SOURCE: Platt, Peter G. “Wonder Personified, Wonder Anatomized: The Tempest.” In Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous, pp. 169-87. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

[In the following excerpt, Platt explores Shakespeare's depiction of the epistemological and aesthetic dynamics of wonder, particularly in regard to the relationship between the marvelous and the real, in The Tempest.]

Unlike The Winter's Tale, where wonder is almost unequivocally embraced as a balm to heal the wounds inflicted by an overly rationalistic world, The Tempest interrogates the marvelous virtually from the outset.¹ The play's ambiguous attitude toward wonder is certainly part of what Stephen Orgel has called a “double and contradictory movement” and of what Stephen Greenblatt has described as a “model of unresolved and unresolvable doubleness.”² Orgel's suggestion that the two plays were written virtually simultaneously and that The Winter's Tale may actually follow The Tempest does not alter the nature of my argument:³ in all of the late plays …, it can be argued, Shakespeare is examining the marvelous even as he employs it.

The depth of Shakespeare's examination of wonder in The Tempest, however, is singular. The play addresses at some level nearly every aspect of the marvelous covered in this study: philosophy, the monster and magical traditions, travel writing, marvel books, the masque, dramatic and nondramatic fictions.⁴ As a way into this expansive treatment of wonder, I explore both the philosophical/epistemological and the aesthetic aspects of the marvelous … but first I focus on two texts to help frame the discussion.

One of these is the proverb … : “Wonder (Marvel, Admiration) is the daughter of ignorance.”⁵ Without pretending that Shakespeare structured The Tempest around, or even that he necessarily knew, this proverb, I would claim that it nevertheless helps us read Prospero's intellectual movement during the course of the play. Originally believing himself to be a sage, a magus, a scholar of immense power, Prospero—through the help of Wonder (his daughter, Miranda) and wonder—learns to accept his essential ignorance, an acceptance that places him in the tradition of Socrates, Nicholas of Cusa, Erasmus, Agrippa, and Montaigne.⁶ In the words of Cusanus, “we conclude that the precise truth shines incomprehensibly within the darkness of our ignorance. This is the learned ignorance we have been seeking and through which alone, as I explained, [we] can approach the maximum, triune instruction in ignorance.”⁷ Prospero's developing interest in the degree to which his magical stagings have a shaping effect allows us to chart his growth to this type of ignorance. Although Prospero has begun his journey before The Tempest starts, its end—such as it is—comes at the close of the play and is figured in Prospero's letting go of his control and accepting that the reception of the marvelous is more important than the making of it.⁸ Thus the logic of a proverb that reflects the prevailing pejorative opinion of the marvelous is revaluated by Shakespeare in The Tempest as he calls into question conventional approaches to wonder.

The second text comes from a Latin edition of Thomas Harriot's Brief and True Report on Virginia by Theodor de Bry (1590). Part of de Bry's head-phrase describes this “Brief and True Report” as Admiranda narratio, or “wonderful narration.”⁹ This juxtaposition of true and marvelous, … can be argued to have an important bearing on The Tempest, and not just because travel narratives helped shape structural and thematic aspects of the play. De Bry's commentary on Harriot highlights the clash that Shakespeare explores in The Tempest—between truth and fiction, reality and illusion, reason and wonder—a clash that represents the cultural anxiety about the substance and value of the marvelous. As usual, Shakespeare interrogates both sides of the issue by at once satirizing and championing the power of wonder, and moments of wondrous spectacle and their interruptions foreground Prospero's and Shakespeare's method of shuttling between the marvelous and the “real” worlds, before Prospero interrupts the play for the last time by stepping out of it.

The Tempest's opening storm and shipwreck certainly function on a naturalistic level, but there is little doubt that there is a symbolic dimension to them as well. Noting the psychological and epistemological nature of the tempest, Coppélia Kahn has described it as “the violence, confusion, and even terror of passing from one stage of life to the next, the feeling of being estranged from a familiar world and sense of self without another to hang onto.”¹⁰ More generally, Stephen Greenblatt has recently linked epistemological estrangement and the voyages of discovery: “Wonder is … the central figure in the initial European response to the New World, the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the presence of radical difference.”¹¹ Indeed, one of the apparent sources for The Tempest, the Strachey letter, records the awe and astonishment that a storm at sea could evoke: “a dreadfull storme and hideous began to blow from out the North-east, which swelling, and roaring as it were by fits, some houres with more violence then others, at length did beate all light from heauen; which like an hell of darkenesse turned blacke vpon vs, so much the more fuller of horror, as in such cases horror and feare vse to overrunne the troubled, and ouermastered sences of all which (taken vp with amazement) the eares lay so sensible to the terrible cries, and murmurs of the windes, and distraction of our Company.”¹² This is, of course, the kind of “distraction” that the Italian lords are subjected to in Prospero's storm, one he concocts so that the literal journey from Tunis will become an epistemological and moral one toward repentance and reconciliation.

What Prospero does not seem fully to realize is that he has a journey to undergo as well: toward the knowledge that is actually and paradoxically an abandonment of the quest for knowledge and an embracing of ignorance. For the Prospero whom we meet in act 1, scene 2, still relishes control, particularly that of “the seeing done by others. … Such displays master his audiences, reducing them to a wondering passivity.”¹³ Furthermore, in Howard Felperin's words, “associations of dark and prideful learning still cling to” Prospero's art.¹⁴ Indeed, the wondrous effect of the sight of the storm on Miranda—“O! I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer” (1.2.5-6)—seems less important to him than the controlled dissemination of knowledge about their past. Prospero claims that Miranda is

          ignorant of what thou art, nought knowing
Of whence I am, nor that I am more better
Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell,
And thy no greater father.

(18-21)

Whether Miranda has been uninquisitive or has been kept ignorant until now is ambiguous: she first claims that “More to know / Did never meddle with my thoughts” (21-22), but a few lines later she admits that Prospero in the past had “Begun to tell me what I am, but stopp'd / And left me to a bootless inquisition, / Concluding, ‘Stay: not yet’” (34-36). What is clear is that Prospero anxiously delivers his narrative, punctuating each segment with a paranoid question or command: “Obey, and be attentive” (38); “Dost thou attend me?” (78); “Thou attend'st not!” (87); “I pray thee mark me” (88); “Dost thou hear?” (106). We see here Prospero's concern for both the delivery and the reception of his tale. Yet he does not allow his daughter to explore her newfound knowledge, and when he senses that Miranda knows enough, he tells her to “cease more questions” (184)—similar to his “No more amazement” (14) after the storm—and puts her to sleep, telling her, “I know thou canst not choose” (186). Prospero's control, as well as his desire for it, is still quite apparent in this first part of act 1, scene 2, and this rage for order is further evinced in his displays of power before both Ariel and Caliban.

Clearly, Prospero knows the limitations of human reason and agency: devoting himself to the world of contemplation and “the bettering of my mind” (90), he lost control of the world of action, “And to my state grew stranger” (76). Prizing his books “above my dukedom” (168), Prospero allowed Antonio to usurp his power and title. Nonetheless, the lessons of this early treachery threaten to become forgotten during the course of the production of theatrical works meant to redress and purge the past; in short, by attempting to redeem his personal history, Prospero is constantly in danger of recreating it. His intellectual journey in this play, then, is simultaneously one of mastery and one of letting go, at once a display and a surrendering of power.

Late in scene 2 of act 1, we see the first suggestion of Prospero's relinquishing control when he watches Miranda and Ferdinand together for the first time, and it is wonder—Miranda, Wonder personified, and the mutual astonishment of the two would-be lovers—that takes Prospero a step closer to the drowning of his book of knowledge. Prospero's aside, “It goes on, I see, / As my soul prompts it” (420-21), both suggests pleasure and reveals a previous doubt about the effect his magic and design would have on the couple.

Prospero introduces Miranda to her wondrous vision with a metaphor of theatrical discovery—“The fringed curtains of thine eye advance, / And say what thou seest yond” (409-10)—and the effect is, indeed, wonderful:¹⁵

FERD.
                                                                                                              My prime request,
Which I do last pronounce, is (O you wonder!)
If you be maid, or no?
MIR.
                                                                                          No wonder, sir,
But certainly a maid.

(426-29)

Ferdinand goes on to marvel that Miranda speaks his language and “wonders” (433) to hear Prospero speak of Naples. Prospero seems pleased that “They are both in either's pow'rs” (451), but he also appears concerned about their becoming lost in amazement and perhaps about surrendering his power so quickly. Thus, as a means of breaking the lovers' enchantment, Prospero accuses Ferdinand of treason and subdues him, using the power of his magic to strip Ferdinand of his sword and his muscular control. After Ferdinand goes gladly to prison—he will still be near Miranda, after all—Prospero utters two words that capture the doubleness of his attitude toward his mastery and his ultimate repudiation of it: “It works” (494). Prospero wonders both at his power—he has had few to practice it on—and the effect of his power on others, the effect over which, ultimately, he has no control.

Prospero's interest in the consequences of his magic grows as the play unfolds, and two scenes from act 3 highlight this fact by placing Prospero in them—“at a distance, unseen” (3.1.15 s.d.) and “on the top, invisible” (3.3.17 s.d.)—as an observer.¹⁶ In the first, Prospero is again led toward a letting go by the wonder that is Miranda and her love for Ferdinand, although his reaction is again complicated. Miranda goes to help Ferdinand with his log-bearing, and Prospero speaks of her love for the young Neapolitan—something he has hoped and planned for—as a disease: “Poor worm, thou art infected! / This visitation shows it” (31-32). Prospero expresses here the dark side of wonder that he has experienced firsthand (and to which we will need to return). But to Ferdinand love—and its concomitant wonder—is transporting: “Admir'd Miranda, / Indeed the top of admiration! worth / What's dearest to the world!” (37-39). Watching their love further, Prospero himself marvels, calling their meeting the “Fair encounter / Of two most rare affections! Heavens rain grace / On that which breeds between 'em!” (74-76), but concludes the scene somewhat more wistfully: “So glad of this as they I cannot be, / Who are surpris'd withal; but my rejoicing / At nothing can be more” (92-94). Prospero is not yet fully an observer—he is still part creator and marvel-maker—and thus cannot completely share in the amazement and surprise of the two lovers. It will take several more encounters and Prospero's own astonishment for the transformation to be relatively complete.

Prospero is also an observer in the “masque of judgment” of act 3, scene 3.¹⁷ As Sukanta Chaudhuri has noted, “the erring courtiers are brought to their moral senses not by the perception of a benevolent order but rather through terror and amazement.”¹⁸ Indeed, it is the wonder of the “marvellous sweet music” (19) and then Ariel's banquet spectacle that shows the entire group, including Sebastian and Antonio, their ignorance. Although it is not surprising to hear Gonzalo find confirmation of wonder books and travelers' tales in the banquet (27-34, 43-49), it is somewhat astonishing to hear both Sebastian and Antonio marvel:¹⁹

SEB.
                                                                                Now I will believe
That there are unicorns; that in Arabia
There is one tree, the phoenix' throne, one phoenix
At this hour reigning there.
ANT.
                                                                                          I'll believe both;
And what does else want credit, come to me,
And I'll be sworn 'tis true. Travellers ne'er did lie,
Though fools at home condemn 'em.

(21-27)

Alonso wonders as well, claiming

                                                                                I cannot too much muse
Such shapes, such gesture, and such sound expressing
(Although they want the use of tongue) a kind
Of excellent dumb discourse.

(36-39)

Epistemological destabilization reigns in this scene even before Ariel appears “like a harpy” (52 s.d.). The men—or at least some of them—come “to their moral senses” after Ariel's sermon and terrorizing. Gonzalo asks Alonso, “I' th' name of something holy, sir, why stand you / In this strange stare?” (94-95), and the king of Naples replies, “O, it is monstrous! monstrous!” (95). Sebastian and Antonio mutter some words about fighting the fiends later, and Gonzalo describes the three as being in a state of “ecstasy” (108) caused by “their great guilt” (104). Prospero's marvels have made their mark, have had their effect: there are real suggestions of remorse in Alonso, and the two younger villains have without question been affected if not changed. What is fascinating about this scene, though, is that Prospero leaves the stage before he receives confirmation of his magic's transformative power. More interested in his display of power than its effect, he moves on to the next scene without waiting for the moral outcome:

                                                                                My high charms work,
And these, mine enemies, are all knit up
In their distractions. They are now in my pow'r;
And in these fits I leave them, while I visit
Young Ferdinand, whom they suppose is drown'd,
And his and mine lov'd darling.

(88-93)

The power of wonder brings all of the men involved to an encounter with the limitations of their own power and knowledge, although Sebastian and Antonio attempt to deny this discovery. It is not until act 4, scene 1, however, that Prospero is confronted with his lack of knowledge, with his essential ignorance, and part of the reason it takes him so long is the desire for and relishing of mastery that we saw in the previous scene. Although Prospero refers to his betrothal masque as “Some vanity of mine art” (41), he is sufficiently enamored of it to miss its effect on Ferdinand, who becomes so lost in the wonder of it that he utters, “Let me live here ever” (122). Ferdinand does not focus on the message of the masque—the importance of order, culture, civilization, sanctioned desire in marriage—only on the spectacular medium. That this has potentially disastrous implications for Prospero's overall design and threatens to echo Prospero's own earlier error is something to which we must turn in the next section. At this point it is important to note only that Prospero forgets to focus on the reception of his marvels. Strangely, it is his remembering about “Caliban and his confederates” (140) that forces Prospero to think about the effect of his magic and to realize that on some people there will be no effect—that his powers are “baseless” (151) to a large degree. The “revels speech” that follows, then, is as much about the vanity of learning as it is about the insubstantiality of art:

                                                                      the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind.

(153-56)

In the words of Harry Berger, “What he feels this time, for the first time, is that everything golden, noble, beautiful, and good—the works of man, the liberal arts, the aspirations variously incarnated in towers, palaces, temples, and theaters—is insubstantial and unreal compared to the baseness of man's old stock.”²⁰ Arriving at the notion of mankind's—and therefore his own—imperfectability, Prospero begins to shift his attention more fully to the reception of the power of wonder.²¹ I say “begins” because he is still able to crow to Ariel, near the end of act 4, as Caliban and company are being chased by hounds, “At this hour / Lies at my mercy all mine enemies” (262-63).

Indeed, it is not until Ariel reminds Prospero in act 5, scene 1, that the effect of his magic is what was important all along that Prospero says goodbye to his spirits and promises “I'll drown my book” (57). For Ariel notices what we did at the end of act 3, scene 3: “Your charm so strongly works 'em / That if you now beheld them, your affections / Would become tender” (5.1.17-19). Prospero, to this point, has still not “beheld” the Italian lords, has not cared to notice the effect of his magic. Prospero seems to realize that he has been in danger of overlooking the moral point to his spectacles when he asks his sprite

Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply
Passion as they, be kindlier mov'd than thou art?

(21-24)

Finally taking note of the power that his wonders have had over the courtiers, he goes on to observe that “their rising senses / Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle / Their clearer reason …” (66-68).

Yet even when the “charm dissolves” (64), the wonder remains. Gonzalo exclaims, “All torment, wonder, and amazement / Inhabits here” (104-5), and later asserts, “Whether this be, / Or be not, I'll not swear” (122-23). Alonso, who marvels more than anyone else during this scene, is stunned upon seeing Prospero: “Th'affliction of my mind amends, with which / I fear a madness held me. This must crave / (And if this be at all) a most strange story” (115-17). In a very important and under-analyzed few lines, Prospero expresses his new vision of admiratio, one that connects wonder to learned ignorance in a fashion similar to that of Montaigne's “Of Cripples”:²²

                                                                                I perceive these lords
At this encounter do so much admire
That they devour their reason, and scarce think
Their eyes do offices of truth. …

(153-56)

Prospero is finally fully aware of the effect of the marvelous on others, and his final “wonder” (170) is one that he can “bring forth” (170) without his magic: the tableau that is Ferdinand and Miranda. This marvel elicits not only Miranda's “O wonder!” (181) at her brave new world but also Sebastian's “A most high miracle!” (177). Soon afterward Ariel enters, “with the Master and Boatswain amazedly following” (216 s.d.), and the language of wonder continues throughout the scene, especially from Alonso:

These are not natural events, they strengthen
From strange to stranger.

(227-28)

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.

(242-45)

This is a strange thing as e'er I look'd on.

(290)

                                                                                                                                            I long
To hear the story of your life, which must
Take the ear strangely.

(312-14)

Significantly, besides the negligible Francisco and Adrian, the only character who does not marvel at all in this scene is Antonio. Much has been made of his relative silence and lack of repentance, and I think his incapacity for wonder is connected to these other absences. Strangely, however, Antonio's one comment in the scene can be seen to invoke the world of marvels. After the entrance of Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo, Antonio responds to Sebastian's “What things are these, my Lord Antonio? / Will money buy 'em?” (264-65): “Very like; one of them / Is a plain fish, and no doubt marketable” (265-66). Here Antonio seems to reprise Trinculo's comments about Caliban in act 2, scene 2, in which the jester speaks of the islander as both a fish and a commodity.²³ Shakespeare may, then, be giving Antonio language that has marvelous connections only to point out ironically how far he is from the transformations of mind that most of the other characters experience. Indeed, because the wonder valued in the play is linked to knowledge and learned ignorance, Antonio achieves neither by being unable to marvel. His only moment of unbridled astonishment—in act 3, scene 3—followed what Prospero would later refer to as a “trick” (4.1.37). Considering its effect on Antonio, that is all the “masque of judgment” was: a cheap visual marvel without moral power. Having one's reason devoured by admiration becomes a necessity for epistemological and moral growth in The Tempest.

The epilogue completes Prospero's journey toward learned ignorance facilitated by Wonder and wonder. Chaudhuri notes that “Prospero's final understanding leads him to the very same doubt, awe, and passivity he worked in other people. … He looks beyond the substance of his science to the fantasies he builds up with its aid, fantasies which lead to nescience and the cessation of power.”²⁴ This cessation ends up being a commencement for the audience, who, now empowered with the potency of amazement, become the test case for whether Prospero's marvels have been received, whether there has been substance to the pageant:

                                                                                                    Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be reliev'd by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
          As you from crimes would pardon'd be
          Let your indulgence set me free.

(13-20)

In a very strong sense, then, Prospero is dependent upon the audience to work a marvel on him: true, it is merely the act of many hands clapping, but as Dennis Kay has noted, “Shakespeare effectively transforms applause, which is the unexceptional, habitual response to any show, into an act of great moment.”²⁵ The spectator, then, becomes the thaumaturge—complete with the power and responsibility of the profession. Shakespeare's revaluation of intellectual wonder—replacing a rage for mastery and order with an acceptance of a certain passivity and ignorance—ends up being a communal, multiple act of making and marveling.

The Tempest's treatment of the aesthetics of the marvelous is even more complicated than its treatment of the epistemology of the marvelous. They are, of course, not wholly separate, for Prospero's growth toward learned ignorance is inseparable from his marvel-making power. Nonetheless, wonder emerges victorious in the philosophical realm, however fragile that victory might be: the characters who grow to goodness do so because they have the capacity for wonder. Yet Shakespeare gives the aesthetic and visual aspect of the marvelous a far greater scrutiny, one that reveals a more profound skepticism about the worth of the very play we are watching or reading. This ambivalence regarding the marvelous in The Tempest has been noted before. Phillip Brockbank has claimed that “the tense marvellings of the play are oddly hospitable to moments of wry mockery.”²⁶ Howard Felperin has asserted that “The Tempest is as much about the limitations of the idealizing imagination as it is about its power.”²⁷ And Stephen Greenblatt has more recently linked The Tempest to the English discovery of the New World, in which the explorers, like Prospero, “are haunted by the emptiness that is paradoxically bound up with the imagined potency of their art.”²⁸ Clearly, then, The Tempest does not unequivocally celebrate the wonder of aesthetic creation.

Indeed, by making his artist-figure a magician, Shakespeare complicates the issue from the outset. In an important article that develops an idea set forth by Alvin Kernan, Barbara Mowat presents several traditions surrounding Prospero's magic.²⁹ For Mowat the tension is between the respectable, serious traditions of magus, enchanter, and wizard on the one hand, and the fraudulent tradition of “art-Magician” or “Jugler”—who succeeds by means of prearranging acts with assistants and by “deceptio visus”—on the other. The shifts between these two poles, then, are at the heart of “the questions the play raises about reality and illusion, about creativity and theatrical fakery, and about disturbing resemblances between the dramatist and the magician.”³⁰

This doubt about the ability of both wonder and fiction to transcend fakery runs throughout The Tempest. In pursuing the aesthetics of the marvelous, then, we may look at three scenes in which the marvelous tradition … is questioned and, to some degree, mocked: the discussion of Prospero's magic in act 1, scene 2; Gonzalo's marveling in act 2, scene 1; and the language of wonder in the first scene involving Trinculo, Stephano, and Caliban (2.2). This focus will then inform an examination of Shakespeare's theater of interruption in four moments of wonder. … [T]his strategy allows Shakespeare, mainly through Prospero, to address the potential for wondrous frivolity both by interrupting—and calling attention to—his fiction and by underscoring the necessary distance between truth and illusion.³¹

We are left with little doubt that during his tenure as duke of Milan, Prospero lost himself in astonishment and wonder, and the incriminating evidence comes from Prospero himself:

And Prospero the prime duke, being so reputed
In dignity, and for the liberal arts
Without a parallel; those being all my study,
The government I cast upon my brother,
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies.

(1.2.72-77)

I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated
To closeness and the bettering of my mind
With that which, but by being so retir'd,
O'er-prized all popular rate. …

(89-92)

“Transported” and “rapt,” Prospero lost control of the real, political world because he preferred the “closeness” of the marvelous realm. If this were not lesson enough for Prospero, he watches as his brother performs a similar act, taking fiction for truth, romance for history, representation for reality:

To have no screen between this part he play'd
And him he play'd it for, he needs will be
Absolute Milan—me (poor man) my library
Was dukedom large enough. …

(107-10)

This early scene sets a tone for the entire play at the same time that it captures a cultural anxiety about magicians and magi: the danger of getting lost in “secret studies,” in the marvelous.³²

Prospero's absorption in these studies can be seen as a version of being lost in an ideal green world. Harry Berger has suggested that the return from this state was a self-conscious, moral imperative for Renaissance fiction-makers: the green world's “usefulness and dangers arise from the same source. In its positive aspects it provides a temporary haven for recreation or clarification, experiment or relief; in its negative aspects it projects the urge of the paralyzed will to give up, escape, work magic, abolish time and flux and the intrusive reality of other minds.”³³ The rest of The Tempest concerns Prospero's negotiations with the marvelous, his attempts to resist “the urge of the paralyzed will.”

Gonzalo's language in act 2, scene 1 (and later in act 3, scene 3) provides another dramatic interrogation of the marvelous tradition: in this case the wondrous travelers' accounts of the New World. Gonzalo's reading has clearly prepared his mind for the reception of the wonder of strange lands, just as it had Columbus's, Magellan's, and Cortez's:

                                                                                          but for the miracle
(I mean our preservation), few in millions
Can speak like us. …

(2.1.6-8)

“But the rariety of it is—which is indeed almost beyond credit—,” Gonzalo continues, “That our garments, being (as they were) drench'd in the sea, hold notwithstanding their freshness and glosses, being rather new dy'd than stain'd with salt water.” (59-60, 62-65). In one sense, then, Shakespeare is satirizing the notion of travelers' marveling at the unimaginable when the accounts seem to be operating within preestablished conventions of wondrous descriptions. François Hartog has taught us that wondrous topoi were, paradoxically, essential to establishing the truth of travel writing, while Charles Frey has written that “we tend not to appreciate the extent to which some themes, situations, incidents, and even phrases in The Tempest were part of the common coin of Shakespeare's day. … Shakepeare shows how what happened and what was hoped for tended to mingle in the minds of far travelers who said they found what they sought, their woes all changed to wonder, and their losses yielding to greater gain.”³⁴

Yet Gonzalo's marvelous speeches are not unequivocally mocked. As we have seen, the capacity for wonder is largely a positive attribute in this play; Gonzalo, though a windbag, is a force of goodness; and the characters who provide the play's internal mockery are Sebastian and Antonio. Indeed, the skeptical duo jeeringly compares Gonzalo to Amphion, whose “miraculous harp” (87) raised Thebes, and yet they are about to witness events that will make them believe in—if only temporarily—unicorns and phoenixes. The ambiguity is most complex in Gonzalo's commonwealth speech (148-57, 160-65, 168-69) based on Montaigne's “Of Cannibals.”³⁵ The inclusion of this defense of pure, unadorned pre-civilization—with the expected interruptive cynicism from Sebastian and Antonio—focuses us on a crucial issue of the play's attitude toward art and culture in general. Civilizing new lands by bringing agriculture and the arts to them could be seen as part of “the bastardizing of naturality by human wit,” or as what tames the Caliban in us, what sends us beyond the raw and natural.³⁶ Shakespeare's doubleness with regard to Gonzalo in this scene is also a doubleness with regard to Montaigne's central argument. Yet Shakespeare takes this dualism a step further by suggesting that the marvels of art, even if one accepts their positive role vis-à-vis the “natural,” can nevertheless corrupt by ensnaring the spectator in a marvelous paralysis. The ambiguous treatment of Gonzalo's language of miracle and wonder reflects [a] larger cultural ambivalence toward the marvelous. …³⁷

Less ambiguous is the satire of the monster and prodigy tradition in act 2, scene 2.³⁸ In this scene, Trinculo tries to describe the indescribable in terms that make sense to him; he attempts to make the strange familiar:³⁹

What have we here? a man or a fish? dead or alive? A fish, he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell; a kind of not-of-the-newest poor-John. A strange fish! Were I in England now (as once I was) and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian. Legg'd like a man; and his fins like arms! Warm, o' my troth! I do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer: this is no fish, but an islander, that hath lately suffer'd by a thunderbolt.

(24-37)

Shakespeare reveals through Trinculo the commodification of the marvelous, the marketability of wonders and prodigies that re-creates on another level and in a more general sense Prospero's abandonment of the real world for the wonderful: “When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.” Trinculo also provides a comic angle on the epistemological experience of the European encounter with the New World, and unlike others, it can be argued, he does not allow his initial reading to shape his inevitable interpretation: he lets loose his opinion.

Caliban, who is later called a “moon-calf” (106), is not the only one treated as a marvel. Having had a taste of liquor that is “celestial” (117) and “not earthly” (126), Caliban is convinced that Stephano has “dropp'd from heaven” (137), asks him to be his “god” (149), and calls him a “wondrous man” (164). Trinculo, the comic doubter of the marvelous, also becomes jealous at the attention paid to Stephano and chides Caliban: “A most ridiculous monster, to make a wonder of a poor drunkard” (165-66). But whether mistaking a drunkard for a wonder, an inexplicable miracle for an act of careful design, a brother's dukedom for one's own, or magic for reality, the characters of The Tempest are constantly negotiating the boundaries between the fictive and the real.

Through a series of spectacles and their interruptions, I would argue, Shakespeare attempts to address the problems that the marvelous raises—merely suggested by the three scenes above—without allowing himself or his audience to become lost in wonder. The first, of course, is the storm that opens the play and that, we have seen, sets forth a motif of epistemological journey. It is also the first spectacle, and Miranda is so affected by the storm that Prospero has to stop it. Although he becomes more interested in the knowledge he must disseminate, he does seem at first to listen to her pleas, and I think we are to imagine that the storm is still going on when Miranda begins to speak: “If by your art, my dearest father, you have / Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them” (1.2.1-2).⁴⁰ Prospero does not want her lost in wonderment because he has so little time to inform her of the important facts of their lives: “Be collected, / No more amazement” (13-14). Miranda—who both wonders and is wondered at—and her astonishment may be another reason Prospero interrupts her so often to make sure she is paying attention. Interruption, then, checks wonder in two ways early in the play: Prospero stops the storm to keep Miranda from being lost in amazement and interrupts his own narrative to make sure that the lingering effects of the storm and the potentially stupefying nature of the tale that “would cure deafness” (106) are not keeping Miranda (and himself?) from paying attention to the present reality.

The second important spectacle comes in the banquet scene (3.3), and it is obviously significant that the magic production of food astonishes such a greedy group. We must remember that this is the only time in the play where Antonio marvels, outstripping Gonzalo in his willingness to believe all travelers' tales: “Travellers ne'er did lie, / Though fools at home condemn 'em” (26-27). Appealing to their visual sense, then, Prospero is able to emphasize, by the interruption of the scene—“with a quaint device the banquet vanishes” (52 s.d.)—the evil of being lost in literal and figurative hunger, lust, and greed.⁴¹ Ariel's appearance as a moralizing Harpy is really a second spellbinding spectacle in this scene and one that the lords are not completely released from until act 5 when, ideally, they are able to apply the knowledge and experience gained from these visions to their present lives.

By far the most important moment of wonder is the betrothal masque of act 4, scene 1. Although the intentions of this grand production seem noble—both to bless and to instruct Ferdinand and Miranda about the power of culture and marriage—Prospero's explicitly stated attitude toward it is initially fairly contemptuous. As David Lindley has pointed out, Prospero refers to the upcoming masque as “such another trick” (37), thereby linking it to the banquet and to cheap visual marvels in general. Therefore, “what should be one of the central emblematic statements” is instead treated with disdain.⁴²

In spite of this recognition, however, Prospero still becomes entranced with the power of his art. From line 59, when Prospero exhorts Ferdinand, “No tongue! all eyes! Be silent,” until line 120, when he answers a question from his would-be son-in-law, Prospero says nothing. More importantly, he ignores Ferdinand's deep wonderment at the masque: “Let me live here ever: / So rare a wond'red father and a wise / Makes this place Paradise” (122-24); Prospero, afraid that the “spell” of the pageant will be “marr'd” (127), twice tells Ferdinand not to speak: “Sweet now, silence!” (124) and “Hush and be mute” (126). There are other problems with Ferdinand's astonishment. If “wise” is correct—and recent scholarship suggests that “wife” is actually the proper word⁴³—then Ferdinand can be seen to have shifted his wonder from Wonder to Prospero and his art, excluding love from his vision of the marvelous: the message of the masque would be lost. Second, the implications of Ferdinand's wishing to remain in “Paradise” are tremendous. If Orgel is right that in Miranda's marriage to Ferdinand Milan becomes part of the kingdom of Naples and Antonio is in effect blocked from the dukedom for life—an act not of reconciliation but of closet and nonbloody revenge⁴⁴—then Prospero is recreating his past error by losing his political senses in the enjoyment of the marvelous. For if Ferdinand is on the island, he is as much of a political nonentity as Claribel is in Tunis.

It takes the thought of Caliban and his plot against Prospero's life to bring Prospero out of his auto-astonishment and to prevent the past from recurring. He reacts by canceling the masque—“to a strange, hollow, and confused noise, they heavily vanish” (138 s.d.)—and describing the insubstantiality of shows, learning, civilization. Prospero addresses Ferdinand in the reveals speech, but he certainly is addressing himself, too, reminding himself once and for all of the transience of the marvelous. Prospero reminds himself—and Shakespeare reminds us—not to become too involved in what we are seeing. As Northrop Frye has commented, “the interruption is a part of the sense of the transient quality of the masque, but that transience gives us an insight into what, perhaps, all dramatic and ritual spectacles are about.”⁴⁵ What they should not be about, in a Shakespearean scheme, is an utterly pacifying idealism. Stephen Orgel has noted that the betrothal masque effectively banishes winter and death from its vision of nature, establishing “a world of ordered and controlled nature from which all the dangerous potentialities have been banished.”⁴⁶ This is a masque vision that Prospero—and Ben Jonson—could live with but that Shakespeare could not. He thus forces Prospero to interrupt his own masque, saving him from the harm that can—and in this play would—follow too much wonder and idealization.⁴⁷

Besides the comic spectacle of Trinculo and Stephano's being seduced by the “trumpery” (4.1.186) in Prospero's cave, the final wondrous display is that of Ferdinand and Miranda before the marveling Italian lords, and especially Alonso. Francis Barker and Peter Hulme have claimed that while the interruption of the masque is the climax of The Tempest, the climax of Prospero's play is the tableau of the lovers, discovered “playing at chess” (5.1.171 s.d.).⁴⁸ However, even this climax has an interruption, courtesy of Ferdinand, Miranda, and Shakespeare. Not content, as Lindley would have it, to be “subsumed into an iconic gesture,”⁴⁹ the lovers interrupt their own scene by injecting an element of playful falsehood, disturbing the vision of amorous perfection with quibbling:

MIR.
Sweet lord, you play me false.
FER.
                                                                                No, my dearest love,
I would not for the world.
MIR.
Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle,
And I would call it fair play.

(5.1.172-75)

Shakespeare resists even this chance to stabilize a vision of the marvelous: to keep Prospero's play from ending with a static emblem, he destabilizes the tableau. A strategic parallel can be found in the two endings of book 3 of The Faerie Queene. In the earlier edition (1590), Scudamour and Amoret passionately unite: “No word they spake, nor earthly thing they felt, / But like two senceles stocks in long embracement dwelt” (3.12.46.8-9); in the revised edition, the two continue to look for one another. Like Spenser, Shakespeare resists the frozen emblematic form for his wondrous couple.⁵⁰

This resistance to rigidity—even in wonderment, even in the state of being astonied—inevitably leads to The Tempest's final interruption: Prospero's epilogue.⁵¹ It becomes the responsibility of the audience to applaud and thus release Prospero from the dangers of the marvelous, the perils of the “paralyzed will”: “As you from crimes would pardon'd be / Let your indulgence set me free” (19-20). The audience must to some extent help unmake the wonder it has helped to realize. After a play that has problematized the marvelous—has seen it as both disease and cure, both corrupting and ennobling—Shakespeare, like Prospero, lets go.

While I do not see this play and its ending as an autobiographical farewell, I do see them as Shakespeare's clearest dramatic statement of both the power and the limitations of wonder. At its best, wonder can destabilize certainty, prejudices, and rigid, over-rational thought; it can reveal new worlds and New Worlds; it can discover the ways and habits of others, previously unimaginable; it can restore one's faith in a tired, seemingly dead world by making that world strange again. But at its worst, wonder and the marvelous can entrance and provide escape from responsibility; can lure one away from serious, effective social action—indeed, can provide an excuse for inaction, can establish illusory transcendence as a substitute for sublunary ethical activity.

The marvelous—and his role in making it—seems to have been increasingly fascinating for Shakespeare. But in The Tempest, while he does not evade responsibility, Shakespeare realizes that the real wonder will take place if and when his plays live on—not in the sense of literary immortality but in the actions and futures of the witnesses. As Harry Berger has written so eloquently of Shakespearean epilogues, “Now as the play turns to artifice before our eyes, as the characters turn back into actors, we are asked to share the playwright's responsibility. … This implies that profit is immanent in the very nature of artifice and fiction, but that fiction can fulfill itself only by going and invading life. It does this through open gestures of self-limitation, as when, by revealing itself as mere make-believe, it seals off its image, breaks the transference, releases the audience, and consigns the fate of its rounded image to their wills.”⁵² Uncertainty resonates in this vision because inevitably there is no guarantee of success. Shakespeare puts into question the power of wonder—that which allows rational certainty to be put in question in the first place. But this is very different from scoffing at the marvelous. Instead, Shakespeare uses the same interrogative methods that help stretch the limitations of the known on the method of questioning itself, investigating vehicle as well as tenor. Shakespeare, in his dramatic questings, establishes new credibility for the marvelous—as did Patrizi, as did Montaigne, as did many others. For while wonder is linked to fiction (and potentially to falsehood), it is also bound up with an unending search for new answers (or questions). As Montaigne declared, “A spirited mind never stops within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength; it has impulses beyond its powers of achievement. If it does not advance and press forward and stand at bay and clash, it is only half alive. Its pursuits are boundless and without form; its food is wonder, the chase, ambiguity.”⁵³ It is in this ongoing pursuit that wonder can diminish reason, can allow the pressing forward and clashing that the marvelous affords the spirited mind.

The notion of wonder, in the hands of writers like … Shakespeare, has changed: from being a stimulus to knowledge, which then subsumes and dissipates it, wonder becomes what cannot be assimilated rationally but instead exists in dynamic, dualistic play. … It is appropriate that an art that takes the audience out of themselves and suspends them in between the rational and affective should also take the author out of himself, stripping him, at least partially, of the control of his signifying power. In order to experience the marvelous, then, the audience must help to make it, thus becoming author and spectator, reasoner and wonderer.

Notes

1. See Felperin, Shakespearean Romance: “Only in The Winter's Tale is the power of art in human life seen as wholly positive” (275).

2. Orgel, introduction to The Tempest, Oxford Shakespeare, 13. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 158. See also Bradbrook, Living Monument, 215-26.

3. See Orgel, Oxford Tempest, 63.

4. G. Wilson Knight writes: “it is precisely such transcension with which The Tempest is concerned, whether in mythology, newly-fabricated symbol, or travellers' tales. It is therefore the revelatory quality of travel, the opening of vistas unguessed, not any particular location that is here important” (The Crown of Life, 250).

5. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs, 749.

6. Prospero could be seen as rejecting the ideas of Bacon, just beginning to circulate, about the pursuit of knowledge and mastery of nature that would become the foundation of the Baconian scientific program. But I agree with John S. Mebane that there is a Christian skepticism in Bacon's work that keeps him wary about the extent of human knowledge—a wariness that has a parallel in his hesitance to abandon completely the marvelous tradition. See chap. 3 above, and Mebane, Renaissance Magic, 169-72.

7. Hopkins, in Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance, 85. On Cusanus and learned ignorance, see Cassirer, Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Domandi, esp. 23-45; and Levao, Renaissance Minds, 5-38. On Shakespeare and this tradition, see Freedman, Staging the Gaze, 10-20, and the opening of chap. 6 above. For a general overview of the traditions of learned ignorance and the vanity of learning in the Renaissance, see Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance, 76-130.

8. See Gilman, “‘All Eyes.’” Prospero's is “a lesson learned not by mastering a body of knowledge,” Gilman writes, “but by suffering the loss of mastery and undergoing a therapeutic process of dislocation and recovery” (230).

9. I owe this reference to Charles Frey's “The Tempest and the New World.”

10. Coppélia Kahn, “The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family,” in Representing Shakespeare, ed. Schwartz and Kahn, 218.

11. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 14.

12. William Strachey, A true reportory of the wracke (1610), in Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimes, vol. 4, bk. 9, chap. 6, p. 1735 (also cited in Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare 8:275-76); emphasis mine. For a cultural-historical analysis of distraction in The Tempest, see Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere, 220-42.

13. Sundelson, “So Rare a Wonder'd Father,” in Representing Shakespeare, ed. Schwartz and Kahn, 43.

14. Felperin, Shakespearean Romance, 276.

15. But see Orgel's caveat on this imagery in the Oxford Tempest, 123.

16. The stage direction at act 3, scene 1, is not in the First Folio and is an emendation by Rowe; Prospero's comments at 74-76 make it clear, however, that he is an observer of this scene. The stage direction at act 3, scene 3, comes from the First Folio.

17. The phrase is Harry Berger's; see Second World and Green World, 153.

18. Chaudhuri, Infirm Glory, 203.

19. See the Strachey letter, in which the author resembles Spenser in the proem to book 2 (stanza 3) of The Faerie Queene: “I hope to deliver the world from a foule and generall errour. … Thus shall we make it appeare, That Truth is the daughter of Time, and that men ought not to deny every thing which is not subject to their owne sense” (A true reportory of the wracke, in Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimes vol. 4, bk. 9, chap. 6, p. 1738; also cited in Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare 8:280).

20. Berger, Second World and Green World, 173.

21. See Kernan, The Playwright as Magician, 129-59; and Mebane, Renaissance Magic, 176, 187-89.

22. “Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry its progress, ignorance its end” (Montaigne, “Of Cripples” [3.11], in Complete Essays, trans. Frame, 788). See also Hymen in As You Like It: “Feed yourselves with questioning; / That reason wonder may diminish” (5.4.138-39).

23. See my discussion of Trinculo's speech below.

24. Chaudhuri, Infirm Glory, 206.

25. Kay, “‘To Hear the Rest Untold,’” 224.

26. Brockbank, “The Tempest: Conventions of Art and Empire,” in Later Shakespeare, ed. Brown and Harris, 183. See also Kermode, introduction to the Arden Tempest, liv.

27. Felperin, Shakespearean Romance, 274-75.

28. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 116.

29. See Kernan, The Playwright as Magician, esp. 146-59. Kernan writes: “the image of the poet as magician, which Shakespeare did not invent but fixed and stabilized, holds in tension both the belief of the poets that their art commands spirits, and the view of a rationalistic and scientific society that art is mere trivial make-believe and an entertainment commodity manufactured for pay” (159).

30. Mowat, “Prospero, Agrippa, and Hocus-Pocus,” 301-2. For a more general discussion of the magical traditions vis-à-vis The Tempest, see Orgel, Oxford Tempest, 20-23. See also West, Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery, 80-95. For analogues to Prospero, see Archelaus in Amadis de Gaula, the hermit in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Ismeno in Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, Archimago in Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Cornelius Agrippa in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller.

31. On interruptions in The Tempest, see Frey, “The Tempest and the New World,” 41 n.25; Frye, “Romance as Masque,” in Shakespeare's Romances Reconsidered, ed. Kay and Jacobs, 11-39, esp. 38-39; Lindley, “Music, Masque, and Meaning in The Tempest,” in The Court Masque, ed. Lindley, 52-53; and Magnusson, “Interruption in The Tempest.” Frey's interest is the oscillation between history and romance that interruption affords Shakespeare. Lindley discusses interruption as frustration and notes that this topos is one normally associated with tragedy. Closest to mine, Magnusson's reading links syntactical and theatrical interruptions as indications of the play's restlessness with convention, stable meaning, and artistic order.

32. See chap. 3 above.

33. Berger, Second World and Green World, 36.

34. Frey, “The Tempest and the New World,” 38. See Hartog, Mirror of Herodotus, trans. Lloyd, esp. 230-37. See also Felperin, Shakespearean Romance, 253-61, and, more generally, Brockbank, “The Tempest: Conventions of Art and Empire”; Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, esp. 140-55; and Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions.

35. See Montaigne, “Of Cannibals” (1.31), in Complete Essays, trans. Frame, 150-59.

36. Brockbank, “The Tempest: Conventions of Art and Empire,” 194-95.

37. On Gonzalo and the limits to his knowledge, see Kay, “Gonzalo's ‘Lasting Pillars.’” See also Mebane, Renaissance Magic, who sees a less ambiguous and more generous treatment of Gonzalo (187-90).

38. On Caliban and the monster tradition, see Kermode's introduction to the Arden Tempest, xxxviii-xl.

39. On the role of language in the encounter with the wonders of the New World, see Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 16-39, and Marvelous Possessions, 86-118; and de Certeau, Writing of History, trans. Conley, 209-43, and Heterologies, trans. Massumi, 67-79.

40. Although I have never seen the play produced in this way, if I were directing it, I would continue to have storm noises blasting in the background until Prospero “lays down his mantle” (24 s.d.). This move would connect this scene with the other moments of interruption to which I think it is linked.

41. For another version of this topos in Shakespeare, see act 3, scene 6, of Timon of Athens.

42. Lindley, “Music, Masque, and Meaning in The Tempest,” 51.

43. See Roberts, “‘Wife or ‘Wise’—The Tempest l. 1786,” and Orgel, “Prospero's Wife,” in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Greenblatt, 228-29.

44. Orgel, introduction to the Oxford Tempest, 54-55.

45. Frye, “Romance as Masque,” 38-39.

46. Orgel, Illusion of Power, 45-46.

47. See also Spenser's treatment of the Bower of Bliss and the Garden of Adonis, in The Faerie Queene 2.12 and 3.6.

48. Barker and Hulme, “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. Drakakis, 203.

49. Lindley, “Music, Masque, and Meaning in The Tempest,” 54.

50. See Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, 420-21. The absence of the reunion scene in the revised Faerie Queene may be a casualty of Spenser's editing and the unfinished nature of the final edition. But the scene was not reintegrated, and this fact is worth noting given the absence of closure and fixity in the poem as a whole, perhaps epitomized in the Mutabilitie Cantos (first published in 1609). Shakespeare, then, can be seen as engaging in the kind of deferral that is characteristic of Spenser's approach to romance form. On Shakespeare's treatment of the emblematic, see Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm.

51. For a similar view of the intellectual and aesthetic fluidity urged by The Tempest, see Gilman, “‘All Eyes,’” 229-30.

52. Berger, Second World and Green World, 37-38.

53. Montaigne, “Of Experience” (3.13), in Complete Essays, trans. Frame, 818.