SOURCE: Lindley, David. “Music, Masque, and Meaning in The Tempest.” In The Court Masque, edited by David Lindley, pp. 47-59. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.

[In the following essay, Lindley calls attention to the abrupt and dissonant endings of the two masques in The Tempest, and suggests that these discordant endings reflect Shakespeare's ambivalence toward the idea that music promotes human and social reconciliation.]

The Tempest employs more music than any other Shakespeare play. It is also the play that most insistently echoes the manner of the masque. Both these aspects of the work have been much commented upon, but in the general revaluation of The Tempest which has seen the older view of it as a celebration of reconciliation replaced by a critical consensus stressing its inconclusiveness, ambiguity, and doubt, the music has consistently been accepted as imaging and enacting ideals of harmony and concord, whether or not those ideals are finally attained.¹

This attitude to the play's music rests upon the view that Shakespeare was employing the standard Renaissance theory that earthly music reflected the celestial harmony of the spheres, and by that analogy was empowered to affect and influence humankind. There can indeed be no mistaking the fact that the power of Ariel's music to allay the fury of the elements and to calm Ferdinand's passions in Act I or to heal the perturbed minds of the noble lords in Act V are fully comprehensible only in a context where an audience might readily supply this symbolic significance to the music they hear. Nor can one doubt that the failure of Antonio and Sebastian to hear and respond to the music that lulls the other lords to sleep in Act II, Scene i is emblematic of the moral disharmony of their natures.

But music in the theatre need not summon up this kind of symbolic significance, for, as Duke Vincentio recognises, ‘music oft hath such a charm / To make bad good and good provoke to harm’.² We have to recognise that music may delude or spur illicit passions as well as cure, heal, and restore. We do not applaud Orsino's indulgence of appetite with music's moody food, for example.

In the experience of a theatre audience music is much too varied in its stimulus and dramatic significance to be tidily packaged in a neo-Platonic wrapper. But in the world of the court masque the power of music and its emblematic significance is much more firmly controlled and directed. Part of the argument of this essay is precisely that The Tempest exploits and explores the tensions between these different dramatic possibilities.

Some of these tensions are apparent in the play's final song, ‘Where the bee sucks’. Critics have been moved to eloquence by it. ‘Ariel's song is pure lyric and pure joy’, writes Mary Chan, while Seng claims: ‘For the brave new world of redeemed man which is to succeed on the old one of crime and punishment there could hardly be a better hymn of praise than Ariel's song of summer and freedom.’³ But these and many other determined efforts to bestow symbolic significance on this song fail to attend to its actual effect in its dramatic context.

Prospero has called for a ‘solemn air’ to restore the unsettled minds of the nobles. As the charm begins to work he resumes the mantle of his lost dukedom. This is the climactic moment of the story that The Tempest narrates. Prospero has successfully courted his ‘most auspicious star’, has regained the lost dukedom, ensured political harmony by betrothing his daughter to the son of his former opponent, and yet to accompany the gesture that signals this triumphant conclusion we are offered no ceremonious fanfare but a song about lying in cowslips.

The disparity between the song and the dramatic action it accompanies forces the audience into reflection. At first the close juxtaposition of the song with the curative heavenly music suggests that they both belong to the same symbolic realm, but as the words of the song register, the difference between them is sharply established. One is the impersonal sonority of the heavens, the other entirely personal and spontaneous song. This is the first time that Ariel has sung his own words, and their self-indulgence links it with other ‘unscripted’ songs in the play, Stephano's ‘The master, the swabber, the bosun and I’ and, more obviously, Caliban's song of freedom, ‘No more dams I'll make for fish’.

For all the differences between these singers, the fundamental similarity of the songs cannot be ignored. They alert us to a different musical possibility from that allowed by a neo-Platonic theory. Music here is an outburst of individual feeling, a gesture whose expression is entirely circumscribed by the individuality of the singer. Such song, as Mark Booth has pointed out, invites us as audience to submerge ourselves in an indentification with the singing voice, hence the appeal of the simple, quasi-pastoral lyric that Ariel sings. But at the same time, the failure of the song to support the action for which it is the incidental music confirms the truth of Booth's observation: ‘A song, set in a play, but set out of the play too by its music, facilitates our indulgence in feelings that may be undercut before and after the music plays’.⁴ Here it is not so much the feeling itself that is undercut, as the disparity between Prospero's abandonment of magic and return to the real world and Ariel's fugitive fantasy that is highlighted. When one adds to this the fact that Ariel, the singer whose feelings we have briefly been persuaded by their musical utterance to take as our own, is an insubstantial figure (quite unlike the obstinately corporeal Stephano and Caliban) then the unsettling elusiveness of this song is plain.

Uncertainty of response is a characteristic effect of most of the musical events in the play. The first song is ‘Come unto these yellow sands’. Ferdinand concludes that its music ‘waits upon / Some god o' th' island’, and reinforces his attribution of celestial origin by his account of its power:

This music crept by me on the waters
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it
Or it hath drawn me rather.

(I.ii.394-7)

No neo-Platonist could wish for better demonstration of the potential of music, no Orpheus could work more marvellously than the singing Ariel. We are willing as an audience to consent to the power Prospero exercises through music precisely because we are able to supply for it the necessary conventional symbolic significance.

Yet there is an unease about the song. Though it sounds fine at first, the burden of the song, sung by ‘watch-dogs’ and ‘Chanticleer’, jars with the lyric's romantic opening. A sense of discomfort is fully justified when, at the end of the play, the sprites who sang ‘bow-wow’ appear in doggy habit to chase Stephano and Trinculo from Prospero's cave. The refrain of the song hints at the capricious, even malevolent side of Prospero's magic and its instruments, demonstrated clearly when he orders his spirits to ‘hunt soundly’ the conspirators. The ‘god o' th' island’ can threaten as well as invite, as Ferdinand himself is soon to realise.

The celebrated ‘Full fathom five’ follows almost at once. Much can be said about this exquisite and potent lyric, its proleptic significance in imaging the ‘sea-change’ the characters experience, its immediate effectiveness in preparing Ferdinand for his meeting with Miranda, or the way its eerie transformations bespeak the power of the art which contrives it. But at the same time an audience must realise that at the simplest level the words of the song are untrue. Already assured that ‘there's no harm done’, we are uncomfortably aware that Ferdinand's statement, ‘this ditty doth remember my drowned father’ reflects an understanding of events entirely contrived by Prospero.

We are caught, therefore, in a double response to this song. Persuaded by Ferdinand's attitude, we accept the emblematic significance that music always possesses as a potential in Renaissance drama; but at the same time our superior awareness of the true narrative state of things makes us uneasily conscious of the compromise with truth that Prospero's designs necessitate.

In two other episodes later in the play there is a similar compromising of music's symbolic significance as it is subordinated to Prospero's designs.

Ariel's music charms Alonso, Gonzalo, and others to sleep in Act II, Scene i apparently only so that Antonio's and Sebastian's conspiracy might have space to declare itself. Prospero's magic arts thus create the conditions for the instigation of vice as well as for the harmonising of discordant passions. More significant is the episode in Act III, Scene ii, where the tune of the catch ‘Flout’ 'em and scout 'em’ is taken up by Ariel's pipe, much to the amazement of Stephano and Trinculo. They, like Ferdinand, follow the celestial music, only to be led into a bog.

However one might contain these episodes within a standard view of music's symbolic significance, by pointing out that where the virtuous Ferdinand is rewarded the base conspirators are duly punished, this should not obscure the fact that by responding to music Alonso and his followers are rendered vulnerable (though by music also they are preserved) and Stephano and Trinculo are reeking of horse-piss. For the audience, and indeed for the characters on stage, the music that lulls the nobles to sleep and the transformed music of the vulgar catch are the same as the music of Ferdinand's song. What distinguishes one from the other is not the nature of the musical harmony, nor the effects they have, but the consequence Prospero derives from his manipulative power.

As will become clear later this focussing on music as a means of power is of great significance for the play as a whole, and for its use of the masque genre in particular. For the moment we might turn from Ferdinand's wonder at the celestial music to Caliban's celebrated response to the island's sound. He tells Stephano and Trinculo:

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. 133-41)

The fact that his response is so similar to Ferdinand's complicates the simple moral scale where sensitivity to music is a mark of virtue. It suggests a moral neutrality in music's effects. For if, in the myth most often used to support the neo-Platonic view of music, Orpheus made rocks, stones, and trees move, it says much for music's power, but indicates also the involuntariness of response to it, and therefore the potential danger of its effects in the hands of an unscrupulous manipulator. But the most important aspect of this speech is Caliban's account of the way music persuades him to sleep and to dream of innumerable riches, only to wake and, waking, to cry to dream again. For it is this pattern of response that underlies the two biggest set-pieces of the work, the two masques which immediately follow this speech.

In the first a banquet is laid before Alonso and his company. As Prospero watches, his spirits enter to ‘solemn and strange music’. Unlike Stephano and Trinculo the nobles are not frightened, but respond to the sweetness of the sound. They, like the dreaming Caliban, are offered riches in the form of food that they desperately need. But just as Caliban can never capture his dream-treasure, so they are denied their banquet as it is taken away ‘by a quaint device’ and Ariel rebukes the ‘three men of sin’.⁵

No sooner is this scene over than Prospero prepares for the next Masque. He addresses Ariel:

Thou and thy meaner fellows your last service
Did worthily perform; and I must use you
In such another trick. Go bring the rabble,
O'er whom I give thee power, here to this place:
Incite them to quick motion; for I must
Bestow upon the eyes of this young couple
Some vanity of mine Art: it is my promise,
And they expect it from me.

(IV.i.35-42)

The connection between this and the previous device is unambiguously made; performed by the same spirits, it is ‘such another trick’. The oddity that Prospero introduces what should be one of the play's central emblematic statements with such apparent contempt may be left on one side for future consideration.

The masque proceeds. Iris, Ceres, and Juno gravely meet and promise richness and fertility to the betrothed couple. Iris then summons the ‘Naiads of the windring brooks’ and ‘sunburn'd sicklemen’ to dance before the couple. Since there are no courtiers on Prospero's island, it is the spirits who must take the place of masquers and perform the dance which, in Jonson's phrase, may ‘make the beholders wise’.⁶ The conjunction of watery female semi-deities and fiery male reapers draws upon the conventional symbolism that Jonson, for example, uses in Hymenaei:

Like are the fire, and water, set;
That, ev'n as moisture, mixt with heat,
Helps everie naturall birth, to life;
So, for their Race, joyne man and wife.(7)

The dance, therefore, suits well with the promise of fertility that the three goddesses make in their song to the couple.

Anthony Stafford's gloss on this symbol reveals a further appropriateness to the concerns of the masque. He writes:

To the same ende did the Romanes of old, carrie before the married couple, fier, and water (the former representing the man; the later, the woman,) what else signifying, then that the woman should expect till heate bee infused into her by her husband? it being as much against the nature of an honest spouse, as of the coldest water, to boile of her selfe; and on the contrarie side, that the bridegroom should distill warmth into his own water and heate it, but not over-heate it.⁸

Prospero at the beginning of the act had warned the couple against anticipation of the wedding night, and then returned to the theme as he sternly rebukes Ferdinand:

                                                  do not give dalliance
Too much the rein: the strongest oaths are straw
To th'fire in th' blood: be more abstemious,
Or else, good night your vow!

Ferdinand replies:

                                                                                                              I warrant you, sir;
The white cold virgin snow upon my heart
Abates the ardour of my liver.

(IV.i. 51-6)

This ideal control, imaged in snow and fire, is sustained throughout the masque (from which Cupid is excluded) and is symbolised in the graceful dance of the temperate nymphs and sunburned sicklemen.

Through this masque Prospero enforces upon Ferdinand and Miranda the difference between a chaste conjunction issuing in happy fertility and the beastly lust that would have peopled the isle with Calibans, or brought forth Stephano's ‘brave brood’. The urgency of his warnings to the couple before the masque begins suggests that Prospero is by no means certain that, without the persuasive effect of his ‘harmonious vision’, he can trust them to understand the difference.

The entertainment, then, works according to the ideal prescription for the masque, leading the spectators to fuller understanding through their contemplation of an image which impresses itself upon them by the power music, dance, and word have to imitate the deeper harmonies of the universe. But though these spectators are of a morally unblemished nature, this show, like the lords' banquet, is snatched away as with ‘a strange, hollow and confused noise’ the spirits ‘heavily vanish’. On their departure Prospero launches into the play's most famous speech, fusing the terminology of masque and reality to remind his audience that the vision, however harmonious, must fade, and they, like Caliban, may cry to dream again.

The pattern of these two scenes is further emphasised by the last trick of Prospero's devising, as Ariel loads a line with glistering apparel to distract Caliban and his fellow conspirators. This illusory richness (which has no real narrative necessity, since Prospero could simply have set his dogs on them when they arrived) is functionally the same as the two shows that precede it. This offering of the island also proves a false treasure.

The frustration common to all these scenes might indeed be held to form the ‘deep structure’ of the play (to borrow a linguistic term). It is realised in many of the surface incidents of the play. Ferdinand is offered Miranda, but then reduced to servitude; Caliban mistakes the promise first of Prospero and then of Stephano to his discomfiture; the villainous Antonio and Sebastian have Alonso presented to them as a victim, only for him to wake up before they can seize the prize. Most notably, Prospero himself has sought the goal of wisdom only to lose his dukedom in the process, and then, on regaining the dukedom must resign the art he has devoted his life to acquiring.

It is the omnipresence of this pattern that helps to account for the uncertainty of the play's effect upon an audience, since it belongs to tragedy rather than to romance. Unease is clarified in the emphasis the pattern receives in the three masque-like episodes, for masques are by their very nature affirmative offerings, made to a married couple, a patron or a monarch, and their standard pattern moves from inhibition to celebration. In standing on its head the masque genre that it employs The Tempest examines the problematic nature of the form, and articulates many of the difficulties and dilemmas that attended it throughout its life.⁹

The Jacobean court masque was continually under attack, most frequently on the grounds of its excessive expense and vainglorious display. The standard defence was an appeal to the notion of princely magnificence: conspicuous consumption is a sign of the richness and importance of a court that would be demeaned by anything less than elaborate and costly show. In The Tempest there is the paradox that all its goodly visions issue not from the self-projection of a rich and stable court, but from the power of a magician who inhabits a ‘full poor cell’ on a desert island. The actors are not the lords and ladies of James's court, whose richness and magnificence might properly become them, but spirits. The play seems to insist that the true riches of the island are the quick freshes and the fruits that Caliban showed to Prospero, rather than the sumptuous banquet that the lords reach for in vain. One might, indeed, see the relationship between the first two set-pieces as antimasque and masque making precisely that point by their juxtaposition. But Prospero's masques are, from this point of view, vanities indeed, having no basis in economic and political reality. Their defence must be sought elsewhere.

Jonson saw the heart of the masque, and its most serious validation, in its capacity to ‘lay hold on more remov'd mysteries’.¹⁰ But making this claim raises further problems. In the first place the arcane hieroglyphs of the masque, since they are comprehensible only to the learned, could make little impression upon the actual audience of Jacobean courtiers, preoccupied with the elegant trappings of ostentation. Secondly, the ideal relationship of performer and role, where the noble personage became (in both senses of the word) the part that he played, was always vulnerable to the uncomfortable knowledge that the glorious surface only partly concealed a less than ideal reality.

As more and more people became disillusioned with the excesses and corruptions of James's court, the gap between the masque ideal and the reality it was supposed to reflect became ever harder to paper over, and the educational potential of the masque less and less easy to credit. Writers both for the court and for the public theatre were moved to explore that gap. Tragedians used the discontinuity between image and reality to bitter satirical ends; Daniel expressed increasing disquiet at the vanity of masques; Jonson attempted to take on critics directly in works like Love Restored, and Campion in The Lords' Masque anxiously insisted upon the necessity of the masquers remembering the significance of the roles they played as they returned to their normal world.¹¹

The Tempest grows out of this general disquiet, and attempts itself to grapple with the problems it raises. While the characters in the play are not themselves participants in the masque, yet the final scene of the play does approach indirectly the question of the relationship between a masquer and the role he enacts. For Prospero arranges as the conclusion of his work of reconciliation a masque-like emblem as he discloses Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess. He promises to requite Alonso's restoration of his dukedom with ‘as good a thing’; he will, in terms that echo masquing vocabulary, ‘bring forth a wonder to content ye’. The emblematic use of the loving couple is very like Campion's later use of the figures of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick Elector Palatine as the concluding symbol of his Lords' Masque, but whereas in Campion's work the masquers and audience turn to do homage to the couple sitting in state, Shakespeare's lovers are preoccupied with each other, and their ideal status is immediately undermined by Miranda's challenge, ‘Sweet lord, you play me false’. Whatever the precise significance of the exchange which follows, it is obvious that Ferdinand and Miranda resist the possibility of being subsumed into an iconic gesture.

This resistance accords with Miranda's own modest deflection of Ferdinand's attempt to turn her into a masque-like goddess at the beginning of the play. It also fits into the way the final scene as a whole plays with the masque's climatic moment of disclosure. When Alonso first sees Prospero he cries out:

                              Whether thou be'st he or no,
Or some enchanted trifle to abuse me,
As late I have been, I do not know.

(V.i. 111-3)

(The paradox of trifles that torment is itself a record of the play's deeply ambiguous attitude to the status and effect of theatrical illusions.) But then Miranda herself looks at the ‘goodly creatures’ before her as if they were a masquing company. The ingenuousness of her amazement is obvious to the audience, and ironically underlined by Prospero's ‘'Tis new to thee’. Thus, where the court masque moves securely and triumphantly from the world of illusion to the court reality it had translated, transcended, and imaged, Shakespeare's dissolution involves a blurring of realms, and much more uncertainty about the boundaries of the too easily opposed worlds of illusion and reality. In so doing it unsettles the audience's response. Are we to be glad that Ferdinand and Miranda are human in a way that Campion's Frederick and Elizabeth are inhibited from being, and do we therefore register this conclusion as a satirical barb aimed at the insulations of the court masque? Or do we regret that Miranda's naïveté, like the optimistic idealism of Gonzalo, is bound to founder on the ambitious pragmatism of Antonio and Sebastian? The problem is not merely an intellectual one, but a dilemma of feeling and response, a dilemma that is most pressingly active in our response to music. For music's capacity to work directly upon feeling is, in the masque, sanctified by its necessary connection with the divinely harmonious universe. In The Tempest we respond as fully to music's lure, but the rightness of our submission is continually questioned.

But though the ending of the play, with its ambiguous relationship to a masque's dissolving, follows upon scenes which have asserted the impossibility of a masque's converting the truly wicked and indicated the frailty of such visions even for the morally unblemished, the play does not therefore retreat to the cynicism of Bacon's verdict; ‘these things are but toys’.¹² For though Prospero had introduced his betrothal masque as a vanity, yet he is concerned enough about its effect to command the spectators' attention, ‘Or else our spell is marr'd’. He stresses, as Jonson so often does, the importance of the spectator's conspiracy in enabling the masque to work.

It is through the presentation of the dilemmas of Prospero, the maker of masques and convenor of the company of musical sprites, that Shakespeare tests the importance and the limitations of the masque genre. For though the constant state of tension in which Prospero exists throughout the play may be explained by the narrative necessity he is under to seize this one opportunity to regain his dukedom, his emotional state can best be understood as arising from a desperate sense of the fragility of the power his art gives him, coupled with an equally urgent sense of the significance of that art.

The outbursts of anger that structure the long second scene of Act I are all aroused by the failure of others to observe a properly obedient attitude towards him. This is not mere despotism, but a precarious fear that those over whom he can or should exercise control resist or abuse the roles he fashions for them. Throughout the play Ariel, executant of Propero's designs, is continually checked up on, commanded to faithful reproduction of his script, overlooked in performance, commended for actorly success. Prospero is as anxious as Hamlet in his producer's guise, as nervous as any caricatured author on the first night of his play.

Prospero cares so intensely not primarily because he himself stands to gain from his magic (the lack of triumph at his resumption of the ducal mantle is, however disconcerting, in accord with the lack of real ambition in Prospero's character), nor even because of his love for his daughter and hope for her future, but essentially because the efficacy of his art is itself to be the validation of a lifetime spent in acquiring it. This is the first and only time that his magic is put to the real test of confronting the complexities of human wickedness, desire, and frailty. Compared to this his past magical exercises, retailed in Act V, are mere sideshows, and his Medean speech not the triumphant assertion of theatrical power that Kernan describes¹³ but a frenzied effort to boost his own confidence before he turns to undo the charm upon the nobles and finds out whether his magic has actually worked upon stubborn human nature. Prospero's anxiety raises precisely the question of the capacity of masque image to work upon an audience that the masque itself resolutely sidestepped and contained.

But if it is the sense of the fragility of his powers that troubles Prospero, the audience's response is further complicated by the fact that they are unsure, during the course of the play, exactly what purpose Prospero intends to serve. At times he seems only to exult in revenge and to be persuaded to forgiveness by Ariel very late in the play. But yet he takes care for the future of his daughter and troubles to attempt to induce repentance in the minds of the lords.

This is a highly significant complication since it establishes as a central issue in the play the responsibility of the poet in constructing his work to some purposeful end. Merely to exercise power, to perform tricks, would indeed be a vanity. Magic power exists to be harnessed, but it is the nature of the magician's designs that determines the moral value of that power. Under Prospero the island resounds to sweet noises, where for the witch Sycorax the only music was the shriek of the imprisoned Ariel. Prospero must liberate the lords from their charmed imprisonment as he had earlier released Ariel if we are not to condemn him as he condemns Sycorax.

In The Tempest, therefore, the masque genre is subjected to a double examination. On the one hand its moral effectiveness is determined (and circumscribed) by the nature and limitations of its beholders; but on the other hand it is also vitally dependent upon the nature and purposes of its contriver. It reflects the sensitivity of Ben Jonson both to the ignorance of his audiences and to the vanity of Inigo Jones, a contriver of masques who (in Jonson's view) saw no further than ‘shows, shows, mighty shows’.¹⁴

The radical element in Shakespeare's work is the recognition, through the examination of Prospero's predicament, of the fundamentally rhetorical nature of the masque. It is an instrument of power, of coercion and manipulation, resistible and corruptible. It is not enough simply to lay hold on some neo-Platonic idea, and, by reproducing it claim that it will therefore ‘work’.

This understanding corresponds very significantly with the new view of music and its effects that was at this time taking hold. For the older, idealist notion of music's correspondence with the music of the spheres was being replaced by a rhetorical model of its affects. Monody and declamatory song were the vehicles of this change, and it was especially in the masque with its professional virtuoso singers that the style flourished.¹⁵ To see rhetoric and neo-Platonism as opposites is of course a far too crude distinction. Nonetheless it is the element of persuasion that rhetoric brings with it that threatens the security of the correspondence between ideal and human reality that sustained the masque and the theories of musica speculativa. It is our awareness that the songs Ferdinand hears are part of Prospero's rhetoric as well as the images of celestial harmony he takes them to be that opens up the play's enactment of the problems that attend the making of masque and music.

This does not, of course, deny the validity of masque or of music. Their power exists, and may be harnessed for good or for ill. The play as a whole interrogates a series of familiar Renaissance debating topics. Art versus nature, action versus contemplation, reality versus illusion are but some of the subjects the play considers, and for all of them no simple preference is established. Most significant for the question of the validity of transitory masque is the opposition between Caliban and Ariel, beast against spirit, earth and water versus air and fire, body against soul.

This last distinction is used by Jonson to characterise the masque, and to defend his part in it. The display is its body, the mystery the poet shadows is its soul, ‘impressing and lasting’.¹⁶ In a very similar analogy Renaissance musicians compared the words of a song to the soul, the musical notes to the body, for only through the words are the fluctuating and transitory impressions of sound given direction and lasting purpose.¹⁷

In The Tempest both these notions are severely tested. When the play ends it is not the spirit who remains, but the thing of darkness that Prospero must acknowledge his and transport back to Milan. In the final scene it is the instrumental music that is curative, and Ariel's last song that slips into solipsism.

Conventional justification of masque and of music is therefore questioned. The self-regarding, inconsequential beauty of ‘Where the bee sucks’ signals the basic fact that music, like the magic powers it enables Prospero to deploy and the masquing visions he creates with its aid, is of itself nothing and the riches it promises an illusion. Prospero's shaking of the earth is similarly a self-indulgence unless it is played to some purpose before an audience, just as Ariel's singing acquires a positive function only when scripted by Prospero and directed to human listeners.

But to recognise, as the play does, that it is the body we are stuck with, the life of action that must ultimately claim us, does not mean that music and the masque must be dumped, valueless, into the sea along with the books of magic. For the power of art is perenially available. Prospero denies himself the means of access to magical powers, not the validity of their exercise. For all their inadequacies music and masque have succeeded in bringing Alonso to repentance, and have imaged the love of Ferdinand and Miranda as something more than mere political convenience. Furthermore, as an audience we cannot deny the power of theatrical illusion when it is only through the masque-play that Prospero creates that we can encounter the meditation upon the limitations of masque and music that Shakespeare offers to us.

Stephen Orgel has rightly suggested that The Tempest is the ‘most important Renaissance commentary’ on ‘court masques and plays’. Mary Chan claims that it ‘shows the validity of the masque's conceptual basis’, while, by contrast, Ernest Gilman calls it ‘a delicately subversive maneuver staged in the enemy camp and hinting at the bedazzled, insulated self-regard of such entertainments’.¹⁸ The truth is that The Tempest resists such simplification of its stance, presenting instead a multi-layered and deeply ambivalent attitude.

It does so because, though it reflects many of the substantial uncertainties about the masque genre current at the time of its composition, it actively involves the spectator in feeling, not merely contemplating the problems. Thus we, like the spectators on stage, are frustrated and disappointed as harmonious visions end in discord. We recognise the compromises that follow upon Prospero's manipulative aims, yet we respect the urgent desire that led him to a life of contemplation to secure the power he exercises. At the end of the play Prospero's wistful farewell to Ariel is echoed by our own regret as we tender the applause that releases Prospero from his island, but banishes us from the theatre. But perhaps most important of all in engendering the audience's complicity in the play's paradoxical statement is the music. Not only are the characters on stage pushed hither and thither by Prospero's music, but it works its end upon our senses also, with an undeniable insinuation. The symbolic view of music is comprehensible as an attempt to validate morally the experiential truth of music's power. The Tempest, by unpicking without ever quite denying that analogy does not merely reflect a historical moment, the time of ‘the untuning of the sky’, but forces us as an audience to go beyond a simple criticism of the fragility of the world of the stage. The Platonic theories that sustain a Sidneyan belief in art's golden world are crumbling, but we are left ‘wishing it might be so’.

Notes

1. One of the most persuasive comments on the play's darknesses is W. H. Auden's poetic descant, The Sea and The Mirror. A characteristic early statement of changing attitudes is Rose Zimbardo, ‘Form and Disorder in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 16 (1963), pp 49-65. A traditional view of the music is articulated by John P. Cutts, ‘Music in The Tempest’, Music and Letters, 39 (1958), pp. 347-58. A less straightforwardly symbolic reading informs Theresa Coletti, ‘Music and The Tempest’, in Shakespeare's Late Plays, ed. Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod (Athens, Ohio, 1974), pp. 185-99.

2. Measure for Measure, IV.i. 14-15.

3. Mary Chan, Music in the Theatre of Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1980), p. 328; Peter Seng, The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 271.

4. Mark Booth, The Experience of Songs (New Haven and London, 1981), pp. 14-23; 118.

5. For a study of the manifold implications of the banquet see Jacqueline E. M. Latham, ‘The Magic Banquet in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Studies, 12 (1979), pp. 215-27.

6. Ben Johnson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford, 1925-1952), 7, p. 489. [Hereafter referred to as ‘Herford and Simpson’].

7. Herford and Simpson, 7, p. 215.

8. Niobe (1611) sig. C2-3.

9. Ernest B. Gilman discusses the manipulation of the masque genre in his ‘“All eyes”: Prospero's Inverted Masque’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980), pp. 214-30, though he sees the conspirators as an ‘antimasque’, and does not discuss the other shows.

10. Herford and Simpson, 7, 209.

11. See Inge-Stina Ewbank, ‘“These pretty devices”: A Study of Masques in Plays’, in A Book of Masques, ed. T. J. B. Spencer and Stanley Wells (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 405-48; Ralph Berry, ‘Masques and Dumb Shows in Webster's Plays’, The Elizabethan Theatre, 7 (1981), pp. 124-46, and, in the same journal, pp. 111-23, Cyrus Hoy, ‘Masques and the Artifice of Tragedy’; Jeffrey Fischer, ‘Love Restored: A Defense of Masquing’, Renaissance Drama, 7 (1977), pp. 231-44; David Lindley, Thomas Campion (Leiden, forthcoming), Chapter 4.

12. Francis Bacon, ‘Of Masques and Triumphs’, in Essays (London, 1625).

13. Alvin B. Kernan, The Playwright as Magician (New Haven and London, 1979), p. 143.

14. ‘An Expostulation with Inigo Jones’, The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 346.

15. See John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky (Princeton, N.J., 1961) passim; James Anderson Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence (New Haven and London, 1981), Chapter 4; and for the music, Ian Spink, English Song, Dowland to Purcell (London, 1974).

16. Herford and Simpson, 7, 209.

17. See, for example, Monteverdi's observation that musical pieces without words were ‘bodies without soul’, in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (New York, 1950), p. 406.

18. Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1975), p. 45; Chan, Music in Ben Jonson, p. 330; Gilman, ‘“All eyes”’, p. 220.