SOURCE: Daniell, David. “Themes.” In The Tempest, pp. 38-63. London: Macmillan, 1989.

[In the following excerpt, Daniell surveys critical approaches to The Tempest from the second half of the twentieth century.]

Watching Shakespeare's Tempest [in the seventeenth century, one] would see a pastoral tragicomic romance, with masque elements. It is not only in order, it is essential, to discuss, in dealing with The Tempest, both the traditions of romance drama in England, and the special literary conventions of pastoral romance as they appear, for example, in Sidney's Arcadia and Spenser's Faerie Queene, and to know how the play shares themes within these conventions. One of the many ways in which Frank Kermode's Arden edition of The Tempest was important was that it first, and most lucidly, set out that:

The Tempest, though exceptionally subtle in its structure of ideas, and unique in its development of them, can be understood as a play of an established kind dealing with situations appropriate to that kind. The Tempest is a pastoral drama; it belongs to that literary kind which includes certain earlier English plays, but also, and more significantly, Comus; it is concerned with the opposition of Nature and Art, as serious pastoral poetry always is, and it shares this concern with the other late comedies, and with the Sixth Book of the Faerie Queen, to which it is possibly directly indebted.

The two following paragraphs must also be quoted in full:

The main opposition is between the worlds of Prospero's Art, and Caliban's Nature. Caliban is the core of the play; like the shepherd in formal pastoral, he is the natural man against whom the cultivated man is measured. But we are not offered a comparison between a primitive innocence in nature and a sophisticated decadence, any more than we are in Comus. Caliban represents (at present we must over-simplify) nature without benefit of nurture; Nature, as opposed to an Art which is man's power over the created world and over himself; nature divorced from grace, or the senses without the mind. He differs from Iago and Edmund in that he is a ‘naturalist’ by nature, without access to the art that makes love out of lust; the restraints of temperance he cannot, in his bestiality, know; to the beauty of the nurtured he opposes a monstrous ugliness; ignorant of gentleness and humanity, he is a savage and capable of all ill; he is born to slavery, not to freedom, of a vile and not of a noble union; and his parents represent an evil natural magic which is the antithesis of Prospero's benevolent Art.

This is a simple diagram of an exquisitely complex structure, but it may be useful as a guide. Caliban is the ground of the play. His function is to illuminate by contrast the world of art, nurture, civility: the world which none the less nourishes the malice of Antonio and the guilt of Alonso, and stains a divine beauty with the crimes of ambition and lust. There is the possibility of purgation; and the tragicomic theme of the play, the happy shipwreck—‘that which we accompt a punishment against evil is but a medicine against evil’—is the means to this end.

(pp. xxiv, xxv)

NATURE

In the central 35 pages of his introduction, Kermode shows how the current voyage-literature, particularly the 1610 Bermuda pamphlets ‘seem to have precipitated, in this play, most of the major themes of Shakespeare's last years: indeed, that is their whole importance’. He goes on:

The events of 1609 in Bermuda must have seemed to contain the whole situation in little. There a group of men were, as they themselves said, providentially cast away into a region of delicate and temperate fruitfulness, where Nature provided abundantly; brought out of the threatening but merciful sea into that New World where, said the voyagers, men lived in a state of nature. Ancient problems of poetry and philosophy were given an extraordinary actuality.

(p. xxv)

Shakespeare, however, was careful to set his play in the Old World, between Naples and Tunis: he was appealing to an altogether wider set of significances. Kermode writes:

The natural life, the Golden Age, and related themes, giving rise as they do to considerations of justice and mercy, man fallen and redeemed, the reclamation of nature by the ministers of grace—these themes are constantly heard in The Tempest; but although the complex in which they are heard is peculiar to the play, they were not novel to the contemporary reader of travel literature.

(p. xxx)

That literature included the Aeneid, and the fabulous holy voyages of The Golden Legend, and especially Montaigne, as far as his essay ‘Of Cannibals’ (in Florio's translation, which Shakespeare used) can be called travel literature. Montaigne seems to suggest that Natural Men, in a primitive natural society, would be happy, and offers the New World as an example of naturally virtuous life uncorrupted by Civilisation. Shakespeare is sceptical. Both sides of the debate—holding the primitive as Golden, or vicious—found evidence in the narratives they studied. At issue also was whether man's interference with Nature corrupted, or was itself part of Nature—the very topic which King Polixenes and Princess Perdita debate, importantly, in The Winter's Tale [IV.iv.70-108]. So there were two versions of the natural: ‘that which man corrupts … and that which is defective, and must be mended by civilisation. … This latter is the view which suits best the conscience of the colonist’ (Kermode, p. xxxvi).

Prospero assumes, as a European prince, his right to rule the island, ‘to be the lord on't’: the exploitation of the inhabitants of fertile territory, something ‘at once virtuous and expedient’, as Kermode puts it, has been the subject of very sharp recent discussion. ([F]or excellent additional material on the significance of travel literature to the play see Brockbank 1966; James 1967; Frey 1979.)

In The Tempest, Shakespeare uses Caliban partly to indicate how much baser the corrupt civilised world can be than the bestiality of the natural. In the play, nature is complex. Antonio and Sebastian jeer at Gonzalo's view of it. He is wrong, apparently, about some pretty basic things (but see below). Yet Gonzalo pronounces the benediction to the play, and Antonio and Sebastian prove incapable of alteration.

The key is Caliban:

The poetic definition of Nature in the play is achieved largely by a series of antitheses with Caliban constantly recurring as one term. He represents the natural man. This figure is not, as in pastoral generally, a virtuous shepherd, but a salvage and deformed slave.

(Kermode, p. xxxviii)

Kermode's equation of Caliban with a European wild man has been challenged recently, as I shall show. Unmistakably, however, Caliban is the necessarily deformed product of a sexual union between a witch and an incubus—evil natural magic, a natural criterion by which we measure the world of Art, represented by Prospero's divine magic and the supernaturally sanctioned beauty of Miranda and Ferdinand. (I say ‘unmistakably’, but as Stephen Orgel points out, we have only Prospero's word for this, he apparently having got it from Ariel. It is possible that it is ‘an especially creative piece of invective’ (Orgel 1984, p. 5)). Kermode writes:

Caliban is, therefore, accurately described in the Folio ‘Names of the Actors’. His origins and character are natural in the sense that they do not partake of grace, civility, and art; he is ugly in body, associated with an evil natural magic, and unqualified for rule or nurture. He exists at the simplest level of sensual pain and pleasure, as music can appeal to the beast who lacks reason; and indeed he resembles Aristotle's bestial man. He is a measure of the incredible superiority of the world of Art, but also a measure of its corruption. For the courtiers and their servants include the incontinent Stephano and the malicious Antonio. Caliban scorns the infirmity of purpose exhibited by the first, and knows better than Antonio that it is imprudent to resist grace, for which, he says, he will henceforth seek. … Men can abase their degree below the bestial; and there is possibly a hint, for which there is no support in Aristotle, that the bestial Caliban gains a new spiritual dimension from his glimpse of the ‘brave spirits’. Whether or not this is true, he is an extraordinarily powerful and comprehensive type of Nature; an inverted pastoral hero, against whom civility and the Art which improves nature may be measured.

(Kermode pp. xlii-xliii)

ART

The courtiers have a fortunate seed within them, are of good stock, endowed with grace, and ‘nurtured in refinement through the centuries in the world of Art’—though an evil disposition can inhere in good stock, as in Antonio. Prospero's art is both as mage, disciplining through learning and temperance, working towards harmony: and as a symbol of the control of Nature. ‘Art is not only a beneficent magic in contrast to an evil one,’ writes Kermode; ‘it is the ordination of civility, the control of appetite, the transformation of nature by breeding and learning; it is even, in a sense, the means of Grace’ (p. xlviii). Kermode further shows the advantage to Shakespeare of the forms he used—

The romantic story is, then, the mode in which Shakespeare made his last poetic investigation into the supernatural elements in the human soul and in human society. His thinking is Platonic, though never schematic; and he had deliberately chosen the pastoral tragicomedy as the genre in which this inquiry is best pursued. The pastoral romance gave him the opportunity for a very complex comparison between the worlds of Art and Nature; and the tragicomic form enabled him to concentrate the whole story of apparent disaster, penitence, and forgiveness into one happy misfortune, controlled by a divine Art.

(pp. lviii-lix)

This has rightly dominated work on The Tempest in the second half of the twentieth century: editors and major critics all acknowledge its importance.

THE TEMPEST AS INVITATION

The Tempest is unique in its open-ness, though that is part of its nature as romance. Hamlet criticism has for several centuries been the playground where anyone with a new theory can feel free to run about a bit. So Hamlet is, or isn't, mad: is, or isn't, Oedipal; is, or isn't, fat, a Catholic, a murderer, a saint, a melancholic, a sceptic, a Modern, an Ancient, too young, too old, a Calvinist, a theatre director (good or bad), a poet (ditto), and so on. Oscar Wilde got it right in the title of his projected essay ‘Are the Commentators on Hamlet Really Mad or only Pretending To Be?’ Yet the puzzle of Hamlet involves moving pieces in and out of the light until a convincing shape appears: too much information seems to be given. The puzzle that is The Tempest is of a quite different order.

Put too succintly, the play has silences and a haunting symmetry. Both are felt to be an invitation to interpret. Patterns emerge easily: structures linking Caliban and Ferdinand, Caliban and Miranda, Caliban and Antonio, Prospero and Sycorax, Antonio-with-Sebastian linked with Stephano-with-Trinculo, and so on. Some of these will be considered presently. For the moment, let us accept Kermode's phrase ‘an exquisitely complex structure’, and consider silences.

The strongly present supernatural, the controlled magic and the sense of wonder match a curious, and unique, bafflement in the reader. There often, undeniably, feels to be far more going on than we are told. Adequate cause is not always shown for the—always strong—feelings in Prospero: he soliloquises, true; but rather than revealing to us interior processes of thought, like Hamlet, or Macbeth, or even Leontes in The Winter's Tale, Prospero makes pictures (see the great ‘Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves’ speech [v.i.33-57 continued in 58-82 to some extent]). Prospero controls the action: but what the action is can puzzle everyone in the theatre—audience, actors, and characters in the play alike. Examining why Prospero does what he does reveals an enigma. That, however, does not too much distress our susceptibilities, because it matches the strange way that a good deal of the play is unknowable.

In the long second scene, Prospero seems over-impatient with Miranda, demanding that she understand. However determined we as readers or spectators may be to understand the play, many details seem to defy understanding. As A. D. Nuttall puts it,

in the unpredictable island of The Tempest, we are denied that prosaic awakening which vividly refutes the night. It seems as if the poet is bent on drawing from us a different sort of credence from that ordinarily given to plays—perhaps a more primitive sort. At III.iii.83 the Shapes (we are given no clearer stage direction) carry out the banquet ‘with mops and mows’, and we never learn what they are or what their dance is about. At V.i.231 we are told how the sleeping sailors awoke to hear strange and horrific sounds and we are never told what made them.

(Nuttall 1967, p. 139)

Unity of time is customarily achieved by creating in the few hours of the drama a sense of the consummation of great events over a telling curve of time: but the past does not seem to dominate The Tempest coherently: we are given little bits of information, for example about Claribel, from whose wedding the court was sailing, or about the earlier history of the island, or about Caliban's mother: but these morsels point to a bigger hunger for information. Claribel married a Muslim, a matter of horror to a Jacobean audience: why had Alonso agreed? What was the ‘one thing’ Sycorax did which reduced her punishment? What were the ‘grand hests’ that Ariel refused? These glimpses can be suggestive, but they do not put enough pressure on the intense present.

There are, furthermore, silences of a more flinty significance. Why is Miranda's mother, Prospero's wife, so remarkably absent, so that Miranda can remember ladies-in-waiting but not her? Why, in spite of all that Prospero has told her about Alonso, does Miranda say nothing at all about him when she knows he is the father of her lover Ferdinand, and greet the courtiers as if nothing had ever gone amiss? How does Prospero travel from his state of mind towards Ferdinand at the start of Act Three, when he has him bearing logs, to his eager betrothal of him to his daughter in Act Four? Exactly how does the conspiracy of Caliban and the others cause the break-up of the masque? What does it mean that Antonio is virtually silent in the last scene? What, precisely, is the state of mind of Prospero at the end of the play? What the play doesn't say can make an unusually long list. There are so-called ‘loose ends’ all over the plays of Shakespeare: here we are dealing with something different.

Consider, further, the unusual poetic resonances. Like many of Shakespeare's plays, The Tempest is almost wholly a poem. It has a new kind of poetry, however, new even for Shakespeare, as if in his maturity he were reaching out to make marvellously advanced experiments. Often a very great artist in his last works can be seen to be taking extraordinary risks (Beethoven springs to mind). It is true of Shakespeare. As well as experimenting with form and structure, he ventures afresh into the relations of art and illusion, nature and nurture, reason and magic, virtue and vileness: and the verbal vehicle for a great deal of new matter is first of all an extraordinary compression, as if only a small amount of what had to be said could be put into words. With the apparently absolute freedom that thought can have here, working through the beat of the five-stress lines, itself especially geared to the expression of powerful feelings, such late-Shakespearean cutting-back to linguistic spareness, with remarkable lyric effects, is in this play carried far beyond expectation.

                                                                                                    … at pick'd leisure
Which shall be shortly single, I'll resolve you,
Which to you shall seem probable, of every
These happen'd accidents …

[V.i.247-50]

Yet this is worked, kneaded in as we might put it, with a strange multivalency. The expected reverberations set up by the lines seem to have fewer limits, or no limits at all: they go in all directions.

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

[III.ii.140-8]

These famous and magnificent lines, using subtle and sophisticated effects characteristic of the very top of the poetic skills of the English Renaissance, are spoken by no noble courtier. They are the words of the ‘debosh'd [debauched] fish’ Caliban. They come at the end of a low scene of silly drunken foolery, when Ariel's music of invisible tabor and drum causes a moment of terror. The scene begins in prose. It is the ‘monster’ Caliban who moves it into verse, half-way through, using sophisticated words like ‘nonpareil’ and ‘jocund’ on his way to that marvellous paragraph of rich sounds and dreams. His low comic on-stage auditors do not grasp what he has said—only that they'll get music for nothing.

The words reach out far beyond their being an announcement by Caliban, and go on reverberating in the silence around them. Something else, it seems, is invisibly happening. Ariel's tabor and drum were invisible: what ‘reality’ they might have had is a disturbing question. As A. D. Nuttall puts it:

Playgoers are fairly well accustomed to that sane and purposive magic which saves a drowning man or refreshes him with sleep, but the music in the air, the voice crying in the wave, the ‘strange, hollow and confused noise’ which accompanies the vanishing of the reapers and nymphs at the end of the masque, the somnolence of Miranda—these gratuitous paranorma are more disturbing … Ariel vanishes in thunder, the ‘Shapes’ carry out the table, and Alonso tells how he heard the name ‘Prosper’ in the withdrawing roar of the waves, and then in the wind and thunder. Again, the empirical character is strong. Experience will supply many such false configurations which have left us momentarily in doubt whether to form a natural or a supernatural interpretation.

(Nuttall 1967, pp. 139, 145)

The multivalency of a few simple sounds can be kaleidoscopic, to mix the metaphor. There is, for example, more music in The Tempest than in any other play of Shakespeare; and some of the words to the music which ‘crept by’ Ferdinand ‘upon the waters’ (whatever that means) have a lyrical singularity which makes them among the most haunting in the language:

Full fathom five thy father lies
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange …

[I.ii.396-401]

These words both are themselves, and refer to, illusions; transformations through art itself. The Tempest is full of new compound words, some beginning with ‘sea-’ (sea-sorrow, sea-storm, sea-swallowed, sea-marge) as if even the way language works can in this play be as shifting and powerful (and in Ariel's hands as transforming) as the sea. Throughout the play, the sense of always-altering perceptions is like that which comes in sleep and with dreams: there are several wakings from sleep in the play, and six strong references to dreams. There is the same evanescence, too. Imaginative insight, which can have such power, has to be seized in the moment, however it comes:

The cloud-capp'd 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.

[IV.i.152-6]

All this is only a part of that strong feeling the play can communicate that it is ‘about’ something just out of sight. If only whatever it is could be grasped, then essential truths about life, the universe and everything might become life-changingly clear. That silent burden of possibility in so much of the poetry is only a fraction, indeed, of the organisation of the play. It is therefore not at all surprising that a good deal of criticism has been aimed at ‘explaining’ this play. Because it is not so commonly seen in performance (a process which does anchor notions to some kind of reality) it is also not surprising that such ‘keys’ to the play are usually at best contradictory and at worst dotty.

ALLEGORY

Romantic criticism of, and absorption of, The Tempest, found Prospero the wizard-like Poet, his magic that of the Romantic poet's imagination. The most insistent allegorical readings of the play, from quite early in the nineteenth century, simply extend that to the equation Prospero = Shakespeare. The location of the play in Folio does give it a certain prominence: from that fact it is easy to conclude that it was especially important to Shakespeare, and then go on to declare that that was because it was the epitome of his career. Thomas Campbell in 1838 was probably the first to make the connection: he found ‘a sacredness as the last work of a mighty workman’. This notion has survived lustily, and is—especially since the establishment of the chronology appeared to make the play Shakespeare's last—still one of the first comments made by people who have heard something of The Tempest, that it is Shakespeare's-farewell-to-his-art. The equation is indeed attractive. Prospero is so conveniently Shakespeare, consummating his career, making his final theatrical illusion, breaking his staff, drowning his book, sailing away from London to Stratford (a difficult voyage, that) and retirement. But like the late-twentieth-century invention of a homosexual Shakespeare, the lover of the Earl of Southampton, it is in fact pure invention. Just as there is not one scrap of evidence that Shakespeare ever even met Southampton (and to try to bring supporting evidence from the Sonnets is to show ignorance of the conventions of Elizabethan sonnet sequences), so there is no evidence whatever for Prospero as Shakespeare. Both seem to be necessary inventions, needed by a public that is mystified by, and therefore a little frightened of, high art, and so reassured by a devaluing equation between the work and the man. And both inventions are a crude form of allegorical reading of the works.

The great allegories of European literature—The Divine Comedy, Piers Plowman, The Romance of the Rose, The Faerie Queene, The Pilgrim's Progress—deliberately invite the activity of suggesting parallel meaning. The plays of Shakespeare's time, including The Tempest, do not. Nor were they taken as allegories when they were first written (which is when the supposed allegorical meaning would be, supposedly, strongest) as the evidence produced by Richard Levin makes so clear (Levin 1979)—though allegory was alive and active as a form at the time. Spenser's Una and Duessa in Book One of The Faerie Queene are named to call up sets of equivalences. Further, if Christian's burden, or roll, or river-crossing, in The Pilgrim's Progress, do not stand for great spiritual experiences, then the book is in fact pretty small beer.

The start of the allegorical approaches to The Tempest can be dated exactly—August Wilhelm von Schlegel's lecture on the comedies of Shakespeare in Vienna in 1808. Schlegel was already a celebrated translator of Shakespeare, and the German version known as ‘Schlegel-Tieck’ established Shakespeare as almost the German national poet. Like Coleridge, Schlegel interpreted the genius of Shakespeare afresh. He challenged the eighteenth-century Shakespeare of ‘a wild irregular genius, in whom great faults are compensated by great beauties’ and presented instead a great poet, a great dramatist and a great creator of characters, with comprehensive, and indeed universal, sympathies. Shakespeare was more: ‘in strength a demi-god, in profundity of view a prophet, in all-seeing wisdom a protecting spirit of a higher order’. It was Schlegel who first related Ariel to the airy elements and Caliban to the earthy, suggesting an allegory which coincides with Elizabethan and Jacobean humour-psychology.

Keats expressed the spirit of those (Romantic) times in his letter begun 14 February 1819:

A Man's life of any worth is a continual allegory—and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life—a life like the scriptures, figurative—which such people can no more make out than they can the hebrew Bible. Lord Byron cuts a figure—but he is not figurative—Shakespeare led a life of Allegory: his works are the comments on it.

(Forman 1947, p. 305)

After Schlegel, early interest was in Miranda, ‘Eve of an enchanted Paradise’; for Heine in 1838, her prototype was ‘hidden behind the stars too far off to reach my sight’. De Quincey and Thomas Campbell in England, and Montégut in France, developed the idea of relation to some parallel world outside the play. Thomas Campbell, as A. D. Nuttall writes, ‘was, as far as I know, the first to make an allegorical connexion between Prospero and Shakespeare himself. Prospero drowns his book and Shakespeare takes his leave of the London theatre’ (Nuttall 1967, p. 5). Montégut took this startlingly further:

Et l'histoire de l'île enchantée telle que Prospero l'expose dans ses conversations du premier acte avec Miranda, Ariel et Caliban, est-ce qu'elle ne raconte pas trait pour trait l'histoire de théâtre anglais et de la transformation que Shakespeare lui fit subir?

(quoted Nuttall, p. 5)

(And the story of the enchanted isle as Prospero reveals it in his dialogues with Miranda, Ariel and Caliban in the first Act, is it not an account, feature by feature, of the English theatre and the transformation to which Shakespeare subjected it?)

He goes on to identify the foul witch Sycorax with the foul English theatre of earlier times. It is illuminating to quote here Nuttall's further examples of such historical allegorising:

A similar impulse for elaboration carries Dowden as far as suggesting that Ferdinand is ‘the young Fletcher in conjunction with whom Shakespeare worked upon The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII’. The twentieth century has, of course, seen hypotheses equally bizarre, if not more so. In 1925 the curious genius Robert Graves was willing to identify the drunken sailors of the play with ‘Chapman and Jonson with a suggestion of Marston’. A Miss Winstanley who corresponded with Graves found in Sycorax the reputed witch Catherine de Medici and in Caliban Jesuitism and Ravaillac, who was entrusted with the task of murdering Henry IV, and is described in pamphlets as a spotted monster and a degenerate. He was, it seems, first racked and then pinched to death with red-hot pincers for the murder.

(Nuttall p. 6)

The greatest excesses have always come from the transcendentalisers, to coin a horrible word. Nuttall notes Victor Hugo, Alfred Mézières, Ruskin—even, in Daniel Wilson's Caliban: The Missing Link (1873) a Darwinian, evolutionary Tempest. Edward R. Russell in 1876 went the whole hog: Prospero is God. As Nuttall observes, ‘even the reader who was prepared to find a sort of sanctity in the play as a whole has some difficulty in bowing down and worshipping the irascible old Duke of Milan as the God of his fathers’ (p. 9). The most influential, however, of the nineteenth-century transcendental-allegorisers has been the American, James Russell Lowell, in Among My Books (1870), where ‘Caliban = brute understanding, Ariel = fancy, Prospero = imagination, etc’ (Kermode 1964, p. lxxxi): and Edward Dowden's far-reaching Shakespere—A Critical Study of his Mind and Art (London, 1875). Dowden, indeed, in a passage not mentioned by Nuttall, writes, in his chapter ‘Shakespere's Last Plays’:

It is not chiefly because Prospero is a great enchanter, now about to break his magic staff, to drown his book deeper than ever plummet sounded, to dismiss his airy spirits, and to return to the practical service of his Dukedom, that we identify Prospero in some measure with Shakespeare himself. It is rather because the temper of Prospero, the grave harmony of his character, his self-mastery, his calm validity of will, his sensitiveness to wrong, his unfaltering justice, and with these, a certain abandonment, a remoteness from the common joys and sorrows of the world, are characteristic of Shakespeare as discovered to us in all his latest plays. Prospero is a harmonious and fully-developed will. In the earlier play of fairy enchantments, A Midsummer Night's Dream, the ‘human mortals’ wander to and fro in a maze of error, misled by the mischievous frolic of Puck, the jester and clown of Fairyland. But here the spirits of the elements, and Caliban the gross genius of brute-matter,—needful for the service of life—are brought under subjection to the human will of Prospero.

(Dowden 1875, pp. 417-18)

Nuttall sums up well:

With varying degrees of seriousness and vividness, the romantic men of letters felt that when they were talking about The Tempest they were talking about the structure of the universe also. They felt, by and large, that The Tempest itself impelled them to this course, but they did not feel that they were expounding the curious feelings of a man long dead. The metaphysics they proposed was, they felt, quite as much their own as it was Shakespeare's. Ontological assertions are woven into the very fabric of their criticism.

(p. 13)

Though E. B. Wagner in 1935 proposed that The Tempest was an allegory of the history of the Church, the major twentieth-century allegorisers are on the whole greater transcendentalists still. E. M. W. Tillyard (1938) and G. Wilson Knight (1948) held that there was a pattern in the tragedies, which they saw as breakdown and death, symbolised by storm, with the suggestion of final reconciliation beyond the grave. This, they said, followed through to the pattern of the Romances, which all consummate in a restoration, regeneration, even resurrection. Such ideas later crystallised into altogether firmer Christianising, as we shall see.

But I pause here to mention by far the most elaborate, and in some ways the most impenetrable, of twentieth-century allegorisings, the two books by Colin Still. His first, Shakespeare's Mystery Play, a Study of ‘The Tempest’ (1921) made a second appearance, in ‘an enlarged and clarified restatement’ as the second part of a longer work altogether, The Timeless Theme of 1936. He wrote there

by the help of direct textual evidence I shall show that THE TEMPEST is an imaginative mystery which is true to the spiritual experience of all mankind; that it is, in effect, a particular version of the universal theme; and that it shares not only the inner significance, but inevitably also to some extent the outward form, of every other version of the same theme.

(1936, p. 134)

The centre of his method is a developed parallel between the action of The Tempest and, surprisingly, the initiation ceremonies of the Eleusinian adepts: he is in fact quite hard to pin down about why this should be. (The ‘mystery’ in his first title has to do with Gnostic mysteries, and not a play presented by a late-medieval guild, as ‘Mystery Play’ would normally be understood.) The Gnostic mystery cults, and Christian doctrine, spontaneous reflections of the unchanging facts of mankind's spiritual pilgrimage, gave him his analogies, and all were, he found, fused in the play, which becomes ‘a dramatic representation of the Mystery of Redemption, conceived as a psychological experience and expressed in mythological form’. The whole is worked through with relentless detail, with Lesser and Greater Initiations, the Ceremony of Water, temptations offered and removed like Christ's in Milton's Paradise Regained; Stephano and Trinculo represent the Fall, Ferdinand ascends to the Celestial Paradise, and Prospero is both Priest and God.

Though Still asserts that only a critic who is truly a mystic can understand the mystic truths in great works of art, he has received some solemn attention: Frank Kermode called his interpretation ‘improbable’ (p. lxxxiii), and that is possibly over-kind.

When I was an undergraduate, I attended a dinner party at which Nevill Coghill was also a guest. He was a good Shakespeare scholar, and director, and an inspiring teacher; he spoke then about The Tempest, and the challenge of putting it on the stage. A mast and spar, he said, would suggest a ship instantly, and would dominate the first scene—and there, he said, you had it, making the shape with his arms: the Christian cross, a controlling image for the whole play. The waters round the island were the waters of baptism—did not the clothes come out of the water better? Thus the island was the kingdom of God. This was heady stuff in the Oxford of the time, and far more graspable than Colin Still's Eleusinian mysteries. It did seem to make Prospero into a sort of Christ, which raised problems, however. I don't believe that Coghill's dinner-table disquisition ever reached print. More recent Christianisers are more eager to proselytise. A strain of pious American criticism of Shakespeare has for two decades seen that curiosity ‘a Christ-figure’ everywhere. It appears, often, regardless of either Tudor and Stuart ways of thinking, or indeed, sometimes, of respect for textual fact. Such a chimera has, for example, been attached to ‘the old fantastical duke of dark corners’, Vincentio in Measure for Measure. A peppering of religious phrases in this play has set these critics busily fixing stained-glass images into the windows of a quite illusory chapel. It is not even as if the play's title is Christian: it echoes a phrase from Matthew 7 which itself echoes an Old Testament idea, which can mean just retribution, or moderation as a virtue, or both. ‘Christ-figures’ have been seen in the most wildly inappropriate characters, as Richard Levin (1979) demonstrates, including Falstaff himself. Such allegorising is not confined to Protestants. The Jesuit Peter Milward has recently given us King Lear as a Virgin Mary figure, which shows the bog-land into which allegorising can sink. In his earlier, and wayward Shakespeare's Religious Background, Milward tries to demonstrate that Miranda, too, is a representation of the Virgin Mary. This claim depends on acceptance of the likelihood of Shakespeare's reverence for the Virgin Mary extending so far as to include a knowledge of rather obscure French plays on the miracles of the Virgin—a Shakespeare who, we may remember, lived in a self-consciously Protestant country, was baptised, brought up, married and buried a Protestant, and saw his children baptised, brought up, and—in the only case—married, as Protestants. Moreover, Milward's Miranda-as-Virgin-Mary claim is based on Prospero's ‘You have not sought her help, of whose soft grace / For the like loss I have her sovereign aid’ [V.i.142-3]. These lines, Milward says, refer to the Virgin: they do not. They do not even refer to Miranda, but to Patience. The bog is deeper than such commentators imagine.

Colin Still seems much less wild by comparison. Though he has never been taken wholly seriously, allegorising is a pertinacious form, and very recently a critic has suggested that there is more life in Still's work than many have suggested. Michael Srigley has been able to suggest his own reading of the play as an allegory of regeneration. He convincingly demonstrates that there are veins of alchemic, Paracelsian and baptismal imagery in the play, and attempts to support Still, that The Tempest is indeed influenced by the rituals of the Eleusinian mysteries. Perhaps the verdict has to be, again, not proven, particularly in view of the absence of contemporary support for reading drama in this way: but Srigley does open a new seam, in suggesting the possibility of the influence of the Renaissance interpretation of the Aeneid as an allegory of the Platonic search for truth. If Srigley is, as he seems to be, reading his allegory through Renaissance spectacles, then he and his subject warrant serious attention (Srigley 1985).

What has to be called the ‘Shakespeare—the Final Phase’ school of criticism, exemplified most in Dowden … grew out of that identifying of Shakespeare with one of his characters, Prospero. So, like a character in one of his plays—though not, interestingly enough, very much like Prospero—Shakespeare had to be seen to develop from early stumblings to final maturity and serene acceptance. Thus Morton Luce in 1902, in the first Arden edition of the play, found that the structure of the Romances showed, if not carelessness, then a lack of ‘concentrated artistic determination and purpose’: the playwright finds the writing of plays now ‘more of a recreation’, though the tone is high. ‘He is now approaching his fiftieth year; and his experience, if it left him sadder when he wrote his great tragedies, has now left him wiser also’. Walter Raleigh, in his Shakespeare (1907), in the chapter on ‘The Last Phase’, found a similar benevolence.

This was all too much for Lytton Strachey in 1904, who in a famous and much-reprinted essay wrote that the happy endings of the plays showed, not Shakespeare's tranquillity, but that he knew how to end a fairy-tale—and ‘in this land of faery, is it right to neglect the goblins?’ Shakespeare's powers had deteriorated. The reader is often bored. So was Shakespeare.

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that he was getting bored himself. Bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama, bored, in fact, with everything except poetry and poetical dreams … on the one side inspired by soaring fancy to the singing of ethereal songs, and on the other, urged by a general disgust to burst occasionally through his torpor into bitter and violent speech.

(Strachey 1922, p. 60)

Strachey does give weight to one quality: ‘The Enchanted Island … has been cut adrift for ever from common sense, and floats, buoyed up by a sea, not of waters, but of poetry’ (p. 61).

The essay was deemed offensive; but it worked. As Philip Edwards wrote, ‘The vision of the mellowed and matured Shakespeare, sitting by the banks of the Avon, the wind playing gently with his white hair, submerged to reappear only furtively’ (Edwards 1958, p. 3). The older allegorisers were put more firmly in their place in an influential essay in 1927 by E. E. Stoll, a powerful senior American critic who was among the most trenchant of that useful school of critics who aimed at a less tuppence-coloured view of Shakespeare: Stoll's penny-plain-ness lay in seeing Shakespeare in relation to his contemporaries and his theatre. Thus he argued that Ariel and Caliban did not in fact need to symbolise anything at all. What they were, as theatrical parts, would be recognisable to Shakespeare's audience, and wholly explicable. To make them symbols is in fact to diminish them: a play's effect is reduced when characters become labels attached to ‘meanings’ (Stoll 1927).

The allegorisers proceeded by enclosing the play in a sort of woolly jacket. Like some more recent iconographers, allegorising critics used their lofty erudition with an apparently determined vagueness about mere detail in the plays. The same could be said of some myth-and-ritualisers.

MYTH AND RITUAL

Asked, we are told, to fill some blank pages at the end of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot somewhat capriciously added Notes. The same stimulus that drove many readers of those Notes, just after the First World War, to Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance and Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough to look for exciting clues to a seductively ‘significant’ poem sent the new readers of anthropology and comparative religion into schematising Shakespeare. The last plays shone with promise. That is not so very extraordinary: romance is always close to myth. The very invitation which The Tempest extends seemed to be addressed to those critics who could write about the great and apparently universal symbols of Royal Death and Rebirth, of Vegetation Rites, of Fertility, and the rest. The key word was ‘universal’. The argument went like this: great art is a process, a movement of events which relate to the greatest experiences of human nature. If you look at great works of art in the right way, you can see that they all contain the same elements. If you look at the great myths of mankind, from anywhere in the world, the right way, you find exactly the same elements. In both, art and myth, they appear not as dramatis personae, or particular shaped sequences, but as symbols of something altogether larger and more universal. The critical approach is close to that of imposing allegorical meaning on to a play or poem or novel, with the difference that now the imposed meaning is something altogether more awesome, and even grander than the fantasies of the Christianisers. For whereas they find mere ‘Christ-figures’ everywhere, here in this exalted air even Christ's crucifixion is itself only a symbol of something infinitely deep in universal human experience—the sacrifice of the young prince for the salvation of the tribe. That this need for assertion of a universal humanity, with emphasis on the infinitely significant value of sacrifice, came after the First World War, is not surprising. Frazer in particular seemed to be drawing aside a veil to show, deeply reassuringly, something of what C. G. Jung later called the ‘collective unconscious’.

Drama, moreover, contains another element which seems to make it perfect for such equations. It enacts for a community a performance with a beginning, a middle and an end—indeed, it can easily be said to be doing this on behalf of the community. That very progression, that longer and more complex development from beginning to end, is an ingredient not always found in myths, which are usually fairly uncomplicated in plot. Drama is performed by special people, and there is some stress on them being the right people, properly capable of it. So drama clearly has a powerful ritual function: and as such is part of a stream of human experience that goes back to the dawn of time, as the phrases have it. The priests of that ancient time, the correct performers, have merely changed their appearance slightly to become holders of Equity cards.

So here was apparently another way into studying the universals of humanity, by studying rituals. (That this understanding of ‘rituals’ was so severely limited as to be virtually useless was not apparent at the time. Frazer worked entirely from written accounts: and did not consider his own position, either ideologically or methodologically—he did not consider his own daily routine as ‘ritual’, for example.) At the time, humanity's great religions, and the supposedly even older folk-customs and rituals, seemed to provide stunning material with which to open up not just a new window into some plays of Shakespeare, but comprehensive understanding of the whole work.

Though early in the twentieth century it had been noticed how Shakespeare at the end seemed preoccupied with the theme of reconciliation, and the importance of the royal children and their survival, creating a new world out of what their parents had nearly destroyed, the classic statement of the appeal to myth came a third of the way through the century, in G. Wilson Knight's enormously influential short essay ‘Myth and Miracle’, published in 1929. Here the words ‘myth’ and ‘universal’ are constantly applied to the four last plays, and particularly The Tempest. In the same volume, The Crown of Life, which opens with ‘Myth and Miracle’, is a long chapter, ‘The Shakespearian Superman: an Essay on The Tempest’. This is less startling, though it does contain one influential suggestion—that ‘The poetry is pre-eminently in the events themselves, which are intrinsically poetic’ (Knight 1948, p. 224). In that chapter, there is a sentence about The Tempest which sums up much of the first chapter's thesis: ‘A myth of creation woven from his total work by the most universal of poets is likely to show correspondences with other well-authenticated results of the racial imagination’ (p. 224).

To get to his much-referred-to ‘universals’, Knight has a good deal to do with the words ‘mystic’ and ‘mysticism’. He argues that there is a twelve-year period which takes Shakespeare from the problem plays through the great tragedies towards a spiritual fulfilment. Note ‘spiritual’: on the first page of ‘Myth and Miracle’ he writes, ‘That spiritual quality which alone causes great work to endure through the centuries should be the primary object of our attention’ (p. 9). He finds that ‘tragedy is merging into mysticism, and what is left to say must be said not in terms of tragedy, but of miracle and myth’—which leads him to Pericles and The Winter's Tale. He writes of the apparition of the goddess Diana in Pericles, ‘A reader sensitive to poetic atmosphere must necessarily feel the awakening light of some religious or metaphysical truth symbolized in the plot and attendant machinery’ (p. 14). The Vision of Jupiter in Cymbeline has ‘clear religious and universal significance’ (p. 16): in view of ‘the mystic significance’ of it, ‘we shall find it quite reasonable that he [Shakespeare] should attempt a universal statement in direct language concerning the implication of his plot’ by means of it (p. 19). Knight sums up, on the three plays before The Tempest, ‘these miraculous and joyful conquests of life's tragedy are the expression, through the medium of drama, of a state of mind or soul in the writer directly in knowledge … of a mystic and transcendent fact as to the true nature and purpose of the sufferings of humanity’ (p. 23).

Thus ‘a prophetic criticism could, if The Tempest had been lost, have nevertheless indicated what must be its essential nature, and might have hazarded its name’ (p. 23). He opposes ‘tempest-symbolism’ to music, and ‘the hate-theme’ to love, ideas he finds consummated in The Tempest. The ‘predominating symbols’ of the four plays ‘are loss in tempest and revival to the sounds of music. It is about twelve years from the inception of this lonely progress of the soul to the composition of The Tempest’. On the island, Prospero is ‘master of his lonely magic. He has been there for twelve years’ (p. 24). So ‘The Tempest is at the same time a record of Shakespeare's spiritual progress and a statement of the vision to which that progress has brought him’ (p. 27). We are here, according to Knight, in a world of timeless absolutes. ‘The progress from spiritual pain and despairing thought through stoic acceptance to a serene and mystic joy is a universal rhythm in the spirit of man’ (p. 29). Concluding, he writes:

As for my contention that the Final Plays of Shakespeare must be read as myths of immortality, that is only to bring his work into line with other great works of literature. Tragedy is never the last word: theophanies and reunions characterise the drama of the Greeks: they, too, tell us that ‘with God all things are possible’.

(p. 30)

Sixty years on, the reader must be struck by both the assurance and the vagueness of this immensely influential piece. The uplifting tone and the woolliness about detail can, in fact, be alarming. In the passage above, he is surely wrong to assert that ‘tragedy is never the last word’ and to use the quotation from St Paul for a sentimental, and again wrong, thought about the Greek drama. He is set on avoiding pain altogether.

It is, indeed, noticeable that these plays do not aim at revealing a temporal survival of death: rather at the thought that death is a delusion. What was thought dead is in reality alive. In them we watch the fine flowers of a mystic state of soul bodied into the forms of drama.

(p. 22)

There is something very wrong indeed here. Death was not a delusion for Mamillius or Antigonus in The Winter's Tale nor for the mothers of Caliban or, presumably, Miranda, in The Tempest. Nor was death a delusion for William Shakespeare; nor is it for you or me, dear reader. ‘The fine flowers of a mystic state of soul’ are meretricious comfort.

Yet the essay was seminal. The last plays were central to all that Knight wrote (and performed) of Shakespeare. A considerable body of his own work, and that of others like Derek Traversi, grew directly from that first essay. He wrote persuasively about themes common to two or more of the last plays, and his work had the attraction of fresh scientific observation. The binary oppositions, not only love and hate but also tempest and music, and so on, gave the sense of looking at an important, and previously hidden, structure. Moreover, he made these themes not only immediate to the whole play, giving it again a Coleridgean organic unity: but at the same time the last plays were seen again to consummate the whole Shakespearean corpus, which satisfied the popular hunger for Shakespeare the Developing Artist now that Dowden's ‘On the Heights’, ‘In the Depths’ were discredited. Just as the boiling-together of world-wide myths and rituals by Frazer had seemed to reveal new chemical elements in human experience, so Knight seemed to be able to relate Shakespeare to common life—not just in Western post-Renaissance societies, but to all humanity. And Knight's opposites, as he developed them, overlapped with the flooding of literary studies by the binary systems of anthropological and linguistic ‘structuralism’.

Not everyone could do it as Wilson Knight had done it. In 1958, John Crow, listing ‘Deadly Sins of Criticism, or, Seven Ways to Get Shakespeare Wrong’, included Arrogance: ‘Let's all hunt for Fisher Kings and Dying Gods and ignore the fact that Mr Eliot wrote The Waste Land after, and not before, partaking of Miss Weston's good wine’ (Crow, 1958)—a telling point. (The punning allusion is to the 1927 novel by T. F. Powys, Mr Weston's Good Wine.) An influential offshoot from Knight was C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy of 1959, which set out to show how close comedy could be to the spirit of ancient English festivals. Barber took Shakespeare's comedies only up to Twelfth Night, though he wrote a separate essay on The Winter's Tale (1964). He had the advantage of appearing to deal in much more specific detail than Knight, and he won a generation of converts. Yet his work also now produces unease. For example, there has been much pronouncement about Saturnalia, in relation to Twelfth Night, without any agreement about what that, or Misrule, or whatever, means. Over-confident assertions about life in England have to be treated with some caution when they are made out of a life-experience many thousands of miles away from England; not to mention four centuries in time—and Olivia's household is in Illyria, anyway.

A good deal of caution has gathered round the work of Northrop Frye. The most powerful disciple of Knight, Frye too, focuses his work in Shakespearean comedy by keeping the Romances firmly in view. He, too, brings in the whole corpus. He, too, likes to see systems: by means of such constructions he is able to show that comedy, not tragedy, is the proper form; ‘tragedy is really implicit or uncompleted comedy’, he wrote in his important ‘The Argument of Comedy’ … ‘comedy contains a potential tragedy within itself’ (Frye 1949, p. 65). He takes the relationship between the genres further than Knight, finding a cycle that imitates what he asserts is the natural cycle of birth, death, rebirth—the rhythm of the seasons, and the basis, he says, of humanity's enduring myths. Comedy is paramount because it points beyond death: and the New Testament becomes a primary text. ‘From the point of view of Christianity, tragedy is an episode in that larger scheme of redemption and resurrection to which Dante gave the name of commedia’ (1949, p. 66) Paradoxically, Frye is harder to pin down than Knight—paradoxically, because Frye touches harder edges than ‘mysticism’. Even so, his observations have been revered. His notion of the escape to, and return from, the ‘green world’, has permeated widely. His manner of ipse dixit has been particularly admired, especially in North America.

But Frye, even more than Knight, is open to attack. The distillation of so much mythological and other material gets perilously close to being meaningless. Something is wrong with the very perspective to which Frye appeals in the title of his work to which The Tempest is most relevant, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (1965). It gives us the play as viewed from a very long way away. This makes, as always, for attractive writing—Frye is always readable: more so than Knight—but many plays are briefly touched, and the process is of amalgamation into a surprisingly small compass. The telescope is again held the wrong way round. The effect is momentarily interesting, but it doesn't assist navigation. His declaration that The Tempest rediscovers the logic of the earlier romantic comedies, moving from confusion to identity, from sterility to renewed life, is ultimately sentimental. We are, he says, lifted out of the world of ordinary experiences into a world perfected by the human imagination. To which the acute reader replies, ‘Yes, but …’ The Tempest is a more complex work, and its end is by a long way more problematical, than Frye suggests.

The attention given to the Romances by Knight and Frye (and Barber) was for an important reason. In these plays conventional realism seemed less demanding, and the plays could feel freer, apparently allowing the underlying myths more immediate presence. The archetypes, it could be claimed, were in their least displaced form. Knight, and others, make enormous claims. He wrote that in Shakespeare's theatre,

a common store of racial wisdom for centuries untapped is now released, as Prospero releases Ariel; and the highly responsible artist has himself to explore and exploit the wide areas of imaginative truth apparently excluded (though perhaps in some sense surveyed and transcended) by Christian dogma.

(1948, p. 227)

So much myth-and-ritual criticism is either plain wrong (death as a delusion) or makes the plays more trivial than ordinary experience of them suggests. Shakespeare's characters talking (and doing things in brackets) are so much more complex: who can decide definitively how Miranda ‘should’ play the second scene? The subtle richness of that problem is far and away more informative about the Human Condition than all the Universal Symbols ever asserted.

I do prefer my Shakespeare neither Knighted, Barbered nor Fryed. In this I am not alone. Having expressed disillusion with D. G. James's 1967 attempt to follow Knight, Philip Edwards, for example, is more seriously disturbed by D. Traversi's Shakespeare: The Last Phase (1954), where it is maintained that the symbolic movements point to the acquirement of ‘maturity’, identified as ‘a balanced view of life’.

The reduction of the complexity of Shakespeare to a striving towards a balanced view of life seems to me typical of the pallidness of all interpretations of the last plays which insist that they are symbolic utterances. There is an appearance (there is certainly a claim) that the depths are being opened, riches are being revealed. But it is an appearance only. It is a disservice to Shakespeare to pretend that one is adding to his profundity by discovering that his plots are symbolic vehicles for ideas and perceptions which are, for the most part, banal, trite and colourless. The ‘symbols’ are so much more fiercely active, potent, rich, complex as themselves than as what they are made to convey. When they are translated, they do not have a tithe of their own magnitude. … Sentimental religiosity, in the sense of a vague belief in a vague kind of salvation, and vague tremors at the word ‘grace’—so long as it is decently disengaged from Christianity; platitudinous affirmations of belief in fertility and re-creation; and insistence on the importance of maturity and balance: these are the deposits of Shakespeare's last plays once the solvent of parabolic interpretation has been applied, but these are not what the reader or audience observes in Pericles' reunion with Marina, the Whitsun Pastorals, Leontes' denial of the oracle or the wooing of Ferdinand and Miranda. The power of suggestion, which is one of the striking features of the last plays, is positively decreased by the type of criticism we are considering.

(Edwards 1958, p. 11)

Works Cited

Brockbank, J. Philip, ‘The Tempest: Conventions of Art and Empire’ in Brown and Harris (1966); reprinted in Palmer (1971).

Crow, John, ‘Deadly Sins of Criticism, or, Seven Ways to Get Shakespeare Wrong’ in Shakespeare Quarterly, 9 (1958) 301-5.

Dowden, Edward, Shakspere—his Mind and Art (London, 1875).

Edwards, Philip, ‘Shakespeare's Romances: 1900-1957’, Shakespeare Survey, 11 (1958) 1-18.

Forman, Maurice Buxton (ed.), The Letters of John Keats (Oxford, 1947).

Frey, Charles, ‘The Tempest and the New World’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 30 (1979), pp. 29-41.

Frye, Northrop, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (London, 1965).

Frye, Northrop, ‘The Argument of Comedy’, English Institute Essays 1948 (1949 pp. 58-73; reprinted in Laurence Lerner (ed.), Shakespeare's Comedies: An Anthology of Modern Criticism (Harmondsworth, 1967).

James, D. G., The Dream of Prospero (Oxford, 1967).

Kermode, Frank, The Tempest, The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1964).

Knight, G. Wilson, The Crown of Life (London, 1948).

Levin, Richard, New Readings vs. Old Plays (Chicago, 1979).

Milward, Peter, Shakespeare's Religious Background (Bloomington, 1973).

Nuttall, A. D., Two Concepts of Allegory (London, 1967).

Orgel, Stephen, ‘Prospero's Wife’, Representations, 8 (1984) 1-13.

Srigley, Michael, Images of Regeneration. A Study of Shakespeare's ‘The Tempest’ and its Cultural Background (Uppsala, 1985).

Still, Colin, The Timeless Theme (London, 1936).

Stoll, E. E., ‘Certain Fallacies and Irrelevancies in the Literary Scholarship of the Day’, Studies in Philology, 24 (1927).

Strachey, Lytton, ‘Shakespeare's Final Period’ in Books and Characters, French and English (London, 1922).

Tillyard, E. M. W., Shakespeare's Last Plays (London, 1938).

Traversi, Derek, Shakespeare: The Last Phase (London, 1954).