SOURCE: Bond, Ronald B. “Labour, Ease, and The Tempest as Pastoral Romance.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 77, no. 3 (July 1978): 330-42.

[In the following essay, Bond contends that The Tempest diverges from the pastoral tradition by depicting idleness (otium) as a moral weakness and work or devotion to a task (negotium) as a virtue.]

In the last decade, several studies of The Tempest have re-examined the old claim that the play is a pastoral romance. Common to these is the assumption that the play embodies elements of two genres, that it, like much Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, has wedded the impulse of pastoral with its literary antecedents and its sometimes etiolated conventions to the sturdier form of romance, which, though no less traditional in some senses, carries with it the baggage of fewer associations and is thus a freer, less confined mode of the creative imagination.¹ But despite these explanations of its pastoral elements, The Tempest remains a play revealing few of the topographical features of the pastoral landscape, few of the topoi of the pastoral genre. Ubi sunt? we might well ask, when trying to align the traditional view of the play as a species of pastoral with the characteristics of the pastoral mode. The atmosphere of the play impels us to ask where is innocence, where is the carefree, where the blissfully and unabashedly erotic? Where, on this “enchanted” island, is there freedom from the tyranny of Time? Where does Nature offer its bounty, unaided and unsolicited by man? True, the play does centre on a dislocation having some similarities with the movement from court to country in conventional pastoral; it does deal with exile and return, and thus corresponds to a pattern evident not just in As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and other later plays, but in Virgil's eclogue book;² it does manifest a concern with learning and purging that is a preoccupation of traditional pastoral, if we recognize the mode as providing cognitive as well as affective experience for those placed in a pastoral landscape or mindscape.³ But we sentimentalize the play if we attempt to foist upon the world entered by Alonso and his party or the world inhabited by Prospero and those in his charge many of the attributes peculiar to the “never-never” land of pastoral. When Northrop Frye identifies romance as a form “in which the themes of shipwreck, pirates, enchanted islands, magic, recognition, the loss and regaining of identity, occur constantly,” we see the macrocosmic literary world of which The Tempest is a part.⁴ No similar definition of pastoral can explain the radical impulse of the play.

That the province of pastoral in the play is carefully demarcated is suggested by Shakespeare's handling of the two most emphatically pastoral moments in it. Consider first Gonzalo's magnificent vision of the Golden Age in Act II. Taken from its context, the speech describes an ideal commonwealth, which is, in spite of Shakespeare's specific debt to Montaigne, traditional in most of its details. As Frank Kermode reminds us, however, the speech is “more appropriate to pastoral poetry which takes a ‘soft’ view of Nature” than it is to the play.⁵ It gains its effect by being such an obvious contrast to the island and to what, as far as the court party is concerned, is happening on it, and this effect is enhanced by the scoffs and jeers of Antonio and Sebastian, whose sardonic commentary cannot be discredited simply because they are discredited in the course of the action.⁶ We must see surely that Gonzalo's “merry fooling” while talking “nothing” to Alonso is simply an attempt to cheer him up and “to minister occasion” to those whose plight seems so uncompromising that it renders his artful fantasy absurd and pretentious. The second version of pastoral in the play is, of course, the masque of Iris, which no less than Gonzalo's speech is distinguished clearly from its surroundings. If the island seems almost a Paradise to Ferdinand when under the spell of this living drollery, it is a paradise soon to be lost: the revels end abruptly, and Prospero's art is elegiacally revealed as an epistemological and ontological vanity. Prospero, unlike Gonzalo, has the means to enact his fancies, but he too is brought to the realization that nothing gold can stay. Reality replaces reverie; labour supplants leisure.

The emphasis the play places on labour is, in fact, a major deviation from the pastoral tradition, which is informed by a contrast between otium and negotium. The retreat from normal existence—that is, existence full of care, work, business, and solicitude—is what makes the classical pastoral poets extol the irresponsible lot of the shepherd whose flocks seem always to tend themselves. When the protagonist of Virgil's first eclogue takes up his bucolic sojourn in exile, he encounters Tityrus living in otium so idyllic and so venerable that it appears to be the gift of a god.⁷ Similarly, Horace perceives the happy man as one who is far removed from the business of Rome: “Beatus ille qui procul negotiis / ut prisca gens mortalium” (Epodes, II, 1-2).⁸ As a formula often imitated, procul negotiis becomes a conspicuous detail in the pastoral mode. Thomas Lodge, to cite one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, expatiates thus on Horace:

Most happie blest the man that midst his countrie bowers
Without suspect of hate, or dread of envious tongue
May dwell among his owne: not dreading fortunes lowres
Farre from those publique plagues that mightie men hath stoong:
Whose libertie and peace is never sold for gaine,
Whose words do never sooth a wanton princes vaine.(9)

As K. W. Gransden has pointed out, moreover, classical otium involves more than a reaction against the turmoil of city life, for it actively promotes the virtues of carelessness and content with one's lot.¹⁰ This aspect of pastoral ease becomes important in Spenser's description of the hermit in Book VI of The Faerie Queene:

And weary of this worlds unquiet waies,
He tooke him selfe unto this hermitage,
In which he liv'd alone, like carelesse bird in cage.

(F.Q. VI.vi.4)¹¹

A reiteration of the idea occurs later in Canto ix, when Melibee, Pastorella's father, tells his life's story to Calidore. The court forsaken, Melibee now lives in a bucolic paradise where “The litle that I have growes dayly more / Without my care” (VI.ix.21). As Calidore notes, he dwells

                                                                                                                                  at ease,
Leading a life so free and fortunate
From all the tempests of these worldly seas,
Which tosse the rest in daungerous disease.

(F.Q. VI.ix.19)

The purpose of introducing these connections between otium and the pastoral form is epitomized in Calidore's image for the life of negotium, that is, dis-ease. Most men, he says enviously, simply cannot remove themselves procul negotiis, “from all the tempests of these worldly seas.” When he himself tries to do so, his sojourn in the pastoral oasis of Melibee's kingdom becomes a shirking of his heroic quest, an abnegation of responsibility: in effect, a truancy.¹² To submit to the charm of Gonzalo's speech or Iris' masque would be likewise a mistake, for The Tempest, as we can now infer from its title, is a play about work and civic engagement, about “all the tempests of these worldly seas, / Which tosse the rest in daungerous disease.”¹³

The dramatic impact of the first scene serves well as an introduction to this theme. Whether or not we regard the tempest itself as symbolic,¹⁴ what we see on stage is the intense activity which the storm generates among the boatswain and his men. The scene is full of urgency and imperatives, as the sailors attempt to surmount the difficulties imposed by the storm. The real tension, however, derives from the difference between the busy and the busybodies, the difference between those who perform their offices and those who are merely officious. When Alonso comes upon the hustling and bustling mariners, he does nothing but criticize: “Good boatswain, have care. Where's the master? Play the men” (I.i.9-10). Having seen the master, the boatswain, and the mariners join in trying to save the ship, we can only regard his reproofs as indelicately superogatory. “You mar our labour: keep your cabins: you do assist the storm,” snaps the boatswain to the meddling Antonio (ll. 13-14). If you “Work the peace of the presence, we will not hand a rope more” (ll. 22-23), he says to Gonzalo, chafing at the mixture of authority and inactivity in the counsellor. “Work you, then,” he exhorts Sebastian and Antonio, when they do nothing but curse at him. Consequently, the scene is more than a humorously realistic framing device for the wonderfully unreal events to follow; it is an image of activity, of men doing their proper duty. It is an image of negotium, where the real not the putative gubernator is in control.

We later learn, of course, that the storm itself is Prospero's doing, his “present business” (I.i.36). Indeed the play underscores over and over the fact of work in human existence and the necessity of action in achieving good ends. “Toil,” “take pains,” “work,” and “business” itself recur constantly, usually in conjunction with Prospero's endeavours.¹⁵ Rather than “fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world” (As You Like It I.i.110-11), Prospero spends time preciously (I.ii.240-41). According to Douglas L. Peterson, the tempest itself offers Prospero the opportunity to use time fruitfully. Destiny consorts with occasion to provide Prospero with a test of his ability to manage time, others, and himself. He does not fail the test, as did the idler Richard II, who learns too late that he had wasted time and now time wastes him. Instead, he is like Prince Hal, the man who casts off a life of ease and insouciance in order to redeem time. “In the course of the play,” says Peterson, “Prospero will recover what through his former negligence he has lost. He will also release time from its captivity through the vigorous prosecution of duty.”¹⁶

Prospero's negligence, his lack of solicitude for “worldly ends, all dedicated / To closeness and the bettering of my mind” (I.ii.89-90), is the error which precipitated his removal to the island. In relinquishing his civic duties, he had created in Milan a contemplative, careless, “pastoral” existence exclusively for himself; now on the island, he diligently employs the bookish learning that he had once used to divorce himself from reality to effect changes in the men under his aegis and to restore the rightful social order.¹⁷ His contemplative propensities subserve the greater task of redeeming others: he synthesizes gnosis with praxis, otium with negotium. When his project nears its end, he, like the similarly negligent Vincentio in Measure for Measure, returns fully to the worldly affairs he had earlier repudiated and even drowns his beloved book in a gesture of farewell not just to his art, but once and for all to the life of careless abandonment that had once made art possible. This gesture can perhaps be glossed by reference to Colin's decision at the end of the Shepheardes Calender to hang up his pipe and to Spenser's beginning The Faerie Queene, a poem whose end is virtuous action, with the displacement of oaten reeds by stern trumpets. The efficacy of Prospero's business and the success of his “industrious” servant, Ariel, enable Prospero to see the value of a selfless life committed to “worldly” affairs.

It might be objected that Prospero does not really work, that Shakespeare differentiates him from Caliban, Ariel, and Ferdinand, characters who get their hands dirty with varieties of manual labour. Harry Berger, in fact, in an extremely provocative reading of the play, has articulated this objection with considerable élan:

the ex-Duke of Milan has a fairly unhealthy attitude toward labor—toward good clean manual work. We hardly expect him, as an aristocrat, to wash his own dishes and light his own fires. But he seems to have an ethical as well as a practical and social aversion to labor: Caliban and Ferdinand do not simply do his chores for him; he makes it clear that they are doing it as punishment and as an ordeal of degradation. Work is the evil man's burden, and I find this cavalier attitude consonant with Prospero's general lack of interest in the active and common life, consonant also with his neoplatonic preference for the more refined labors of the contemplative life.¹⁸

At stake in accepting Berger's claim are two issues: whether Shakespeare's contemporaries would think enterprises of the mind inferior to “good clean manual work”—the lack of commas is suggestive of Berger's proletarian assumptions—and whether Prospero can legitimately be accused of subjecting Caliban and Ferdinand, not to mention Ariel, to demeaning and belittling tasks for his own unworthy gratification.

If we accept Berger's proposition that Prospero should be denigrated because he is not himself a “worker,” we have to dismiss the play's language for what he is doing; we have to forget Elizabethan concepts of the social order, where each has his status, each his appointed job to do; most important, we have to ignore the belief held by many of Shakespeare's contemporaries that mental activity is ethically as good as other kinds of work. The homilist “Against Idlenesse” maintains unequivocally, for instance, that since there are “divers sorts of labours, some of the mind, and some of the body, and some of both … whosoever doeth good to the commonwealth and societie of men with his industrie and labour … by what … meanes soever hee bee occupyed, so that a profit and benefit redound thereof unto others, the same person is not to be accounted idle.”¹⁹ Similarly, Lyly's Euphues proclaims that “if this active life be without philosophie, it is an idle life … if the contemplative lyfe be separated from the Active, it is unprofitable.”²⁰ Prospero surely has rid himself of the tendency to separate his contemplative and active exertions: when the play begins, they are the same. If, as mage, he strikes some as godlike, it is partly because his actions are mindful and his mind is active. As Jove puts it in Giordano Bruno's Lo spaccio de la bestia trionfante,

the gods had given intellect and hands to man and had made him similar to them, giving him power over the other animals. This consists in his being able not only to operate according to his nature and to what is usual, but also to operate outside the laws of that nature, in order that by forming or being able to form other natures, other paths, other categories, with his intelligence, by means of that liberty without which he would not have the above-mentioned similarity, he would succeed in preserving himself as god of the earth. That nature certainly when it becomes idle will be frustrative and vain, just as are useless the eye that does not see and the hand that does not grasp. And for this reason Providence has determined that he be occupied in action by means of his hands, and in contemplation by means of his intellect, so that he will not contemplate without action and will not act without contemplation.²¹

The arduous activity that Prospero undertakes is certainly different from Caliban's or Ferdinand's, but it does not, as Berger suggests, smack of distaste for true work. Instead, it substantiates Prospero's rededication of himself to the offices of dukedom, as he allies art with civic duty.

Berger also concludes that Prospero degrades Caliban and Ferdinand by demanding they carry logs. This assertion pays scanty attention to the parodic elements in the play and to the patent contrast between Prospero's motivation in each case. Caliban is a slave not because Prospero wants him to be a slave, but because he is uneducable, because he tried to rape Miranda, because he is a threat to the commonweal, incapable as he is of acknowledging the differences between service and servitude. Were Prospero to allow Caliban the fulfillment of his desires, liberty would pluck justice by the nose and Prospero's reassertion of authority would become a mockery. Caliban's actions have proved that liberty in a savage nature unreformed by nurture is sheer license; his existence in the play betrays its “hard” primitivism.

When this carnal man complains about the penance Prospero sets for him, he merely corroborates what the “Homily Against Idlenesse” says about men of “sensuall affection”: “all labour and travaile is diligently avoyded, as a thing painefull and repugnant to the pleasure of the flesh.”²² Yet Prospero, the man of voluminous mind, must acknowledge this thing of darkness as his, if he is wisely to rule, if he is fully to dissociate himself from arrogant solitude. In other words, Prospero must learn from Caliban, just as he learns from Miranda and Ferdinand, and from Ariel. In each case, the knowledge gained represents an increase in Prospero's humanity: in Miranda and Ferdinand's delight with each other, he is impressed with an image of human spontaneity incompatible with his magical prescience (III.i.92-94); from Ariel's compassion for the distracted court party, he derives insight into his own passion, conceding that fury and vengeance have almost usurped the place “nobler reason” and “virtue” ought to occupy in him (V.i.23-28). But his final anagnorisis emerges from his realization that he has a bond with Caliban: at the end of the play when he acknowledges Caliban as his own, Prospero sees fully the extent of the ruler's responsibility for his subject, sees how head and foot are connected, and, most remarkably, sees that the subtle knot which makes him man is composed, in part, of darkness, the flesh, and mortality. Preparing for death (“Every third thought shall be my grave” [V.i.311]), Prospero sues at the end for freedom from fault and pardon from crime, just as Caliban, his version of an earthly paradise unattained, seeks for the grace which his depravity has resisted throughout the play. When Prospero “punishes” Caliban, then, he is not so much putting him through an ordeal of degradation as he is restraining and chastening the wilfullness which the wise ruler must quell in the body politic and the wise man must subdue in himself.

Ferdinand's task, on the other hand, is imposed upon him not as a penance for lusting after Miranda, but as a pledge of his love for her. The form of the pledge—submission to Prospero's wishes and to travail—reflects Prospero's revaluation of himself as ruler and of work as a necessary and useful pastime. He must make the “swift business” of their love “Uneasy” (I.ii.453-54) since he has learned to cherish negotium and since he sees its compatibility with goodness and happiness. Moreover, when Miranda makes Ferdinand's labours pleasures—when thoughts of her make the yoke easy and the burden light—we see a new and important concept entering the play. Work, however painful, becomes sport when done in the proper spirit, when done to promote love. The psychology of the play proclaims the transforming power of love and intellect; it celebrates the victory of mind over matter, of nomos over physis. The concord, therefore, which Prospero's efforts evoke is analogous to the love between Ferdinand and Miranda: their love anticipates the union of disparate factions in Act V (a union also figured in the meeting of earth and water, sprites and reapers, in the masque), when the commonwealth is joyfully restored and the orderly past, thought dead, is exhumed. Work and love, then, become surrogates for each other in the play, which seems virtually to conflate two Virgilian sententiae: “labor omnia vincit” (Georgics I) and “omnia vincit Amor” (Eclogues X).²³

If Caliban's perturbing attitude toward work is an exception to this syndrome, so too are the excursions of Antonio and Sebastian, Stephano and Trinculo. These plots mirror each other of course, but they also parody the actions of Prospero. Antonio and Sebastian first conceive of usurpation when the other members of the court party fall asleep. On the one hand, this is a parody of seizing occasion by the forelock, as Prospero has done in trying to regain a position of lost authority; on the other, it is a parody of action, as opposed to sloth and idleness. “I'll teach you how to flow,” says Antonio. “Do so: to ebb / Hereditary sloth instructs me,” replies Sebastian (II.i.217-18). Thinking that the sleeping men—the idle men—are at their mercy, Antonio and Sebastian conjure up empires predicated on hatred and murder, not love. In trying to gain what is not rightfully theirs, moreover, they are the true idlers: engaged in vain and trifling activity, they correspond to the men in Bruno's Lo spaccio who confirm “that in the house of Leisure there is leisure as regards active life” and whose work is castigated by Sophia as “those busy idlenesses that have thrown the world into greater troubles and travails than any employment could ever have done.”²⁴ Along with Alonso, who is in fact guilty of usurpation, these men of sin contribute nothing “to the commonwealth and society of men with their industrie and labour.” Rather, they act like the busybodies described by St. Paul and scorned by the homilist, the busybodies who try to partake of other men's banquets, but shall be denied:

S. Paul hearing that among the Thessalonians, there were certaine that lived dissolutely and out of order, that is to say, which did not worke, but wer busibodies: not getting their owne living with their owne travaile, but eating other mens bread of free cost, did command the said Thessalonians not onely to withdraw themselves, and abstaine from the familiar company of such inordinate persons, but also that if there were any such among them that would not labour, the same should not eate, nor have any living at other mens hands.²⁵

When Ariel removes the banquet from the schemers, their forced abstention is nicely ironic and entirely appropriate.

Stephano and Trinculo in the company of Caliban are also busybodies.²⁶ They serve the belly-gods, not Prospero; they struggle manfully to carry the bottle, not wood. Idlers in their work, they are least busy when they attempt to oust Prospero from his appointed place as ruler. Like the banquet that is prepared for the court party, the distractions offered them are apposite to their condition. The foul lake, the “filthy-mantled pool” (IV.i.182) in which Ariel plunges them for a time, is an icon for their sloth and their unworthy business: it is akin to Spenser's Idle Lake, that “griesy,” “sluggish sourse,” “thicke as troubled mire”; it is reminiscent of the swamp of Styx, that region of hell where Dante places the indolent.²⁷ Similarly, the frippery which even Caliban recognizes as an impediment to business is an inducement to and corroboration of their idleness. As Dame Ydelnesse says in Lydgate's Pilgrimage, one of her duties is to

Studye ffor to ffynde off newe
Devyses mad off many an hewe,
ffolk to make hem fresh & gay
And hem dysguyse in ther array:
Thys myn offys, yer by yere.

(II. 11667-71).²⁸

Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban leave the stage at the end of Act IV pursued by spiritual hounds and struggling under the encumbrance of their new-found wardrobe in striking visual contrast to Ferdinand, the man we have last seen with a burden, a burden made light by love.

In Act V, as Prospero announces at the outset, the “project gathers to a head”: labours end, and burdens are cast off as “time / Goes upright with his carriage” (V.i.3).²⁹ The painful, careful exertions of Prospero, the negotium which he has avoided only during the wedding masque, yield finally to otium, as Prospero rests himself content (V.i.144), and “to content” Alonso shows him Ferdinand and Miranda not at work, but at recreation, love having reduced wrangling for kingdoms to a matter of inconsequence. Even the business of remembering, in which Ariel had occupied Alonso and his colleagues, is a burden no longer necessary: “Let us not burthen our remembrance with / A heaviness that's gone” (V.i.199-200). The holiday won by the reapers who come to the nuptials of Ferdinand and Miranda has been strenuously earned, and so too has the holiday won by Prospero, who will waste some time that night and anticipates other moments of picked leisure. His work has been successful; he has created the otium which, according to Cicero, it is the duty of principes optimatium to create, “‘public tranquillity born of an undisturbed political order.’” an otium associated not with pastoral ease, but with pax and concordia.³⁰

Although The Tempest is a play replete with humour and imbued with marvellous equivocation about states of dreaming, the nature of Prospero's magic, and the allegorical possibilities of Caliban and Ariel, its airy edifice rests on the foundation of civic duty and social responsibility. The Virginia pamphlets were unanimous in decrying “the difficulties experienced in setting up a colony in Virginia as due to ‘dissension and ambition’ among the leaders and ‘the Idlenesse and bestial slouth of the common sort,’”³¹ and Shakespeare's emphasis on toil in the play may reflect the influence of the pamphlets on him. But it is also possible that he wanted, without writing an overtly Christian play, to give dramatic expression to the medieval idea that work is a virtue, antidote to one of the Deadly Sins—an idea resurrected during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by incipient Christian “capitalists,” with their emphasis on vocation and calling in a sanctified life.³² When Harry Levin observes that some sixteenth-century commentators on the Golden Age accommodated work in that paradise, envisioning the sweat of man's brow as a sign of virtue, his effort less a curse than a token of the felix culpa, he provides the only context conceivable for viewing The Tempest as a “pastoral” romance.³³ For Shakespeare calls upon us to view human experience from a post-lapsarian perspective, although the vehicle for this call is a singularly secular scripture, and he virtually demands that we share the realization of Milton's Adam:

                                                                                          On mee the Curse aslope
Glanc'd on the ground, with labor I must earn
My bread; what harm? Idleness had been worse;
My labor will sustain me.

(P.L., X, 1053-56).³⁴

The Tempest, then, tempers the facile sentimentalism of ancient pastoral with the puritanical conviction that sloth is sinful, and exults not in the pleasures accruing to otium, but in the satisfactions of tasks well done. It is a play which, however wonderful, is set in a workaday world full of briars; however strange, exotic, and dreamlike, it fronts unflinchingly “all the tempests of these worldly seas, / Which tosse the rest in daungerous disease.”

Notes

1. See Thomas McFarland, Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1972) and David Young, The Heart's Forest: A Study of Shakespeare's Pastoral Plays (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972). These works, which take up the lead supplied by Edwin Greenlaw, “Shakespeare's Pastorals,” SP, 12 (1916), 112-54, have assimilated the ideas of important twentieth-century commentators on pastoral, notably Empson and Poggioli. Both McFarland and Young, however, while recognizing Shakespeare's affinities to Sidney and Greene and to writers of Greek romance such as Longus and Heliodorus, set his plays occasionally in the broader context of Renaissance pastoral poetry. This context stems, of course, from Virgil and Theocritus, and flowers during the Renaissance in Mantuan, Barclay, and Spenser. We do not need Polonius to remind us that hybrid forms existed, but we should be wary, as this article suggests, of too easily grafting distinct traditions: pastoral romance and pastoral poetry. Pastoral drama is indebted almost exclusively to the first, while the Sixth Book of The Faerie Queene is a true hybrid—pastoral poetry indebted to pastoral romance.

2. Young says that the striking feature of Shakespeare's pastoral plays is “a story concerned with the exile of some of its central characters into a natural setting, their sojourn in that setting, and their eventual return” (p. 27).

3. As Eleanor Winsor Leach asserts, after reviewing criticism on pastoral since Empson, “we have moved from a theory that was almost entirely emotional, or affective, to one that is highly cognitive.” See Vergil's ‘Eclogues’: Landscapes of Experience (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974), p. 33.

4. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), p. 15.

5. Frank Kermode, ed., The Tempest, Arden Edition (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. xxxvii-xxxviii. Arden Editions are used throughout for quotations from the plays.

6. While it may, as Kermode says, be “over-simple to assume that [Gonzalo's] perennial theme is destroyed by the cheap jeers of Antonio and Sebastian” (p. xxxviii), it is equally simplistic to assume that our response to his vision is unaffected by them. On the dramatic balance here achieved by Shakespeare, see James Smith's Shakespearian and Other Essays ([Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974], p. 255). McFarland, apparently uncomfortable with the fact that Gonzalo's speech does not ring true, distinguishes the “pastoral” projection of the play from the “utopian” projection of Gonzalo's speech (p. 43). If useful at all, these designations, it seems to me, should be reversed.

7. Michael Putnam points out the importance of Tityrus' god-given leisure in Virgil's Pastoral Art: Studies in the Eclogues (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p. 25.

8. In The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), Harry Levin emphasizes the sentimental artifice of this quotation and claims that the paradoxically urbane attitude it promulgates is characteristic of the pastoral impulse (pp. 5-7).

9. “In Praise of the Countrey Life,” one of the poems in Scillaes Metamorphoses; see Thomas Lodge, The Complete Works, ed. Edmund Gosse (1883; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), I, 34.

10. K. W. Gransden, “The Pastoral Alternative,” Arethusa, 3 (1970), 105.

11. The text used is The Complete Poetical Works of Spenser, ed. R. E. N. Dodge (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1936).

12. Although critics are divided on the significance of Calidore's pastoral interlude, two are particularly effective in demonstrating that he forsakes his knightly duty while staying with Pastorella: J. C. Maxwell, “The Truancy of Calidore,” ELH, 19 (1952), 143-49, and Richard Neuse, “Book VI as Conclusion to the Faerie Queene,” ELH, 35 (1968), 329-53.

13. Note that the pun on “rest” sharpens the dichotomy between otium and negotium in these lines.

14. G. Wilson Knight's contention that tempests in Shakespeare are fraught with symbolic nuances has been recently reaffirmed by Douglas L. Peterson, who specifies what many of these meanings are in Time, Tide and Tempest: A Study of Shakespeare's Romances (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1973), passim.

15. For a short list of references confirming this statement, see Tempest I.i.135-37; I.ii.238; I.ii.255; I.ii.317; I.ii.356; I.ii.368-69; I.ii.409; I.ii.453-55; III.i.94-96; IV.i.34; IV.i.189-90; IV.i.263; V.i.52-53. Throughout the play, “business” is to be understood in part as “busyness.”

16. Peterson, p. 223.

17. The reclamation of a lost kingdom in The Tempest, a reclamation parodied in Caliban's abortive insurgence against Prospero, is a theme that shows Shakespeare's continuing interest in issues handled in Measure for Measure, the history plays, and several of the tragedies.

18. Harry Berger, “Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare's Tempest,” Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), 257.

19. Certaine Sermons or Homilies, introd. Mary Ellen Rickey and Thomas B. Stroup (1623; facsimile rpt. Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1968), p. 250.

20. Quoted by Frank Davidson, “The Tempest: An Interpretation,” in Shakespeare, ‘The Tempest’: A Casebook, ed. D. J. Palmer (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 216.

21. Giordano Bruno, Lo spaccio de la bestia trionfante, trans. Arthur D. Imerti (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1964), p. 205. Although Bruno's biographer, Vincenzo Spampanato, may be wrong in thinking Shakespeare had read Bruno, it is certain that Bruno, friend of Sidney and Greville, had an audience in England. Lo spaccio is dedicated to Sidney.

22. Certaine Sermons, p. 249.

23. As recorded here, the phrase from the Georgics perpetuates a textual corruption commonplace in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The phrase should read “labor omnia vicit.”

24. Bruno, Lo spaccio, pp. 210 and 214.

25. Certaine Sermons, p. 250. Gonzalo urges the others to eat with his conscience clear because he is not one of the “three men of sin.” As R. G. Hunter remarks, “what occurs when the sinners approach the banquet is not the capitulation of weak men to the blandishments of sensuality, but the prevention of unworthy men from partaking of good things.” See Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965), p. 234.

26. Corin, from As You Like It, is a revealing contrast to the group composed of Antonio, Sebastian, Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo: “Sir, I am a true laborer; I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man's hate, envy no man's happiness, glad of other men's good, content with my harm” (III.ii.69-71).

27. The Faerie Queene, II.vi.18 and 20; Inferno, VII, 121-24. On the latter, see Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1967), pp. 200-202.

28. Quoted by Wenzel, p. 153.

29. The play has gained that repose which King Lear is seeking when he divests himself of his kingship, hoping to “Unburdened crawl toward death.” It is significant that Lear's burdens become heavier the moment he repudiates his duty, whereas Prospero's become lighter as he re-establishes his mandate as ruler.

30. Cicero, Pro Sestio, pp. 96 ff. See Chaim Wirszubski, “Cicero's cum dignitate otium: A Reconsideration,” Journal of Roman Studies, 44 (1954), 1-13, and Putnam, p. 75. When Putnam defines Ciceroniam otium as “the order requisite for happiness, the subtraction of guile and innocence from the world, the unification of opposites, and the harmonization of all elements of nature” (p. 184), he provides unwittingly a splendid summary of The Tempest's dénouement and Prospero's achievement.

31. See Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), VIII, 238.

32. Wenzel demonstrates that “toward the end of the Middle Ages the sin of acedia came to include failure in the performance of worldly duties and activities” (p. 91); earlier, acedia had referred almost exclusively to spiritual lassitude. For modern enquiry into Tawney's contention that protestantism was the seminary of the capitalist ethic and for excerpts from some relevant texts, see Capitalism and the Reformation, ed. M. J. Kitch (London: Longman, 1969).

33. Alexander Barclay and Antonio de Guevara are two of the writers cited by Levin, pp. 29-30.

34. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957).