SOURCE: Brockbank, Philip. “The Tempest: Conventions of Art and Empire.” In Later Shakespeare, pp. 183-201. London: Edward Arnold, 1966.

[In the following essay, Brockbank examines the ways in which Shakespeare fashioned allegory from his textual and generic sources—exploration narratives, pastorals, and masques—for The Tempest.]

There is enough self-conscious artifice in the last plays to allow us to suspect that Shakespeare is glancing at his own art when Alonso says:

This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod;
And there is in this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of: some oracle
Must rectify our knowledge.

And it may be that Prospero quietens the fretful oracles in his first audience with a tongue-in-cheek assurance:

                                                                                                                                            at pick'd leisure
Which shall be shortly single, I'll resolve you,
Which to you shall seem probable, of every
These happen'd accidents; till when, be cheerful,
And think of each thing well.

The tense marvellings of the play are oddly hospitable to moments of wry mockery. Things are never quite what they seem.

The play's mysteries, however, are authentic not gratuitous; they touch our sense of wonder and they are accessible to thought; and we need no oracle, skilled in the subtleties and audacities of Renaissance speculation, to rectify our knowledge. We must nevertheless seek to attend with the apt kind of attention, to get the perspectives right, and the tone. For, as often in the comedies, the perspectives and the tone are precisely secured, and it is only too easy to upset the balances of convention, of innocence and scepticism, that keep the allegory of the play at an appropriately unobtrusive distance.

There is a multiple, complex allegory. It has to do with the social and moral nature of man, with the natural world, with the ways of providence, and with the nature of art. Yet this very complexity is the source of the play's simplicity—of its power to entertain, to move, and to satisfy our playgoing and contemplative spirits.

The Tempest is about a human mess put right by a make-belief magician. Or, to recast the point in the suggestive neo-platonic phrases of Sidney, it is about a golden world delivered from the brazen by providence and miracle. But there remain more specific ways of saying what it is about. In relation to its immediate sources it touches the colonizing enterprise of Shakespeare's England. In relation to one strain of dramatic tradition it is a morality, about the cure of evil and the forgiveness of sin; in relation to another, it is a pastoral entertainment, fit to celebrate the fertility and order of nature; and it owes to the masque its felicitous handling of illusion, spell, and rite. In relation to Shakespeare's own art, it seems to recollect much that has gone before, and to shadow forth (Sidney's phrase) the playwright's role in the theatres of fantasy and reality.

The several kinds of expressiveness found in the play owe much to the fragmentary source material on the one hand and to the tactful management of stage convention on the other. Theatrical techniques are so used that they illuminate an area of Elizabethan consciousness that was expressing itself also in the activities and in the literature of exploration and empire. Long before we pursue ‘meanings’ (after the play, brooding upon it) we recognize that the allegory is anchored in the instant realities of human experience. Its aetherial affirmations are hard-won, spun out of substantial material. The truths which offer themselves as perennial are made very specifically out of and for the England and the theatre of Shakespeare's own time. The play is as much about colonization as initiation, as much about the intrigues of men as the tricks of spirits.

The principal documents behind The Tempest are well known if not wholly easily accessible; they are William Strachey's True Repertory of the Wreck, published in Purchas his Pilgrimes together with an extract from the anonymous True Declaration of Virginia, and Sylvester Jourdan's A Discovery of the Barmudas. The uses to which the play puts these materials would have been very different had it not been for the hospitality of the contemporary theatre (whose tastes Shakespeare himself did most to fashion) to the techniques and interest of the late comedies.

Strachey and Jourdan tell how Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Summers were driven away from the rest of the fleet, bound for Virginia in June, 1609, by a storm which finally lodged their ship—the Sea Venture—between two rocks off the coast of the Bermudas. After many ‘rare and remarkable experiences’ they built a new boat, The Deliverance, and a pinnace, Patience, and set sail for Virginia in May, 1610. Their survival (like many another in the pages of Hakluyt) had about it something of the miraculous, and it invited as much comment on the ways of Providence as on the skill and resourcefulness of English sailors.

Shakespeare, with the storms of Othello, The Winter's Tale, and Pericles freshly accomplished for the theatre, would recognize occasion enough for a play in the story of the Bermudas wreck. And the material offers itself most invitingly to a playwright whose interest in the ways of Providence, and in the conversion and salvation of man had matured through long practice in allegoric, romantic comedy. The prose accounts of the wreck are constantly suggestive in ways that would be less noticeable were they read without knowledge of the play. It is often so. The masterpiece illuminates the sources, more than the sources the masterpiece. It is no longer possible to read the collections of Hakluyt and Purchas without recognizing that they offer as much to Shakespeare and to Coleridge as to Captain Cooke.

In the True Repertory the storm is both a physical ordeal and a moral:

a dreadfull storme and hideous began to blow from out the Northeast, which swelling, and roaring as it were by fits, some houres with more violence than others, at length did beat all light from heaven; which like an hell of darkenesse turned blacke upon us, so much the more fuller of horror, as in such cases horror and feare use to overrunne the troubled, and overmastered sences of all, which (taken up with amazement) the eares lay so sensible to the terrible cries, and murmurs of the windes, and distraction of our Company, as who was most armed, and best prepared, was not a little shaken.

(p. 6)

The ‘unmercifull tempest’ is a terrible leveller; death at sea comes ‘uncapable of particularities of goodnesse and inward comforts’, and gives the mind no ‘free and quiet time, to use her judgement and Empire’. There are hints enough for the play's opening scene in which hope is confounded by the counterpointed roarings of crew, court, and elements; the dignities of seamanship and of prayer are subdued to ‘A confused noise within’. For the dignity of Gonzalo's wit (that alone survives the horror and the test) there is no equivalent in the source. But Strachey has his own way of wondering at man's powers of survival:

The Lord knoweth, I had as little hope, as desire of life in the storme, & in this, it went beyond my will; because beyond my reason, why we should labour to preserve life; yet we did, either because so deare are a few lingring houres of life in all mankinde, or that our Christian knowledges taught us, how much we owed to the rites of Nature, as bound, not to be false to our selves, or to neglect the meanes of our owne preservation; the most despairefull things amongst men, being matters of no wonder nor moment with him, who is the rich Fountaine and admirable Essence of all mercy.

(p. 9)

And it is easy to see in retrospect how, at a touch, the observations, the marvellings, and the pieties of Strachey might be transformed into the language of The Tempest with its capacity for dwelling upon the preservation of life, the rites of nature, and the ‘admirable Essence of all mercy’.

The pieties of the prose accounts are more than conventional; they owe their awed intensity to the sequences of catastrophe and miracle that the voyagers endured. We need not hesitate to treat the play as allegory since that is how Shakespeare's contemporaries treated the actual event. After God has delivered the seamen from the ‘most dreadfull Tempest’ of ‘tumultuous and malignant’ winds, the authority of the Governor is required to deliver them from what The True Declaration calls ‘the tempest of Dissention’. Reviewing the mutinies that threatened the survival of the Bermudas party, Strachey writes:

In these dangers and divellish disquiets (whilest the almighty God wrought for us, and sent us miraculously delivered from the calamities of the Sea, all blessings upon the shoare, to content and binde us to gratefulnesse) thus inraged amongst our selves, to the destruction each of other, into what a mischiefe and misery had wee bin given up, had wee not had a Governour with his authority, to have suppressed the same?

(p. 32)

Reading this passage (and some similar ones) with the poet's eye, we can see how Prospero might have taken shape. From his experience of the theatre Shakespeare's imagination and invention readily made a single figure out of the miraculous deliverer from the sea's calamities, and the ‘Governour with his authority’ stopping the victims of the wreck from killing one another. It is an apt opportunity to take after Measure for Measure, which is about the saving powers of a governor, and Pericles with its miraculous deliveries from the sea.

A more specific occasion for the play's rendering of the storm as a feat of providential magic is offered by Strachey's description of the St. Elmo's fire that danced like Ariel about the rigging:

Onely upon the thursday night Sir George Summers being upon the watch, had an apparition of a little round light, like a faint Starre, trembling, and streaming along with a sparkeling blaze, halfe the height upon the Maine Mast, and shooting sometimes from Shroud to Shroud, tempting to settle as it were upon any of the foure Shrouds: and for three or foure houres together, or rather more, halfe the night it kept with us; running sometimes along the Maine-yard to the very end, and then returning. At which, Sir George Summers called divers about him, and shewed them the same, who observed it with much wonder, and carefulnesse: but upon a sodaine, towards the morning watch, they lost the sight of it, and knew not what way it made.

(p. 11)

The elusive, mockingly playful fire and light in the encompassing total darkness, observed with wonder and carefulness by the crew, is poignantly ironic. Strachey leaves the natural phenomenon very ripe for transmutation into stage symbol. ‘The superstitious Sea-men’, he says, ‘make many constructions of this Sea-fire, which neverthelesse is usual in stormes.’ The Greeks took it for Castor and Pollux, perhaps, and ‘an evill signe of great tempest’. The Italians call it ‘Corpo sancto’. The Spaniards call it ‘Saint Elmo, and have an authentic and miraculous Legend for it’. The irony is that it could do nothing to help the seamen, but rather quickened their torment:

Be it what it will, we laid other foundations of safety or ruine, then in the rising or falling of it, could it have served us now miraculously to have taken our height by, it might have strucken amazement, and a reverence in our devotions, according to the due of a miracle. But it did not light us any whit the more to our knowne way, who ran now (as doe hoodwinked men) at all adventures.

(p. 11)

It is one of the play's discoveries that this mocking hell is providentially (and indeed playfully) contrived. While allowing Ariel's tale to mimic the lightning, Shakespeare recalls the sonorous miseries described in an earlier passage:

our clamours dround in the windes, and the windes in thunder. Prayers might well be in the heart and lips, but drowned in the outcries of the Officers: nothing heard that could give comfort, nothing seene that might incourage hope. It is impossible for me, had I the voice of Stentor, and expression of as many tongues, as his throate of voyces, to express the outcries and miseries, not languishing, but wasting his spirits, and art constant to his owne principles, but not prevailing.

(p. 7)

By personalizing, in Prospero, the natural processes of the storm and its happy outcome, Shakespeare displays theatrically the exacting cruelties of a providence that works to saving purpose:

PROSPERO:
                                                                                My brave spirit!
Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil
Would not infect his reason?
ARIEL:
                                                                                                                        Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad, and play'd
Some tricks of desperation.

Human reason is ‘infected’ and human skill disarmed in order that all might be brought to shore safely:

                                                                      Not a hair perish'd
On their sustaining garments not a blemish,
But fresher than before.

This allusion to the shipwreck of St. Paul at Malta (Acts xxvii. 34) reminds us that catastrophic voyages and the ways of Providence are readily considered together. God uses shipwrecks. But the play is more insistent than the New Testament upon the waywardness and apparent arbitrariness of Providence (men hoodwinked, in a maze, amazed) and it has taken its signals from the prose of the voyagers.

At the utmost point of their despair, when skill and energy can do no more, the sailors are ready to surrender passively to the sea. As Jourdan puts it:

All our men, being utterly spent, tyred, and disabled for longer labour, were even resolved, without any hope of their lives, to shut up the hatches, and to have committed themselves to the mercy of the sea, (which is said to be mercilesse) or rather to the mercy of their mighty God and redeemer.

(p. 195)

That drift from the commonplace ‘mercy of the sea’ through ‘said to be mercilesse’ to ‘their mighty God and redeemer’, is not inertly conventional. It testifies to the quite palpable presence in both stories (but particularly in the opening paragraphs of Jourdan's) of the sequence—storm, fear, death, miraculous renewal of life. While Shakespeare follows Strachey in his treatment of Ariel's description of the last moments of the wreck, he follows Jourdan where he hints at a ceremonious leave-taking on the stricken ship (‘Let's all sink wi'th'King … Let's take leave of him’):

So that some of them having some good and comfortable waters in the ship, fetcht them, and drunke the one to the other, taking their last leave one of the other, until their more ioyfull and happy meeting, in a more blessed world.

(p. 195)

The play does not allow too intrusive a ceremonious piety, but rather a wry nostalgia for ‘an Acre of barren ground’ tempering Gonzalo's patient acquiescence: ‘The wills above be done! but I would faine dye a dry death.’ The ‘more blessed world’ is offered nevertheless when all hope is dead, for, as Strachey reports ‘Sir George Summers, when no man dreamed of such happinesse, had discovered, and cried Land’.

After the ordeal by sea, the island inheritance. Both Jourdan and Strachey are moved by the paradox that made ‘The Devils Ilands’ (the name commonly given to the Bermudas) ‘both the place of our safetie, and meanes of our deliverance’. Jourdan is particularly eloquent in confronting general, superstitious expectations of the islands with his own ecstatic experience of them. ‘But our delivery’, he says, ‘was not more strange in falling so opportunely and happily upon the land, as our feeding and preservation, was beyond our hopes, and all mens expectations most admirable.’ It has the quality of Gonzalo's marvellings. Jourdan tells us that the islands were never inhabited by Christian or heathen but were ever esteemed ‘a most prodigious and inchanted place affording nothing but gusts, stormes, and foule weather’. ‘No man was ever heard, to make for this place, but as against their wils, they have by stormes and dangerousnesse of the rocks, lying seaven leagues into the sea, suffered shipwrack.’

Jourdan's phrases seem to license the play's magical, paradisial, and mysterious atmosphere, and some may be the germ of the rival versions of Shakespeare's island voiced on the one hand by Gonzalo and Adrian, and on the other by Sebastian and Antonio:

Yet did we find there the ayre so temperate and the country so abundantly fruitful of all fit necessaries for the sustenation and preservation of man's life … Wherefore my opinion sincerely of this Island is, that whereas it hath beene, and is still accounted, the most dangerous, infortunate, and forlorne place of the world, it is in truth the richest, heathfullest, and pleasing land (the quantity and bignesse thereof considered) and merely natural, as ever man set foot upon.

(p. 197)

Shakespeare intervenes to associate the auspicious vision of the island (‘The air breathes upon us here most sweetly’) with the innocent courtiers, and the inauspicious (‘As if it had lungs, and rotten ones’) with the culpably sophisticated. But Strachey and Jourdan are equally clear that ‘the foule and generall errour’ of the world distorts the truths about the islands which are in time revealed to those who experience it.

In the sources, as in the play, the island deliverance is a beginning and not an end. Once saved from the wreck, the survivors have still to be saved from each other. Strachey tells how Sir Thomas Gates dispatched a longboat (duly modified) to Virginia, moved by ‘the care which he took for the estate of the Colony in this his inforced absence’ and ‘by a long practised experience, foreseeing and fearing what innovation and tumult might happily arise, amongst the younger and ambitious spirits of the new companies’. The Governor's authority, however, proves equally essential to the prosperity of both the communities, of the Bermudas and of Virginia. Strachey writes of the onset of the island mutinies:

And sure it was happy for us, who had now runne this fortune, and were fallen into the bottome of this misery, that we both had our Governour with us, and one so solicitous and carefull, whose both example (as I said) and authority, could lay shame and command upon our people: else, I am perswaded, we had most of us finished our dayes there, so willing were the major part of the common sort (especially when they found such a plenty of victuals) to settle a foundation of ever inhabiting there … some dangerous and secret discontents nourished amongst us, had like to have been the parents of bloudy issues and mischiefs.

(p. 28)

And the True Declaration discloses the analogous issues and mischiefs in Virginia:

The ground of all those miseries, was the permissive Providence of God, who, in the fore-mentioned violent storme, seperated the head from the bodie, all the vitall powers of Regiment being exiled with Sir Thomas Gates in those infortunate (yet fortunate) Ilands. The broken remainder of those supplyes made a greater shipwracke in the Continent of Virginia, by the tempest of Dissention: every man over-valuing his owne worth, would be a Commander: every man underprizing anothers value, denied to be commanded.

(p. 67)

The play's second act does most to explore the mutinous disaffections that attend upon and threaten ‘the vitall powers of Regiment’. Its Neapolitan courtiers fittingly convey the temper of Virginia's ‘younger and ambitious spirits’:

                              There be that can rule Naples
As well as he that sleeps; lords that can prate
As amply and unnecessarily
As this Gonzalo; I myself could make
A chough of as deep chat.

‘Every man underprizing anothers value, denied to be commanded.’ And the drunken, anarchistic landsmen represent the discontents of the ‘common sort’ on the Island. By extending the powers of Ariel and Prospero over both groups of conspirators, moreover, Shakespeare allows a fuller expression to the moral ideas that issue in the True Declaration's reflection on ‘the permissive Providence of God’. The conspiracies are at once permitted and constrained.

It is altogether appropriate that the Governor's authority should be represented as a care for ‘the state of the Colony’ and not as a bent for empire and sovereignty. The True Declaration finds for the word ‘colony’ its richest meaning and fullest resonance: ‘A Colony is therefore denominated, because they should be Coloni, the Tillers of the Earth, and Stewards of fertilitie.’ ‘Should be’; but are not, for:

our mutinous Loyterers would not sow with providence, and therefore they reaped the fruits of too deere bought Repentance. An incredible example of their idlenesse, is the report of Sir Thomas Gates, who affirmeth, that after his first comming thither, he hath seen some of them eat their fish raw, rather then they would go a stones cast to fetch wood and dresse it.

(p. 68)

The tillers of the earth and the fetchers of wood, runs the argument, are the heirs to God's plenty: ‘Dei laboribus omnia vendunt, God sels us all things for our labour, when Adam himselfe might not live in Paradise without dressing the Garden.’ It is this thought that seems to hover mockingly behind the log-bearing labours of Ferdinand. Prospero, imposing the task, does not do as Sir Thomas Gates and set his own hand ‘to every meane labour’ dispensing ‘with no travaile of his body’. He rather exercises over the Prince (himself a potential governor) the rule of Providence's dominant law; he sells Miranda (the richest of the island's bounties) only in return for work.

Once the recalcitrant passions of the Virginian colonizers have been tamed, once they have ceased to ‘shark for present booty’ out of idleness and lawlessness, they may hope to enjoy the bounty of nature. This idea is in itself almost enough to suggest the invention of Caliban. Strachey speaks of the ‘liberty and fulness of sensuality’ that drew the ‘idle, untoward and wretched’ to murmuring discontent, and ‘disunion of hearts and hands’ from labour (p. 28). The grotesque, spectacular figure of Caliban, and his conspiracy with the butler and the jester, enable Shakespeare to make Strachey's point within the conventions of masque and comedy.

Caliban, however, seems like Prospero to be doubly fashioned from the travel literature. Not only is he a theatrical epitome of the animal, anarchic qualities of the colonizers, he is also the epitome of the primitive and uncivilized condition of the native American. Strachey tells how the Virginian Indians severely tested the magnanimity of the Governor ‘who since his first landing in the Countrey (how justly soever provoked) would not by any meanes be wrought to a violent proceeding against them’. But, like Caliban, they have natures on which nurture cannot stick; pains humanely taken are quite lost. One of the Governor's men—alas for tractable courses—is carried off into the woods and sacrificed; and the Governor ‘well perceived, how little a faire and noble intreatie workes upon a barbarous disposition, and therefore in some measure purpose to be revenged’ (p. 62).

But when Caliban consorts with Trinculo and Stephano the play expresses, with joyous irony, both the common appetites and the distinctive attributes of man primitive and man degenerate. Caliban's scorn of Trinculo's tipsy acquisitiveness, ‘Let it alone, thou fool; it is but trash’, measures the distance between them. Fittingly, the strictures of the True Declaration fall most heavily upon those delinquent colonizers who ‘for their private lucre partly imbezeled the provisions’, spoiling the market by leaving the Virginians ‘glutted with our Trifles’ (p. 70).

As witnesses both to the fine energies of Caliban and to his truculence, the first audiences of The Tempest might well have asked for themselves the questions that Purchas sets in the margin of The True Repertory:

Can a Savage remayning a Savage be civill? Were not wee our selves made and not borne civill in our Progenitors dayes? and were not Caesar's Britaines as brutish as Virginians?

(p. 62)

To this last question Cymbeline had already supplied something resembling Purchas's own answer, ‘The Romane swords were best teachers of civilitie to this & other Countries neere us.’ The Tempest leaves us to wonder at a range of possible answers to the first. For Shakespeare's understanding of Caliban is not co-extensive with Prospero's. ‘Liberty’ and ‘fulness of sensuality’ (to recall Strachey's terms) are auspicious when opposed, not to temperance, but to constraint and frigidity. Hence Caliban's virtue and dignity, and the quickness of his senses accords with his love of music—an Indian and a Carib characteristic remarked by the voyagers.

As his name may be meant to remind us,¹ Caliban is conceived as much out of the reports of the Caribana as of those of the Bermudas and Virginia. Purchas his Pilgrimage² tells of the Caraibes, the priests of the Cannibal territory in the north of Brazil, to whom ‘sometimes (but seldome) the Divell appears’, and of their witches ‘called Carayba, or holiness’. There is here just enough pretext for associating Caliban with the blacker kind of sorcery that Shakespeare allows to Sycorax.

Sycorax represents a natural malignancy (‘with age and envy … grown into a hoop’) consonant with her negative and confining skills. Unlike the Carayba of Purchas's account, however, she does not embody a native devilry and priestcraft, but is a disreputable exile from Argier with only a casual claim to dominion over the island. Thus the play qualified the righteousness of Caliban's resentment and complicates the relationships between native and colonial endowments. We are left to wonder about the ultimate sources of the moral virus that has infected what might have been a golden world, and Prospero's account of Caliban's genesis (‘got by the devil himself Upon thy wicked dam’) may be taken either as imprecation or as a fragment of bizarre biography.

When Shakespeare confronts Prospero with Caliban he does not restrict the range of his implications in the theatre to the command that a colonial governor might seek by kindness and by torment to secure over a native. That relationship itself is only one expression of what Montaigne, in a passage familiar to Shakespeare from the ‘Essay On Cannibals’, called the bastardizing of original naturality by human wit. Shakespeare's scepticism, like Montaigne's, recoils upon authority itself. Prospero's malice (‘tonight thou shalt have cramps’) is a comic instance of the barbarism of civilization that Montaigne finds more shocking than cannibalism; we mangle, torture, and mammock our living neighbours not from natural perversity but ‘under pretence of piety and religion’.

The secret dialogue that, metaphorically speaking, Shakespeare conducts with Florio's Montaigne is an intricate one. Gonzalo's Utopian vision is at its centre. Much of Florio's prose is assimilated into the routine of the verse, but the quiet climax of Gonzalo's musings—to do with the fecundity of the anarchic paradise—is intensely in the mode of the last plays:

                              Nature should bring forth,
Of it own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.

Florio says that his admirable savages have no need to gain new lands, ‘for to this day they yet enjoy that naturall ubertie and fruitfulnesse, which without labouring toyle, doth in such plenteous abundance furnish them with all necessary things, that they need not enlarge their limits’. Gonzalo is mocked by the sophisticated conspirators for, as it were, his reading of Florio. Shakespeare contrives to vindicate Montaigne's contempt for the ‘unnatural opinion’ that excuses the ‘ordinary faults’ of ‘treason, treacherie, disloyaltie, tyrannie, crueltie, and suchlike’; for however apt and amusing the taunts of Antonio and Sebastian, their persistent malice is seen for what it is, and Gonzalo's words are never quite out of key with the mood that the island scenes have created in the theatre. At the same time, Montaigne's sanguine vision of uncultivated innocence is exquisitely, and critically, related to the dreams that a benign but vulnerable ageing courtier might have of sovereignty. Where Montaigne believes (or pretends to believe) that the wild nations in reality ‘exceed all the pictures wherewith licentious Poesie hath proudly imbellished the golden age’, Shakespeare leaves the notion to an old man's fantasy. But a significant fantasy, properly entertained by ‘Holy Gonzalo, honourable man’.

When ‘foison and abundance’ are again at the centre of attention we are contemplating the betrothal masque. The masque has several kinds of appropriateness in a play about colonization. It accords with Strachey's concern with bounty and the proper regulation of passion, and it reminds us of the indivisible integrity of the laws of nature and government. Miranda's presence on the island has some occasion, perhaps, in the story of Virginia Dare, grand-daughter of Captain John White, born in 1587 in the first English colony of Virginia and left there in a small party.³ But it matters more that Purchas comments in his marginal note to Strachey's account of the marriage of one of Sir George Summers's men: The most holy civill and most naturall possession taken of the Bermudas by exercise of Sacraments Marriage, Childbirth, & c. (p. 38). The sacrament of marriage is looked upon as the perfection of the island's sovereignty. Prospero's admonition that Ferdinand should not break Miranda's ‘virgin-knot before ❙ All sanctimonious ceremonies may ❙ With full and holy rite be minister'd’, is not only in character (the officiously solicitous father), it is also a full recognition that heaven rains down blessings only upon those who honour the sanctities of its order:

No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-ey'd disdain and discord shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both.

The metaphors take life from the island truths about ‘the tillers of the earth and the stewards of fertility’; life flourishes best by cultivation and restraint.

The masque decoratively, but with a quick pulse, endorses the sustaining idea; the ‘sweet aspersion’ that the heavens let fall is recalled by Ceres' ‘upon my flowers ❙ Diffusest honey-drops, refreshing showers’. There is much to remind us of the continuity of the play with pastoral comedy—with As You Like It and The Winter's Tale. ‘So rare a wondered father and a wise’, says Miranda, ‘Makes this place Paradise’.

Purchas almost immediately follows his note on the marriage sacrament with another on a camp atrocity—‘Saylers misorder’. The effect in the narrative is a paler version of that in the play when Prospero suddenly remembers ‘that foul conspiracy ❙ Of the beast Caliban and his confederates’. Strachey tells how a sailor murdered one of his fellows with a shovel, and how others conspired to rescue him from the gallows ‘in despight and disdaine that Justice should be shewed upon a Sayler’. The ‘mischiefs of mariners’ reported by Strachey are intensified by the activities of ‘savage spies’ from among the disaffected Indians (p. 50). The Governor's nerves and moral resolution are, like Prospero's, severely tested.

The Tempest does not, however, return to the moral antinomies of pastoral comedy—opposing the seasonal, fecund processes of nature to human sophistication. Its most memorable nature has little to do with that which fills the garners and brings shepherds and sheep-shearing into The Winter's Tale. It is not the ‘great creating nature’ that Perdita honours in her festive ceremonies. It is an elemental nature, made of the air, earth, and water that meet on a tempestuous coast, and in listening to the play's many mysterious and subtle evocations of the ways of the elements we may be aware still of the poet's transfigurations of the sailors' experience.

Shakespeare is sensitive to the narrative sequence (already noticed) of storm, fear, death, and the miraculous renewal of life in the island's ‘temperate air’. Shakespeare's tact sustains the sequence without surrender to superstition (pace Gonzalo's marvellings) and without inviting moral exegesis. In Ariel's opening songs and in Ferdinand's exquisitely mannered reception of them, the truth of the sequence becomes lyrical and musical:

                              Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the King my father's wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air.

The quieting of storm and sorrow have in the theatre become the same process. Grief is transposed into melody. The word ‘air’, like Ariel's song itself, hovers elusively between atmosphere and melody:

This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes. I hear it now above me.

The island's airs are themselves melodious, and when Ferdinand finds Miranda ‘the goddess ❙ On whom these airs attend’ the suggestions of aetherial harmony are perfected.

Ariel's second song offers what is perhaps the play's most eloquent and characteristic symbol:

Those are pearls that were his eyes:
          Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
          Into something rich and strange.

The sea-change metaphors are a more searching expression of moral change as The Tempest presents it than the overtly pastoral convention could supply, and can touch more closely the mysteries of death.

Its beginnings in Shakespeare are familiar in Clarence's dream in Richard III—significantly a dream, and a reaching-forward to the mood and tenor of the last plays:

O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown,
What dreadful noise of waters in my ears.

The pain and noise of drowning were still ‘beating’ in Shakespeare's mind when he wrote The Tempest, and the consolatory transformations are remembered too:

                                                                                and in the holes
Where eyes did once inhabit there were crept,
As 'twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems,
That woo'd the slimy bottom of the deep
And mock'd the dead bones that lay scatter'd by.

It is (as A. P. Rossiter once said) ‘submarine Seneca’; but it is ready to become ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’. The marine fantasy seems to owe nothing to seaman's lore (Hakluyt and Purchas collect mostly matter-of-fact accounts of the genesis of pearls) although the travel books have much to say about the ‘great store of pearl’ to be found in Bermuda seas. It suffices that Shakespeare's early experience in the mode enabled him to refine and to amplify his distinctly surrealist vision of death by water. But Clarence expresses too the continuing physical ordeal:

                                                  but still the envious flood
Stopp'd in my soul and would not let it forth
To find the empty, vast, and wand'ring air;
But smother'd it within my panting bulk,
Who almost burst to belch it in the sea.

The sentiments and images are soon quite subdued to the English Senecal conventions—the ‘melancholy flood With that sour ferryman which poets write of’; but not before Shakespeare had written:

O, then began the tempest to my soul.

The sequence, storm, fear, death, is in Clarence's experience uncomsummated by the liberation that the strange word ‘belch’ seems to promise.

It is otherwise in Pericles, another play in which marine nature is more poignantly mysterious, more eternal and more consolatory than pastoral nature:

                                        Th'unfriendly elements
Forgot thee utterly; nor have I time
To give thee hallow'd to thy grave, but straight
Must cast thee, scarcely coffin'd, in the ooze;
Where, for a monument upon thy bones,
The aye-remaining lamps, the belching whale
And humming water must o'erwhelm thy corpse,
Lying with simple shells.

In Timon of Athens too, the sea retains its cleansing sanctity when the pasture that lards the rother's sides and the sun that breeds roots in the corrupt earth are forgotten:

Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood,
Who once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover.

The sea ‘whose liquid surge resolves ❙ The moon into salt tears’ is symbol too of a perpetual compassion:

                                                                                                    rich conceit
Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye
On thy low grave, on faults forgiven.

The prose accounts behind The Tempest offer Shakespeare new opportunities for this morally expressive sea-eloquence.⁴ Ariel admonishes the courtiers as if their survival from the wreck were owed to their destined unfitness for the sea's digestion:

You are three men of sin, whom Destiny,—
That hath to instrument this lower world
And what is in't,—the never-surfeited sea
Hath caus'd to belch you up.

But the sea-swell of the rhythm subdues the joke to the solemnity of the occasion. Prospero, in a slow movement of the play (the still figures and the leisured speech) that makes it remarkably fitting, uses the figure of the cleansing, clarifying sea:

                                                  Their understanding
Begins to swell, and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shore
That now lies foul and muddy.

The sea is an almost constant presence in the play's verbal music; both the dancing kind:

And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune,

and the more sombre:

Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder
That deep and dreadful organ pipe, pronounc'd
The name of Prosper; it did bass my trespass.
Therefore my son i'th'ooze is bedded; and
I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded,
And with him there lie mudded.

The moral sonorities are the sonorities of the sea. The apprehension of final judgement is expressed by way of sea, wind, and thunder; but ‘deep and dreadful’ and ‘bass’ are as apt for the sea as they are for the thunder; while the thunder lingers upon the next lines stirring the words ‘deeper’ and ‘sounded’ as they are used of the plumb-line, and coming to rest in ‘mudded’.

Elsewhere, language used about music and about haunting noises is not directly about the sea, but might well have been:

Even now we heard a hollow burst of bellowing.

It might be a breaking wave. Recalling the ‘humming water’ of Pericles, it is apt that Caliban should speak of instruments that ‘hum’ about his ears. Humming is a common spell of the play's language:

The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds.

What is manifest in the detail of the play's accomplishment is manifest still in its large design—which owes more to the literature of sea-survival. The suggestion that the action of The Tempest takes place under the sea is witty and illuminating. The first scene is about men drowning, and its conventions are decisively naturalistic—there at least the storm is not merely symbolic. But the second scene changes the mood and the convention; the perspectives shift; time and place lose meaning, and characters and events shed a measure of their routine actuality. The play becomes a masque; and not improbably a masque resembling a masque of Neptune, with Ariel and Caliban seen as mutations of triton and sea-nymph. If contemporary productions, however, had looked for hints for figures and décor in the literature of Virginian colonization, they would have found them in John White's ‘True Pictures and Fashions’.⁵

To dwell upon the ‘sea-sorrow’ and ‘sea-change’ processes of the play is to recognize the difference from the more usual changes associated with pastoral in other comedies and late plays. Only Pericles resembles The Tempest. In The Winter's Tale moral growth is presented as a seasonal process, enabling Leontes to greet Perdita, when innocence returns to Sicilia in the last act, with the words: ‘Welcome hither as is the spring to earth’, and ‘the blessed gods ❙ Purge all infection from our air ❙ Whilst you do climate here’. But conversion and repentance are not in The Tempest, simple processes of growth. They are elusive mysteries, requiring strange mutations and interventions; occurring within dream states, under spells, conditionally ruled by laws that Shakespeare is content to offer as ‘magical’. But it is the sea, as the Elizabethan imagination dwelt upon it, that supplied the language of moral discovery.

Shakespeare's gift, it might be said of this and other plays, was to allegorize the actual; to conjoin his responsiveness to the moral order with his sense of turbulent, intractable realities. In lesser degree that was Strachey's gift too, and Jourdan's. But to the reconciliations accomplished in this play, Shakespeare's theatrical art brings a severe qualification—one that might be expected at this mature and resourceful phase of English drama. It is brought home to us that harmony is achieved in the human world only by allowing to Prospero and to Providence the powers of a playwright; particularly of a playwright skilled in masque—for the cloud-capped towers and all the things that vanish when the magician forfeits his power are recognizably the paraphernalia of masque. In this sense Prospero is indeed Shakespeare, but not Shakespeare the private man (whether retired or exhausted) but Shakespeare the professional playwright and masque-maker, perceiving that the order he seems to reveal in the world that the voyagers disclose to us is a feat of theatrical illusion. The magic does not work everywhere and for ever. From the poetic world there is the return to Milan where Sebastian and Antonio will keep their hard identities. Prospero returns himself and the audience to vulnerable humanity.

The end of the play, however, does not wholly determine its final impression. The climax of the moral magic discovers Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess. We may remember that a world chess master, Giacchino Greco (il Calabrese), was much about that time visiting England from Italy. Or we may take it that the game is a proper symbol of comedy—of conflict transposed into play. As T. E. Hulme once said—‘Many necessary conditions must be fulfilled before the chess-board can be poised elegantly on the cinders’. Life is only provisionally, for the span of a play which obeys all the unities, a perfectly coherent moral order; and where there is no art—no play—we have leave to doubt that there can be order. Unless it is to be found among Montaigne's savages.

Notes

1. Gustav H. Blanke, Amerika im Englischen Schrifttum des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (1962), points out that one Bodley atlas has the version ‘Caliban’ for ‘Cariban’. The genesis of names is always elusive. It is noticeable that Strachey (p. 14) names the historian of the West Indies, Gonzalus Ferdinandus Oviedus, which might have supplied Gonzalo and Ferdinand.

2. Op. cit. 3rd ed. (1617), Book IX, Chap. 5, p. 1039

3. See Wright, The Elizabethans' America, p. 133.

4. See for example Purchas his Pilgrimage (1617), p. 654.

5. The Trve Pictvres and Fashions of the People in … Virginia … draowne by Iohn White, appended to A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (Frankfurt, 1590). See particularly the figure of The Coniuerer or The Flyer.