[In the following essay, Grant surveys the moral purpose of The Tempest as both a theodicy and a disputation on the political structure of society.]

Ad hoc enim homines congregantur, ut simul bene vivant, quod consequi non posset unusquisque singulariter vivens; bona autem vita est secundum virtutem; virtuosa igitur vita est congregationis humanae finis.

thomas aquinas

The interpretation of literature in terms of larger ideas has led to so many abuses that much contemporary criticism is threatening to retreat into aesthetic or exegetical detachment. But any such retreat is based on illusion. What has happened is merely that an entirely proper fastidiousness has mistaken its object. It is ideologies that are at fault not the disciplines (the custodians of these larger ideas) they have requisitioned.¹ The latter are as much a part of life as their practical equivalents: ethics is no less “real” than morality. Literature, too, is a part of life. But it is not life itself, a fact in which, in some periods, it has found cause for self-congratulation. Try, however, as it occasionally may to dissociate itself, it cannot help but be “about” life, since the practical resonances of the language on which it depends can never be entirely suppressed. It follows that, in varying measure, literature abuts or even encroaches on the territory of other reflective modes. It is, in fact, capable if it so chooses of initiating independent reflection in any idiom whatever. A work of art may, under certain circumstances, be also a contribution to theology, political philosophy, or ethics. When it offers itself as such, the critic is entitled—indeed invited—to respond by developing the discussion along extraliterary lines. In the present case I have accepted what seems to me such an invitation.

Literature is also about value. It is hard to see how a work of literature could avoid having at least some ethical bearing or moral significance, since language, except when doctored for scientific purposes, is as instinct with value as it is with representational elements. For what it projects is a world not of neutral “objects,” but of human facts or experiences, of which the cognitive and evaluative components are rarely separable. (To separate them is in some academic instances a virtue, but in the moral life it is generally a vice.) Purely descriptive or purely aesthetic criticism is therefore a chimera.

It is, however, not for this reason alone that it is impossible to treat The Tempest as a purely aesthetic achievement. It is, of course, a work of incomparably exquisite artifice. But it is also, in another of its aspects (the one on which I shall be concentrating), a quite deliberate apologue, as it seems to me, upon the themes indicated in my title. It addresses itself with unusual directness, and in the case of the providential theme quite explicitly, to the grander issues of life. And, for all the subtlety with which these are dramatized, in this play Shakespeare also takes sides. Anyone can express a preference for virtue in the abstract (indeed, it would be eccentric not to), but this play ultimately sees it as more or less uniquely embodied in a particular social and moral order. The play's pervasive ironies are rhetorical rather than exploratory: their purpose is to consolidate rather than to qualify. The sly ambiguity that made Shakespeare a byword for “impersonality” to Romantic critics is here virtually absent. The Tempest, in short, not only celebrates sincerity but is itself “sincere,” a quality reflected in the limpid simplicity of its verbal texture. Yet it is this latter feature which also gives it an air more of demonstration than of dogmatism. In its way, the play is no less “impersonal” than those which specialize in equivocation.

The effect is to offer value in the guise of fact: to affirm that value lies at the heart of things and in a particular conception of the world. The latter is seen not as a so-called cultural option but as obligatory and “natural.” Rather as moral actions are sometimes said to be “beautiful,” in one's response to the author's affirmation it is hard to distinguish aesthetic enjoyment from moral approbation and intellectual assent or to say where one ends and the other begins. (Conversely, a person who disapproved of The Tempest’s implicit propositions might well consider it a bad play or, at least, not as good as a person who approved of them thought it.) As a consequence, much of what I shall have to say about the issues raised by the play (that is, where I depart from straightforward literary criticism) will very likely appear partisan. I have not, for example, concealed my impatience with many current moral and political assumptions. But the play itself calls recognizable versions of more than a few of them into question. A sympathetic reading and an awareness of the profound intellectual tradition to which the play belongs reinforce each other. And they are bound to reveal some of the brightest of our contemporary ideas, singularly adapted (as they are thought to be) to an age of change, as at once parochial novelties and ancient errors. It is my aim in the following essay to provide such a reading, to map out that tradition, and to explore and develop it in a manner relevant, I hope, to more than the limitedly topical controversies of the present time.

I should add that a good many of the ensuing reflections were prompted some years ago by the appearance of Michael Oakeshott's On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).

The three themes of my title are, as I shall argue later, necessarily interrelated, even in the abstract. Though, in the interests of clarity, I shall attempt as far as possible to deal with them separately, this is to do them something of an injustice. Moreover, what may seem to us to be readily pigeonholed categories (Providence belonging to theology, Authority to politics or sociology, and so on) are, in the play itself, a manifold of interlocking significances. And this is so not merely because it is characteristic of all fiction to realise in concrete form the potential interrelatedness of its material, but also because for Shakespeare, as for his age, the inseparability of these particular themes was a matter of moral faith.

That Providence occupies an important place in The Tempest will need no arguing, since it is repeatedly and explicitly invoked. Yet the play is not obviously a disquisition on Providence as it may be said to be on the other themes I have undertaken to examine. Providence seems to be more of a backdrop, a habitual assumption against which the more clearly secular themes are developed. In itself it is very likely incapable of development, for the classic literature of Providence is both sparse and remarkably samely, in a manner suggesting that a logical dead end was reached almost as soon as the concept emerged as a conscious formulation. The pre-Shakespearean canon consists of a mere handful of works by Seneca, Plutarch, Plotinus, and Boethius.² Of these, the Plutarch and the Boethius were both translated into English (the latter for the third time) in the decade previous to The Tempest, in 1603 and 1609 respectively; it may be that the Bermuda pamphlets merely quickened into dramatic life philosophical considerations, and their poetical expressions, that were still fairly fresh in Shakespeare's mind. The few providential works that come after do little more than anthologize, conflate, or rewrite the original expositions in the light of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural science.³ The reason, no doubt, is that theodicy, or providential philosophy, sets itself a near-impossible task. It relies heavily, though in a purely analogical manner, on natural theology, and attempts to do for the moral world what natural theology, with greater plausibility, does for the physical, namely, to argue for the existence of design. It tries to show, from internal evidence, that the visible universe is not merely physically organized but also morally organized, in other words, that it is a just place. The evidence for its justice, however, is much weaker than the evidence for its physical organization. Accordingly, theodicy is perpetually driven to supplement the empirical observation in which, like natural theology, it begins, by drafting in precisely the transcendental conclusions it is intended to establish.⁴

Earthly life everywhere exhibits a manifest disproportion between virtue and happiness, a disproportion susceptible only of limited rationalization. Beyond that point the case for a moral universe can only be saved by the premature introduction of an additional, invisible world in which outstanding accounts are finally squared. It is small wonder, then, that few philosophers have accepted such an unpromising brief, or that those who have may more fitly be said to have produced imaginative literature than philosophy proper.

But imaginative literature, of course, is precisely our present concern, and in this connection some interesting points arise. The first is that most works of theodicy possess considerable literary merit, as though rhetorical force carried a conviction denied to logic. All the pre-Shakespearean ones draw on cosmology and borrow its traditional poetical resources to stage set-piece accounts of the Creation which rival in imaginative power their ultimate original in the Timaeus (a reference of some relevance to The Tempest, as we shall see). Secondly, the bridge between natural theology and providential thought may be no more than analogy, but from the literary viewpoint this is actually an advantage. For analogy is a conceptual mode highly amenable to imaginative exploitation and embellishment. It is the basic building material not only of the Renaissance mental universe but of poetry itself. Thirdly, Providence as an idea has a natural affinity with narrative in general. Narrative, like Providence, finds meaning in experience—or a plausible equivalent of experience—through the imposition, or discovery, of design. Comedy in particular shares with Providence the notion of “poetic” or commutative justice. The universe, says Plotinus, is alethesteron poima, a “truer fiction.”⁵ When Prospero likens human life to the masque of Ceres it may be something other than an expression of senile resignation. We may be meant to feel, as Anne Righter has argued in discussing the Epilogue, that “the play goes on beyond the formal limits of its fifth act, that it runs into and shares the reality of its audience.”⁶

But The Tempest, as I have said, bears a closer relation to theodicy than that involved simply in being a dramatic fiction. It is one of the very few substantial works of fiction in which the notion of Providence is central and more or less explicit, and shares many of their main features. (Such works are so few, though, that they can hardly be said to constitute a literary genre; their similarities derive less from any tradition than from a single, urgent, and perennial impulse to rationalize human suffering.) Other than The Tempest, I can think only of Robinson Crusoe, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” and (with reservations) the Philoctetes. If we rule out expository works such as Greville's Treatie of Warres, Herbert's “Providence,” and the Essay on Man, we are left with narratives which, like Boethius’ Consolation, dramatize a situation seen as the type of all misfortune, namely exile from the only condition proper to man (the zoon politikon), the social world of common understandings and reciprocal self-enactments, about which I shall say more later. And, if this isolation is actually specified in the setting—a desert island, for example—the setting becomes the means to a symbolic concentration, a kind of laboratory in which the human essence can be distilled uncontaminated by historical circumstance.

One might be tempted, perhaps, to class the epic (War and Peace?) as providential, particularly since the nation which gave us the Old Testament has conceived its own history of suffering and exile in both providential and epic terms. But in the traditional epic at least, because the gods are dramatically visible, the effect is to naturalize divinity and hence to burke the real difficulty in providential thinking, which is whether a transcendental direction in human affairs can be detected simply on the level of actuality. For Providence is not God himself (one would not pray to it), but God's purpose in the world. It is—to use Adam Smith's expression—an invisible hand that, even in miracles, never emerges from behind the veil of appearances. And this leads to another observation about providential fiction: though it may exhibit allegorical features, it is not allegory. Appearances, whatever they may suggest beyond themselves, are still to be taken at face value. However fantastic the setting, the characteristic texture of providential fiction is realistic, even minutely so; consider Robinson Crusoe, or compare The Winter's Tale with The Tempest.

What I have loosely called “providential fiction,” then, does appear to have common features in which The Tempest shares. And The Tempest also echoes, though in ways that are far from simple, many of the notions found in providential philosophy. It is not my purpose to discuss these for their own sake, and I have indicated above why they might be philosophically sterile. Nevertheless, the more important are worth setting out here, especially in view of the historical reasons given earlier why Shakespeare may have been particularly aware of them at the time of The Tempest’s composition. I shall add, where appropriate, the most tentative of Shakespearean glosses, though everybody will be able to compete in devising his own. I shall then go on to discuss the more problematic points of contact with the play. Here then are the central articles of classic theodicy. Each is to be found in most of the philosophers I have instanced, and some in all.

1. The universe is organized and was created by God.

2. The minuter tasks of Creation were delegated to subordinate ministers (cf. Ariel).

3. The universe was created either out of nothing or out of Chaos. Chaos is imagined as either

a. an amorphous, undifferentiated mass awaiting the stamp of individuation (cf. pre-social man? Caliban before Prospero's arrival?) or

b. frustrated potentialities locked in mutual strife (“warring seeds” is a common, Lucretian trope, of particular interest for being a social metaphor: compare Hobbes).

4. God does not generally order the temporal affairs of his Creation by promiscuous intervention. This would be clumsy and unaesthetic. Instead he has instituted Necessity for this purpose. It operates through stellar influence and natural laws, and appears as causality in the inanimate world and as instinct in animals.

5. Man is subject to Necessity, but free will enables him at once to master and to fulfil it.

6. The world is the best of all possible worlds, and enjoins a response of acceptance and gratitude on God's creatures. (This need not lead to fatalism: remediable evils are there to be remedied.)

7. Nevertheless, evil and suffering are necessary, and God permits them to exist, because

a. evil provokes the virtuous to exemplary action (Gonzalo?)

b. without it good would be unrecognizable as such

c. suffering is an arbitrary discipline upon the virtuous, and teaches them to rise superior to it (Ferdinand's ordeal?)

d. deserved suffering exemplifies the workings of natural law (Ariel's harpy speech)…

e. and conduces to amendment of life in the errant (Alonso)…

f. and torments the obstinately wicked more than others, because they are more selfish (Antonio and Sebastian in II.i?)

g. some evil propensities, though morally reprehensible, are materially useful (Caliban's servitude?).

One's immediate impulse, on scanning the above schedule, is to equate Prospero with God, as has frequently been done in the past. Here, however, one must be cautious. It is clear that many of the attributes of divinity on which providential thought concentrates are recapitulated in human form by Prospero. But I say in human form because I see no reason to treat The Tempest as allegory: Prospero is not a symbol of God.⁷ Indeed, his most obviously Godlike attribute (his magical powers, complete with subordinate ministers) is largely to be read as a symbol of earthly authority, as I shall argue later. And though God may restrain, he does not, as Prospero does, renounce, his faculty of miraculous interposition. To partake of divinity as, according to the philosophers,⁸ the virtuous man does by freeing himself from crude necessity, is not to be any less human. It is only in aspiring to God's omnipotence—that is, in forgetting that unlike God he himself is always a subject—that man is guilty of hubris. For the rest, man as man, as a creature uniquely endowed with reason, is actually obliged to imitate, within the limited circuit of human existence,⁹ the powers and virtues of God that his reason discloses to him and thereby himself to become their instrument. As a ruler, however, absolute, he must practice both justice and mercy; as a master and father, both love and discipline. He must treat his fellows with both equity and charity. And his rational self must impose discipline on his animal nature (which is internal to him, although external to God). And the result is to introduce into the social order and one's own character (the spheres of authority and the moral life) precisely the aesthetic harmony to be found in the macrocosm.¹⁰

The state (as Burckhardt noted) becomes a work of art; morality becomes a style. The fiat of Authority reiterates the act of Creation. It rescues man from presocial Chaos. Civil society, which it inaugurates and guarantees, puts an end to the self-cancelling “freedom” of the bellum omnium contra omnes, and enables the individual to emerge from the anonymity of savagery. In establishing peace, it nourishes communication and establishes that world of common meanings of which the emblem is language (without which Caliban did not “know his own meaning”). And the moral values it fosters deliver the individual from slavery to his own discordant passions, thereby rendering him capable of rational, decisive action, giving him, in fact, authority over himself.

In all these repetitions of the divine activity man himself becomes a minister of Providence. In this play, conceived under these assumptions, Prospero becomes a reflection in the human world of divine rulership, paternity, and artistry. But it must be emphasized that these, like his magical powers and his benevolence, are symbols not of divinity proper but rather of the divine potential in man. We are not allowed to forget that Prospero is a man. Divine benevolence cannot be the product of God's victory over his own irascibility; God does not, as Prospero does, take part with his nobler reason against his fury, since in God there can be no conflict. Prospero's residual and quite understandable resentment and tetchiness prior to the great forgiveness scene do not qualify or diminish his goodness, but are rather a constant reminder of what must be conquered or sublimated in order to achieve it.¹¹ They represent, in fact, like the sullen obduracy of Antonio and Sebastian at the end, a further gesture toward the realism that, except in point of merely physical probability, has been sustained throughout. The human condition gives cause only for optimism, not for complacency.

As for Prospero's magical powers, essentially the same point can be made. It is true that Ariel's account of the tempest and Prospero's apostrophe of his spiritual ministers resemble a great many accounts of the Creation to be found in providential writing, but the connection is oblique. As everyone knows, the immediate source of Prospero's speech is to be found in Book VII of Golding's Ovid. Medea's celebration of black magic is an inversion of the Platonic Creation myth with which the work opens, in that it reduces the divine order to chaos again. It is as though Shakespeare wished to retain the imaginative power of Medea's speech while playing down its antinatural or destructive aspects (Prospero, for example, does not make streams run backward). Other feats, such as raising the dead or rifting Jove's stout oak with his own bolt, certainly carry suggestions of Promethean hubris.¹²

But I take the point to be this, that it is characteristic of the virtuous man, unlike the black magician (Medea or Sycorax), that he does not abuse or divert to selfish ends such powers as he may possess (compare the classical distinction between monarchy and tyranny). The intimations of hubris are there, that is, to remind us as before of temptations that in Prospero's case are resisted. From a historical point of view it would hardly be extravagant to see Prospero's magical powers as at least partially signifying, not God's omnipotence, but the rapidly concentrating power, justified in theory and enjoyed in practice, of the Renaissance prince and late Renaissance man's dizzily increasing mastery of nature, together with a built-in warning to use such dangerous privileges responsibly. (And I mean responsibly: classically, the absolute ruler is still responsible to God.) Nor am I tempted to feel that God's miraculous powers are compromised by Prospero's ability to mimic them, as one might in considering that, in the vanishing banquet scene, Ariel, in the speech written for him by Prospero, attributes the raising of the tempest not to his master but to Destiny and the cosmic powers themselves. Though still problematic (it could be a version of Plato's “noble lie”), this seems to me primarily an intelligible dramatization of the idea that in collaborating with Providence, in using the materials it has put in his way, the good man himself (without actually being it) becomes its agent. (Of course, in a roundabout way, this is also true of the wicked man, since in the long run evil is a necessary part of the providential design. But to pursue this point would be to involve oneself in paradoxes that have taxed the greatest philosophers.) In other words, Ariel is telling no more than the truth.

To dispose finally of the supposition that Prospero's magic powers symbolise anything other than human faculties, the following additional points may be made. They are limited, unlike God's powers, by geographical space and astrological time, which reminds us also that they operate only in that part of the cosmos influenced by the stars, the world of natural phenomena (to which minor spirits such as Ariel belong). It is study to acquire them that has cost Prospero his dukedom in the first place, though (a characteristic providential twist) it is also they very largely that have enabled Prospero and Miranda to survive once on the island and they, with providential help, that restore him to Milan. But, once they have served their purposes, it is seen as proper that Prospero should renounce them.¹³ They give him power over others, and one of their uses is to discipline those in their physical or moral nonage (the young or the not incorrigibly wicked) and thereby to make full maturity available to them. But, once that end is accomplished, they are otiose; and there is a feeling also, I think, that they are incompatible with Prospero's own full maturity. He himself always refers to them slightingly, as incipiently vain, crude, or vulgar—the sort of thing, in fact, to impress only the susceptible. It should be noted, furthermore, for reasons to be given later, that they would be out of place in the civilized society to which the castaways finally return: one in which the errant have been reformed, the young inducted into independence, and the criminal rendered powerless.

Finally, there is a kind of magnanimity or moral artistry in living a life of authority unaided by them. Authority supersedes mere power as forgiveness supersedes revenge. Power over oneself supersedes the brute power over others that easily degenerates into tyranny, or the use of power for personal ends.¹⁴ Prospero's renunciation is akin to God's aesthetic “impersonality” (his refusal to be always meddling): it is as appropriate to the government of ideally mature individuals as God's self-restraint is to rule of a race endowed by himself with free will. In sum, Prospero's magical powers (like everything else in the play) are understandable, not in terms of divine symbolism or allegory, but in terms rather of analogy.¹⁵ Prospero is not a symbol of God, but the equivalent of God within his own subordinate sphere. Within each of our spheres of discourse—providence, authority, and the moral life—the same structure obtains (and not only in respect of government, though government is of the essence). These connections are nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the De Regimine Principum of Aquinas. Chapter 12 of this work is headed, “The duties of a king: the similarity between the royal power and the power of the soul over the body and of God over the universe.” It contains these words:

Since art is but an imitation of nature, from which we come to learn to act according to reason, it would seem best to deduce the duties of a king from the examples of government in nature. Now in nature there is to be found both a universal and a particular form of government. The universal is that by which all things find their place under the direction of God, who, by his providence, governs the universe. The particular is very similar to this divine control, and is found within man himself; who, for this reason, is called a microcosm, because he provides an example of universal government. … In a certain sense, reason is to man what God is to the universe … a king has assumed the duty of being to his kingdom what the soul is to the body and what God is to the universe. … If he thinks attentively on this point he will … be fired with zeal for justice, seeing himself appointed to administer justice throughout his realm in the name of God, and … will grow in mildness and clemency, looking upon the persons subject to his government as the members of his own body.¹⁶

With these reflections I come to the question of authority proper. And no one bearing them in mind will misunderstand the assertions first, that The Tempest is a political play (“in a way,” says one critic cautiously, “the play is all about politics”),¹⁷ and secondly that, notwithstanding, the political aspect cannot be detached from the moral and metaphysical aspects, nor these even from such apparent trivialities as manners or civility (la petite morale). The Tempest, that is, is not a Machiavellian essay in the dynamics of pure power (though it anticipates much in Hobbes). It also lacks—and is the profounder for lacking—the unique intellectual dispassionateness of Coriolanus. Again, the dependency it implies between the political and the transcendental, or between the political and the moral, is not of the kind to secure the approval of so-called liberation theology or of the guardians of our contemporary political conscience. No doubt we stand in need of a political conscience, properly understood, but it is not to be found in the current fad for the moralization of politics. The latter generally amounts simply to a politicization of morals, to desire which is merely to show ignorance of the true nature of either. For, according to a profounder conception of politics, which can count both Aristotle and Shakespeare among its supporters, the end of political life—so far as it has an end—is the production of virtue. Virtue is not to be defined, topsy-turvy, as the factional solidarity that redeems its adherents from the hardships of moral autonomy. Neither is the moral autonomy on which it depends to be confused with the essentially economic travesty of it celebrated by liberals under the banner of “freedom of choice.”¹⁸ On the contrary, virtue consists not in not knowing, but precisely in knowing how to behave, and moral autonomy in the faculty, acquired by education, of rational intelligent beings of participating spontaneously in a common culture or polis which it is the business of politics, properly conceived, to foster. There is, in fact, both an analogy and a necessary connection with language, which in the opinion of Aristotle and Aquinas after him distinguished human society from the mere organized mechanical gregariousness of the social animals such as bees.¹⁹

The good man and the good citizen are identical; they are morally literate. But the good man is not the political conformist. What he has learned is not a set of gestures and responses, but rather the ability to make relevant ones. He has not been trained like an animal or programmed like a computer for the performance of specific tasks; he has not been indoctrinated; he has been educated in the ways of his society. In fact, under this conception, the current notion of political conformity is as unintelligible as the politics of either power, “conscience,” or the so-called minimal state (that is, the various politics of individualism). For conformity of this kind can only be enjoined in relation to a specified extrinsic purpose (the achievement of, say, “racial purity,” “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” “economic growth,” “maximization of choice,” “a multi-racial society,” or “the kingdom of God on earth”). The life of the polis, by contrast, is, like friendship, an end in itself.²⁰ The only conceivable “purpose” it could have, therefore, is intrinsic, namely, self-preservation, which entails both the exercise of the coercive power necessary for the establishment and maintenance of any society, and sufficient additional authority to perpetuate the culture of the particular society, through the education and moral initiation of the next generation. Such authority, therefore, could not without self-contradiction—indeed, without self-extinction—infringe the autonomy of its citizens or moral graduates (being designed to produce it); nor could it impose any extrinsic “social purpose” upon them, since any “social purpose” there might be would already be comprised and implied in their pursuit of their private ends, which, a fortiori, would not be “selfish” or antisocial.

The current conception of politics, in sum, is too narrow for our purposes; the belief that there is a realm of the specifically political (consequent to which one has actually arisen) is common both to individualists (who wish to minimize it, seeing any social claims as a threat to moral “choice”) and to totalitarians (who, seeing it as the sole ground of value, seek to subordinate everything to it). And, correspondingly, we have very largely lost the conception of character, and the moral vocabulary in which it is expressed, appropriate to an understanding of The Tempest.²¹ But that will follow from an examination of the political aspects of the play.

In view of what I have just said it may seem paradoxical to claim that Shakespeare singles out the political aspect for particularly explicit treatment. By this, however, I mean merely that the values dramatized in the various political models offered by the play are not, unlike the moral and metaphysical assumptions, simply taken for granted, something that might in itself be deduced from the fact of variety. Of course, in the moral sphere, there are bad and good men, but it would be ridiculous to suppose that the variety we are offered there is offered as a necessary precondition of rational preference. People are not good and bad in such divergent ways that the varieties of each demand separate illustration. On the other hand, they exercise power, legitimately or otherwise, in very different ways, and the play goes to considerable lengths to illustrate each in what, as far as possible, is a pure form, an undertaking to which the technical device of geographical isolation contributes. The immediate reason for this I take to be historical, a version of what may be called the Richard/Bolingbroke problem. Some people, relying on habitual obedience, on rational assent, or on brute force, have power over others. On what moral basis, if on any, does this power rest? Skepticism has not gone so far (except perhaps in Machiavelli)²² as to doubt that a moral basis is necessary, but the question is, of what kind?

The moral basis of power, where it has one, is called authority. My contention will be that there are adumbrated in The Tempest two main kinds of authority; that each has degenerate derivatives; that each is dealt with in comparative isolation; that both are necessary to the life of the polis; and that the isolation of ideal types and their derivatives is, though familiar (as in Aristotle and Aquinas), particularly prompted by the need to clarify the ambiguities of a historical situation bounded on the one side by the traditionalism of a Hooker and on the other by the rationalism of a Hobbes.

The Tempest embodies several models of human association, each clearly intended as a gloss on the others. They are as follows: first, the situation on board ship. Secondly, the traditional polity of Milan under Prospero, which we only hear about, but which is largely recapitulated, conspiracy and all, in the marooned Neapolitan court. Thirdly, the polity of the island, with Prospero as supreme authority over all, both the original inhabitants and the castaways. Fourthly, the comic polity of Stephano, the nominal sovereign over Trinculo and Caliban. Lastly—and least—the Saturnian commonwealth (an alternative version of the state of nature) borrowed by Gonzalo from Montaigne and by Montaigne largely from Ovid. I say least, because it is plainly intended merely as a focus for the exhibition of various moral attitudes (important as these are) rather than as a serious intellectual proposition in itself. It is perhaps just worth noting in passing that such a dream of idyllic anarchism could only be entertained by a man so thoroughly and harmoniously civilized as to have forgotten that human society is built in the first instance upon constraint, and furthermore by one who is a conspicuous representative of the providential power which is so central a reference point in the Bermuda pamphlets and the Elizabethan literature of discovery in general.

First, let us deal with the “polity” (if we may so call it) on board ship. The ship, of course, is a traditional type of the State (Quintilian uses it as his example of allegoria).²³ But it does not, in this instance, signify the polis proper. The ground of the officers’ authority, over the royal party as over the seamen, is purely functional, being based not on any superior moral qualities they might possess but simply on superior skill. The contract whereby the king delegates all authority on board to the sailors derives on each side from self-interest; if this authority is not observed all alike will be drowned. The contemptible rebellion against it by Antonio and Sebastian is a piece of outrageous criminal folly rather than metaphysical wickedness.

It is tempting perhaps to see an analogy with Prospero's authority on the island, for he too appears to rule in virtue of superior skill and knowledge, and his magical powers obtain as exclusively on the island as the authority of the officers does on board. But although there is something in this, the analogy is defective. For Prospero's superior knowledge is not, in this context, the ground of his authority—it actually constitutes his authority and is the force with which he backs it. Furthermore, Prospero's relationship with his habitual subjects on the island contains many nonutilitarian elements such as sentiment, duty and loyalty; Prospero's authority has a moral and even aesthetic dimension not found in the purely practical or rational authority of the Boatswain. Gonzalo actually reminds the Boatswain of this distinction when, having been ordered below with the observation that the sea cares nothing for the King's authority, he asks the Boatswain, while obeying him, nevertheless to “remember whom thou hast on board.” Finally, the Boatswain's authority is appropriate only to the conduct of a common and specified enterprise.²⁴ It is not the sort appropriate to the enjoyment of a settled and permanent condition. Even in the polis as I have sketched it there is, of course, a purposive element, but this is merely the enterprise of securing sufficient order to stay alive and to defend one's interests, as Prospero is forced to do in enslaving Caliban. Once security has been established, the authority necessary for this becomes overlaid with the moral or aesthetic elements I mentioned. The enterprise, that is, is at an end, qua enterprise, and is transmuted from a purposive undertaking into a state of affairs to be accepted, enjoyed, and explored.

The second major type of association in the play is represented by the traditional civilization of Milan and Naples, and most of what needs to be said about it has already been given in my outline of the ideal character of the polis. It is, in fact, the polis with the functional or purposive elements left out. The Neapolitan court will serve as an example. The only functional element lies, not within the polis itself, but in the private contract made between Alonso and Antonio, who is not a subject proper but a foreign tributary. Alonso's “authority” over Antonio is simply a commercial quid pro quo, Antonio's part of the bargain for help in deposing Prospero. It's fitting, therefore, that it should be Antonio rather than Sebastian who is going to kill Alonso; bargains made out of pure self-interest, without any real power to enforce them (and not being, as on board ship, virtually self-enforcing) may be, and are likely to be, broken from the same motives (a fact, of course, which is a major obstacle to the acceptance of Hobbes's theory of obligation).²⁵

There is no necessary bond of sentiment between Alonso and Antonio, and not merely because of Antonio's personal incapacity for it. (It will be recalled that in Hobbes sovereigns exist in a state of nature toward each other.) But Alonso's relation to Sebastian and Gonzalo is different. To Sebastian he is not only a sovereign but also a brother, and the two conditions are analogous in that both are moral and metaphysical, even aesthetic, rather than “rational” in the sense of being reducible to an expression of “purpose.” Fraternity is a “transcendent” bond.²⁶ The importance of the moral element in it is pointed up by the existence of the two “unnatural” brothers. Gonzalo, on the other hand, has been to Alonso all that a brother ought to be: sovereignty is ideally an extension of kinship.²⁷ Furthermore, he is part of the original Prospero-Antonio-Alonso scheme: without any rational or contractual obligation he has, out of pure humanity, virtually saved the lives of Prospero and Miranda. Over and above fulfilling his obligation to Alonso, he has given Prospero his household supplies and (most important) his magic books. It should be noted that this humanity is also a product of civilization, though in this case it extends, as it should ideally do, beyond the bounds of the particular polis. This is reflected in the pre- and anti-Hobbesian insistence, to which Hobbes himself only genuflects, that the sovereign and the polis should be subject to the “law of nature” (not the “state of nature”) in their conduct of external affairs.

A skeptic might well object here that it was fortunate that Gonzalo, though right, as Prospero recognizes, to have carried out the orders of his legitimate sovereign (in spite of their being against the law of nature or nations), was not ordered to kill Prospero and Miranda. I see no way out of this crux, though it may be shelved by the paradoxical observation that it is precisely because Gonzalo's charity has cost him nothing that it is above suspicion, that is, could not be part of any conceivable bargain. But be that as it may, it is in token of the purely gratuitous, spontaneous, and disinterested character of Gonzalo's charity that Prospero calls him “holy Gonzalo”; it is worth pondering the etymological relationship between the words gratis, gratuitous, gratitude, and grace. Gonzalo, as I have said earlier, is in his limited way a direct human representative of the Providential power that lies behind the play; it is in him that the moral, metaphysical, and political aspects of The Tempest have first begun to mesh with each other. In his “grace” and free giving, over and above the terms of his obligation, he has at once imitated and actually embodied the action of Providence.

Before coming to Prospero's authority it will be convenient to look at the sovereignty of “King” Stephano. It will be recalled that Lytton Strachey found the jokes in the comic subplot tired; while agreeing with him I should say that he had missed a serious point. The sardonic humor of these episodes may depend precisely on the jokes's being none too funny. Stephano, not having the same critical function, is no Falstaff. The comedy is not one of Saturnalian liberation from the traditional pieties but a reinforcement of them. In Shakespeare's conception there is an unmistakable contempt, if not for the lower orders per se, at any rate for the kind of society they would create if left to themselves.

Stephano's authority is the type called by Weber “charismatic.” It is self-evidently not moral, and being so ludicrously inefficient, can hardly be called rational, though in so far as Stephano makes a show of protecting the timid Trinculo and of helping Caliban dispose of Prospero it may be said to constitute a debased version of rational sovereignty. At the same time it is a lunatic travesty of traditional authority—Caliban takes Stephano not merely for a king but for a God (Shakespeare may well also be recalling accounts particularly of Spanish conquests in the New World). The “grace”—charisma—dispensed by his new sovereign comes out of a bottle, mysteriously replenished from a hidden butt of sack. The charismatic Fuehrer—for he is a “leader,” not a ruler—is under one obligation only to his subjects, to perform the same miracle again and again, and his authority lapses only when the drink runs out, that is, when the bottle is lost in the pool. In return, they surrender such personal autonomy as they have absolutely, thereby perpetuating the moral infancy from which their sovereign has neither the ability nor the inclination to rescue them.

Weber, it may be noted, thought of traditional authority as the institutionalization of charisma, rather than of charisma as the debasement of traditional authority. But there is no real conflict here, for, from the point of view of the mature polis, the institutionalization of charisma may be regarded as its dilution, the sovereign's “farewell” to the cruder aspects of his “art.” And this may be thought to proceed pari passu and reciprocally with the emergence to maturity of its members. In this connection we may note that Caliban gets tired of Stephano as soon as Stephano shows himself incapable of concentrating on the plot against Prospero—that is, of fulfilling the rational aspect of his sovereignty, for which Caliban has partly submitted, as Antonio did to Alonso—and that only Caliban shows the slightest resolution in trying to carry it through. To revert, though, it is hard not to find in Stephano's kingdom a suspicion of bread and circuses, of which history would have furnished Shakespeare with plenty of examples. And as for the supposed “freedom” that Caliban enjoys under Stephano, it amounts, of course, to the most servile obsequiousness, to which even slavery under Prospero, where all that is required of him is obedience, seems aesthetically preferable. The episode somewhat resembles the fable of King Log and King Stork. It might have been devised as a wry cautionary motto for the prewar totalitarian decade, a reminder, perhaps, to

Always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.

Finally, I come to Prospero's authority. His authority over the castaways has already been implicitly accounted for. Although it involves securing “natural” justice for his personal wrongs (in other words, restitution), the purely self-interested element has been waived along with revenge. What remains has a Providential impersonality by no means incompatible with altruism: the correction of the errant, the restraint of the criminal, and the education of the immature. In other words, it belongs to the ethos of the polis. And, in the case of the blameless Gonzalo, whose innocence in another sense is of precisely the kind that is no shame in the mature, we should note that in true Stoic fashion (though without the smugness of Seneca) his acceptance of and ability to see the best in misfortune, right from the start, is just what renders it no real injury, though I think here the inconveniences he has suffered at Prospero's hands have to be read as having a directly providential rather than a political interpretation. The other important aspect of Prospero's sovereignty on the island are found in his relations with his regular subjects (Miranda's case may be considered self-explanatory).

Originally, we are told, Prospero accorded Caliban virtual equality in rights. He gave him house room and an education. I disagree with Robert Langbaum's contention that to do so was an error and a breach of “degree.”²⁸ It has certainly turned out to be impolitic, and it also echoes Prospero's decided negligence, for which he has paid, in having previously trusted Antonio. But the two situations are not strictly comparable. Not all humanity and trustfulness is negligence; and any “degree” involved will not be the sort contingent upon a preexisting social artifice. In the Hobbesian state of nature that in essentials is dramatized on the island, there can be no “degree,” only force, and because it was always open to Prospero to do as he did, namely, to readopt when necessary the force he had renounced, he can hardly be accused of rashness. Nor, since he was ignorant of Caliban's propensities, can he be said to have been wrong in not treating him originally as an Aristotelian “natural slave.” Prospero does, of course, flirt with the idea of racial or natural superiority in order to justify his power (and authority) over Caliban, and in this Shakespeare is no doubt echoing a familiar rationalization of colonial conquest. But the argument is not borne out by the play. Caliban is redeemed, curiously enough, more through the intelligence and natural reason Prospero has developed in him than by internalizing the restraints he has suffered. It is “freedom” under Stephano that has cured him. He refers to himself at the end not as consumed by guilt but as a “thrice-double ass.” He is, in fact, the unique focus of a rational rather than moral demonstration of the legitimacy of traditional authority. And we should note the anticipation of Hobbes's fundamentally rationalist position in the fact that Caliban's assent antedates the moral and metaphysical considerations that would, to a pious traditionalist, seem to claim precedence. He is an ass now, and “hereafter,” in his own words, he is going to “seek for grace.”

But from Prospero's side, the relationship has not always been as exclusively “rational” as it has finally become. Not only has he treated Caliban as a potential equal, he has treated him with kindness and educated him; in other words, he has tried to initiate him into the polis. But Caliban's attempt on Miranda, and his lack of remorse, puts him beyond the pale of civil association. He has shown himself incapable of understanding the reciprocal character, in both its moral and its rational aspects, of life in the polis. Prospero's reduction of him to slavery is thus doubly justified: rationally, on Hobbesian grounds of self-defense, and morally, from breach of trust and ingratitude. And although Prospero's authority is perfectly legitimate, it is unilateral. There is no actual or imputed consent on Caliban's part; his slavery is not legitimated by any benefits he himself may be supposed to receive from it. On the other hand, as a slave, he is exempt from the duties as well as excluded from the liberties of the civil condition. He is not expected to show deference; rather the reverse, in fact: he is allowed the slave's traditional comic license to relieve his feelings by abuse and grumbling²⁹ in a way that would be, and is, condemned in Ariel. Nor is he expected to regret the plot against Prospero's life (Hobbes, incidentally, considered it lawful for a slave to kill his master).

Although all three comic conspirators are appropriately punished by Prospero, I think (as I have already suggested) that Caliban's “freedom” under Stephano (at which Prospero has connived), in which he is denied even the residual self-respect Prospero allows him, is supposed to be far worse than that or than any of the normal hardships Prospero has previously imposed. We should note also that after his initial grumbles Caliban does not persist in accusing Prospero of injustice; Prospero's authority as master is restrained, if not by any law (for none is required), then at least by his own will (which in the virtuous man is identical with the law of nature). Prospero is severe—Caliban says he is tormented “for every trifle”—but he is not unjust. His dominium is never exercised for amusement. And finally, that Caliban is said by Prospero to be indispensable is not a utilitarian justification of his slavery; it is merely a happy consequence of it, entirely in accord with the providential spirit of the play.

Prospero's authority over Ariel is different. Ariel is both a servant and a subject, at worst, a mere bondman. Prospero notes sarcastically that Ariel affects to represent himself as a slave. His right over Ariel is in the first instance analogous, though not identical, to Hobbes's “sovereignty by institution”; that is, it is the right of a liberator, like Robinson Crusoe's over his man Friday. It rests, we might say, on imputed contract; it has the appearance of a rational justification, but since no actual contract was made when Prospero released Ariel from the pine tree, the ground of his authority is in fact moral rather than rational. Ariel's rebelliousness convicts him not of dishonesty but of an ingratitude in some ways worse than Caliban’s. His enforced civilization was perhaps Caliban's cruelest month, since he was originally his own king, for what that was worth (not a lot, in the poet Browning's view). But Prospero has released Ariel from quite literal imprisonment, not merely from superstitious hebetude. He is thus entitled to treat the relationship from his side as at least partially one of contract. Although, as in Caliban's case, he voluntarily limits his demands (in this instance by setting a term to Ariel's service), he is actually entitled to call the tune unconditionally, as Ariel acknowledges in giving up grumbling as soon as Prospero threatens him with imprisonment again; he could, after all, opt for it if he really preferred it.

It is presumably for these reasons that Prospero, on his side, insists on minute and exact performance of Ariel's duties, and why, as if in a mirror image of his own claim, he treats his own freely given promises to Ariel as being absolutely binding on himself. That is to say, he imputes a claim to Ariel which in reality it would be presumptuous for Ariel to press. When Ariel, trading on his faithful performance of Prospero's errands, actually does press it, and more, in demanding an early release, Prospero dismisses it angrily, changing the tack of the argument in what might seem an irrelevant direction, by reminding Ariel of his debt of gratitude. But it is not at all irrelevant. Ariel's duties do not entitle him to any reward; on the contrary, it is Prospero who is entitled to them as his reward for setting Ariel free. Ariel is the debtor, Prospero the creditor; Ariel has already had his share of the imaginary bargain and has no legitimate bargaining power left, but it is entirely appropriate that Prospero, who has yet to receive his share, should insist on its being paid in full, particularly since it was open to him to demand much more. Ariel is attempting to extort favors under the guise of justice. An early release, of course, is Ariel's to ask and Prospero's to grant, but it is not Ariel's to demand. In attempting to turn what, from his side, is a moral obligation into an equal and bilateral contract Ariel is guilty both of falsification and an ugly self-delusion. It should be noted that he never doubts that Prospero will keep his original promise to the letter.

So far, the relationship between Prospero and Ariel represents a remarkably profound inquiry, in dramatic terms, into the nature of sovereignty and civil obligation. In particular, it throws some much needed light on the subtle allocation of rights and duties that lie at the root of political life and on their various distribution, relative to the parties concerned, between the moral and rational spheres. But a tree is more than its roots; indeed, its roots are generally invisible, though it could not live without them. Thus the prevailing idiom of the relationship is not that of the bargain, contractual or otherwise. Its characteristic note is one of chivalry. It realizes itself not in the exchange of quantifiable payments, but in the bountiful free exchange of ever greater endearments and gifts, in which parity of contribution is irrelevant. It is a traffic not of goods but of gestures: a kind of potlatch contest in which the competitive element has been appropriated for aesthetic purposes or sublimated into pure play. Prospero is hailed as a Caesar and teased as a lover; the relationship embodies not only Hobbesian sovereignty (for “pine tree” read “state of nature”) but feudal lordship as well. And the primary insistence, over and above the element of obligation, on bounty and free giving links it also with Providence and the Gospels. But it is Christianity with a difference: the humility is left out, or rather, transformed into a lordly self-respect.

If Prospero is deferential, as he is toward the repentant Alonso, it is from a position of strength, self-mastery, and courage—what Aristotle called magnanimity or great-souledness—rather than from the weakness or fear that many (including Hobbes) have alleged as the basis of deference and humility. And that it is moral strength, not a moral whim indulged by Prospero under the protection of his magical powers, is given in the reflection that he would hardly renounce them later if it were. As for the deference which his subjects owe him, they seem to pay it in surplus, and without thereby abating any of their own self-respect (this is true even of Caliban's grudging recognition of Prospero's authority).³⁰

I have already suggested in my account of the polis the basis of Prospero's authority over Ferdinand. Its real meaning is almost entirely aesthetic. It consists, that is, in pure discipline. It is not a punishment for anything—indeed, it is quite “unjust”—but is entirely educational. It is, of course, partly an ordeal imposed to test the strength of Ferdinand's affection; but over and above that, it may be said to symbolize the value of otherwise gratuitous suffering both as a moral gymnastic and as an induction to full adulthood and self-responsibility; in fact, to be a combination of a rite de passage with the sort of moral and aesthetic education described in Castiglione. The only work of art known to me that at all resembles The Tempest in this respect (and which also bears an uncanny resemblance to it in others) is The Magic Flute. It is no surprise to learn that Mozart had in fact taken sketches for an operatic version of The Tempest before he died.³¹

The Tempest, then, is a fable about human association. And the principle of human association (even when, as between equals, it has apparently been transcended) is authority. As a political fable alone it is a matchless achievement. To have implicitly theorized human association in all its varieties—citizenship, contract, service, servitude, and tyranny—is not perhaps new, though it had hardly ever been done with such insight and copiousness of dramatic illustration; but to have done so in terms of its internal character is at that date virtually unique, Shakespeare's sole forbears being Aristotle and, in what seems comparatively accidental fashion, Marsilius of Padua.³²The Tempest in this respect anticipates much of Hobbes. But, miraculously, it includes what Hobbes, either by temperament or for the purposes of abstraction, had to omit. It places human association, that is, in a fully articulated context of cosmic purposiveness and moral value. But it is not seen as being in a relation of essentially external dependence upon them; it is not ultimately reduced to either, as it is by Plato, Aquinas, Bodin, and Hooker. Nor, on the other hand, are they, and the political realm itself, reducible to ideological projections of supposedly more fundamental power struggles or economic conflicts.³³

The Tempest, in other words, dramatizes a complex of mutually sustaining meanings, a tissue of analogy in which the realms of human society and moral character owe their very autonomy to the providential pattern which both embraces and informs them. For this reason, the feats of abstraction performed by the dramatist and called forth in the critic in the one case do, and in the other should, involve no loss. To call The Tempest a play about “politics” in the sense intended is precisely not to ignore the metaphysical and moral worlds. For human association and its various languages of words, gestures, and actions is their only medium. Without the polis, both God and the self are, for all practical purposes, dumb. Yet it is perhaps primarily for this reason that neither The Tempest nor providential fiction as I have characterized it can be read as religious allegory or as contributing to pure theology in any immediate way, if, indeed, the latter should happen to be anything more than imaginative exercises. The Tempest tells us much about human life, but it has nothing to say about divinity in itself. For, whereof one cannot speak directly, thereof one must, in a manner, be silent.

I come finally to Shakespeare's conception of the moral life. For reasons just given, much of it has already been implied in the course of the argument, but a few of its more salient features are worth separate summary. Providence by definition cannot be conceived as the mere arbitrariness of omnipotence, both on account of God's conformity to his own essential nature and on account of the natural laws, physical and moral, to which he has subjected his Creation. Authority too ceases to be authority if it is neither benevolent nor reasonable. The appropriate moral response, then, invited by both is one of acceptance, an acceptance experienced by the virtuous man as neither servility nor external restraint. Self-restraint is necessary, of course, and both authority and Providence offer the disciplines by which it may be acquired, but once it is acquired natural suffering becomes tolerable and social constraint superfluous. Authority is internalized as reason, but the relation in which reason stands to passion is not the repressive, puritanical one of brute force (such as is illustrated in Angelo in Measure for Measure). It is one of genuine authority; passion, in “consenting,” makes itself available for aesthetic sublimation.

Caliban's sensitivity to nature and his capacity for wonder are, it may be supposed, simply the raw material of “nobility,” for both are also found in Gonzalo (neither, of course, is found in the real villains). Self-restraint, thus understood, rescues man from self-division—he becomes a single will. The harmony of the universe is recapitulated in the character; morality becomes, as Huizinga observed of the chivalric code, an aesthetic achievement. Furthermore, the acceptance of limitation, the willing performance of duty, and the abolition of self-division all conduce to the establishment of a determinate personality. It is precisely in accepting that he is not everything that a man delimits or stakes out his individuality; he distinguishes himself from what he is not, and in this lies his “distinction.” In the spontaneous identification and performance of his duties he becomes, as Hegel observed of the “noble” mind,³⁴ one with his actions: they are “graceful.” He at once interprets, fulfills, and develops the potentialities of the available social language; in expressing them, he expresses himself. The “freedom” of a Caliban or even of an Ariel is meaningless to him; it is the freedom to have either nothing to say or no means of saying it.

“Restraint” means quite literally “pulling oneself together”; the man who has done so successfully is “collected.” In the language of The Tempest, such a man has found his “proper self”; in Boethian phrase, he “knows what he is”; in William James's words, he is “at home in the Universe.”³⁵ He has no need of the cruder defenses against existential insecurity; his powers over others subserve only an ideally evanescent tutelage; they are not needed to extort recognition or (in the manner of Shelley's Ozymandias) to impress a spurious permanence and continuity upon each miserable passing caprice. And it should be noted that such a man restrains his desires not because, as Blake alleged, they are weak enough to be restrained. The injunction of chastity in The Tempest, for example, does not half commend, in a not uncommon Jacobean fashion, the sexual debility of Rousard in The Atheist's Tragedy, of Camillo in The White Devil, or of Albany in King Lear. The good man is not recognizable by indifference or incapacity. On the contrary, the very potency of the sexual instinct is what makes it worth moralizing. Hymen recruits Priapus; Juno supplants Venus and joins hands with Ceres. Within social forms the sexual instinct is truly naturalized; it is not distorted but straightened out.³⁶ Nor is it dammed up to produce a tense ascetic hubris. For pride also is moralized into magnanimity and calm self-respect; life overflows, in Yeats's words, without ambitious pains.

Such a life, then, since it involves acceptance, is static and modest in aspiration. It asks only for Ferdinand's affectingly simple catalog of enjoyments: quiet days, fair issue, long life, and such love as ’tis now. Change should be endured, since we are mortal, but only a man at odds with himself would pursue it; maturity, the coming into one's civilized inheritance, signals the superfluity of all further change. One could perhaps sum up by saying that (to borrow a metaphor from Michael Oakeshott) The Tempest is one of those miraculous performances in which the conflicting tendencies of a vanishing era are momentarily and finally compressed into a significant and harmonious image before being, in the natural course of things, flung off again into the future. For what we have here is pretty well the unique solution to the habitual Renaissance problem of the incompatibility between the great man and the good man. The good man, as he appears in the poetry of Herbert twenty years later, is certainly both virtuous and impressive (as well as being, in The Church Porch, a curious anticipation of Dr. Arnold); but the extraordinary vitality and athletic grandeur of the moral ideal realized in The Tempest have gone. Virtue becomes an essentially individualistic sideshow, in closer intimacy with a correlatively more “personal” God. It comes to stand, like the Puritan “conscience,” in potentially subversive relation to the polis. It would be no wonder if the naked Emperor, faced with such competition, employed his tailors to array him all the more gorgeously in the gilded straitjackets of ius divinum or of secular absolutism.

It would be pleasing to end on the same note of unequivocal affirmation as the play. But a few reflections on the language of The Tempest afford us only a guarded optimism. To take a very ordinary example, the Boatswain's description of the miraculously refitted ship as “royal, good and gallant” moves us today, if it moves us at all, mostly through the poignant memories it evokes of an irrecoverable moral innocence: of a childhood world in which values were few and simple.³⁷ Nowadays only the shallow, the ignorant, or the ambitious are likely to entertain us to visions of a brave new world. For most of us (abetted, no doubt, by Aldous Huxley) Miranda's phrase is almost indelibly tinged with irony. There is, of course, some dramatic irony. But, says David William, “for a moment, the audience will do right to see the world through Miranda's eyes.” “It seldom happens like this, however,” he adds, “as the speech invariably raises a laugh in the theatre, a depressing reflection on the chances of a reasonable hearing for idealism.”³⁸

Now The Tempest clearly projects an ideal. It may be that such ideals bore scant relation to historical circumstance. But, on the other hand, the play's language remains even today a kind of archaeological deposit containing the fossils of living moral concepts. Probably people did not in general behave in the manner idealized in The Tempest (though there is reason to suppose that such people as Sir Philip Sidney, Richard Lovelace, and Sidney Godolphin actually did). Nevertheless, the play would have been unintelligible to them if they had not occasionally caught a fleeting glimpse of the ideal in the texture of a mundane actuality, an ideal, in other words, which everyday life might be held to imply.³⁹ We cannot suppose that a contemporary audience would have been embarrassed by Miranda's outburst. And it should be noted that what William calls Prospero's “gentle aside” (“’Tis new to thee”) does not stain the moral transparency of her words with the ambiguity otherwise so habitual to the Jacobeans in their contemplation of the human scene. The corruption of human nature, in The Tempest, is (if intrinsic) largely curable, and it does not automatically infect the ideals equally intrinsic to a civilized humanity with the murkiness that more recent centuries have made it a point of sophistication to detect in them.

It may be doubted, though, whether the confused and self-contradictory nature of current ideals gives us any right to skepticism. In concluding, since what I have to say requires a measure of tact, let me invoke some words of Coleridge's on the politics of The Tempest. “In his treatment of this subject,” Coleridge observes, “Shakespeare is quite peculiar.” Although he shows “a profound veneration for the established institutions of society,” “delighting in those … which have a tendency to bind one age to another,” “he never promulgates any party tenets”; “he is always the philosopher and the moralist.”⁴⁰

Now, there are contemporary versions of Providence, authority, and the moral life; and they are as closely interdependent as those I have tried to chart. Modern civilization, whatever its local forms of social and economic organization, has chosen, comparatively recently, to identify its ends in terms of “welfare.” (This has little to do with the so-called welfare state and still less to do with the bene vivere of Aquinas.)⁴¹ Seduced by a mirage of endless technological advance, it has engaged itself to provide for its subjects (or rather, its electorate) not only less erratically than divine providence, but inexhaustibly; and not out of benevolence, but in satisfaction of the “rights” it has bestowed in exchange (it is hoped) for their allegiance. Its success in insuring man against some of the more remediable misfortunes, furthermore, breeds the demand that it guarantee him immunity from the rest, including those of a nonmaterial nature. Even to begin to satisfy its customers, it must acquire formal powers undreamed of by any Renaissance prince. But its promises are inevitably unfulfillable. Moreover, both in origin and execution, they are not only seen but vaunted to consist in specifically human agency, against which claims may be made and blame laid, and from which redress may supposedly be exacted. These factors together conspire to strip such a civilization of all authority and to leave merely an amorphous, cumbersome residue of power in hands too nerveless and demoralized to exercise any of it, even those elements essential to the maintenance of any society whatever.

And, with the demise of authority and the “transcendent” social bonds which both nourish and are nourished by it, comes the demise not only of moral literacy but of the moral life altogether—ultimately, the death of the self. Personal identity ekes out a pseudoexistence either in fatuous eccentricity or in random and pathetically incompetent improvisations upon isolated, half-remembered themes which, whatever meaning they may once have possessed in a live moral context, have long been reduced to cliché. And a self so vacuous is ripe for invasion by spurious transitory authorities, in whose tawdry luster it slavishly seeks a reflection of the power and autonomy it might once itself have enjoyed: peer groups, prophets, political ideologies, pop stars, or presidents. If The Tempest does indeed embarrass a modern audience, it is no wonder; but the very fact that it can still make us uncomfortable, whether from nostalgia or the effort of repressing it, may after all be a sign of hope. It may be that we can share the optimism, truly astonishing for 1935, of these words from Hardin Craig:

The Elizabethans seem to have known and thought more about conduct than than we do. … They were able to think, and did habitually think, with clarity and fruitfulness, in regions of the mental and emotional life into which the modern man more rarely enters, such as filial piety and the nature of true love. The wisdom of Shakespeare is a wisdom of family and state, of peace and war, of love and friendship, of death, and of a good life. In these fields he is still pre-eminent, and so stable are certain of the ways of men from age to age that he has a fair chance of preserving this pre-eminence.⁴²

Notes

1. I have written about this elsewhere, and will not repeat myself. See “Art versus Ideology: the Case of L. H. Myers,” Cambridge Quarterly, 6 (1975), esp. 215-16.

2. Viz. Seneca, De Providentia; Plutarch, De Sera Numinis Vindicta (tr. Philemon Holland, 1603); Plotinus, Enneads III, ii and iii; Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (tr. by “I. T.,” 1609). G. L. Kittredge noted the possible relevance of the Plutarch to The Tempest (see New Arden Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode, p. 190). There is so much in Boethius of relevance that it is barely worth enumerating similarities of theme and treatment; nevertheless, the following may be noted: the vanity of art (I, ii, prose); the cosmic powers (ibid., verse); self-mastery (I, iv, verse); self-knowledge (I, vi, prose); philosophy and music (II, i, prose); reason, passion, and divinity (III, x, verse); forgiveness (IV, iv, prose); wonder (IV, vi, verse); virtue is blessedness and hence partakes of divinity (III, xii, prose—compare Pericles, III.ii. 26 ff.). The 1609 version (Loeb, 1918) is a work of some literary merit, unlike its successor in the Loeb series.

3. For example, Ralph Cudworth, The Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), Bk. v; John Ray, F.R.S., The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691). Ray's book is full of Shakespearean echoes; in particular his account of the state of nature recalls both Caliban and “poor Tom.” It may be appropriate also, given our theme, to recall that the author of the Evidences of Christianity, William Paley, was also the author of Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), which has been commended by F. A. Hayek for its championship of liberal principles. On the whole, though, it seems to me that the implications of the providential outlook are conservative. The propensity to take risks characteristic of economic liberalism may connote a trust in the beneficent ordering of the universe, but it also smacks of presumption. Against this, however, we may set the similarity between Adam Smith's “invisible hand” (The Wealth of Nations, IV, ii, 9) and Plotinus’ subtle account of the providential order (III, ii, 14). And Robinson Crusoe, also, has frequently been read as a work of “bourgeois” ideology.

4. Compare the second paragraph of Dr. Johnson's famous review of Soame Jenyns's Free Enquiry (1757), where the same point is made. The Free Enquiry, in this respect as in many others, seems true to type.

5. Enneads, III, ii, 16.

6. New Penguin Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Anne Righter, Introduction, p. 51.

7. See, in general, A. D. Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory: a Study of Shakespeare's “The Tempest” and the Logic of Allegorical Expression (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967).

8. For example, Plato, Timaeus, 90; Seneca, i, 5; Boethius, III, xii, prose. Compare the magus Cerimon's speech (see note 2, above).

9. There is an aesthetic parallel here. “Providential fiction”—which is as much as to say comedy in this context—enacts the final moral reckoning on earth, within the world of appearance, and not in the afterlife. Hence The Divine Comedy, as the distinguishing epithet in its title indicates, is a comedy only by a figure of speech.

10. See, for example, Plato, Timaeus, 47-48.

11. “Shakspere has shown us his [Prospero’s] quick sense of injury, his intellectual impatience, his occasional moment of keen irritability, in order that we may be more deeply aware of his abiding strength and self-possession, and that we may perceive how these have been grafted upon a temperament not impassive or unexcitable” (Edward Dowden, Shakspere—His Mind and Art [London, 1897], p. 418).

12. Compare the myth of Salmoneus: “Salmoneus was hated by his subjects, and went so far in his royal insolence as to transfer Zeus's sacrifices to his own altars, and announce that he was Zeus. He even drove through the streets of Salmonia, dragging brazen cauldrons, bound with hide, behind his chariot to simulate Zeus's thunder, and hurling oaken torches into the air; some of these, as they fell, scorched his unfortunate subjects, who were expected to mistake them for lightning. One fine day Zeus punished Salmoneus by hurling a real thunderbolt, which not only destroyed him, chariot and all, but burned down the entire city” (Robert Graves, The Greek Myths [Baltimore: Penguin, 1955], 68.a). See also James I on the punishment of monarchs, who are accountable only to God: “Jove's thunderclaps light oftener and sorer upon the high and stately oaks, than upon the low and supple willow trees” (The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, 1598, in Political Works of James I, ed. McIlwain [New York: 1965]). Compare Pericles, II.iv. (Antiochus’ death).

13. Kermode, locating Prospero's renunciation in a Renaissance tradition of ethical or white magic, has some pertinent words: “When Prospero achieves this necessary control over himself and nature he achieves his ends (reflected in the restoration of harmony at the human and political levels) and has no more need of the instrument, ‘rough magic’” (New Arden Tempest, Introduction, p. xlviii).

14. “Tyranny” so defined: Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, VIII, x, and Politics (Barker) IV, x; Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, I, 3; Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, ed. M. J. Tooley (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1955), p. 62 (II, 4); James I, Trew Law, p. 55.

15. See Nuttall, and Reuben Arthur Brower, The Fields of Light ch. 6 (“The Mirror of Analogy: The Tempest”).

16. A. P. d’Entrèves, ed., J. G. Dawson, trans., Aquinas: Selected Political Writings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948), pp. 66-67. Some of these notions are also found, of course, in the Trew Law, which is a dogmatic mishmash of classical theories. It is marginally worth noting that James also draws an analogy between the monarch and a schoolmaster (Prospero has been a “schoolmaster” to Miranda, and I shall argue later that authority has a certain “educational” function in The Tempest). The Courtly circumstances of the play's production are well known.

17. Nuttall, p. 151. See also note 40, below.

18. See, for example, Samuel Brittan, Capitalism and the Permissive Society (London: Macmillan, 1973). The fallacy (one of the many in which “pluralism” is enmeshed) lies in confusing the essential faculty of moral choice (that is, free will, without which no action can be called “moral”) with a sought-after multiplicity of behavioral options or manifest “choices,” all thought of as equally “valid.” The quasieconomic “maximization of choice” in morals in fact evacuates morality of any meaning whatever.

19. Politics (Barker), I, ii, 10; Aquinas, I, 2. Compare Cicero, De Officiis, I, 50 (horses and lions cannot be “just”), and Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 4 (“Of Speech”).

20. See, for example, Nichomachean Ethics, I vii, 7 (autarkeia defined), and VIII, viii (and friendship); Politics, I, ii, 8 (and the polis).

21. The moral and political idiom required needs to be able to accommodate a conception of human character that is neither individualist anarchy nor mechanical, collectivist slavery (both of these, in fact, belong to the same rival conception and jointly exclude the possibility of moral conduct: see Shirley Robin Letwin, “On Conservative Individualism,” in Conservative Essays, ed. Maurice Cowling [London: Cassell, 1978]). Dowden had a characteristically old-fashioned way of putting it: “A thought which seems to run through the whole of The Tempest … is the thought that the true freedom of man consists in service.” But he is wrong to upbraid Caliban for being “impatient of service.” Caliban is a slave (see below).

22. But see, however, K. R. Minogue, “Theatricality and Politics: Machiavelli's Concept of Fantasia”: “Paradoxically, might makes right—not in the sense that the mighty have a right to do what they do, but in the sense that until some might has established a state, there is no soil in which the plant of morality, as it may locally be conceived, may grow” (in The Morality of Politics, ed. B. Parekh and R. N. Berki [New York: Crane, Russak, 1972]). Compare Leviathan, I, xiii, 8-9.

23. His text is Horace, Odes, I, xiv, in which “navem pro re publica, fluctus et tempestates pro bellis civilibus, portum pro pace atque concordia dicit” (Institutio Oratoria, VIII, vi, 44).

24. The distinction is essentially that made by Tönnies between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (“community” and “association” are the usual makeshift translations): “First, in communities individuals are involved as complete persons who can satisfy all or most of a wide range of purposes in the group, while in associations individuals are not wholly involved but look to the satisfaction of specific and partial ends. Secondly, a community is united by an accord of feeling and sentiment between individuals, whereas an association is united by a rational agreement of interest” (T.B. Bottomore, Sociology [London: Allen & Unwin, 1962]).

25. Friendship, statecraft, utility: Nichomachean Ethics, Viii, iv, 4; self-enforcing “authority”: Cicero, De Re Publica, I, 63 (“ut in navi … cum subito mare coepit horrescere … valet salus plus quam libido”); obligation in Hobbes self-destructive: Cudworth, V, v, 30 ff., and cf. Cicero, De Legibus, I, 43: “Ita fit, ut nulla sit omnino iustitia, si neque natura est, eaque quae propter utilitatem constituitur, utilitate illa convellitur.”

26. See Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1980). This difficult expression is Kantian in flavor (cf. Metaphysics of Morals, Ch. II, para. 10; Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction, VII, para. 1), and defines more or less what Dowden means by the “bonds of affection, bonds of duty, in which they find their truest freedom” (p. 421). It seems to signify relationships based on obligations which are a priori, “natural,” not the outcome of choice, not to be discharged in material terms (though material benefits might be their vehicle), unconditional, and subject to no agreed limits (for example, of time or “purpose”). No doubt “elective affinities” such as friendship also qualify as “transcendent,” since although “choice” is involved, it is not “rational” in the sense of “self-interested.” A mark of the “transcendent” bond could be that its interruption or dissolution (for instance, absence, death, deceit in a friend, civil war, national disgrace) was attended primarily by grief rather than by (self-centered) emotions such as disappointment, frustration, or resentment.

27. The assimilation of kingship to, for example, paternity is, of course, a commonplace (see the Trew Law). But philosophers are more cautious. Aristotle assimilates paternity to kingship (Politics, I, xii), Aquinas notes merely “a certain similarity,” whereas for Bodin the father's is the only “natural” authority. None can be called “paternalist”—i.e. none assimilates citizenship to childhood.

28. See Robert Langbaum, Introduction to Signet Tempest (New York: Signet, 1964), xxvi.

29. See Bernard Knox, “The Tempest and the Ancient Comic Tradition,” in English Institute Essays (1954), reprinted in Signet Tempest.

30. Compare Burke's paradox: “That generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom” (Reflections on the Revolution in France, III).

31. There is a powerful modern version (1956) by the late Swiss composer Frank Martin. Martin's characteristic musical idiom (see, for example, his Everyman), a sonorous combination of rigor and generosity, austerity and tenderness, is perfectly adapted to The Tempest.

32. On Marsilius, see A. P. d’Entrèves, The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1939), Lectures II and III.

33. See, for example, Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals; Marx, Preface to The Critique of Political Economy, etc.

34. See Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, ed. J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 500 ff. There are some illuminating pages on Hegel in Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), Lecture II, where he refers also to The Tempest (p. 39). Caliban's potential nobility does not, however, lie in his “resistance to servitude” (p. 42n.), a view Trilling attributes to modern audiences.

35. Tempest, III.iii.59 (Ariel); V.i.32 (Prospero); V.i.212-13 (Gonzalo). Boethius: “‘Iam scio,’ inquit, ‘morbi tui aliam vel maximam causam; quid ipse sis, nosse desisti’” (I, vi). James: compare Cicero on the virtuous man: “civis totius mundi quasi unius urbis” (De Legibus, I, 61).

36. Compare Cicero, De Legibus, I, 25: “Est autem virtus nihil aliud quam perfecta et ad summum perducta natura”; Quintilian, IX, iv, 3 (on style): “id est maxime naturale, quod fieri natura optime patitur”; the association of Nature and “gentilesse” in Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, esp. ll. 372-78; Winter's Tale, IV.iii.88 ff (Polixenes on “Nature”). Chaucer, in fact, begins with Cicero's Somnium Scipionis. The rest of the De Re Publica was not discovered until 1820, so it would not have been directly available to Shakespeare. But the ideas in it would have been familiar enough.

37. No one, I suppose, has used the word gallant unironically since Scott of the Antarctic used it of Captain Oates.

38. David William, “The Tempest on the Stage,” in Jacobean Theatre, reprinted in Signet Tempest.

39. That is to say, it would be not only a moral ideal but also something like a Weberian “ideal type”: “a utopia which has been arrived at by the analytical accentuation of certain elements of reality” (Max Weber, “Objectivity in Social Science”).

40. S. T. Coleridge, “The Moved and Sympathetic Imagination” (1836) in Shakespeare: The Tempest: a Casebook, ed. D. J. Palmer (London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 65-66. Compare Dowden: “It must be admitted that Shakspere, if not, as Hartley Coleridge asserted, ‘a Tory and a gentleman’, had within him some of the elements of English conservatism” (p. 421).

41. “Welfare,” in the sense I intend, appertains to the notional satisfactions of individuals conceived solely as consumers of goods or claimants of “rights.” Such a conception obviously makes no connection with Shakespeare's moral universe, based as that is primarily on obligations. It is both amusing and typical that “welfare economics” should have coined the expression “psychic income” to denote nonmaterial satisfactions.

42. Hardin Craig, The Enchanted Glass (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1936), p. 82.