SOURCE: Leggatt, Alexander. “Shakespeare, The Tempest.” In Introduction to English Renaissance Comedy, pp. 109-34. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Leggatt analyzes The Tempest, suggesting that its principal concern is with the inversion and possible dissolution of various forms of power: individual, social, sexual, and linguistic.]

Modern criticism has put The Tempest, along with Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale, among Shakespeare's ‘romances’; but that category is a recent invention. The Tempest appears in the Folio of 1623 at the head of the comedies, making it the first play in the collection. It has also acquired a kind of mythic status as the last play in Shakespeare's career, his summing-up, though in fact it could have been written before The Winter's Tale, and Shakespeare went on afterwards to collaborate with Fletcher, possibly on Henry VIII, certainly on Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio. In recent years the habit of seeing it as Shakespeare's meditation on his art has been replaced by what is virtually a critical industry treating the play as a document in the history of colonialism.¹ The play has generally seemed to be making an important statement about something; yet in practice it has had some difficulty living up to its reputation as a masterpiece. In performance it is generally disappointing. Peter Brook, who has tackled The Tempest several times both in conventional productions and in experiments, has noted that ‘if you were to describe it to someone who did not know it then it would appear to be the greatest play in the world’, yet ‘the text itself never seemed able to deliver what it promised’.²

In order to free the play from its reputation, and simply see what it is doing, it may be useful to take it back to its first performances, in 1610 or 1611. Then it would have appeared not as one of Shakespeare's last romances, or as an attempt, successful or otherwise, at a world-class masterpiece, but as the King's Men's latest comedy, part of its repertory at the Globe and the newly acquired Blackfriars. …

It opens with the stage representing a storm-tossed ship on which a group of well-dressed aristocrats, angry and in a panic, are interfering with the work of the sailors who are trying to save the ship, and their lives. The social order has been inverted (or, if we prefer, has been revealed in its true light): everything depends on the workmen, and the best thing the aristocrats can do, and are singularly failing to do, is keep out of the way.³ As the Boatswain tells them, ‘You mar our labour. Keep to your cabins’ (1.1.13-14).⁴ Reminded that one of his passengers is the King of Naples, he is no more impressed than the sea is: ‘What cares these roarers for the name of king?’ (1.1.16-17).

This inversion opens the way for a period of experiment. The stage becomes an island, a natural identification at the Globe in particular, where it would be surrounded by the audience as an island is surrounded by the sea. On this island stage political events, displaced from reality, are acted out by performers. In an obvious sense this is the normal condition of theatre: kings, lords and rebels are impersonated by paid professionals, well down the social scale. The scripts they follow may (like The Malcontent) include sardonic suggestions that the great folk they impersonate are acting too. The Tempest's sense of displacement depends not just on conscious theatricality but on the stage's own impersonation of an island: cut off from society, where power struggles might seem to be about something, the characters, high and low, go on struggling for power, acting out rebellions that are reduced by the emptiness of the surroundings to pure performance, political comedies rendered ironic by the setting as the power struggles of The Malcontent are rendered ironic by the style.

From More's Utopia to Golding's Lord of the Flies, islands have been places to try out models of society. The honest old lord Gonzalo sees this island as a chance for a fresh start. If it were his to rule,

I'th'commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things, for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation.

(2.1.145-52)

He has created his ideal society by taking normal society and adding the word ‘no’; his speech is a catalogue of nouns evoking the social world. Besides the obvious irony (which Antonio and Sebastian are quick to point out) that this free society depends on Gonzalo's ownership and sovereignty, the play has already shown through the relations of Prospero and his servants that on this island, even with its meagre population, contract, service, territorial bounds, occupation and the exploitation of nature are matters of hot dispute. Even the idealized vision of nature Prospero presents for the lovers includes images of agricultural labour.⁵ Gonzalo's ideal commonwealth is like Oberon's vision of the imperial votaress untouched by love: no action could be founded on it, and The Tempest is full of action.

At once grave and playful, Gonzalo's speech toys with an attractive impossibility. At the opposite end of the scale is the carnivalesque absurdity of the rebellion conducted by Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban. They have a mini-tempest of their own at the beginning of 2.2, as though at this point a counter-play is beginning with a parody of the storm that opens the main play, transformed into low-life comedy by Trinculo's observation, ‘Yon same black cloud, you huge one, looks like a foul bombard that would shed his liquor’ (2.2.20-1). New birth, a serious idea when Prospero's victims come alive out of the sea, is acted out before our eyes when Stephano seems to pull Trinculo out of Caliban's body, equating birth with passing a bowel movement: ‘How cam'st thou to be the siege of this mooncalf?’ (2.2.101-2). Led into the horse-pond by Ariel, the conspirators suffer their own version of death by water: as Trinculo complains, ‘Monster, I do smell all horse-piss, at which my nose is in great indignation’ (4.1.198-9). Prospero speaks of drowning his book in the sea; Stephano's source of power is his bottle, also called his ‘book’ (2.2.124), and when he loses it in the horse-pond he determines to dive in after it (4.1.212-13).

Thinking he and his fellows are three-fifths of the island population, Trinculo remarks, ‘if th'other two be brained like us, the state totters’ (3.2.6). Gonzalo wants to dispense with the state and the offices that go with it, to create a peaceful life; Stephano wants to create a state that is all offices, and founded on violence: ‘Monster, I will kill this man. His daughter and I will be king and queen—save our graces!—and Trinculo and thyself shall be viceroys’ (3.2.104-6). Caliban already knows the state will be not just founded on violence but kept in order by it: watching Stephano beat Trinculo, he demands, ‘Beat him enough. After a little time / I'll beat him too’ (3.2.82-3). He knows how subjects are kept in line; Prospero has taught him.

Gonzalo imagines a world without commerce. For Stephano and Trinculo, as for the characters of Michaelmas Term, everything has market value. That includes Caliban: Stephano declares, ‘If I can recover him and keep him tame, I will not take too much for him;⁶ he shall pay for him that hath him, and that soundly’ (2.2.73-5). Trinculo plans to display Caliban as a sideshow freak and thinks of England as a particularly lucrative market: ‘When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian’ (2.2.31-2)—a disquieting joke for an audience that has just paid money to see The Tempest. Stephano's response to Caliban's stunning description of the island's music is ‘this will prove a brave kingdom to me, where I shall have my music for nothing’ (3.2.142-3). This commercialism is one of their links with Antonio and Sebastian. Prospero's ‘Two of these fellows you / Must know and own’ (5.1.274-5) follows hard upon the lords' mockery of the mutineers: ‘Will money buy 'em? … Very like. One of them / Is a plain fish, and no doubt marketable’ (5.1.265-6). Humiliated themselves, Antonio and Sebastian are trying to find someone more degraded. Their mockery, they think, opens a gap between themselves and the lower orders; Prospero's remark, triggering our awareness of the actual resemblance, seals it up.

Antonio and Sebastian resemble Stephano and Trinculo not just in their commercial mind-set but in their history of rebellion. Antonio has already usurped Prospero's dukedom, and in the process parodied his art. Recalling how Antonio wormed his way into power, Prospero thinks of his brother as a black magician who ‘new created / The creatures that were mine, I say: or changed 'em’ (1.2.81-2). As Prospero deals in deceptive illusions, Antonio fooled himself, making himself believe ‘He was indeed the Duke’ (1.2.103). And as Caliban rebels only to get a new master, Antonio won the dukedom at the cost of submission to the King of Naples. By tempting Sebastian to kill Alonso and become King in his stead, Antonio plans to solve that problem. Sebastian promises to release him from paying tribute (2.1.290-2), and, given that Antonio is clearly the more decisive of the two, the prospect is that from now on Milan will dominate Naples.

But he is also tempting Sebastian into a re-enactment of his own crime, and in that re-enactment there is not just something second-hand but something absurd. Given that they have no prospect of returning to Naples, this is a palace revolution without a palace. If the murder will make Sebastian king of anything, it will make him king of an island he and Antonio have already insisted is barren—as bare, in fact, as the stage of the Globe. One recalls Fortinbras conquering a tiny patch of Poland, not worth farming, or Voltaire's gibe about Britain and France fighting over a few arpents of snow (Canada). As there is something dream-like about the world of The Malcontent, there is something dream-like about this conspiracy: Sebastian speaks more truly than he knows when he jokingly accuses Antonio of talking in his sleep (2.1.209-10). Believing in the power of the sword, Antonio insists that all it will take for Sebastian to become king is ‘three inches’ of ‘obedient steel’ (2.1.281). But steel in this play is disobedient. When in the show of the disappearing banquet the courtiers try to draw their swords, they are unable to lift them and, recalling the Boastwain's ‘What cares these roarers for the name of king?’, Ariel tells them they might as well fight the sea (3.3.61-8). Prospero's power, like Bacon's, renders the weapon of the aristocrat useless.

The disappearing banquet introduces another strand in the play's sardonic deflation of power and its symbols. Much has been made of The Tempest's relation to the court masque, mostly because the show Prospero puts on for Ferdinand and Miranda, with its allegorical dialogue and its celebratory dance, recalls the masques of the Jacobean court.⁷ Ben Jonson's The Masque of Queens (1606) is a classic example of the form; it begins with an antimasque of hags, who stage a grotesque dance in the midst of which, to a single loud note of music, the setting, a smoky hell-mouth, is miraculously transformed into the gorgeous House of Fame. The hags vanish; the masque continues with a celebration of famous queens of legend and a tribute to James's consort Anne. It concludes with a series of dances, which would have been followed by a banquet. But the relation of The Tempest to shows like The Masque of Queens is far from straightforward. While the actual Jacobean masques, with texts by Jonson and designs by Inigo Jones, depended on the presence of the real court with King James in the place of honour in the audience, Prospero's wedding show, if it is a masque at all, is a masque within a play. As Lyly's Cynthia is (at times) an onstage imitation of Elizabeth, but hardly Elizabeth herself, this is an onstage imitation of a masque, imperfect and truncated, displaced from its natural setting as the political struggles are displaced from theirs, on to the island which is also a stage. Jones's spectacular scenery, a key element in the court masque, is missing. There is no monarch in the audience to be celebrated as the source of light, order and power, as James is in the typical masque; if any power is celebrated here it is that of the maker, Prospero. The only transformation scene is the sudden, confused and confusing breakup of the vision.

It is worth noting that in The Tempest as a whole the usual sequence of a court celebration—antimasque, masque, banquet—is reversed. The banquet comes first. The courtiers think they are being welcomed to a feast by courteous islanders. Instead, to the noise of thunder and lightning, the table vanishes;⁸ then Ariel appears as a harpy and lectures them on their sins, reversing the flattery courtiers could expect when they were addressed by mythical figures in a masque. Jonson's Oberon, performed around the same time as The Tempest, paid tribute to Prince Henry as James's heir; Ariel says of the powers he serves, ‘Thee of thy son, Alonso, / They have bereft’ (3.3.75-6). The spirits, parodying their initial courtesy, then reappear and remove the banquet, with rude gestures (‘mocks and mows’ (3.3.82.2)). The betrothal masque also breaks up in disorder when in the middle of the dance Prospero recalls Caliban. Caliban and his fellow conspirators then appear as antimasque figures, embodiments of comic disorder. The difference is that antimasque figures normally appear first, to be transformed or banished as the true masque begins; but Caliban and his cohorts have in effect banished the masque.

The language of the masque included rich costumes, and fine clothing was an important part of the courtly ethos.⁹ As the courtiers are fooled with a banquet, Stephano and Trinculo (like Lethe and the Country Wench) are led astray by ‘glistering apparel’ (4.1.193.1) that the uncourtly Caliban recognizes as ‘trash’ (4.1.223). Again there is an ironic link with Antonio, who sees his successful usurpation as a chance to dress better: ‘look how well my garments sit upon me, / Much feater than before’ (2.1.270-1). Ariel describes how he has supplied suitable music and dance for the antimasque:

                                                  Then I beat my tabor,
At which like unbacked colts they pricked their ears,
Advanced their eyelids, lifted up their noses
As they smelt music …
                                                                                                    At last I left them,
I'th' filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell,
There dancing up to th'chins, that the foul lake
O'erstunk their feet.

(4.1.175-84)

The symbolic language of the masque, culminating in dancing, celebrated the power of the court. The Tempest comically subverts that language.

The business of the masque was to mystify power by turning it into music, dance and spectacle. As master of illusion Prospero can do that too; but the play is also clear about how much his power depends on the use of force, even of torture. The masquing Dukes of The Malcontent, we remember, had weapons under their costumes. Prospero threatens Caliban, ‘For this be sure tonight thou shalt have cramps, / Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up’ (1.2.325-6). He has Caliban and his cohorts hunted as though they were animals, and commands Ariel,

Go charge my goblins that they grind their joints
With dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews
With agèd cramps, and more pinch-spotted make them
Than pard or cat o'mountain.

(4.1.259-62)

To an audience used to seeing public torture—whipping, branding and mutilation, not to mention hanging, drawing and quartering—this might seem mild; but it would not seem fanciful. This was how they were used to seeing criminals dealt with.¹⁰ Punishment seems to have a salutary effect on Stephano, who by the last scene has lost his identity in pain—‘I am not Stephano, but a cramp’—and who replies to Prospero's challenge, ‘You'd be king o'the isle, sirrah?’ with a rueful pun, ‘I should have been a sore one then’ (5.1.286-8). To put it one way, he is reformed; to put it another way, he has been brought to self-contempt by torture.

Incarceration is another stock punishment. Prospero, reminding Ariel that Sycorax imprisoned him in a pine, threatens to imprison him in an oak (1.2.274-96). Caliban complains,

                                                                                here you sty me
In this hard rock, while you do keep from me
The rest o'th' island.

(1.2.342-4)

The play is full of images of bowed bodies: Prospero threatens Ferdinand, ‘I'll manacle thy neck and feet together’ (1.2.462), recalling Sycorax, ‘who with age and envy / Was grown into a hoop’ (1.2.257-8). Caliban repeatedly stoops as he tries to kiss Stephano's foot, making literal the action of Antonio when he submitted to Alonso and bent ‘The dukedom yet unbowed—alas, poor Milan!—/ To most ignoble stooping’ (1.2.115-16).

The free movement and shape-shifting of Ariel may seem to contrast with these images of stooping and imprisonment; but Ariel too is in bondage, against which he chafes. His initial dispute with Prospero, in which each accuses the other of forgetting the terms of their contract and Prospero is reduced to Sycorax-like threats, is a burst of surprising anger on both sides.¹¹ There is arguably something of the whipped dog in Ariel's later question, ‘Do you love me, master? No?’, though the tone of Prospero's reply, ‘Dearly, my delicate Ariel’ (4.1.48-9), suggests real affection and warns us not to reduce the relations of these two characters to a mere power struggle. Like Robin Goodfellow when he recounts his practical jokes, Ariel describes a shape-shifting power that would be hard to show on stage: ‘Sometimes I'd divide / And burn in many places’ (1.2.198-9). The shape-shifting we see, like that of Quomodo's spirits, is a mastery of stage disguise: Ariel becomes a sea-nymph, a harpy and (assuming the same actor is used) Ceres. When in his mockery of Stephano and company he plays the tabor and pipe, he would recall the famous Elizabethan clown Richard Tarlton. If we can imagine Ariel doing a Chaplin impersonation we may get something like the original effect. What we never see is Ariel's true form. When he celebrates his coming freedom—

Where the bee sucks, there suck I,
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry;
On the bat's back do I fly …

(5.1.88-91)

—we realize that this is the true Ariel, and all we have seen is the form he adopts when appearing to Prospero, the form of a life-sized actor. As Ariel was imprisoned in the pine, he is now imprisoned, temporarily, in the body of the actor who plays him. We never see him released.¹² Singing of his freedom, he uses the present tense, while, in his adopted body, he is helping dress Prospero. It is as though he is simultaneously free and bound, as he is when darting around in different shapes on Prospero's orders.¹³

The paradox of bondage in freedom, and freedom in bondage, is explored more overtly through Caliban and Ferdinand. Caliban's cry as he rebels against Prospero—‘Freedom, high-day! High-day, freedom! Freedom, high-day, freedom!’ (2.2.181-2)—is a drunken frenzy made sharply ironic by the way he grovels to his new master Stephano. As Ariel sings of his freedom while dressing Prospero, Caliban sings of his, while proclaiming, ‘'Ban, 'Ban, Ca-Caliban / Has a new master’ (2.2.179-80).¹⁴ The next thing the audience sees is Ferdinand carrying a log, doing the job Caliban has rejected. He makes it an image of his service to Miranda:

The very instant that I saw you did
My heart fly to your service, there resides
To make me slave to it, and for your sake
Am I this patient log-man.

(3.1.63-6)

When the lovers exchange vows they promise service to each other, and Ferdinand, kneeling, offers himself as husband to Miranda ‘with a heart as willing / As bondage e'er of freedom’ (3.1.88-9). The idea of love as service, which can be a dead metaphor, is given life by the literal servitude Ferdinand is performing. For him the service of love is freedom. The final revelation of the lovers playing chess may give us a last image of the bent body, as they bow toward each other over the chessboard.

Accepting bondage gives the lovers, and Ariel, the freedom they want. Physical pain seems to do Stephano good, and emotional pain seems good for Alonso. Prospero succeeds with Alonso because, through the apparent death of his son, he can make him suffer; unlike Antonio and Sebastian Alonso cares for someone other than himself, and this means he can be hurt. Punishment has wrought in Caliban only resentful submission, but, when he sees Prospero dressed as Duke of Milan, he is impressed as he never was by Prospero the magician: ‘How fine my master is!’ (5.1.262). The glistering apparel did not impress him, but, when clothing becomes part of the language of power, it works on him as the sight of the Count's boots works on Jean in Strindberg's Miss Julie. He determines to ‘be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace’ (5.1.294-5). So far the play seems to be endorsing the wisdom of punishment and extolling the virtue of submission.

But there is one set of characters unaccounted for: Prospero's spirits. Like Ariel they appear only in the forms in which Prospero conjures them up—nymphs, reapers, hounds. Giving Ariel power over them, Prospero calls them ‘the rabble’ (4.1.37); he speaks of releasing them ‘from their confines’ (4.1.121) to perform for him, as though backstage in his magic theatre is a row not of dressing rooms but of prison cells. Caliban, thinking Trinculo is one of the spirits, cries, ‘Thou dost me yet but little hurt; thou wilt anon, I know it by thy trembling. Now Prosper works upon thee’ (2.2.76-7). This suggests the agony of the spirits as Prospero's power moves through them, a kind of demonic possession in reverse. When Caliban says of the spirits, ‘They all do hate him / As rootedly as I’ (3.2.92-3), there is no reason to disbelieve him. (Caliban, so far as we can tell, never lies.) Prospero's surrender of his magic presumably releases them, but the play makes no particular point of this, as it does about Ariel's freedom. This reflects Prospero's own relative indifference to them: in plantation terms, Ariel is his personal servant, who works with him in the house, and with whom he develops a close relationship; the spirits are the field hands. In his final song, Ariel gives a brief glimpse of his independent life in his own words; the only glimpse we have of the spirits' independent life comes in the speech in which Prospero surrenders his magic (5.1.33-40). He describes them as free nature spirits, like Ariel; but it is his description, not theirs. Readings of The Tempest as a play about colonialism naturally concentrate on Caliban as oppressed native. But Caliban is an islander in the same sense that (for example) I am a Canadian—born there of a mother who was born elsewhere. It may be that the spirits are the true natives, and that the play's refusal or inability to see them in anything other than the shapes they take for the imaginations of the invaders replicates the European understanding, and misunderstanding, of the natives of what for them was the new world.

The Tempest, like the court masque, celebrates order in music and dance. But this vision is in tension with images of disorder, and the play is full not just of music but of confused noise. As The Malcontent begins with jarring, out-of-tune music, The Tempest begins with ‘A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning’ (1.1.0.1); and as the ship sinks we hear ‘A confused noise within’ (1.1.59.1).¹⁵ The mariners' cry, ‘We split, we split!’, conveys both the breaking of the ship and the breaking of human ties in death: ‘“Farewell, my wife and children!” “Farewell, brother!”’ (1.1.60-1). Things fall apart. We hear also of the groaning of the imprisoned Ariel, the roaring of the hunted mutineers, the ‘strange and several noises / Of roaring, shrieking, howling, jingling chains’ that wake the mariners (5.1.232-3). The ‘hollow burst of bellowing, / Like bulls, or rather lions’ (2.1.309-10) that Sebastian and Antonio claim to have heard is their own invention, but it confirms the general impression that the isle is full not just of noises but of noise. The climax of the play's vision of order is the wedding masque; and as it breaks up we hear what may well be the natural sound of the spirits when their forms and voices are not being shaped by Prospero: ‘to a strange, hollow and confused noise, they heavily vanish’ (4.1.138.4-5). This is a play full of order, a play full of meaningful symbols, a play that responds almost too readily to allegorical readings. But at this moment we hear the sound of chaos, of unmaking, of non-meaning. Like the sound of the echo in the Marabar caves in A Passage to India it flattens meaning into absurdity. Prospero forces the spirits to mean something, on his terms. The confused noise we hear is the sound of his control relaxing. It may be their own natural language, perfectly meaningful to them; but we will never know.

Friar Bacon controls, initially with confidence, demonic forces from a familiar, popular Hell. His spirits are devils, and appear as such. Prospero controls, with palpable effort, powers whose true nature we never quite see. He determines the way they appear to us, and in that way his hold over the audience is greater than Bacon's; but his power in the long run is no less problematic. Up to a point, he has unusual control over the audience. He fools us as he fools the other characters, revealing that the shipwreck we thought we saw in 1.1 was an illusion.¹⁶ In A Midsummer Night's Dream the lovers express in their own words what it feels like to wake up after their night in the forest, poised between dream and reality. At the equivalent point in The Tempest, as the courtiers come out of his spell, it is Prospero who describes for us what they are feeling (5.1.64-8). His magic may be dissolving, but his quasi-authorial control of the narrative remains. Yet his own nature is curiously fissured. Like Malevole-Altofront he is a displaced ruler, and this gives him a split identity. As Duke, magician and father he has different roles, each with its own kind of authority. While Malevole-Altofront seems unable to keep his roles apart, Prospero seems unable to hold his roles together. Before he tells Miranda the story of the loss of his dukedom, he takes off his magician's robe, with the words, ‘Lie there, my art’ (1.2.25). Here as in Michaelmas Term, garments create identity, and before putting on the father and exiled ruler Prospero has to put off the magician. At the end of the play he puts off the magician again and dons a hat and rapier to become ‘As I was sometime Milan’ (5.1.86). He makes Miranda sleep before he calls up Ariel, as though she is not allowed to watch the magician at work. It is striking that Miranda and Ariel, the two characters with whom Prospero has the closest relationships, have no relationship with each other. Ariel never refers to Miranda, and Miranda shows no knowledge that Ariel exists. Prospero's most acute problems come from his inability to be ruler and magician at once: concentrating on magic lost him his dukedom, and he surrenders that magic before he resumes office. Prospero's claim as he interrupts the masque that he simply forgot Caliban's conspiracy is startling; but it takes its place with other lapses of attention that reveal disconnections in his own nature. Miranda exclaims she has never seen him so angry (4.1.144-5); perhaps his inattention to Caliban recalls his inattention to Antonio.¹⁷

As he describes that first lapse, his own language suggests that he did more than create a vacuum that made Antonio's evil possible: he actually created that evil:

                                                                                my trust,
Like a good parent, did beget of him
A falsehood in its contrary as great
As my trust was.

(1.2.93-6)

In that respect his magic was positively dangerous, and he was responsible. This may explain the lingering anger that makes him couch his forgiveness of Antonio in such vindictive language:

For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother
Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive
Thy rankest fault—all of them—and require
My dukedom of thee, which perforce I know
Thou must restore.

(5.1.130-4)

There is an unresolved tension here, as though the person Prospero really cannot forgive is himself.

As he reviews the power of his magic just before he surrenders it, he conveys again a sense of its danger. His speech draws on a speech of Medea in Ovid's Metamorphoses, linking what we may have seen as Prospero's white magic with the black magic of the witch, collapsing Cynthia into Dipsas. He speaks not of the harmony he has created but of the destruction he has caused with storms and earthquakes, and he rises to a startling climax:

                                                            Graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art.

It is at this point that he reins himself in, and declares, ‘But this rough magic / I here abjure’ (5.1.48-51). Though some Renaissance texts saw raising the dead, when performed by a true magus doing the will of God, as a legitimate miracle,¹⁸ Sir Walter Raleigh gave the conventional Protestant view when he warned that those who think they are raising the dead are really raising the Devil.¹⁹ By one interpretation that is what Marlowe's Faustus is doing when he conjures up Helen of Troy; and Greene's Bacon deals quite frankly with devils. We never see Prospero go so far; but as he surrenders his magic he lets us glimpse its link with the demonic.

Dangerously powerful in some directions, Prospero's magic is limited in others. He depends on Caliban for the most ordinary tasks: ‘We cannot miss him. He does make our fire, / Fetch in our wood’ (1.2.311-12). Prospero's magic, we gather, could produce the illusion of fire, but not a fire that would actually cook anything. He can produce illusions and torments for his victims; but he cannot get right into their minds and transform them. If they respond to external experience, as Alonso and possibly Stephano do, they can change themselves. But the silence of Antonio and Sebastian suggests they have resisted. In the last scene, as the courtiers wake, Ariel leaves the stage, and from that point Prospero deals with the others not as magician to victim but as man—and occasionally father or ruler—to man, drawing on that common humanity Ariel's compassion made him acknowledge (5.1.17-30). But while he embraces Alonso and Gonzalo (it is the touch of a human pulse that makes Alonso feel his sanity restored (5.1.113-15)) he means to keep Antonio and Sebastian under control by the ordinary art of blackmail:

But you, my brace of lords, were I so minded,
I here could pluck his highness' frown upon you,
And justify you traitors. At this time
I will tell no tales.

(5.1.126-9)

In effect, he has a file on them; his magic gone, he is learning the tougher arts of politics. If he cannot reform them, he can at least intimidate them. Marston rendered the ordered ending of The Malcontent ironic by speeding it up. Shakespeare slows down the ending of The Tempest, exploring the failures and limitations of the final order as well as its real successes, making it not too swift to be true but too real to be simple.

Matters of political power—who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out—are not, however, the only issues the play explores. The story of how Prospero came to the island, a story we have to piece together from the words of different speakers each of whom has an interest in telling it his way,²⁰ involves a whole network of relationships. Prospero, telling the story to his fellow Europeans, claims he ‘was landed’ on the island ‘To be the lord on't’ (5.1.161-2), as though his authority rests on a kind of Manifest Destiny. Caliban tells another story:

This island's mine by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou tak'st from me. When thou cam'st first,
Thou strok'st me and made much of me; wouldst give me
Water with berries in't, and teach me how
To name the bigger light and how the less,
That burn by day and night; and then I loved thee,
And showed thee all the qualities o'th'isle.

(1.2.331-7)

Though he begins by asserting his own territorial claim through inheritance (a claim perhaps as arbitrary as Prospero's), Caliban goes on to describe a lost community of mutual support and co-operation. He taught the newcomers about the island, and they taught him the names and uses of things (though he has either forgotten the words ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ or is stubbornly refusing to use them). Each had something to give the other, and their mutual need seems to have been touched with mutual affection.

But somehow this Edenic existence, this time of naming, discovery and mutual help, went wrong, and the community was replaced by a rigid power structure:

                    I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king, and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o' th' island.

(1.2.341-4)

As Prospero does not say how he came to master the island, and has to be reminded, Caliban does not say what went wrong, what produced the fall in this Eden. Prospero does:

                                                            I have used thee—
Filth as thou art—with humane care, and lodged thee
In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate
The honour of my child.

Caliban is unrepentant:

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

(1.2.345-50)

He and Prospero read the event quite differently. Their languages are different: Prospero uses words—violate, honour, child—that seem to mean nothing to Caliban. Caliban was following a breeding instinct so impersonal he uses the passive voice for it (‘would't had been done’). Prospero centres his accusation on the threat to Miranda; Caliban ignores her. Even their offspring would be simple reproductions of him, and him alone. Miranda's own version is cryptic and general:

                                                                                But thy vile race—
Though thou didst learn—had that in't which good natures
Could not abide to be with.

(1.2.357-9)

It was Miranda who taught Caliban language;²¹ but her own language lapses into generalization when she recalls, or refuses to recall, what he tried to do to her in return.

The biblical sense of the word ‘know’ implies that one's first sexual experience is an initiation into a new kind of understanding. It is, in effect, learning a new language. This is the terrible irony of the relationship of Caliban and Miranda, as her initiation of his mind is met with his attempted initiation of her body. Miranda conveys what she did for Caliban:

                    When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known.

(1.2.354-7)

Without language, he knew nothing; he in turn tried to ‘know’ her. Miranda's claim recalls the assumption of European explorers that the natives were speaking meaningless gabble.²² But Caliban never claims he had a language before Miranda taught him hers; it was a strange, hollow and confused noise he himself did not understand. His stinging retort—

You taught me language, and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!

(1.2.362-4)

—shows that teaching him language was, from his point of view, an injury. It lets him shape, feel and understand his torment.

Power, knowledge, sex and language—all these things are bound up in the tangle of mutual resentment and misunderstanding that binds these three characters. Caliban is now so trapped in the mind-set thus created that when he encounters Stephano and Trinculo he can only replicate his relationship with Prospero and Miranda, even as he thinks of himself as rebelling. Giving him drink—and perhaps forcing the bottle into his mouth, hinting at the violation with which Caliban threatened Miranda—Stephano orders, ‘Open your mouth—here is that will give language to you, cat’ (2.2.78-9). Caliban in return offers service and teaching:

I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts,
Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how
To snare the nimble marmoset.

(2.2.162-4)

He is trying to restore something like the original community. But the subjection Prospero has forced on him he now offers voluntarily and abjectly to Stephano; and while he still thinks of Miranda as good breeding stock he offers her to his new master: ‘she will become thy bed, I warrant, / And bring thee forth brave brood’ (3.2.102-3). Paying tribute to her beauty, he has advanced (or declined) in his view of Miranda far enough to see her as a trophy. Like the women of The Malcontent, she is a political trophy, the legitimate prize of whoever wins the island.

Caliban's return to his old master is distasteful to modern readers who would rather see him as a successful rebel. (For that, we must turn to Aimé Césare's Une Tempête (1969), where Prospero remains on the island, doomed to lose the power struggle with Caliban.) But there is some question about what that return means. Caliban grovelling and seeking for grace is not all that happens. Caliban not only has problems with language, he creates problems of language for others. What is he? Stephano and Trinculo see him variously as fish, monster and devil. Is he human? Miranda counts him as human, calling Ferdinand ‘the third man that e'er I saw’ (1.2.446). His mother was Sycorax, and witches are human. Prospero's accusation that his father was the Devil (1.2.319-20) is open to question on two counts: it may be Prospero's own anger talking, and in any case paternity is unprovable. In the end Prospero accepts and acknowledges Caliban in a manner that raises more questions still: ‘this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine’ (5.1.275-6). ‘Thing of darkness’ keeps Caliban's identity unsettled; ‘mine’ opens many possibilities. Has Caliban found his true, or at least adopted father? Is Prospero acknowledging Caliban as the darkness, the cursing anger and unbridled desire in himself, including his own incestuous feelings for Miranda?²³ (As he and Caliban cursed each other on Caliban's first entrance, they sounded disconcertingly alike.) Or does ‘mine’ simply mean ‘my slave, my responsibility’? Prospero's final order to Caliban suggests the old master-servant relationship restored, but with a difference:

                                                                      Go, sirrah, to my cell;
Take with you your companions. As you look
To have my pardon, trim it handsomely.

(5.1.291-3)

He puts Caliban in charge of the work party, as he put Ariel in charge of the spirits; he gives him responsibility. And this is not just the brute labour of carrying logs: he expects Caliban to show a bit of taste. In some way a new relationship is beginning, as each character reaches out to the other. It remains incomplete: Caliban's response when Prospero acknowledges him is ‘I shall be pinched to death’ (5.1.276); he is still fixed in the old fear. When he comes out of it with his promise to ‘be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace’ Prospero replies, ‘Go to, away’ (5.1.294-7). But on one point there is a connection: ordered to trim the cell, Caliban replies, ‘Ay, that I will’ (5.1.294). Whatever remains to be negotiated, the master-servant relationship is restored, and for the first time Caliban obeys an order without complaining.

But we have had hints that this relationship is not all there is between the characters, and the affinities between Prospero and Caliban are not confined to Prospero's dark side. In his tribute to the music of the island, ‘The isle is full of noises’ (3.2.133-41), Caliban has not only shown he can do more with Miranda's language than curse; he reveals a link between his imagination and Prospero's:

                                                            then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

(3.2.138-41)

Two scenes later Prospero declares,

                    like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

(4.1.151-8)

What for Caliban is a dream is for Prospero life itself; Caliban wants to possess the dream, Prospero is willing to surrender it.²⁴ What links them is a sense of vanishing glory. They do not hear each other's speeches; but if Prospero seems to be moving, however tentatively and incompletely, back towards Caliban at the end of the play, it may be because they both know what it is to be dispossessed.

The relationship Prospero and Miranda have with Caliban is a dark version of the relationship they have with Ferdinand. As Caliban is the central figure in the story of how they came to the island, Ferdinand is equally crucial to their leaving it. Though he appears in the first scene he does not speak, and this means that on his entry in 1.2 he is virtually a new character, embodying a fresh start.²⁵ Miranda has no point of reference for him: ‘What is't?—a spirit?’ (1.1.410). She herself, after spending most of her life with only her father and Caliban, is ready for a fresh start. In her first scene, she seems to be rebelling against her father, demanding that he stop the tempest and rebuking him for his cruelty:

Had I been any god of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere
It should the good ship so have swallowed, and
The fraughting souls within her.

(1.2.10-13)

This anticipates the way Ariel rebukes Prospero for his treatment of his victims: ‘if you now beheld them, your affections / Would become tender … Mine would, sir, were I human’ (5.1.18-20). A gap between Miranda and her father opens when, as he tells the story of his life, he keeps checking her level of attention: ‘Dost thou attend me? … Thou attend'st not!’ (1.2.78, 87). She is presumably listening as hard as she can, but it can never be hard enough for Prospero; the story can never matter to her as it does to him. When she actually meets the characters of Prospero's story her exclamation, ‘How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is!’ (5.1.182-3) confirms his suspicion that she was not really paying attention.²⁶ But it is, appropriately, in her relationship with Ferdinand that Prospero's control over her weakens most obviously. She lets her name slip out: ‘Miranda.—O my father, / I have broke your hest to say so’ (3.1.36-7). She is too excited to follow the model of conventional female behaviour he has taught her:

                                                                                But I prattle
Something too wildly, and my father's precepts
I therein do forget.

(3.1.57-9)

In a play full of forgetting Miranda's acts of forgetfulness are creative, freeing her from her father's control.

She has an instinctive rapport with Ferdinand. Even as she watches the ship sink she laments it ‘had, no doubt, some noble creature in her’ (1.2.7). She knows there was more than one passenger, but her imagination already senses that one in particular matters. When they first meet he addresses her as ‘O you wonder!’ (1.2.427), sensing her name before he literally knows it. It is only in 3.1, long after he has fallen in love and proposed marriage, that he goes through the formality of asking her name. (Hello, I love you, won't you tell me your name?) The rapport is more remarkable in view of the wide gap of experience between them. The cultural gap between Prospero and Caliban over his attempt on Miranda (social code versus natural behaviour) is duplicated when Ferdinand refuses to let Miranda carry logs for him, claiming it would be dishonour. She replies that she's just as capable of carrying logs as he is, and, if she feels like it, why shouldn't she? (3.1.25-31). There is also a wide disparity of sexual experience. Miranda has known no member of the opposite sex apart from her father and Caliban; Ferdinand admits to having loved ‘Full many a lady’ (3.1.39).

When they first meet, the interwoven ideas of language, teaching and sex, so crucial to her experience with Caliban, are recalled and transformed:

FERDINAND.
                                        Vouchsafe my prayer
May know if you remain upon this island,
And that you will some good instruction give
How I may bear me here. My prime request,
Which I do last pronounce, is—O you wonder!—
If you be maid or no?
MIRANDA.
                                                                                          No wonder, sir,
But certainly a maid.
FERDINAND.
                                                                                My language! Heavens!

(1.2.423-9)

As he knows her name, they know each other's language. We can imagine a wide gap closing slowly and painfully as Miranda taught Caliban words. Here the gap closes instantly. His marriage proposal, which comes only a few lines later, makes her virginity the only condition (1.2.448-50). His frankness makes him seem as direct as Caliban, but unlike Caliban he cares about the codes of society. Like the wood of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the island (popular fantasies about islands notwithstanding) is no place for free love. Even in Gonzalo's back-to-basics commonwealth the women will be ‘innocent and pure’ (2.1.153); and Miranda, ignorant about so much, knows that her ‘modesty’ is ‘The jewel in my dower’ (3.1.53-4). Ferdinand evidently agrees. He and and Caliban both get straight to business; but the business is radically different.

Prospero has a curious relationship to the lovers. While they seem to be falling in love on their own initiative, his aside, ‘It goes on, I see, / As my soul prompts it’ (1.2.420-1), suggests that his desire for the match is so great he is somehow making it happen; or at least he would like to think so. In 3.1, imagining they are alone, they have a long, frank conversation, on which Prospero eavesdrops. It is hard to separate benevolent interest from distasteful prurience. At the same time he admits a gap between himself and the lovers: ‘So glad of this as they I cannot be, / Who are surprised withal’ (3.1.92-3). Here again there is a double effect: Prospero's control and prescience make this affair something he has expected, even created. But as there is no surprise in it for him, he also recognizes that he can never experience the delight of first love as they do. In that way they have the edge over him. The author, and the audience, may be closer to Prospero at this point. We always seem to be looking at Ferdinand and Miranda from a distance, as though the author of The Tempest could not write so directly of young love as could the author of, say, As You Like It.

Prospero also imposes a narrative design on a love that seems too straightforward to need it, as though following, arbitrarily, the dramatist's principle that a love story needs a complication:

They are both in either's powers; but this swift business
I must uneasy make lest too light winning
Make the prize light.

(1.2.451-3)

It is not enough for them to be in each other's powers; they must also be in his. Yet Prospero's interference is not purely arbitrary. The fact that he gives Ferdinand Caliban's job of carrying wood shows he is testing the Caliban in him. There is a sharp juxtaposition of the two characters, as Ferdinand's first appearance on the island follows immediately on Caliban's exit, and the song that brings the prince on to the stage runs backwards from the final harmony of the joining of lovers—‘Come unto these yellow sands, / And then take hands’—to a warning of approaching danger—‘Hark, hark! … The watch-dogs bark!’ and a suggestion of phallic impudence, ‘The strain of strutting Chanticleer’ (1.2.374-85).²⁷ Making Ferdinand unable to use his sword, Prospero seems to be inducing impotence, as witches were sometimes accused of doing: ‘I can here disarm thee with this stick / And make thy weapon drop’ (1.2.473-4).²⁸ Even when Prospero relents and accepts Ferdinand, he gives him not just one lecture on premarital chastity but two. Ferdinand seems a decent young man who hardly needs this treatment. But Caliban's attempt on Miranda has created an anxiety in Prospero that he finds hard to shake—another reason why the sudden memory of Caliban makes Prospero so angry, and destroys the wedding masque.

The vision of harmony and fertility that the masque creates is oddly sexless: it is all about the land and the crops, ‘Earth's increase, foison plenty, / Barns and garners never empty’ (4.1.110-11). Venus and Cupid are explicitly banished, and Cupid, like Ferdinand, is reduced to infancy, his weapons broken (4.1.99-101). As it imagines a year without a winter—‘Spring come to you at the farthest, / In the very end of harvest!’ (4.1.114-15)—the masque seems to imagine fertility without sex, as though Ferdinand and Miranda could have children without doing what Caliban wanted to do. Sex in Michaelmas Term was a crude commercial transaction, hole-sale. To Prospero it seems more a dangerous, magic power, which can easily become black magic if the timing is wrong. As Prospero is aware of the importance of timing in his own magic (1.2.180-4), he warns Ferdinand that if he anticipates the wedding night

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

(4.1.19-22)

(In George Lamming's novel Water with Berries (1971), the character who corresponds to Miranda is gang-raped, leaving her both sexually frigid and compulsively promiscuous.) Ferdinand's assurance of premarital chastity embodies not coldness but an eagerness like that of Theseus. He too knows the importance of timing; by waiting he will make the magic more powerful. No temptation, he promises, will

                                                                      take away
The edge of that night's celebration
When I shall think or Phoebus's steeds are foundered,
Or night kept chained below.

(4.1.28-31)

Prospero replies, ‘Fairly spoke’, but it may be this frank expression of desire that a few lines later leads him to give Ferdinand a second lecture (4.1.51-6).

The court party have come from a political marriage, that of Claribel and the King of Tunis, that seems to have been unpopular with everyone including the bride (2.1.121-9). There is of course a political dimension in the linking of Ferdinand and Miranda, but it goes far beyond that. Chess is a game of sex and power;²⁹ it is a game of seduction (Middleton uses it this way in Women Beware Women (c.1621); and it gives the players an ability to toy with kings and other potentates that recalls the power of Prospero. The lovers, bent over the chessboard, are showing control over the political world (unlike Claribel, who was a political puppet) and over their own sexuality. Even their quarrel is significant: Miranda accuses Ferdinand of cheating—‘Sweet lord, you play me false’—and, when he denies it, instead of accepting his denial she claims it doesn't matter: ‘Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, / And I would call it fair play’ (5.1.172-5). She began the play listening to her father brood at length on past injuries; she offers to treat any betrayal by Ferdinand as fair play, to wipe out any offence as though it had never happened. This may be naive or just playful; but it dramatizes a power of forgiveness far greater than Prospero's, and the contrast between the lightness and speed of her response and the sheer length of Prospero's opening narrative is an important part of the effect. It is more than their youth that suggests the lovers can give the world a fresh start.

Even Sebastian seems for a moment impressed: ‘A most high miracle!’ (5.1.177). Alonso sees in Miranda a power greater than Prospero: ‘Is she the goddess that hath severed us, / And brought us thus together?’ (5.1.187-8). When, learning her true identity, Alonso asks Miranda's forgiveness, Prospero tells him to leave the past behind: ‘Let us not burden our remembrances with / A heaviness that's gone’ (5.1.199-200). He cannot, we have seen, do this with Antonio. But, given the fresh start the lovers represent, he can do it with Alonso, and Alonso himself, thinking his son and Prospero's daughter were both drowned, has already pointed the way:

O heavens, that they were living both in Naples,
The king and queen there! That they were, I wish
Myself were mudded in that oozy bed
Where my son lies.

(5.1.149-52)

Prospero shows at times a similar willingness to give up his own life and make way for the future, but in him it is characteristically less straightforward. Giving his daughter to Ferdinand, he claims to be giving away ‘a third of mine own life, / Or that for which I live’ (4.1.3-4). Throughout 4.1 he speaks only to Ferdinand, suggesting he has indeed let Miranda go. But this also gives him a new role as Ferdinand's mentor; he is not letting go that easily. His surrender of his magic seems a deeper, more radical surrender. In the Epilogue he turns to prayer, an admission of his dependence on a higher power, like Friar Bacon's turning to God. In this he repeats the action—a socially levelling one—of Alonso, Ferdinand and the mariners, who in the face of imminent death turned to prayer. Behind his declaration, ‘And my ending is despair / Unless I be relieved by prayer’ (5.1.333-4) lies the simple cry of the mariners, ‘All lost! To prayers, to prayers!’ (1.1.51).

It seems an appropriate ending for a play that has so radically examined the danger and the emptiness of power. In the end we are all equally helpless, and can only pray. But this is not really how the play ends; Prospero has not quite let go. In two time signals, he and Ariel equate the action of the play with an afternoon at the playhouse. Near the start of the play they check the time and find it is two o'clock, time for the performance to begin. (Of course it is already under way.) Allowing a little more than the usual two to three hours, Prospero declares, ‘The time 'twixt six and now / Must by us both be spend most preciously’ (1.2.240-1). Later, the metatheatrical reference is seemingly completed when Ariel announces it is ‘the sixth hour, at which time, my lord, / You said our work should cease’ (5.1.4-5). But if we think the play is over we have been fooled; this is the beginning of Act 5, and there is a whole act to go.

Even so Prospero may surrender his magic, but he does not quite surrender the narrative control that went with it. He prays, it would seem, not to God but to the audience, and in turning the story over to us he tells us what to do with it:

                                                            Now 'tis true
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got,
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
On this bare island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.

(5.1.321-8)

Now the stage itself is a trap, and Prospero's plea is the play's final image of release from bondage. A play full of confinement, restriction and imprisonment ends with the words, ‘set me free’ (5.1.338). Our ‘hands’ will do it, meaning our applause. What audience will not applaud (especially since, if they do not, the play will never end and they will never get out of the theatre)? As the audience applauds, Prospero leaves the stage which is also the island; the last word of the Folio text is ‘Exit’. Prospero's last command has been obeyed.

Critics who have taken up his invitation to complete the story have tended to stress Prospero's ongoing power. The marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda may seem to duplicate Antonio's offence of submitting Milan to Naples; but it can also be seen as expanding Prospero's dynastic influence, as King James did by uniting England and Scotland;³⁰ and it effectively cuts Antonio out of the line of inheritance.³¹ If these completions of the story are valid, Prospero achieves the control over the future that eluded Quomodo. His vision of the final dissolution of all pomp and power, of the world ending like a play or masque—

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

(4.1.152-6)

—should be seen in its dramatic context. He attributes it to a moment of stress: ‘Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled’ (4.1.159). The response of the lovers, speaking together, ‘We wish your peace’ (5.1.163), may be the response of the audience when out of compassion they release the tired old man from the island. But no sooner have the lovers left the stage than Prospero, no longer complaining of weakness, calls up Ariel and mounts his last, violent attack on Caliban and his company. The Tempest ends, seemingly, with a moving image of the surrender of power; but with enough of its pervasive scepticism in place to leave us wondering how far we can believe it.

Notes

1. There is no point in attempting a full listing, but a few examples may be mentioned. John Gillies, in ‘Shakespeare's Virginian Masque’, English Literary History, LIII, 1986, points out that the double image of the island as a rich paradise and a place of danger and deprivation parodies the contemporary double image of Virginia (p. 682). In New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, tr. Janet Lloyd, Cambridge, 1985, Richard Marienstras argues that Caliban combines the ‘Indian’, who ‘must be dominated and overcome’ with the ‘Black’, who ‘was seen as a domestic animal, one necessary to the exploitation of the continent and the domination of nature by the White man’ (pp. 177-8). Barbara Fuchs, in ‘Conquering Islands: Contextualizing The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, XLVIII, 1997, proposes that colonialist readings should include the British subjugation of Ireland, and equates Caliban's cloak with the Irish mantle (pp. 45-54). There is a full and balanced discussion of the whole issue in Meredith Skura, ‘Discourse and the Individual: the Case of Colonialism in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, XL, 1989, 42-69.

2. Albert Hunt and Geoffrey Reeves, Peter Brook, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 136-7.

3. Francis Barker and Peter Hulme see this as the first of a series of ‘actual or attempted usurpations of authority’: ‘Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: the Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest’, Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis, London and New York, 1985, p. 198. On the ship's crew, see M. M. Mahood, Playing Bit Parts in Shakespeare, London and New York, 1998, pp. 205-22.

4. All references to The Tempest are to the Oxford Shakespeare edition, ed. Stephen Orgel, Oxford and New York, 1987.

5. Gillies, ‘Virginian’, p. 689.

6. Orgel glosses, ‘No price will be too high for him’.

7. See Orgel, Introduction, pp. 43-50.

8. After The Masque of Blackness (1605) there was such crowding and confusion that the table holding the banquet was overturned; see Ben Jonson, X, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, Oxford, 1950, p. 449.

9. R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Art and the Material Culture of Majesty in Early Stuart England’, The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, ed. R. Malcolm Smuts, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 91-3.

10. In a discussion of state-sanctioned torture as part of the play's context, Curt Breight notes that pinching could mean removing pieces of flesh with red-hot pincers, and Caliban's fear of being ‘pinched to death’ (5.1.276) is not hyperbole: ‘“Treason Doth Never Prosper”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Treason’, Shakespeare Quarterly, XLI, 1990, 24-6.

11. According to K. M. Briggs, Prospero's ‘rude, peremptory and unconciliatory’ manner is the one magicians normally adopted to keep control over the spirits they had raised: The Anatomy of Puck, London, 1959, p. 54.

12. Productions sometimes manage a spectacular exit for him; at Stratford, Ontario in 1962 he ran off up the centre aisle of the theatre. In Peter Greenaway's film Prospero's Books (1991) he runs towards the camera, through a series of rooms, getting younger as he goes. But in the 1982 Royal Shakespeare Company production, Prospero, giving his last orders to Ariel, looked around and found he was already gone. He hadn't seen him go, and neither had the audience. Since the last order is for calm seas and auspicious gales, and since Prospero in the Epilogue turns to the audience to release him from the island and send him to Naples, one implication of this staging is that Ariel neither hears nor obeys the last command. We have to take over.

13. This paradox was captured in Giorgio Strehler's production for the Piccolo Teatro di Milano (revised 1977). Ariel (played in this case by a woman) was in a flying harness that let her soar freely; but during her quarrel with Prospero she struggled on the end of the wire like a fish on a line. At the end Prospero released Ariel by freeing her from the harness (Orgel, Introduction, p. 27). This brilliant production was an exception to the rule that the play generally fails in performance.

14. In the 1976 production at Stratford, Ontario, Caliban sang his song of freedom while marching on all fours, with a collar round his neck and Stephano holding the leash.

15. It is not clear that the exact wording of the stage directions is Shakespeare's; it may be that of the scribe Ralph Crane, reporting a performance he saw (Orgel, Introduction, p. 58). But at least it can be said that the effects described are part of the play as Shakespeare's company performed it.

16. Anne Righter [Anne Barton], Introduction to the New Penguin Shakespeare edition of The Tempest, Harmondsworth, 1968, pp. 7-9.

17. Margareta de Grazia, ‘The Tempest: Gratuitous Movement or Action without Kibes and Pinches’, Shakespeare Studies, XIV, 1981, 259.

18. John S. Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age, Lincoln and London, 1989, pp. 178, 180. Mebane gives a positive reading of Prospero (pp. 174-99), in contrast to the rough handling he gets in much late twentieth-century criticism. The latter is exemplified by de Grazia's listing of the parallels between Prospero and Sycorax (‘Gratuitious’, pp. 255-6).

19. K. M. Briggs, Pale Hecate's Team, London, 1962, p. 44.

20. According to Barker and Hulme, Prospero's ‘Here in this island we arriv'd’ suppresses the full story, and it takes the objections of Ariel and Caliban to reopen it (‘Nymphs’, pp. 199-200).

21. The speech that gives this information (1.2.350-61) used to be transferred from Miranda to Prospero, by editors who found its harsh tone unsuitable to the Miranda of their imaginations. The result was a generation of texts in which Prospero taught Caliban language, and the assumption that he was the teacher persists: in Prospero's Books we see Miranda and Caliban as children, studying side by side under Prospero's direction.

22. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, New York and London, 1990, pp. 17-18.

23. This is the interpretation offered in the 1954 science fiction film Forbidden Planet, where the equivalent of Caliban is the ‘monster from the id’, a projection of the scientist himself.

24. John Gillies notes another difference: Caliban sees a ‘strangeness and mystery’ in the island that no other character expresses (‘Virginian’, p. 702).

25. In Derek Jarman's 1980 film version, Ferdinand emerges naked from the sea. The effect is more telling than the nakedness of the actors in Prospero's Books, which is so general that it becomes drained of meaning.

26. Righter, Introduction, pp. 10-11.

27. David Sundelson, ‘So Rare a Wonder'd Father: Prospero's Tempest’, Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn, Baltimore and London, 1980, p. 46. David Lindley links the barking watchdogs with the hounds who hunt Caliban and his cohorts: ‘Music, Masque and Meaning in The Tempest’, The Court Masque, ed. David Lindley, Manchester, 1984, p. 49.

28. If Prospero's relations with Miranda include incestuous feeling, he is not just striking Ferdinand with impotence but demonstrating his own superior phallic power.

29. Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor, ‘Ferdinand and Miranda at Chess’, Shakespeare Survey, XXXV, 1982, 114-15.

30. David M. Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family, Lawrence, Kan., 1985, p. 201.

31. Orgel, Introduction, pp. 54-5.