So Rare a Wondered Father: The Tempest and the Vision of Paradise
Last Updated August 15, 2024.
[In the following essay, McFarland views The Tempest as an affirmation of pastoral values that combines Christian and pastoral perspectives. The critic maintains that Prospero is a godlike figure who presides over a golden world, a place of social harmony where evil is defeated.]
Standing first in Heminge and Condell's arrangement of the plays, and last chronologically among Shakespeare's major achievements, The Tempest in still other ways constitutes the alpha and omega of Shakespeare's comedy. For here the two great realities of Shakespeare's comic vision—the movement toward social concord on the one hand, and on the other the recognition of disharmony and disruption (identifiable as early as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and grown almost cancerously into the bitterness of the middle comedies)—come face to face in a final confrontation. The Tempest reaffirms the festive happiness of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, and at the same time completes and overcomes the motif of Jacobean “cohaerence gone” that strained against Shakespeare's comic dream in Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, in Cymbeline and Pericles. Accepting in full the social asymmetry of the bitter comedies, the mighty pastoral of The Tempest serenely reasserts the enchantment of brotherhood and social harmony.
The completeness of pastoral's victory is here unique. For the jars it muffles and the shocks it concludes are not the “human follies” of comic sport, but rather the crimes of religion's testament: brother against brother, the intent of rape, the intent of murder, the reality of lies, disloyalty, and plots both large and small. Never before in Shakespeare's comedy has the paradisal vision been so profoundly challenged. And never before has the pastoral affirmation so completely dominated the materials of the play; for the corresponding bliss of A Midsummer-Night's Dream is attained without opposition from the harsher aspects of existence. In The Tempest disharmonies, for all their prevalence, have no purchase; the goodness that flows from Prospero, in his island haven, represents not only absolute benignity but absolute power as well. All the motifs of betrayal that persistently tormented Shakespeare's view of reality are here, but the pastoral vision reduces treachery to something like the willful naughtiness of children. The principle of evil represented by Caliban is formidable: ingratitude for kindness, the attempted rape of his benefactor's daughter, and gruesomely planned murder (not only is his name an anagram for “cannibal,” but as G. Wilson Knight well says, “all Shakespeare's intuition of the untamed beast in man” is “crystallized” in his character [The Shakespearian Tempest (London, 1968), p. 258]). But so impotent is that evil under the omniscient gaze and awful power of Prospero that Caliban's motives enlist sympathy rather than arouse horror. Just as in Paradise Regained our foreknowledge gives the evil efforts of Satan, Belial, and the other devils, doomed as they are to failure, a sense of Sisyphean pathos, so Caliban's schemes seem, by their hopelessness, ridiculous and somewhat sad. For even evil needs a structure of hope; and that hope must here be abandoned.
So, too, for all other intents of evil in the play, overmatched as they are by Prospero's mysterious good. The Machiavellian aspiration, which dominated so much of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic imagination, and which, in Shakespeare's Octavius, Claudius, Macbeth, and Bolingbroke, became an absolute standard of the perverted hope that forfeits all values of mutual human regard—the Machiavellian aspiration is here as incapable of evil fruition as is the transcendent evil of Caliban. Just as Claudius kills his brother, or as Macbeth kills his king, so Sebastian and Antonio plot to kill brother and king. They plot in the manner of Richard of Gloucester, of, indeed, the whole long dramatic tradition of the power-greedy and amoral Machiavellian plotters:
ANTONIO.
Will you grant with me
That Ferdinand is drown'd?
SEBASTIAN.
He's gone.
ANTONIO.
Then tell me,
Who's the next heir of Naples?
[2.1.234-36]
And then:
ANTONIO.
Say this were death
That now hath seiz'd them; why, they were no worse
Than now they are. There be that can rule Naples
As well as he that sleeps; lords that can prate
As amply and unnecessarily
As this Gonzalo: I myself could make
A chough of as deep chat. O, that you bore
The mind that I do! What a sleep were this
For your advancement! Do you understand me?
SEBASTIAN.
Methinks I do.
[2.1.251-60]
And Sebastian accepts with alacrity the Machiavel's main chance, unlike the equivocating Pompey of Antony and Cleopatra, who retreats before Menas's proposal (“These three world-sharers, these competitors, / Are in thy vessel. Let me cut the cable; / And, when we are put off, fall to their throats. / All there is thine.”). In play after play, not only in Shakespeare, but in his contemporaries as well—Marlowe, Marston, Jonson, Webster—such murderous intent is depicted as fulfilled by the actual fact of murder, and the subsequent action wrestles with the consequences of the deed. Every preliminary for such a deed is observed in The Tempest:
SEBASTIAN.
But, for your conscience—
ANTONIO.
Ay, sir, where lies that? …
twenty consciences,
That stand 'twixt me and Milan, candied be they
And melt, ere they molest! Here lies your brother,
No better than the earth he lies upon,
If he were that which now he's like—that's dead;
Whom I with this obedient steel, three inches of it,
Can lay to bed for ever; whiles you, doing thus,
To the perpetual wink for aye might put
This ancient morsel, this Sir Prudence, who
Should not upbraid our course. …
SEBASTIAN.
Thy case, dear friend,
Shall be my precedent; as thou got'st Milan,
I'll come by Naples. Draw thy sword. One stroke
Shall free thee from the tribute which thou payest;
And I the King shall love thee.
[2.2.266-85]
We might almost be reading Webster or Tourneur, or Shakespeare at his most bloodily tragic, so explicit and lengthy is the Machiavellian preparation as here presented. And all for nothing. The deepest plots and most ruthless readiness advance evil's cause not an iota. The intervention of Prospero's agent, Ariel, leaves the conspirators almost ludicrously explaining the fact of their drawn swords to their suddenly awakened victims:
GONZALO.
What's the matter?
SEBASTIAN.
Whiles we stood here securing your repose,
Even now, we heard a hollow burst of bellowing
Like bulls, or rather lions. …
ALONSO.
Heard you this, Gonzalo?
GONZALO.
Upon mine honour, sir, I heard a humming,
And that a strange one too, which did awake me;
I shak'd you, sir, and cried; as mine eyes open'd,
I saw their weapons drawn—
[2.2.300-311]
Evil, indeed, is in this enchanted place not only stripped of its effectiveness, but stripped even of its Luciferan dignity. Sebastian and Antonio, swords drawn, are converted in the twinkling of an eye from fell assassins to sheepish explainers. And the same thing happens to Caliban. The “abhorred slave, / Which any print of goodness will not take” (1.2.351-52), the “lying slave, / Whom stripes may move, not kindness!” (1.2.344-45), who, treated “with human care,” sought in return “to violate / The honour of my child” (1.2.346-48)—this creature, in grotesque reflection and doubling of Sebastian and Antonio's death plot, plans with the clown and the butler the death of Prospero:
Why, as I told thee, 'tis a custom with him
I' th' afternoon to sleep; there thou mayst brain him,
Having first seiz'd his books; or with a log,
Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,
Or cut his wezand with thy knife. Remember
First to possess his books; for without them
He's but a sot, as I am, nor hath not
One spirit to command; they do all hate him
As rootedly as I.
[3.2.83-91]
In the hideous explicitness of Caliban's proposal the intent of evil does justice to all the random brutality of actual experience. But this horror in the subplot is disarmed as magically as its aristocratic Machiavellian counterpart; Prospero treats the intent of unspeakable brutishness (I'll yield him thee asleep, / Where thou mayst knock a nail into his head” [3.2.57-58]) as a threat hardly worth noticing: in the midst of the wedding masque he suddenly remembers:
I had forgot that foul conspiracy
Of the beast Caliban and his confederates
Against my life; the minute of their plot
Is almost come.
[4.1.139-42]
And although Caliban is
A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost;
[4.1.188-90]
Prospero's treatment of him and his confederates is not counteraction of equal brutishness, but the almost ludicrous punishment of pinchings, dunkings, crampings and other trivial harassments, which “plague them all / Even to roaring” (4.1.192-93). Thus, despite his unlimited evil, Caliban, thwarted by Prospero's power, becomes, in the words of Trinculo, in this drama a “most ridiculous monster” (2.2.155).
The childish impotence of evil emphasizes the almost divine power of Prospero's good. And it is accordingly in this play that Shakespeare seems to come closest to open identification of the comic ideal and the hope of religion, of pastoral realm and Christian heaven. While it is true that some theological authority frowned on any attempt at the representation of divine things, it is also true that a tradition of such representation did exist. Sidney praises David's Psalms as “a heavenly poesy, wherein almost he showeth himself a passionate lover of that unspeakable and everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith,” and hails his “notable prosopopeias, when he maketh you, as it were, see God coming in his majesty.” It may well be that Shakespeare in this play avails himself of that mode that Bacon, in his De augmentis scientiarum, calls “Parabolical” poetry, which “is of a higher character than the others, and appears to be something sacred and venerable; … It is of double use … for it serves for an infoldment; and it likewise serves for an illustration … for such things … the dignity whereof requires that they should be seen as it were through a veil; that is, when the secrets and mysteries of religion … and philosophy are involved in fables or parables.” And Henry Reynolds, in a platonizing treatise called Mythomystes, published about 1633, urges that the name “poet” is a “high and sacred title,” that one should look “farther” into “those their golden fictions” for a “higher sence,” something “diuiner in them infoulded & hid from the vulgar.” The tradition that divine things must be ‘infoulded & hid from the vulgar” was an ancient one: “Holy things,” said Plotinus, “may not be uncovered to the stranger, to any that has not himself attained to see” (Enneads, 6.9.11).
Furthermore Christianity, as well as the Platonist tradition, emphasizes that sacred matters are both presented and veiled by means of parabolical statement:
And when he had said these things, he cried, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. And his disciples asked him, saying, What might this parable be? And he said, Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand.
[Luke 8.8-10]
So Milton speaks of Spenser's Faerie Queene as a poetic statement “where more is meant than meets the ear.” In his pastoral Comus, the Spirit talks of “the Gardens fair / Of Hesperus, and his daughters three / That sing about the Golden tree … there eternal Summer dwells.” And there Adonis is said to be “Waxing well of his deep wound”—a statement prefixed by the exhortation, “List mortals, if your ears be true.” Milton seems by this exhortation symbolically to link the recovery of Adonis with the resurrection of Christ, just as the pastoral “eternal Summer” suggests the Christian heaven.
Parabolical utterances, rather than direct statements, are required because, as Paul says, we must see divine things “through a glass darkly.” Inasmuch as the parabolical conceals as well as communicates, its existence must somehow be signaled. Such signals are constituted by an obliquely insistent request for special attention: Milton's “List mortals, if your ears be true,” or Jesus' “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” And words like those appear prominently in Prospero's lengthy discussion with Miranda in the first act: “The very minute bids thee ope thine ear” (1.2.37); “Dost thou hear?” (1.2.106); “Hear a little further” (1.2.135).
The play reinforces such indications in other ways. The language possesses a mysterious resonance and elevation. Prospero does not ask, “What do you remember?” he asks instead “What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?” (1.2.49-50). He does not say, “Look there”; he says, rather, “The fringed curtains of thine eye advance” (1.2.408). Even the most sorrowful thoughts somehow seem, because of the mystery of the language, to be wonderful. As Ferdinand says:
Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the King my father's wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air. …
And the music, which is Ariel's song, makes the idea of death beautiful, wonderful, but not fearful:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
[1.2.389-401]
Something of that same wonder permeates Alsonso's counterstatement about the supposed death of Ferdinand:
Therefore my son i' th' ooze is bedded; and
I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded.
And with him there lie mudded.
[3.3.100-102]
Darkly wonderful unexpectedness continually springs from the language of the play, especially in the first interview between Prospero and Miranda, and so too do flickerings of ancient meanings. The reassurance uttered in a specific incident has a deeper and more universal comfort:
Be collected;
No more amazement. Tell your piteous heart
There's no harm done.
[1.2.13-15]
In haunting and symbolically indistinct words, old catastrophes and unknown fallings off are mentioned: “What foul play had we, that we came thence?” asks Miranda in a question that all struggling humanity could use for its own. And Prospero's answer keeps the same tone: “By foul play, as thou say'st, were we heav'd thence; / But blessedly holp hither” (1.2.60-63).
As old mysteries of sin and redemption seem to whisper behind the topics discussed by Prospero and Miranda, so also do more reverberating implications surround the figure of Prospero himself. In a matrix where the past becomes the “dark backward and abysm of time,” Prospero's own antecedents seem to suggest something more than the deposition of a Duke. The ambiguity of the language everywhere hints at deeper things. Ariel tells the newcomers that “man doth not inhabit” the island (3.3.57). Miranda is told by Prospero that she does not know “Of whence I am”; that she does not know “that I am more better / Than Prospero” (1.2.19-20). Sebastian and Antonio, conversely, are “worse than devils” (3.3.36). “Had I not / Four, or five, women once, that tended me?” asks Miranda. “Thou hadst, and more, Miranda,” replies Prospero ambiguously (1.2.46-48); and he tells her that “a cherubin / Thou wast that did preserve me” (1.2.152-53). Indeed, when Prospero says that “Thy father was the Duke of Milan, and / A prince of power” (1.2.54-55), Miranda, strangely, asks: “Sir, are not you my father?” (1.2.55).
Moreover Prospero, by his ability to control the elements, even to restore lives that seem lost, is invested with the power of a god. His power, in fact, is more than that of a god: “His art is of such pow'r,” says Caliban, “It would control my dam's god, Setebos, / And make a vassal of him” (1.2.372-73). And the aged magician possesses also the physical presence of a divine being: not the form of a pagan deity, but that of the infinitely wise God whom Christians worship. The reverend age associated anthropomorphically with God mantles Prospero's shoulders also, as do the divine attributes of justice, wrath, gentleness, and forgiveness. When Anselm of Canterbury argued for the existence of God from the idea of perfection that he found in his own mind, the monk Gaunilo made rebuttal by arguing that the idea of a perfect island did not make such an island exist. But in Shakespeare's art the perfect island does exist, and God, linked with that island in the theological arguments of the schoolmen, exists there also, although parabolically shadowed forth. As Ferdinand says of Prospero, “So rare a wond'red father and a wise / Makes this place Paradise” (4.1.123-24).
Prospero, indeed, bears the same relationship to his island haven as does Francesco Sansovino's Mythra, who, in a book reprinted at intervals throughout Shakespeare's lifetime, is represented as God ruling over an island Utopia. After a “descrittione dell' Isola d'Utopia,” Sansovino notes that some inhabitants of the island worship the sun, the moon, or the moving stars. “The greater part, however, I mean the wisest, do not worship any of these things, but believe that there is a secret and eternal divinity above any human capacity, which with its virtue and grandeur stretches over this world, and this God they call father.” On the island of Utopia, moreover, the inhabitants “hold in the temples no image of the gods, in order that each man can freely image God (liberamente imaginarsi Dio) in what form he pleases” (Del Governo et amministratione di diversi regni, et republiche, cosí antiche, come moderne [Vinegia, 1607], f. 183v, 198, 200).
On Shakespeare's own island, the parabolical suggestions of “Paradise” and “wond'red father” accord as fully with the pastoral tradition as they do with Christianity. Drayton notes of pastorals that “the most High, and most Noble matters of the World may be shaddowed in them, and for certaine sometimes are” (Works, ed. Hebel, 2:518). Furthermore, both Ovid and Virgil, with those historical effects the pastoral ideal is so profoundly entwined, were in the Renaissance repeatedly interpreted as allegories and foreshadowings of Christian mystery (see, e.g., Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance [Baltimore, 1970], pp. 135-99). And Plato, in a major prototype of the pastoral golden world, speaks of an Age of Kronos in which God himself was shepherd. Like Prospero ruling his enchanted island, and like the Christian God ruling over Eden, Plato's shepherd-God governs a paradisal realm:
When God was shepherd there were no political constitutions and no taking of wives and begetting of children. … People instead had fruits without stint from trees and bushes; these needed no cultivation but sprang up of themselves out of the ground without man's toil. For the most part men disported themselves in the open, needing neither clothing nor couch; for the seasons were blended evenly so as to work them no hurt, and the grass which sprang up out of the earth in abundance made a soft bed for them.
[Statesman, 271E-272A]
Even the supernatural agency of Ariel, similar but inferior to the authority of Prospero, is pastorally foreshadowed in the Age of Kronos: “Over every herd of living creatures was set a heavenly daemon to be its shepherd. … So it befell that savagery was nowhere to be found nor preying of creature on creature, nor did war rage nor any strife whatsoever. There were numberless consequences of this divine ordering of the world” (271D-E).
If Prospero, in brief, is naturalistically the deposed Duke of Milan, he suggests parabolically, along all lines of reference, the Ancient of Days: “His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire. … And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death” (Rev. 1:14-18).
It is here that W. C. Curry, in his elucidation of Prospero as a theurgic magician in a non-Christian, Neoplatonic mold, seems to go astray. The diffusion of magical motifs in the early seventeenth century, as indeed today, placed those motifs in the public domain, as it were, without any necessary commitment to Neoplatonic magic on Shakespeare's part (we surely do not seek a learned magic in, say, The Witch of Edmonton). Furthermore, Neoplatonism itself, from Ficino to Cudworth, was customarily syncretized with Christianity. It accordingly does not follow, as Curry would have it, that “in the Tempest, with its Neo-Platonic concepts serving as an artistic pattern” Shakespeare “no longer employs Christian myth as the integrating principle … here he creates an altogether different world … which is integrated by a purely pagan philosophy” (Shakespeare's Philosophical Patterns, 2d ed. [Baton Rouge, 1959], p. 198). On the contrary, pagan motifs, from Plato to the Sibylline oracles, were eagerly syncretized to Christianity during the Renaissance, and their presence, even if established, cannot be used as an argument against Christian interpretation (for a concurring opinion see D. G. James, The Dream of Prospero [Oxford, 1967], p. 61). Curry seems closer to the mark in his statement that “Prospero is evidently a theurgist of high rank. But we cannot determine precisely the degree of his attainments” (p. 188). It is the very indeterminateness that suggests the parabolical, the seeing through a glass darkly. And what is there glimpsed is neither merely a theurgic magician nor merely a Duke of Milan; rather, in “a notable prosopopeias” or use of personification, we “see God coming in his majesty.” This seemed strikingly clear to me the first time I read the play, and before I encountered any commentary at all; I have since been pleased to find that others have argued as much, not only among modern commentators, but among those of the past as well (for two nineteenth-century apprehensions, in 1859 and 1876, that Prospero is a representation of divinity, see A. D. Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory: A Study of Shakespeare's The Tempest and the Logic of Allegorical Expression [London, 1967], pp. 7, 9.) “The devil speaks in him,” whispers Sebastian. Prospero's reply is one word: “No” (5.1.129).
The immensity of this mysterious father-figure's power is the first of his attributes we encounter. At the beginning of the second scene of the first act, Miranda says: “If by your art, my dearest father, you have / Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them” (1.2.1-2). Shakespeare's dramatic tact is here unerring; he does not simply verbalize the hypothesis of Prospero's power, rather the tempest that begins the play takes us into the reality of that power and then leads us, daunted, to an encounter with the author of the storm.
That author is also the savior from its terrors. It is generally agreed that Shakespeare's imagined tempest had its immediate source in the “most dreadfull Tempest” actually experienced by a ship under the command of Sir George Summers in July, 1609:
a dreadfull storme and hideous began to blow from out the North-east, which swelling, and roaring as it were by fits, some houres with more violence than others, at length did beate all light from heaven; which like an hell of darkenesse turned blacke upon us. … For foure and twenty houres the storme in a restlesse tumult, had blown so exceedingly, as we could not apprehend in our imaginations any possibility of greater violence, yet did wee still finde it, not onely more terrible, but more constant, fury added to fury, and one storme urging a second more outragious than the former. … Prayers might well be in the heart and lips, but drowned in the outcries of the Officers: nothing heard that could give comfort, nothing seene that might incourage hope.1
With reference to Prospero's relationship to his own storm, it is interesting to note that William Strachey, the reporter of these events, recognizes God as the author of affliction: “It pleased God to bring a greater affliction yet upon us; for in the beginning of the storme we had received likewise a mighty leake.” And the deliverance from the storm is also, in this source, ascribed to God: “the almighty God wrought for us, and sent us miraculously delivered from the calamities of the Sea.”2
Now the fact of storm (as G. Wilson Knight has extensively documented) constitutes one of Shakespeare's major dramatic preoccupations, one that extends throughout his career. Storms occur from The Comedy of Errors all the way to The Tempest. We need only think of the storm that rages off the coast of Illyria, or the one that occurs off the coast of Bohemia; of the storm that surrounds Macbeth's castle, or the one that harrows Othello's passage to Cyprus. As a persisting symbol of the harshness of reality, and also as a convenience for the dramatist who can utilize the fortuitous separations and reunions incident to storms, the repeated use of tempestuous weather is a fitting adjunct to Shakespeare's dramatic art, both comic and tragic. But the achievement represented by the great storm scene that gives The Tempest its name can be matched only by the howling chaos deluging King Lear. The storms in both plays are similar in their evoked intensity, and similar also in their centrality to their dramatic situations. In other respects, however, they differ significantly. The storm in Lear occurs on land, while that of The Tempest takes place at sea. The implications of the former are that all reality is inundated by forces alien to humanity, while the implications of the latter are those of a passage from alien turmoil to a peaceful haven: in The Tempest we hear, in mysterious words, “the last of our sea-sorrow” (1.2.170). The storm in King Lear indicates a kind of monism of dramatic situation, a no-exit predicament; that in The Tempest, a dualism of earth and heaven. And the differing emphases reinforce the respective differences of tragedy and comedy. The storm in King Lear serves to underscore, in a macrocosm-microcosm correspondence, the tempestuous emotions in King Lear's heart. But the storm in The Tempest has quite the opposite effect, for it serves to accentuate the unearthly tranquility of Prospero's rule.
The storm in The Tempest, though comparable in intensity to that in King Lear, is really more closely related to the “sea-sorrow” in The Winter's Tale and Pericles, which are The Tempest's immediate predecessors. As the “last” of such sea-sorrow, The Tempest takes all the divisions and uncertainties represented by voyaging on the treacherous waters, and brings them to safe and paradisal reunion on holy ground.
Indeed, the fact that the storm here begins the play, rather than occurs as part of the internal action, accentuates the “sea-sorrow” experienced in the other two plays and closes the action off from any repetition of that sorrow. For the opening storm is like a curtain that divides the world of the island from all the world preceding, a veil that leaves all existential anxiety and striving on the other side.
The symbol of “sea-sorrow”—voyagings and storms and shipwrecks—is the symbol taken up by the existential thinkers of the twentieth century as a description of the human predicament. In Karl Jaspers it is called “Scheitern” (shipwreck or foundering) and is identified as a final truth about all human life. Likewise, Ortega y Gasset, in calling for an end to reverential biographies of an Olympian Goethe, says: “Give us a Goethe who is shipwrecked in his own existence, who is lost in it and never knows from one minute to the next what will become of him.” And such a biography, claims Ortega, is the only one that could achieve human plausibility, because
Life is, in itself and forever, shipwreck. To be shipwrecked is not to drown. The poor human being, feeling himself sinking into the abyss, moves his arms to keep afloat. This movement of the arms which is his reaction against his own destruction, is culture—a swimming stroke. … Consciousness of shipwreck, being the truth of life, constitutes salvation. Hence I no longer believe in any ideas except the ideas of shipwrecked men.3
The dramatic ideas of The Winter's Tale, Pericles, and in culmination, The Tempest, are those “ideas of shipwrecked men” which alone seem valid in the light of existential experience.
In The Tempest, the existential shipwreck gives way to a new security. But here too Shakespeare remains true to human needs as elucidated by philosophers of the human situation. Indeed, a title by Otto Bollnow—Neue Geborgenheit: Das Problem einer Überwindung des Existentialismus (New Security: The Problem of an Overthrow of Existentialism)—reveals how inseparably connected is the idea of haven and security with the existential idea of sea-sorrow. Every “Existenz,” as Jaspers repeatedly emphasizes in the most central idea of all his philosophy, is orientated toward “Transzendenz.” The enchanted island on the other side of the storm is the transcendence toward which shipwrecked existence reaches. And Paul, in the words of Calvin, “points out that faith, without holding to a consideration of the state of things present, or looking about at the things visible in this world … rises above the whole world and casts its anchor in heaven” (Commentaries, trans. J. Haroutunian and L. P. Smith [Philadelphia, 1958], p. 240).
So the pastoral ideal reveals itself as something far more necessary than a merely historical tradition in literature. As an analogue of the Christian heaven that exists as the goal of struggling mortals, of Jaspers's “transcendence” that flickers unattainably before all existence, it represents the deepest authentication of the meaning of human hope.
The necessity for that haven which is heaven is dramatically indicated in The Tempest by the fury of the awesome storm. Few more convincing testaments to Shakespeare's dramatic genius exist than the one provided by this first scene. For here he does not begin to build a plot, or describe character, or even, surprisingly, set the mood that will prevail in the play. Instead, without explanation, he simply represents the shattering fact of “Scheitern”: the fact of human existence tossed on the deeps, with no knowledge of what is to come, with the most tenuous hold on life itself. The divisions and distinctions that obtain in daily life are here expressly declared to be illusions. When Gonzalo, the man of eminence whom society respects, exhorts the boatswain to “be patient,” the boatswain's reply demolishes puny human distinctions in the face of reality's storm: “When the sea is. Hence! What cares these roarers for the name of king? To cabin! silence! Trouble us not!” (1.1.15-17). And when Gonzalo persists in his attempt to uphold the illusions of human significance by saying that the boatswain should “remember whom thou hast aboard” (1.1.18), the second reply is even more devastating than the first:
You are a counsellor; if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more. Use your authority; if you cannot, give thanks you have liv'd so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if it so hap.—
[1.1.19-26]
Gonzalo's inability to alter the situation, despite his “authority” so mockingly acknowledged, accentuates the divine power of Prospero. For Gonzalo, in terms of humanity, is much like Prospero: he too is aged, he too has lived and suffered, he too is benign. But he is simply a man, and his Polonius-like absurdity, as a “counsellor” with no solution to the problems of reality, emphasizes his powerlessness, which in its turn throws into dramatic relief the unchallengeable potency of Prospero.
The fury of the storm testifies to the universality of humankind's situation, a predicament fully realized only when the veil of illusion is pierced: “All lost! to prayers, to prayers! all lost!” (1.1.49); “Mercy on us! / We split, we split! Farewell, my wife and children! / Farewell, brother! We split, we split, we split!” (1.1.57-59). “All lost”: that statement, when life is seen steadily and whole, represents the ultimate judgment that all men must utter. “To prayers”: when the philosopher of existence, Friedrich Jacobi, lay on his death bed, his final exhortation was to pray, because, he explained, that is all we mortals can do.
And the transcendent haven so desperately sought by storm-tossed humanity is hungrily summoned up by Gonzalo in the speech that concludes the opening scene: “Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, long heath, brown furze, any thing” (1.1.62-64). Then, miraculously, beyond all Gonzalo's hope, the play presents the island. No “acre of barren ground,” it is instead an enchanted delight played upon by sweet music, and it parabolically suggests an unexpressed remainder to Ferdinand's statement that “This is no mortal business, nor no sound / That the earth owes” (1.2.406-7).
If Ferdinand finds that things here are other than mortal, his father finds them other than natural. “These are not natural events,” asserts Alonso. The other than mortal confirms the island as theological heaven; the other than natural, as poetic golden world. For “Nature,” as Sir Philip Sidney says, “never set forth the earth in so rich tapistry as diverse poets have done—neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.”
The difference between the golden island world and the brazen world of Naples and Milan is one of Platonic opposites. The Machiavellians of the real world, who pride themselves upon seeing things as they are, reveal themselves, in lengthy self-humiliation, as seeing nothing of reality. On the other hand, Gonzalo, mocked as a foolish unrealist, is in the island haven the speaker of certain truth. “I not doubt / He came alive to land,” says Gonzalo about Ferdinand (2.1.115-16). “No, no, he's gone,” replies Alonso sadly, acknowledging the reality that prevails in the probabilities of our brazen experience (2.1.116). But here Gonzalo's optimism is miraculously justified. Miraculously right also are his mysterious words of comfort—words that in another reality would be foolish: “be merry; you have cause, / So have we all, of joy; for our escape / Is much beyond our loss. Our hint of woe / Is common” (2.1.1-4). And the rightness of his vision, juxtaposed against the blindness of his too-human companions, is emphasized at length. Alonso's dejected answer to Gonzalo's counsel of joy is a curt “Prithee, peace.” And to Alonso's dejection Sebastian and Antonio append cynical mockery:
SEBASTIAN.
He receives comfort like cold porridge.
ANTONIO.
The visitor will not give him o'er so.
SEBASTIAN.
Look, he's winding up the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.
GONZALO.
Sir—
SEBASTIAN.
One—Tell.
[2.1.10-15]
But Sebastian and Antonio are so preoccupied in mocking the man they consider a sententious old fool, that they do not realize that Gonzalo (and Adrian, who is also mocked) are speaking simple truth. “Fie, what a spendthrift he is of his tongue!” sneers Antonio of Gonzalo (2.1.23). And when Adrian cautiously begins, “Though this island seem to be desert—” the two Machiavellian realists again interject mocking banter. But Adrian continues, is joined by Gonzalo, and their descriptions of what they see are strongly contrasted with the egotistically blind mockery of Antonio and Sebastian:
ADRIAN.
It must needs be of subtle, tender, and delicate temperance.
ANTONIO.
Temperance was a delicate wench.
SEBASTIAN.
Ay, and a subtle; as he most learnedly deliver'd.
ADRIAN.
The air breathes upon us here most sweetly.
SEBASTIAN.
As if it had lungs, and rotten ones.
ANTONIO.
Or, as 'twere perfum'd by a fen.
GONZALO.
Here is everything advantageous to life.
ANTONIO.
True; save means to live.
SEBASTIAN.
Of that there's none, or little.
GONZALO.
How lush and lusty the grass looks! how green!
ANTONIO.
The ground indeed is tawny.
[2.1.41-51]
The counterpoint of blindness with sight, of merry fatuity with serious understanding, continues as Gonzalo embarks upon his great Utopian vision, which epitomizes the coincidence of social hope and the pastoral ideal:
GONZALO.
Had I the plantation of this isle, my lord—
ANTONIO.
He'd sow't with nettle-seed.
SEBASTIAN.
Or docks, or mallows. …
GONZALO.
I' th' commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things. …
I would with such perfection govern, sir,
T' excel the golden age.
SEBASTIAN.
Save his Majesty!
ANTONIO.
Long live Gonzalo!
[2.1.137-63]
The discrepancy between Gonzalo's paradisal vision, which is now the actual sight of reality, and the unheeding cynicism of his fellows, which is now the mark of stupidity, is made still greater by Alonso's comment on the great Utopian projection:
Prithee, no more; thou dost talk nothing to me.
GONZALO.
I do well believe your Highness; and did it to minister occasion to these gentlemen, who are of such sensible and nimble lungs that they always use to laugh at nothing.
[2.1.164-68]
Gonzalo, indeed, realizes as soon as he sets foot upon the island that the miraculous is now the real: “but for the miracle, / I mean our preservation, few in millions / Can speak like us” (2.1.6-8). His acceptance of the miraculous event reveals him as an easy inhabitant of the realm of hope, while Alonso, dejected and “out of hope” (3.3.11)—“I will put off my hope” (3.3.7)—and Sebastian and Antonio, vainly pursuing their irrelevant Machiavellian plot, cannot accept, and have no happy part in, the new reality. When Prospero's spirits enter with solemn and strange music, bringing in a banquet, Alonso's initial refusal to eat the food is contrasted with the childlike acceptance revealed by Gonzalo's answer:
Faith, sir, you need not fear. When we were boys,
Who would believe that there were mountaineers,
Dewlapp'd like bulls, whose throats had hanging at 'em
Wallets of flesh?
[3.3.43-46]
Gonzalo accordingly is not numbered among the evil men identified by Ariel's harpy interruption of the feast:
You are three men of sin, whom Destiny,
That hath to instrument this lower world
And what is in't, the never-surfeited sea
Hath caus'd to belch up you; and on this island
Where man doth not inhabit—you 'mongst men
Being most unfit to live.
[3.3.53-58]
Noteworthy in Ariel's pronouncement is the convergence of religious and comic themes. The actions of the three are identified by the theological concept of “sin,” and at the same time by the social concept of “'mongst men / Being most unfit to live.”
Since the sinful despair of Alonso is reproved by the miraculous survival of his son, and since all the plots and evil plans of Sebastian, Antonio, Caliban, and even Stefano come to nought before the power of Prospero, despair and evil are thereby shown to have no place in the enchanted haven. But if the most negative potentialities of humankind can achieve no actuality against the nullifying power of Prospero, positive potentialities come to perfect fruition. Side by side with the theme of evil, the play develops the archetypal comic theme of the progression to marriage. As, in The Winter's Tale, Perdita and Florizel bring new life and harmony to replace the disruptions of their elders, so here does Ferdinand bring a new intent of love to replace the power-struggles of his father and uncle. It would be difficult to improve on the beautiful statement of D. G. James: “There are, and always will be, the Antonios and Sebastians, frivolous, without reverence, treating the prompting of their moral natures as irrational, delusory, or meaningless. … But of Ferdinand and Miranda we shall say, if I may risk allegorizing them, that they represent the hope by which we live and without which we could not bear the burden of our lives” (The Dream of Prospero, p. 171).
The process of courtship is controlled by Prospero. This variation of the comic movement toward marriage is justified in the play by, on the one hand, Prospero's benignity, omniscience, and omnipotence, which are maintained absolutely; and on the other, by the projection of Miranda as a paradisal figure untainted by human sin. In terms of our actual experience of life, she is as ideal as the island itself; and her innocence and purity serve to rebuke all the meannesses of humankind. “O, wonder!” exclaims Miranda, “How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in't!” But Prospero's laconic answer, desert-dry, is: “'Tis new to thee” (5.1.181-84). For the “goodly creatures” number among them the unholy trinity formed by the despairing and self-centered Alonso, the faithless and murderous Sebastian, and the treacherous and lying Antonio—the “three men of sin,” the “worse than devils,” the “unfit to live” among men. Miranda's salutation, uttered in openness of heart, shames all human actions that fall below mankind's heaven-orientated possibilities; and her unwitting criticism, spoken as it is in words of praise, bites almost as deeply as the most scathing denunciations of Timon or Lear.
To achieve so perfect a rebuke, however, the character of Miranda must be conceived as wholly unsullied by experience of humanity's baser nature. Hence her first view of man, that of Ferdinand, expresses the same wonder as does her attitude in the fifth act: “I might call him / A thing divine; for nothing natural / I ever saw so noble” (1.2.417-19). In view of the need to preserve this exalted idealism unmarred, so that Miranda remain “perfect and peerless … created / Of every creature's best” (3.1.47-48), Prospero's management of the courtship makes psychological sense. Indeed, not only does he note that “this swift business / I must uneasy make, lest too light winning / Make the prize light” (1.2.450-52), which gives both a dramatic and psychological basis for the extension of the courtship and the temporary harshness toward Ferdinand; but he is also much concerned that the act of love preserve its full dignity by being channeled untainted into marriage:
If thou dost break her virgin-knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be minist'red,
No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; …
[4.1.15-19]
The courtship, in this context, is not merely celebrated by the lovely masque of Ceres and Juno, but is actually part of that celebration itself. Ferdinand accepts his role as “patient log-man” (3.1.67), because he—and the audience—understands that
some kinds of baseness
Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters
Point to rich ends.
[3.1.2-4]
His patience, and the obedience of Miranda, are possible because of the security of their sense of love, and their faith in their future's happiness. To Prospero's warnings about the need for preserving Miranda's virginity, Ferdinand replies: “As I hope / For quiet days, fair issue, and long life, / With such love as 'tis now, the murkiest den, / The most opportune place … shall never melt / Mine honour into lust” (4.1.23-28). For, as he says, “I / Beyond all limit of what else i' th' world, / Do love, prize, honour you” (3.1.71-73). So Prospero can tell him that “All thy vexations / Were but trials of thy love” (4.1.5-6); and the omniscient father secretly pronounces an early benediction on the lovers' hopes:
Fair encounter
Of two most rare affections! Heavens rain grace
On that which breeds between 'em!
[3.1.74-76]
The postponement of the sexual union of Ferdinand and Miranda, in short, is represented not as a denial of happiness, but as a game and rite of joy: a deliberate savoring and treasuring of the meaning and prospect of happiness. The courtship, like the masque that crowns it, proceeds with the deliberate dignity that only freedom from anxiety, harassment, and trouble can afford. It thus becomes a testament to the goodness of the island, and a counterpoise to the seething plots of evil that are hatching in its shadows. Even in the happiness of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, the lovers are represented as opposed to the authority of fatherhood. But here only evil is furtive and disharmonious: no antagonism mars the relationship of Prospero and Miranda, no selfish greediness or degrading haste distorts the courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. In the brazen world of tragic reality, a Desdemona must hurt her father in order to please her lover, an Ophelia must hurt her lover in order to please her father; and Freud has spoken of these psychic facts as deep and fundamental wounds in human nature. In the Platonic opposites of the enchanted other realm of Prospero's island, however, even these age-old festerings are healed.
The masque confirms the deliberate and ceremonial dignity of these “two most rare affections,” and also perfumes the island with Arcadian evocations. The idea of contract is emphasized:
Come, temperate nymphs, and help to celebrate
A contract of true love; be not too late.
[4.1.132-33]
In the world of tragedy, Gertrude's selfish actions violate the meaning of contract: she commits “such a deed / As from the body of contraction plucks / The very soul, and sweet religion makes / A rhapsody of words” (Hamlet, 3.4.45-48). But comedy's aspiration, assisted here by religious parabolism, stresses the contractual dignity and lastingness of human society as symbolized by marriage. And the nymphs, along with the ancient goddesses, Iris, Ceres, and Juno, turn the play toward the classical matrix of the pastoral vision. The language of their pastoral evocation recovers once more the honeysuckle diction, gone so long from Shakespeare's art, that graces A Midsummer-Night's Dream:
IRIS.
Ceres, most bounteous lady, thy rich leas
Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats, and pease;
Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep,
And flat meads thatch'd with stover, them to keep …
the Queen o' th' sky,
Whose wat'ry arch and messenger am I,
Bids thee leave these; and with her sovereign grace,
Here on this grass-plot, in this very place,
To come and sport. …
CERES.
Hail, many-coloured messenger, that ne'er
Dost disobey the wife of Jupiter;
Who, with thy saffron wings, upon my flow'rs
Diffusest honey drops, refreshing show'rs,
… why hath thy Queen
Summon'd me hither to this short-grass'd green?
IRIS.
A contract of true love to celebrate. …
[4.1.60-84]
The images tumble out in pastoral profusion. In a consummate movement of dancing measures, comedy's coming together in marriage and pastoral's vision of an ideal environment merge with one another and are expressly hailed:
JUNO.
Honour, riches, marriage-blessing,
Long continuance, and increasing,
Hourly joys be still upon you!
Juno sings her blessings on you.
CERES.
Earth's increase, foison plenty,
Barns and garners never empty,
Vines with clust'ring bunches growing,
Plants with goodly burden bowing;
Spring come to you at the farthest,
In the very end of harvest!
Scarcity and want shall shun you
Ceres' blessing so is on you.
[4.1.106-17]
The abundance poured forth from such a cornucopia of comic and pastoral benignity elicits from Ferdinand, as it must from all audiences everywhere, the judgment that “This is a most majestic vision, and / Harmonious charmingly” (4.1.118-19).
But the majestic moment cannot last. Prospero remembers “that foul conspiracy / Of the beast Caliban and his confederates,” and the “vision” fades and disappears like the masque, leading directly to Prospero's greatest speech:
FERDINAND.
This is strange; your father's in some passion
That works him strongly. …
PROSPERO.
You do look, my son, in a mov'd sort,
As if you were dismay'd; be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd;
Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled;
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity.
[4.1.143-60]
This coincidentia oppositorum of human grandeur and human insignificance compresses the deepest paradox of man's existence into a burning focus of poetry. Coleridge once said that Shakespeare could achieve by dropping a handkerchief what Schiller could only approximate by burning up a whole town; to this we might add that in the words, “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep,” Shakespeare evokes the wonder, pathos, and mystery that Bossuet's orations and sermons require waves and organ tones of Baroque prose to communicate.
Prospero's great speech is full of opposed and blended meanings, which penetrate through the situation of the play into larger prospects beyond. Prospero, who seems dismayed, lightens his own dismay by a reflecting care for that of Ferdinand: “You do look, my son, in a mov'd sort, / As if you were dismay'd.” And his next utterance, “be cheerful, sir,” standing as a kind of absolute command and assurance, seems to counsel cheer not merely in the face of present dismay, but in the face of all experience of existence. It seems, indeed, to echo the mysterious words of Jesus: “be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). The statement, “Our revels now are ended,” speaks not only for the disappearance of the masque, but as has often been suggested, seems almost to be Shakespeare's own farewell to his career as a playwright, and even to his career on earth; and if the word “travails” be substituted for the word “revels”—a substitution that the evil portion of the play's action, as well as Prospero's past troubles, might seem to countenance—the meanings remain strangely unchanged: for in this play, and climactically in this passage, travails dissolve into revels, and revels into peace. The words, “this insubstantial pageant faded,” fuse in marvelous economy three realms: that of the spirit-masque within the play, that of the actual life of the theatre in which the man Shakespeare moved, and that of all human life everywhere. The diction of the whole speech diminishes and at the same moment elevates human aspirations: “the baseless fabric of this vision” is a statement of literal nihilism, but the words are of soaring affirmation. Words that indicate insubstantiality undermine but at the same time caress, the illusion of substantiality: “spirits,” “melted,” “air,” “thin air,” “baseless fabric,” “vision,” “dissolve,” “insubstantial,” “faded,” “dreams,” “sleep”—these are the units that combine to form the dreamy, airy mixture of exaltation and regret that characterizes the passage. By modifying the substantial “towers” with the insubstantial but elevated “cloud-capp'd,” the substantial is simultaneously made grander and dissipated.
And the concluding words, “Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled,” strangely contradict the established fact of Prospero's superhuman power. But they also render him, in his human frailty and age, somehow even more dignified and worthy of reverence than before. He descends from the isolated throne of power and rejoins, in the final meaning of comedy, the struggling family of humankind.
By doing so, he partakes of the dignity and pathos of that other old man, King Lear; the words, even, are almost the same. Purged alike of arrogance and madness, Lear says, “You must bear with me. / Pray you now, forget and forgive; I am old and foolish” (King Lear, 4.7.84-85). Divested alike of power and isolation—the two conditions of divinity—Prospero, in saying “Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled,” almost duplicates Lear's words and so for a pregnant moment abrogates the polar oppositions of comedy and tragedy.
Indeed, Shakespeare's crowning achievement in comedy, The Tempest, constantly recalls King Lear, his crowning achievement in tragedy. The relationships until now have seemed to be mostly those of contrast: the storm in The Tempest contrasts, as noted above, with the storm in Lear. Lear is pathetically powerless, while Prospero is omnipotent. Lear rejects Cordelia and scorns her marriage; Prospero's love for Miranda is never disturbed, and her marriage is not only approved but arranged by him. Lear stumbles about on a godless heath, while Prospero thrives on a lush island crowded with supernatural beings. But the similarities are what make the contrasts hold true: both plays have as their central figure an aged man; both plays emphasize the relationship of that aged man to a loved daughter; both plays explore the idea of human wrongs, especially familial wrongs perpetrated against reverend age.
Yet the figures of Lear and Prospero, coinciding in the moment of their recognition of age and weakness—of the need for mankind to bear with one another's infirmities—then begin to diverge. Drawn by the requirements of tragedy, Lear maintains his transcendent meanings in the face of death; and death it is that claims both Cordelia and Lear, as well as Goneril, Regan, Edmund, and Gloucester. The requirements of comedy, however, are different: Prospero does not die, although, having divested himself of divinity, his aged humanity is marked by the emphasis that “Every third thought shall be my grave” (5.1.311). Furthermore, The Tempest's new awareness is translated into a rebirth of social concord. Such concord is brought about by Prospero's forgiving the evil.
Throughout his comic work, Shakespeare has relied on the theological act of forgiveness to reclaim certain deviations too severe, or even criminal, to be laughingly dismissed as follies. Indeed, the theme is so pervasive that R. G. Hunter, in his Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness, has treated it as constituting a valid subgenre of Shakespeare's endeavor. As early as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the near-criminal figure of Proteus is reclaimed by the device of forgiveness. And in both The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure the theological rationale of forgiveness and mercy is explicitly adduced. Portia utilizes the paradoxes of St. Paul:
The quality of mercy is not strain'd;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven. …
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown. …
But mercy is above this sceptred sway; …
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this—
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation; we do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.
[The Merchant of Venice, 4.1.179-97]
And Isabella argues almost as does Anselm in his Cur Deus homo:
Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once;
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy. How would you be
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? O, think on that;
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made.
[Measure for Measure, 2.2.73-79]
Such reasoning underlies Prospero's action of forgiveness; no such theological rationale, however, is overtly invoked to justify it. Indeed, rather as Christ, the Son of God, is referred to constantly in the gospels as the Son of Man, Prospero finds his reasons not in the divine analogy he shadows forth but in his participation in mankind:
ARIEL.
Your charm so strongly works 'em
That if you beheld them your affections
Would become tender.
PROSPERO.
Dost thou think so, spirit?
ARIEL.
Mine would, sir, were I human.
PROSPERO.
And mine shall.
It is perhaps the most exquisite of the many wonderful moments in the play. Prospero continues:
Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,
Passion as they, be kindlier mov'd than thou art?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th' quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part; the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance; they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further. Go release them, Ariel;
My charms I'll break, their senses I'll restore,
And they shall be themselves.
[5.1.17-32]
In the all too human situations of Portia and Isabella, the rationale for forgiveness is argued upward: as man's attempt to imitate God's perfection. Prospero, conversely, already parabolically representative of the divine, argues downward, in terms of participation in humanity—of kindness arising from the sense of our kind—for that same mercy. And to confirm the argument, he follows the decision to forgive by, as it were, giving up his divine power and isolation:
I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault
Set roaring war. To the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-bas'd promontory
Have I made shake. … But this rough magic
I here abjure; and, when I have requir'd
Some heavenly music—when even now I do—
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.
[5.1.41-57]
Though the argument is different in its direction, the invocation of forgiveness fits the theological parabolism of The Tempest perfectly; indeed, mercy functions here more profoundly than it does in any other Shakespearean comedy. Its dramatic necessity is clear, for the “three men of sin,” like the “demi-devil” Caliban, are “unfit” for human society. Prospero says to Antonio:
You, brother mine, that entertain'd ambition,
Expell'd remorse and nature. … I do forgive thee,
Unnatural though thou art.
[5.1.75-79]
This is the most difficult act of forgiveness for Prospero, because Antonio, traitorous and murderous, is his own Claudius-like brother. Hence Antonio remains silent throughout the final act, except for two lines in response to the bedraggled entrance of Caliban and his confederates:
SEBASTIAN.
Ha, ha!
What things are these, my Lord Antonio?
Will money buy 'em?
ANTONIO.
Very like; one of them
Is a plain fish, and, no doubt, marketable.
But this brief and coarse exchange, so wonderfully in character for both speakers, is an invitation to the rebuked brother to join the new society, and also a sulky acceptance. To Sebastian Prospero says:
For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother
Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive
Thy rankest fault—all of them. …
[5.1.130-32]
Less tainted than the others, Alonso complements the giving of grace by the asking of pardon:
Thy dukedom I resign, and do entreat
Thou pardon me my wrongs.
[5.1.118-19]
The dramatic necessity for forgiveness is clear, and so too is the positive affirmation of joy. Such an affirmation once before issued from a forgiving Shakespearean ruler. To reclaim the despicable Bertram in All's Well, his mother asks that he be forgiven:
'Tis past, my liege;
And I beseech your Majesty to make it
Natural rebellion, done i' th' blaze of youth;
When oil and fire, too strong for reason's force,
O'erbears it and burns on.
KING.
My honour'd lady,
I have forgiven and forgotten all;
[All's Well, 5.3.4-9]
And when Bertram himself then asks pardon, the King's answer conveys a sense of joy and restoration:
All is whole;
Not one word more of the consumed time.
Let's take the instant by the forward top;
For we are old. …
[All's Well, 5.3.37-40]
The same joyous hushing of a troubled past pervades the forgiveness tendered by Prospero:
ALONSO.
But, O, how oddly will it sound that I
Must ask my child forgiveness!
PROSPERO.
There, sir, stop;
Let us not burden our remembrances with
A heaviness that's gone.
[5.1.197-200]
But the forgiveness of Prospero, though similar in tone to that of Bertram's king, is far more intricately connected with the whole meaning of its play than is the mercy offered in All's Well. For if forgiveness fits the dramatic requirements of the ultimate reconciliation in The Tempest, it also accords with the theological overtones of the play. Mercy, in Portia's words, is “an attribute to God himself.” That Prospero, the anthropomorphic figure of the divine, should offer it, is simply to authenticate his role as defined from the beginning of the drama. And that role channels the conclusion of The Tempest to a unique coalescence of the aims of comic reconciliation on the one hand, and the mysteries of religion on the other. Indeed, on the rarefied comic level to which The Tempest attains, religion no longer stands above comedy, but is actually its other face. As O. B. Hardison contends, in Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages, the Christian Mass itself “is comic in structure,” having “a joyful resolution,” exhibiting, as does The Tempest, “a movement from tristia to gaudium” (p. 83).
The final scene of this exalted play is bathed, therefore, in the unmistakable and specific language of religion. “A most high miracle,” says the formerly cynical Sebastian (5.1.177). “Holy Gonzalo, honourable man,” says Prospero in his greeting to his old friend (5.1.62). “Look down, you gods,” says Gonzalo, “And on this couple drop a blessed crown” (5.1.201-2). And Alonso blesses this blessing: “I say, Amen, Gonzalo!” (5.1.204). Then Alonso says, “Give me your hands. / Let grief and sorrow still embrace his heart / That doth not wish you joy!” (5.1.213-15). And Gonzalo in his turn speaks with sacred words: “Be it so. Amen!” (5.1.215).
So does this most holy of betrothals confirm the shared aims of comedy and religion. And so does the entirety of this most mysterious and elevated testament of Shakespeare's comic understanding, as it melts into the thin air of its conclusion, leave in our minds, as symbol of its unique gladness, the words of Gonzalo:
Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue
Should become Kings of Naples? O, rejoice
Beyond a common joy, and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars. …
[5.1.205-8]
For, set down in the golden harmonies of Shakespeare's language, upon the lasting pillars of his dramaturgic representations, The Tempest rejoices in a majestic vision of the final oneness of all comic, pastoral, and religious meanings.
Notes
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Purchas his Pilgrimes (Glasgow, 1905-7), 19:6-7.
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Ibid., pp. 8, 32.
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“In Search of Goethe from Within,” in The Dehumanization of Art: and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature, trans. Helene Weyl (Princeton, 1968), pp. 145, 136-37.
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