civilized morality:

A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost.

(IV.i.188-90)

'The minute of their plot/Is almost come' (IV.i.141-2), Prospero says in his distraction. What I am trying to argue is that the intrusion of the Caliban plot to murder Prospero into the dance that culminates the marriage masque of Ferdinand and Miranda makes a kind of deep psychological sense. It is not, I believe, the threat to Prospero's life that is at issue here, but the threat to his psychic equilibrium posed by his repressed incestuous desires. In surrendering himself to the progress of the masque, in letting himself become absorbed into a process that does 'enact/My present fancies', Prospero loses conscious control over the direction in which his 'fancies' lead him. The ' country footing of the reapers and the nymphs comes to represent for him the repressed sexual dimension of his longing for his daughter, and the violent dissolution of the dance breaks the hold of the masque turned to nightmare. Prospero's understanding of the interruption as his sudden memory of Caliban's plot both disguises the threat and identifies it, since it is Caliban as a representation of his own repressed sexuality that figures unconsciously into the memory.

The exquisite poetry of 'Our revels now are ended' expresses Prospero's full recoil from his dangerous absorption in his 'present fancies'. The masque has drawn him into a process that, for the first time in the play, eludes his control, draws him into a closeness with deeply repressed dimensions of himself—not only his desire for Miranda but his very capacity to give himself over to an experience that follows a logic deeper than his conscious manipulations. The psychological result, as he recovers himself, and before he turns to the business of resuming control over the action, is a movement in the opposite direction from control. After the marriage masque has drawn him too deeply into its symbolic action, Prospero retreats to a vantage point where nobody is in control and where it does not much matter.

Prospero's lyrical vision of the world as 'insubstantial pageant' in some respects recalls Caliban's account of his dream of imminent riches that are all but his, but that waking deprives him of. 'I am full of pleasure' (III.ii.114), Caliban says, when he thinks all will work out with Stephano. It is a momentary perception, ill grounded, but its expression catches the whole orientation of Caliban's character. This orientation is most fully expressed in his account of the 'Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not' (III.ii.135), of the clouds he thinks will 'open and show riches/Ready to drop upon me' (III.ii.139-40)—the experience to which he gives himself in his dreams, and for which, upon awakening, he cries to dream again.

My notion here is that Prospero's marriage masque captures him in something of the same way that Caliban is captured by his dream of imminent but elusive riches. It is the closest this power-dominated man comes to a point where it would make sense for him to say, with Caliban, 'I am full of pleasure'. In his absorption in the masque, which represents his 'present fancies', that pleasure proves to be disruptive. Suddenly vulnerable to a threat from within himself, Prospero for the first time finds himself in a situation where he cannot address his crisis by magically manipulating the external world. He cannot act on, cannot even acknowledge directly, the sexual component of his need for Miranda—though he will, later, in a famous and problematic statement, say of Caliban: 'this thing of darkness I/Acknowledge mine' (IV.i.275-6). And he cannot stop the socially inflected but ultimately natural clock that has brought Miranda to sexual maturation and that demands that he surrender her to another. In short, Prospero, the master manipulator, the nearly omnipotent controller of the action of this play, finds himself in a position beyond the limits of his control, a position of helplessness before his own need and before developments in his world that will not yield to his magic.

Prospero's immediate response is not to cry to dream again. Nor is it to reassert the sort of control that has been crucial to his life on the island. Instead, Prospero retreats to a vantage point from which neither the nature of his feelings nor the control he exercises over his world matters. Where Caliban, in his dream, envisions a world heavy with riches ready to drop upon him, Prospero envisions a receding world, of no more substance or consequence than 'this insubstantial pageant faded', dissolving, without a trace, into nothingness. His life, those of his daughter, her suitor, the usurping visitors to the island on whom he still seems to plan vengeance—a little world of people about whom Prospero has made the finest distinctions, ranging from his precious daughter to his pernicious brother, from the venerable Gonzalo to the despised Caliban—all are simply 'such stuff/As dreams are made on'. Their lives, all lives, add up to a 'little life/ . . . rounded with a sleep' (IV.i.155-8).

When Prospero the master of magical power confronts his own helplessness in the face of a situation beyond the limits of his control, he retreats to a vantage point in which action no longer matters, where the precise distinctions and discriminations and the minute-by-minute timing that have characterized his relation to the world are dissolved in the blank emptiness of eternity. On the one hand, this vision of all of life as an insubstantial pageant faded is the extreme form of theatricality as a defence, Prospero's version of Macbeth's poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. But the tone or feeling of the speech could hardly be more different from that of Macbeth's. Prospero describes an emptiness as radical as Macbeth's, an emptiness that suggests Yeats's notion of Shakespeare meditating on a world 'almost as empty in his eyes as it must be in the eyes of God'. But Prospero's speech conveys something very different from the embittered desolation of Macbeth. It is offered to comfort Miranda and Ferdinand; and it seems to bring comfort to Prospero, to break the agitation of his thought of Caliban.

Part of Prospero's comfort, of course, derives simply from the distancing this vantage point provides, the relief of watching his inner conflict and the vexations of managing his world recede into oblivion. But the comfort provided seems to be more richly textured than the comfort of the world's absence. And Prospero's speech, unlike Macbeth's, seems shielded from the perception of life's emptiness as a source of despair, or of terror.

It is harder to point to what there is in the language of this speech that accounts for this more positive sense of comfort and reassurance. But I think important keys are in the lines that bring Prospero's vision of the world's emptiness to a culmination:

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

It seems to me that there may be some sense in which 'stuff brings as much substantiality to 'dreams' as 'dreams' brings ephemerality to 'stuff. There is, moreover, a kind of gentleness about this utterance, a tenderness even, quite uncharacteristic of Prospero elsewhere in the play. But I think more important is what happens in the last clause.

The plain sense of the passage is that human lives emerge out of a dark, sleeplike void and pass back into it at death and that these brief lives are of small matter in this everlasting movement from nothing to nothing. But 'our' in 'our little life' seems to play against the sense of dispossession that the speech has turned on. The word 'little' does not suggest paltriness or insignificance here so much as the vulnerability of tininess. I associate 'little life' here with infancy, a little living person. The phrase 'little life . . . / . . . rounded with a sleep' seems to present a kind of holding, almost a caressing image, the little life held by the sleep, or held in ways that facilitate sleep, protecting it from the hurly-burly of the larger world. And 'rounded' here seems to me to convey something of the same tenderness that we can find in this account from A Midsummer Night's Dream: 'For she his hairy temples then had rounded/With coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers' (IV.i.48-9), describing Titania's tender and protective dotage over Bottom.

In short, the speech has submerged within it the tender infant-mother paradigm I earlier associated with Bottom's fulfilment through Titania. In this phase of Shakespeare's development, I think it suggests a point of connection to the two romances from which it most differs: to the promise for renewed life associated with Marina's infancy in Pericles and Perdita's in The Winter's Tale. Within The Tempest, it points back to the nostalgic evocations of Miranda's infancy, both to her distant memory, 'rather like a dream than an assurance/That my remembrance warrants' (I.ii.45-6), of being attended by feminine presences in Milan, and to Prospero's memory of the courage he gathered from Miranda's infantile presence on the 'rotten carcase of a butt' (I.ii.146) that brought them to the island in their exile: 'O, a chérubin/Thou wast that did preserve me' (I.ii.152-3).

Within the play, it also reaches out to Caliban's dream of maternal riches about to drop upon him. If Caliban's sexuality unconsciously represents to Prospero his repressed incestuous longing for Miranda, Caliban's psychological orientation toward a nurturant, giving world represents for Prospero a comparably repressed wish to turn oneself over in trust to a world understood as the heritage of the infantile world of oneness with maternal bounty. Foregoing this wish has defined Prospero's post-Milan world of magic, power, mastery. Obliquely, but poignantly, following his recognition of his helplessness before his own desires and developments in his world, and in the course of an imaginative vision of universal emptiness, Prospero touches base with that wish. It is, I think, an important moment for him, one that contributes crucially to the gestures that culminate his role in the play: his surrender of his magical power, his foregoing of his plan for vengence, his final, formal release of Miranda to Ferdinand, his acknowledgement of Caliban, and his readiness to prepare himself for death in Milan, 'where/Every third thought should be my grave' (V.i.310-11) and where his own little life will be rounded with a sleep.

Notes

² Drive-centred theories and object-relations theories of psychoanalysis have their respective points of departure in this situation—the emergence of infantile sexuality within the nurturant environment that provides both the first objects of desire and the object relation in which the infant's primary sense of being in the world is anchored.

³ See Holland's chapter on the poet H.D., called 'A Maker's Mind', in Holland (1973: 5-59).

⁴ Recent readings of the play as either a complicit celebration of or a subversive indictment of the colonialist enterprise complicate and extend that trend. When Caliban complains to Prospero that his 'profit' from learning the Europeans' language is 'I know how to curse' (I.ii. 362-63), Greenblatt (1990: 25) writes: 'Ugly, rude, savage, Caliban nevertheless achieves for an instant an absolute if intolerably bitter moral victory.' For Paul Brown, even the dream that seems to give Caliban something he 'may use to resist, if only in dream, the repressive reality which hails him as villain', is ultimately the expression of desire generated by and within colonialism: 'the colonialist project's investment in the processes of euphemisation of what are really powerful relations here has produced a Utopian moment where powerlessness represents a desire for powerlessness' (' "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine": The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism', in Dollimore and Sinfield (1985: 65, 66).

⁵ Skura (1989: 60-5), however, points tellingly to several situations in Shakespeare's earlier drama that provide parallels to this moment when the exiled, manipulative, paternalistic duke erupts in anger in response to a figure who embodies qualities he has repudiated in himself: Antonio to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice; Duke Senior to Jaques in his satiric mood ('thou thyself hast been a libertine') in As You Like It; Duke Vincentio to Lucio in Measure for Measure; the newly crowned Henry V to Falstaff in 2 Henry IV.

⁶ The psychoanalytic components of this narrative have been distributed variously in different psychoanalytic accounts, but they have been in place since 'Otto Rank [in Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage (1912)] set out the basic insight' (Holland, 1966: 269).

⁷ Prospero's pageant presents a mythic Utopian vision which Skura (1989: 68) compares to Gonzalo's 'more socialized' utopia and to Caliban's dream: all three 'recreate a union with a bounteous Mother Nature. And like every child's utopia, each is a fragile creation, easily destroyed by the rage and violence that constitute its defining alternative—a dystopia of murderous vengeance; the interruption of Prospero's pageant is only the last in a series of such interruptions.'

References

Unless otherwise indicated, place of publication is London.

Dollimore, Jonathan and Sinfield, Alan (eds) (1985) Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Manchester.

Freud, Sigmund (1953-74) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. J. Strachey, 24 vols.

Greenblatt, Stephen (1990) Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York.

Holland, Norman (1966) Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare. New York.

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