SOURCE: Black, James. “Shakespeare and the Comedy of Revenge.” In Comparative Critical Approaches to Renaissance Comedy, edited by Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella, pp. 137-51. Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation Series, no. 9. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions Canada, 1986.

[In the following essay, Black suggests that The Tempest may be read as a “revenge comedy” that features a protagonist who has the power to retaliate for wrongs done to him yet chooses not to do so. He calls attention to the many elements the play has in common with conventional revenge tragedy, particularly Hamlet.]

Renaissance revenge tragedy is a widely recognized and clearly definable literary form whose most famous—indeed supreme—example is Shakespeare's Hamlet.¹ Fredson Bowers, tracing the development of revenge tragedy up to and past Hamlet, into its Jacobean decadence, convincingly argues that in Hamlet the form had developed as far as it could go.² Certainly after Titus Andronicus, his early attempt in the genre, and Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote no more revenge tragedies. But in the blazing sunset of his career, with The Tempest, he devised or accomplished a new genre—a Renaissance revenge comedy.

The Tempest is one of only three Shakespearean plays not extensively adapted from existing sources,³ though certain minor analogues and conjectural sources have been found or suggested. Shakespeare clearly saw and in part used the Bermudan pamphlets with their accounts of the miraculous escape of the Sea-Adventure in 1609. These documents are Sylvester Jourdain's Discovery of the Bermudas (1610), the Council of Virginia's True Declaration of the State of the Colonie in Virginia (1610) and William Strachey's letter, the True Reportory of the Wrack, dated 15 July, 1610 though not published until 1625. Shakespeare's use of atmosphere and incidents from these accounts being relatively minor and having little to do with plot beyond the shipwreck and miraculous preservation of those on board, other analogous European works have been canvassed as sources. Among these are [Jacob] Ayrer's (d. 1605) Die Schone Sidea and the two Spanish works: Antonio de Eslava's Noches de invierno (1609) and Diego Ortunez de Calahorra's Espejo de Príncipes y Caballeros (1562, translated into English 1578, 1601). At least, it appears there are elements in these works analogous with plot incidents in The Tempest, and some scholars have argued with especial enthusiasm that Eslava's story is a source, but the Arden editor of Shakespeare's play considers the structure of source possibilities (which include Bulgarian, Byzantine, Latin and Italian as well as Spanish and German analogues) to be “a mare's nest.”⁴The Tempest also has certain parallels with Commedia dell'arte scenarii, and these parallels are discussed by K. M. Lea in her Italian Popular Comedy. I shall be returning to Commedia possibilities, but it should be emphasised that aside from the clear borrowings from the Bermudan pamphlets all “sources” of the play are suggested or reputed only. One possibility which I think has not been canvassed adequately—and the oversight may have something to do with the enthusiasm with which source-hunters have searched outside Shakespeare—is Shakespeare's own work. Though it has no full sources, The Tempest has precursors in the revenge tragedies of the time, and is especially influenced by Hamlet.

As Ashley H. Throndike defined it, revenge tragedy is “a tragedy whose leading motive is revenge and whose main action deals with the progress of this revenge, leading to the death of the murderer and often the death of the avenger himself.”⁵ Thorndike notes that the revenge motive appears in the anonymous Alphonsus of Germany (c. 1590) and in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (also c. 1590), but after examining precursors of Shakespeare's Hamlet (including the earlier or Q. 1 version) he suggests that Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and the Q. 1 Hamlet are the main sources of later developments in the genre.⁶ “From 1599 to 1604 … [revenge] plays were popular on the stage and … Marston, Chettle, Tourneur and Jonson, as well as Shakespeare, were employed in supplying the stage demand.”⁷ But although Shakespeare's Hamlet owed its existence primarily to a marked stage fashion for revenge tragedies, Shakespeare's hero leaves “the old stage type and [rises] into that ideal sphere where imagination and reflection dwell alone.”⁸ As Bowers explains, the dramatists' imaginations were helped along by their reading of Italian novelle in translations and imitations by William Painter, George Pettie and George Turberville. In these works the Italianate revenger is a leading and impressive figure. He also flourished in Italian histories such as Guicciardini's account of The Warres of Italie, translated by Geoffrey Fenton in 1579. Guicciardini's is typical of the kind of “history” of continental practices which fascinated the English. He notes “the readinesse of [Italy] to … broiles and innovations, with the present divisions and factions of the Italians”;⁹ and sets out to describe how Italian princes turn “to the damage of others, the power which is given them for the common good.”¹⁰ “From the novelle and the non-fictional accounts of Italian life the Elizabethans took almost every dramatic device that was to be found in Seneca, and more besides,” says Bowers.¹¹ By the 1590's stereotype Italians, Spaniards and other continentals dominated the English tragic stage with their vendettas and blood-lust. Hamlet is the supreme achievement of the revenge genre because Shakespeare made the issue turn on the character of the revenger; only in Hamlet, as Eleanor Prosser has it, do we “find the tragic issue of [revenge] to be rooted in an ethical dilemma that is universal.”¹²

As the epitome of revenge tragedies, Hamlet has all the apparatus of the type: (1) Revenge is the fundamental motive for the action. (2) The revenge is supervised by a ghost—usually the ghost of someone who has endured a blood wrong. (3) There is justifiable hesitation on the part of the revenger, who is weaker than his adversary and who, on the failure of legal justice, supposedly lacks a suitable opportunity for straightforward action. (4) Madness is an important dramatic device. (5) Intrigue used against and by the revenger is an important element. (6) The action is bloody and deaths are scattered through the play. (7) The contrast and enforcement of the main situation are achieved by parallels. (8) The villain is an almost complete Machiavellian. (9) The revenge is accomplished terribly, fittingly, with irony and deceit.¹³ As will be seen, all of these elements, with one exception, appear in one way or another in The Tempest. The exception is that of bloody action: there are no actual deaths in The Tempest, though deaths are surmised and threatened.

Among the features of revenge tragedy just listed, the most interesting characteristic is the weakness and hesitation of the revenger. It is mainly in this aspect that the plot of Shakespeare's Hamlet differs from its predecessors and successors, in that the hero has serious ethical considerations about what he is to do. In the standard revenge tragedy the revenger bides his time to collect proof and watch for his opportunity. This is the method of Titus Andronicus, who is at his weakest in III, i when, desolate and maimed, left with his violated daughter Lavinia and well-meaning but helpless brother, he begins to move against the Roman Emperor and Empress and the Empress' evil sons and henchman. By a sequence of accidents and planning Titus achieves a ghastly revenge on Saturninus and Tamora, making the latter eat a meal whose ingredients are her sons' heads, bones and flesh, and killing her before the Emperor kills him.

Now, there is a side to the business in Titus Andronicus which, in the frantic destructive energies—and the indestructibility—of some of the characters is almost comic. When the arch-villain Aaron the Moor is planning the rape and mutilation of Titus' daughter he gives a perfect exhibition of what Hamlet will call (in bad acting) “damnable faces” (Hamlet III, ii, 246):

What signifies my deadly-standing eye,
My silence and my cloudy melancholy,
My fleece of wooly hair that now uncurls
Even as an adder when she doth unroll
To do some fatal execution?
No, madam, these are no venereal signs:
Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,
Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.

(II, iii, 32-9)

There is critical controversy over just how seriously certain parts of Titus Andronicus are to be taken. The New Cambridge editor requests the reader to note the florid images which Shakespeare employs in various places to convey the plight of Titus' daughter, and to “ask himself whether he can conceive Shakespeare writing this stuff in earnest.”¹⁴ He writes about another conceit (again on Lavinia's plight) which, he feels, “shows us the author pulling our leg”; and he concludes that Titus Andronicus is in parts “burlesque and melodramatic travesty … a huge joke which, we may guess, Shakespeare enjoyed twice over, once in the penning of it, and again in performance.”¹⁵ The New Arden editor of Titus argues against this conviction of a burlesque intention on Shakespeare's part, though he admits that “it would be rash to say that a uniform attitude of deadly seriousness is presupposed.”¹⁶

Is Titus Andronicus in places a kind of revenge farce, then? Without attempting here to answer this question, I would nonetheless point out that, although the Italian histories, which lent their flavour or atmosphere to the Elizabethan revenge tragedies, have been read with great seriousness by Bowers and others, these histories are not necessarily always uniformly serious. Some of their characters, dreadfully violated on one page, miraculously are up and about their own depredations on another, displaying the resilience and energy—and the comic possibilities—of morality-play Vices. Consider for instance Guicciardini's account of the Cardinal D'Este and his brother Julio, rival lovers of the same young woman:

The Cardinall Hippoloto d‘Este, loving fervently a young maide his kinswoman, who for her part was no lesse amorous of Don Iulio the bastard brother of the Cardinall, and confessing her selfe to the Cardinall, that that which above all other things made her affection so vehement to his brother, was, the sweete aspect and beautie of his eyes: the Cardinall being full of wrath, having spied a time when he should go out of the towne on hunting, set upon him in the field, and plucking him from his horse, caused some of his pages to plucke his eyes out of his head, for that they were the companions of his love, and he had the heart to behold the doing of so wicked an act; which afterwards was the cause of very great scandals among many of the brethren. Such was the end of the yeare a thousand five hundred and foure.¹⁷

Then, a few pages further on from this example of Italianate villainy, we find that

Ferdinand brother to Duke Alphonso and Iulio, whose eyes the Cardinall had violently caused to be plucked out (but by the readie helpe of Physitions were restored without losse of his sight), conspired together with the said Iulio the death of the Duke.¹⁸

As I have suggested, in the serious contemplation of the blood and thunder with which continental texts apparently filled the imaginations of Renaissance English audiences, critics overlook the comic possibilities of some of these endlessly-energetic and apparently indestructible depredators. The mind which neatly parallels the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (a tragedy turning on vengeful acts) with the robust knockabout of “The most lamentable comedy … of Pyramus and Thisbe” is a mind that could have noticed the comic possibilities in Italian stories and histories, which often are written in King Cambyses' vein.

One comic possibility exploited by Shakespeare is the matter of a solemnly-enrolled but thoroughly reluctant and frustrated revenger—Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. At the climactic moment in Much Ado (IV, i), when Hero has been rejected at the altar by Claudio, Beatrice turns into a Clytemnestra and, when Benedick protests that he will do anything to show his love for her, demands that he “Kill Claudio.” At this moment and for the remainder of the scene, the action and comic development of Much Ado hang in the balance and, as R. A. Foakes puts it, “we the audience, are exposed to the idea of a growth and spread of evil.”¹⁹ Loving Beatrice as he does and convinced at last of her deadly seriousness, Benedick can only accept the revenge mission—“Enough, I am engaged; I will challenge him” (IV, i, 331-2) and goes off to find his victim. Two scenes later, white-faced (V, i, 129) and uncharacteristically laconic, he issues what he intends to be a deadly challenge. But just as it has taken Beatrice some time to convince Benedick of her seriousness about wanting Claudio killed, Benedick can't get across to Claudio the idea that he seriously wants to duel with him. He goes off the stage without receiving any answer to his challenge. And just as the gravity of the situation comes home to Claudio and Don Pedro who have been laughing Benedick's words off, Dogberry and his watch enter with Borachio and the revelation of Don John's villainy toward Hero. The duel becomes unnecessary, the happy ending is secured, and the dramatist has had a brief fling at introducing revenge into a comedy. In doing so he has, as Alexander Leggatt puts it, moved “temporarily outside the shelter of the normal world of comedy into a world of deeper and more painful feelings. … In the scene of Benedick's challenge, the license of comedy is temporarily suspended.”²⁰ The comic resolution of Benedick's temporary dilemma—he must visit revenge on his friend to prove his love—is all the more striking in being accomplished by the clowns, who are unwitting dei ex machina. Nonetheless, for that space while Beatrice's vengeful imperative, “Kill Claudio,” is Benedick's law the play has turned toward revenge tragedy and its possibilities.

In the complex of motivations which drive Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, first to make and then to enforce his bond, vengeful anger at the loss of Jessica is an important element: “If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” (III, i, 66-7. See also 11. 68-73). And although comic resolutions, here and in Much Ado, head off the tragic potentiality, vengeful energies clearly are at work among the characters in Shakespearean comedy. Such energies threaten the comic reconciliation in Twelfth Night when Feste's claim to have accomplished his revenge is answered by Malvolio's parting malediction:

FESTE
… Do you remember, ‘Madam, why laugh you at such a barren rascal? And you smile not, he's gagg'd.’ And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
MAL.
I'll be reveng'd on the whole pack of you.

(V, 1, 374-77)

Revenge threatened, then, can be part of the complication in a Shakespearean comedy; revenge prevented gives comic satisfaction, though in Twelfth Night a sense of unease seems deliberately to be left as revenge, however comically achieved, is seen to tend to set off further reaction. Where comic reconciliation is achieved in spite of an impulse to revenge it usually is because the revenger is foiled, like Shylock, or has a redundant cause, like Claudio. Malvolio appears to have the will (and the name) to retaliate, but given his social place he has no power. The prerequisites for carrying out a revenge mission are neatly summed up by Hamlet as “Cause, and will, and strength, and means” (Hamlet, IV, iv, 45). Ironically, though he claims to have “Cause, and will, and strength, and means” to carry out the task of avenging his father, Hamlet is at the time he speaks very far from having strength and means to fulfill this mission. In revenge tragedy the horrors come from the interchange and uses of power, and revenge may be accomplished as bloody instructions return to plague the inventor. The suspense in the genre comes from the relative weakness of the revenger. This is why, in Hamlet, one of the most startling moments—startling because it comes so early in the play, III, iii—is that scene where the prince surprises Claudius at prayer and for a long and indecisive time stands with drawn sword over his kneeling unwary adversary—exactly as Pyrrhus in the Player's recitation of II, ii stood over King Priam before hacking him to pieces. There is a long tradition of critical argument over Hamlet's renunciation of opportunity here, and over the reason he gives for that renunciation. From the ‘Mouse-Trap’ play he has evidence of Claudius' guilt, and the recreation of his father's murder performed twice over in that play has excited him. Now he has cause, and strength, and means—and what Shakespeare calls in Sonnet 94 the power to hurt:

They that have pow'r to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces,
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flow'r is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flow'r with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
          For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
          Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

In pulling back from doing hurt Hamlet does not “inherit heaven's graces.” He goes directly from this renounced opportunity to the killing of Polonius, thus becoming “the villain in [Laertes'] cause which images his”¹⁹ and tying himself irrevocably to his “double-sided nature and double-sided task.”²¹ Finding Claudius apparently at prayer, Hamlet shows he has not the will to revenge in cold blood; his tragedy is that he will do no hurt, but does it.

Prospero, on the other hand, with cause, and strength, and means turns potential revenge tragedy into revenge comedy, acting out the sonnet's theme. The fundamental motive for the action of The Tempest is Prospero's revenge. As Milan was taken from Prospero, so Caliban fancies that Prospero has taken the island from him—“This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak'st from me” (I, ii, 333-34)—and therefore Prospero's intrigue against his usurping enemies is imaged in an intrigue against him by Caliban. Although Frank Kermode, the New Arden editor of The Tempest, maintains that the chief opposition in the play is between the worlds of Prospero's Art and Caliban's Nature,²² the action turns as well on the struggle within Prospero's own all-too-human nature. For Prospero has a justified resentment and a deeply-entrenched recollection of the wrongs which have been committed upon him and his daughter Miranda. The resentment is kept fresh by the recollection.

Aids to memory are standard props of the sensationalist revenge tragedies. In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy the revenger Hieronimo carries a handkerchief stained (and apparently always freshly so) with his son's blood: “It shall not from me, till I take revenge” (II, v, 51-2). He also appears with a book, reading and expounding a lesson of revenge (III, xii, 1f). In Hamlet, memory needs no aids: it is a theme of the play. The revenger is urged by the Ghost of his father to “Remember me,” and responds:

                                                            Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all along shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter.

(I, v)

“Heaven and earth, Must I remember?” (I, ii, 142-43) Hamlet rhetorically asks in his first soliloquy. He cannot choose but remember as he sees the wrong done to his father imaged in life—Claudius as his mother's husband and as king—and in art—in the speech the Player once spoke to him from a never-acted play; in ‘The Murder of Gonzago;’ in the cameo pictures of the new king which the Danes wear. Memory is another Ghost which haunts Hamlet and prompts his revenge.

Memory also haunts Prospero. The long expository second scene of The Tempest is an extended illustration of how “the dark backward and abysm of time” (The Tempest I, ii, 50) is preserved in his mind. Probably no other Shakespearean character besides Hamlet has such a gift or curse of total and passionate recall as Prospero has: the length and near-monologue quality of his first scene attest to this. Frank Kermode attempts to ascribe Prospero's irascibility in this scene to his descent from a bad-tempered giant-magician of folk tale.²³ Such an explanation takes no account of the simple and all important fact that the one day in which the play's action takes place concentrates all Prospero's feelings about the former day of his and Miranda's victimization and about all the days and years since then. “Twelve year since, Miranda, twelve year since” (II, ii, 53), he emphatically begins his story: and as the story unfolds he repeatedly admonishes his daughter and the audience, “I pray thee, mark me” (1. 67), “Dost thou attend me?” (1. 78), “Thou attend'st not?” (1. 87), “I pray thee, mark me” (1. 89), “Dost thou hear?” (1. 106). In its urgent imperiousness, Prospero's tone is reminiscent of the Ghost's charge to Hamlet: “Mark me. … My hour is almost come …” (Hamlet, I, v, 2), “Lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold” (11. 5-6), “List, list, O, List!” (1. 22) In each of these scenes in Hamlet and The Tempest the voice of the past speaks urgently to the present, proclaiming a wrong and announcing that the time has come to deal with the wrongdoers. As the Ghost of Hamlet's father is obsessed with the wrongs done him, so too is Prospero; as the Ghost recalls his victimization in intimate detail, so too does Prospero, who blames his brother not only for his venality but also for the fact that he “made such a sinner of his memory To credit his own lie” (11. 101-02). Prospero's memory is not confused or edited. Sharp, detailed and fierce, it gives this long expository scene its energy. Remembrance is the ghost which haunts The Tempest: it is a ghost from a revenge play.

Reinforcing Prospero's angry remembering is the fact that Caliban also is an aggrieved rememberer. He has a selective recall of how Prospero first befriended him and then usurped him. Ariel, on the other hand, is free of memories of former terrors and of what he owes Prospero. It is of course an expository device that Prospero should remind Ariel of his debt, but Prospero's forcefulness in doing so illustrates once again his own all-too-circumstantial recall:

PROS.
Dost thou forget
From what a torment I did free thee?

(11. 250-51)

PROS.
Hast thou forgot
The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy
Was grown into a hoop? Hast thou forgot her?
ARI.
No, sir.
PROS.
Thou hast. … I must
Once in a month recount what thou hast been,
Which thou forget'st.

(11. 257-64)

Even allowing for Prospero's excitement at the arrival of this long-studied-for day, Prospero's language is strikingly belligerent. The belligerence seems justified, for as Hamlet's father was the victim of “foul play” (Hamlet I, ii, 255), Prospero and Miranda were “By foul play … heaved hence” (Tempest I, ii, 62). Beginning with reassurances to Miranda, who is terrified for the ship in the tempest, his story builds through the account of what was done twelve years before into stronger and stronger recrimination toward their wrongers: “that a brother should Be so perfidious!” (11. 67-68); “Thy false uncle” (1. 77); “in my false brother Awak'd an evil nature” (11. 92-3); “mine enemies” (1. 179). Soon the story is “beating in [Miranda's] mind” (1. 176) just as it beats in her father's (IV, i, 163). This strong working in the mind is potentially dangerous, as Prospero tells Alonso when at the end of the day Alonso tries to comprehend all the things that have been happening: “Do not infest your mind with beating on The strangeness of this business” (V, i, 246-47).

This “beating in the mind” is paralleled in the play with the force of the sea, and it is clear from the exchange with Ariel that the force and terror of the shipwrecking storm were in every detail specified by Prospero: “Perform'd to point … To every article” (11. 194-95). When he is angered by Caliban's truculence and invective, Prospero responds with equal violence of language, calling down (like King Lear when he is raging) a barrage of natural afflictions:

CAL.
As wicked dew as e'er my mother brush'd
With raven's feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both! a south-west blow on ye
And blister you all o'er!
PROS.
For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps,
Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins
Shall, for that vast of night that they may work,
All exercise on thee; thou shalt be pinch'd
As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging
Than bees that made 'em.

(I, ii, 323-32)

And,

PROS.
If thou neglect'st, or dost unwillingly
What I command, I'll rack thee with old cramps,
Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar,
That beasts shall tremble at thy din.

(11. 370-73)

With Ariel he already has threatened that

If thou more murmur'st, I'll rend an oak,
And peg thee in his knotty entrails, till
Thou hast howled away twelve winters

(11. 294-96)

And for Ferdinand, in the same scene, it is, “Come,”

I'll manacle thy neck and feet together:
Sea-water shalt thou drink; thy food shall be
The fresh-brook mussels, wither'd roots and husks
Wherein the acorn cradled.

(11. 463-67)

Frank Kermode says that Prospero exercises “the supernatural powers of the holy adept” and achieves “an intellect pure and conjoined with the powers of the gods.”²⁴ This is a retrospective view, and eventually a reasonable one, but it is not easy to credit on the evidence of Prospero's first long scene, where he dominates by force, memory and invective. The violence in the exchanges just quoted is re-echoed through the play in the plans of murder and ravishment which Caliban hatches with Trinculo and Stephano. Their plot, as R. G. Hunter points out, is a comic analogue both to Alonso's original crime and to Antonio's and Sebastian's frustrated attempt to repeat it.²⁵ Generally in discussions of this aspect of the play Prospero is seen as far above the conspirators, but the Prospero who rages at Caliban in Caliban's terms is not this remote mage. His grievance is Caliban's grievance—a sense of having been misled, usurped and exiled. Caliban is a revenger—however ridiculous and fumbling his plotting may be, he has a sense of “cause and will” inspiring him to do hurt, and he has terribly violent intentions. And Prospero is associated with Caliban's darkness, as he admits; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” (V, i, 275-76). The audience is kept in suspense in the first act as this man with “power to hurt” keeps his own counsel:

                              Know thus far forth.
By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune,
(Now my dear lady) hath mine enemies
Brought to this shore; and by my prescience
I find my zenith doth depend upon
A most auspicious star, whose influence
If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes
Will ever after droop. Here cease more questions.

(I, ii, 177-84)

Now, the senexes of classical comedy and the Pantalones of Commedia dell'arte often froth with ridiculous belligerence over suitors whom they perceive to be unworthy of their daughters. In Commedia dell'arte pastorals the Magician who broods apart is averse to wooing and marriage on his island or sea-coast.²⁵ Clearly, Prospero is not far removed from these traditions in his first encounter with Ferdinand, who sees him as “compos'd of harshness” (III, i, 9). In Shakespearean comedy, revengers are rather given to splutters of frustration—Benedick trying to convince Claudio that his challenge is serious—or storms of recrimination—Shylock raging in the street over his lost turquoise and a wilderness of monkeys (Merchant of Venice III, i, 113-23). But although Prospero ultimately will engineer a comic outcome at the cost of swallowing his resentment, his recall of grievance and his reactions to Ariel, Caliban and Ferdinand show him on the play's terms to be a haunted and potentially dangerous man of (as we ofter forget) Italianate nature, with a cause for revenge. With this cause, he has what the conventional revengers of drama lack—power to hurt.

This power may be exercised at will in the play's setting, a remote island which could be an ethical wilderness. The wicked Antonio recognizes such a possibility almost as soon as he finds his feet on dry land. When King Alonso of Naples, the idealistic old courtier Gonzalo and their other companions are charmed asleep, leaving only Antonio and Alonso's brother Sebastian awake, Antonio promptly sees an opportunity for Sebastian:

My strong imagination sees a crown
Dropping upon thy head.

(II, i, 203-04)

Believing that Ferdinand, the heir of Naples, is drowned, recognizing that his sister Claribel is married in Tunis, “Ten leagues beyond man's life” (II, i, 241), and that they on the island are “sea-swallow'd,” as distanced from Tunis and Naples as those places are from one another by “A space whose every cubit Seems to cry out” that no record or suspicion of their deeds will ever surface (II, i, 252-55), Antonio persuades Sebastian to let him murder Alonso while Sebastian simultaneously kills Gonzalo. Convinced, Sebastian says, “As thou got'st Milan [by disposing of Prospero] I'll come by Naples” (II, i, 286-87).

The ethical bare stage or wilderness which the villains so keenly identify is the equivalent of the unweeded garden which is Hamlet's Denmark: “Things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely” (Hamlet I, ii, 136-37). Titus Andronicus recognizes the state of moral emptiness even more clearly: “Dost thou not perceive,” he asks his brother,

That Rome is but a wilderness of tigers?
Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey
But me and mine.

(Titus Andronicus iii, i, 53-6)

The “tigers” of Prospero's island, Antonio and Sebastian, think themselves able, as Antonio puts it

                              To perform an act
Whereof what's past is prologue; what to come,
In yours and my discharge.

(Tempest II, i, 247-49)

“What's past is prologue” and Sebastian's “As thou gotst Milan, I'll come by Naples” (II, i, 286-87) clearly indicate that the villains are not so much acting a new crime as re-enacting a form of the original blood wrong—a brother's attempted murder—while the avenger watches through his art (II, i, 292). This is a form of the revenge tragedy's play-within-a-play. The villains' sterile repetition of the past is brilliantly contrasted by the other play-within-the-play, Prospero's Act IV masque, which is all about fertility and the future. Antonio, who thus in his re-enactment has confessed and confirmed his guilt, as Claudius does in Hamlet III, is the complete Machiavel. Ruthless and unrepentant, he goes back in Shakespeare beyond Claudius to Aaron. Only when it suits him will Aaron remember having heard of “a thing within [religious individuals] called conscience” (Titus Andronicus V, i, 75). When Antonio proposes to serve Sebastian's brother much as he served Prospero, Sebastian wavers at first:

SEB.
But for your conscience.
ANT.
Ay sir; where lies that? If'twere a kibe,
'Twould put me to my slipper: but I feel not
This deity in my bosom: twenty consciences,
That stand 'twixt me and Milan, candied be they,
And melt, ere they molest!

(Tempest II, i, 270-75)

“Then tell me,” Prospero already has asked Miranda, “if this might be a brother?” Her reasonable reply is that Antonio and Prospero need not be alike, for “Good wombs have borne bad sons” (I, ii, 117-18, 120). But Prospero's excited wrath and Antonio's remembered and presently-confirmed evil dominate the first two acts of the play. By the beginning of Act Three we have a drama of Italian brothers, with parallel enforcements of an evil strain and an examination of the use and misuse of power and opportunity—three of the brothers already being guilty of actual or contemplated usurping villainy. The dramatic energy of the play to this point appears or threatens to be revenge and, were Prospero to show the same tigerish disposition as his adversaries, he could be ready to emulate them in destructiveness when he is sure that

                    My high charms work
And these mine enemies are all knit up
In their distractions: they are now in my power.

(III, iii, 88-90)

Ironically, the traditional hesitation of the Renaissance stage revenger would bring about the destruction of Prospero's foes. As we have seen, left to themselves with no apparent law they quickly propose to murder one another. Prospero does not need to kill them, he merely needs not to strive officiously to keep them alive. In II, i he prevents the murder of Alonso and Gonzalo: dramatically this could be to draw out Alonso's, Antonio's and Sebastian's punishment. It is only in the third act, when we see him observe the courtship of Miranda and Ferdinand and hear his language soften, that there appears the likelihood of grace rather than revengeful destruction:

PROS.
                              Fair encounter
Of two most rare affections! Heavens rain grace
On that which breeds between 'em!

(III, i, 74-6)

But Ferdinand has been carefully isolated from the older generation, and at the end of this act Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian still are Prospero's “enemies” and as already mentioned, fully in his power. Even after the betrothal-masque for the young couple there is a resurgence of Prospero's fierce indignation at Caliban for his conspiracy and for his nature, on which “Nurture can never stick: on whom my pains, Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost” (IV, i, 188-90). This description (in which, incidentally, a cry from the storm in the first scene is echoed: see I, i, 51) also applies to Antonio. With renewed indignation comes a reminiscence of the earlier violent language:

Go charge my goblins that they grind their joints
With dry convulsions; shorten up their sinews
With aged cramps: and more pinch-spotted make them
Than pard or cat o'mountain.

(IV, i, 258-61)

This violence is directed at Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo, but it does not bode well for the aristocratic villains, as Prospero immediately turns to contemplate with menacing satisfaction the situation whereby

                              At this hour
Lies at my mercy all my enemies:
Shortly shall all my labours end.

(IV, i, 262-64)

On this foreboding, or at any rate ambiguous, note the fourth act ends. Prospero seems to be, as the play's own phrase for moral indecision has it, in standing water. (Tempted by Antonio, Sebastian non-committally replies, “Well, I am standing water”: Antonio's response is “I'll teach thee how to flow,” and he does, II, i, 216-17). Will Prospero “flow” toward preserving Ferdinand and Gonzalo but take his satisfaction on the others? At this point he can be compared to Hamlet, standing over the helpless Claudius with “power to hurt.” But Prospero, like Hamlet and like the type of man apotheosized in Sonnet 94, will not take advantage. The moment of sea-change from potential tragedy to comic resolution is at hand, and when Prospero agrees with Ariel that he should and will forgive his enemies the violence which in the play's language has been associated with the sea, ebbs: “Though the seas threaten, they are merciful” (V, i, 178). The turn into comedy is accompanied—perhaps consciously marked—by references to a turning tide:

… Ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back.

(V, i, 35-37)

Most strikingly, it is a tide of reason and of cleansing power:

                                        Their understanding
Begins to swell; and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shore
That now lies foul and muddy.

(V, i, 79-82)

The process of sea-change is fully accomplished in Alonso (this metamorphosis was announced, as a sea-change, in Ariel's dirge in I, ii). As Prospero recognizes, it does not take effect in Antonio (V, i, 78-79, 130-34). Having forgiven the villains, Prospero shows that he has thrown off not only revenge but also the memory of injury, telling Alonso not only to beware of infesting his mind with beating on the strangness of this business, but also saying,

Let us not burthen our remembrance with
A heaviness that's gone.

(V, i, 199-200)

This weight of memory is the last burden which Prospero puts off. With this renunciation the ghost of the past is exorcised (save of course for the important but irreparable matter of Antonio and Sebastian still being “themselves,” V, i, 32), and Gonzalo's benediction is proclaimed in the very next lines. The benediction sums up only the reconciliations issuing from the adventure, underlining Prospero's determination to “think of each thing well” (V, i, 251).

Reading The Tempest for its associations with and possible origins in Commedia dell'arte, K. M. Lea shows many striking parallels with the Commedia, but has difficulty accounting for what she calls the awkwardness of construction which allows the flow of stage movement in the Italian tradition to be interrupted at a crucial moment by a revenge plot (she has in mind Caliban's revenge intrigue):

At the moment when we might expect [comic scenes of mishandled magic] in The Tempest the Masque of Juno and Ceres is summoned, and then just as they reach their height the revels are rudely interrupted by Prospero, who dismisses the dancers and prepares to defend himself against a conspiracy. … If it were not that every time we read the play we are spellbound by the loveliness of his apology we might resent the intrusion of a revenge which now seems beneath his dignity.²⁶

Lea suspects a faulty interpolation of the masque here. Like many other commentators on The Tempest she overlooks the possibility that the revenge intrigue and counter-intrigue are part of the main—if not the main—business of the play. As a comedy of revenge The Tempest embodies nearly all the conventions of its tragic counterparts, especially Hamlet: revenge as a fundamental motive; a “ghost”; intrigue by and against the revenger, and dramatic parallelling; a Machiavellian villain and, as in Hamlet, a hero on whose character the issue of revenge turns—in this case to forgiveness. The Tempest might even be said to have the revenge tragedy device of play within a play, or rather to be a play within a play, for as a drama of potential revenge its one-day's (or between-tides) events are framed on one side by a story from the dark backward and abysm of time and on the other by that dark forward: the possibility that Prospero will act by the revenger's code. He does not do so, and consequently can project his hopes for his daughter into the future, embodying them in the masque. The brave new world may be new and brave only to Miranda (V, i, 183-84), but Prospero has turned away as well as he can from the bad old one.

As early as Titus Andronicus Shakespeare had begun to bring tragedy and comedy close together. In doing so he was carrying on a form of literary experimentation which had been conducted in Italy during the sixteenth century. Louise George Clubb has described these experiments in the combining of generic elements:

The practice of conflating individual units of action, character, and language from different sources had, even in the early commedie, sanctioned fusions of Roman comedy and pieces of the Decameron and Petrarchan imagery. In time, the principle of contaminatio levied parts from more numerous and disparate sources and eventually led to combining generic elements and aims chosen challengingly for their seeming incompatability within the limits of regular comedy and of regular tragedy.²⁷

There emerged from these experiments a commedia grave, which “included matters thought by Renaissance theorists to be fit for tragedy: characters of noble rank, threats of serious danger, of death or spiritual peril, occasions for heroism and pathos.”²⁸

Clubb suggests that there is some reason for believing Shakespeare was aware of Continental theatrical trends, and she discusses his “testing of generic possibilities” in Romeo and Juliet and Othello.²⁹ In my view, The Tempest combines “generic elements and aims chosen challengingly for their seeming incompatibility within the limits of regular comedy. …” Shakespeare has taken the elements of revenge tragedy and reconstructed them as tragedy's binary opposite.

It is rather appropriate that The Tempest seems to have no major sources and few analogues of substance, for in its ethical dimension it is unique. Only the playwright who had carried the revenge tragedy as far as it apparently could go would carry it farther still, by taking its conventions and, with The Tempest, sea-changing tragedy into revenge comedy.

Notes

1. Fredson Thayer Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 1587-1642 (Gloucester, Mass., 1959), 278.

2. Bowers, 278.

3. See Stanley Wells, “Shakespeare Without Sources,” in M. Bradbury and D. Palmer, eds., Shakespearian Comedy. Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 14 (London, 1972), 58-74.

4. Frank Kermode, Introduction to the New Arden The Tempest (London, 1968), 58-74.

5. Ashley H. Thorndike, “The Relations of Hamlet to Contemporary Revenge Plays,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association] XVII, 2 New Series X, 2, 125.

6. Thorndike, 126.

7. Thorndike, 127.

8. Thorndike, 217.

9. Geoffrey Fenton, trans., The Historie of Guicciardin: Containing the Warres of Italie. Reduced into English by Geoffrey Fenton. Third Edition (London, 1618), 16.

10. Fenton, 1.

11. Bowers, 266.

12. Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge (Stanford and London, 1967), 252.

13. In its essentials this list is borrowed from Bowers, 71, 268.

14. John Dover Wilson, Introduction to the New Cambridge Titus Andronicus (Cambridge, 1948), liii.

15. Wilson, lvi.

16. J. C. Maxwell, Introduction to the New Arden Titus Andronicus (London, 1968), xxxiv.

17. Fenton, 257.

18. Fenton, 266.

19. R.A. Foakes, Introduction to the New Penguin Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing (Harmondsworth, 1968), 19.

20. Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London, 1974), 179.

21. Both quotations in this sentence are from Harold Jenkins' Introduction and Longer Notes to the New Arden Hamlet (Methuen, 1982), 156, 515.

22. Kermode, xxiv.

23. Kermode, lxiii.

24. Kermode, xlvii.

25. Robert Grams Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York, 1965), 231.

26. K. M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia Dell'Arte 1560-1620. 2v. (New York, 1962), I, 201.

27. Louise George Clubb, “Shakespeare's Comedy and Late Cinquecento Mixed Genres.” In Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Maurice Charney (New York, 1980), 130.

28. Clubb, 130-31.

29. Clubb, 135.