SOURCE: Greene, Gayle. “Excellent Dumb Discourse: Silence and Grace in Shakespeare's Tempest.” Studia Neophilologica 50 (1978): 193-205.

[In the following essay, Greene points out that although Prospero occasionally uses language to constrain or coerce, his special powers of healing are affected by silence, show, and music. Greene maintains that this accentuates Shakespeare's exploration of both the necessity and the limitations of speech.]

“Hush and be mute, or else our spell is marr'd.”

Critics have commented on the poetic thinness of The Tempest, and some have expressed surprise that the play has such great imaginative impact in spite of its paucity of poetic and rhetorical effect. The language is characteristic of Shakespeare's late plays, terse, spare, lacking the rhetorical embellishment and exuberance of his earlier style. It is relatively scarce in imagery, and what there is of it remains concrete and sensuous, rather than assuming the resonance of metaphor or symbol which is vitally integrated into imaginative conception. Hallett Smith, observing this thinness of texture, wonders “why this should be … critics find it difficult to account for the effect the play has upon them”.¹

And indeed, there does seem an incongruity between language and power, for The Tempest is one of Shakespeare's most deeply moving plays; it has the power ascribed by Bradley to the great tragedies, of “dilating the imagination”.² Magical in its celebration of “wonder” and “miracle”, it is—what Ferdinand calls Prospero's masque—“a most majestic vision … / Harmonious charmingly”³ but, as these terms indicate, its effect is derived from modes of expression other than the verbal. When we consider, also, that though the text is one of the shortest, the play is as long as the others in performance, we realize the extent to which it relies on masque-like elements, the song and spectacle that are the means of Prospero's magic. Some have accounted for this in terms of the influence of the masque: but surely it is possible to understand the dominance of visual and musical effects in relation to the paucity of the poetic and rhetorical, and to account for both in terms of the play itself. G. Wilson Knight suggests a connection between the “unmetaphorical and transparent style” and the play's “visionary conception” (p. 223) which indicates something of Shakespeare's purposes: before wonder and miracle, at the edges of experience, modes of expression other than language take over. The Tempest is a play which in several ways suggests the limits of its own verbal medium.⁴

Though it is difficult to generalize about “the language of a play”, since always in Shakespeare, character is differentiated by idiom, this play would be identifiable as late even without external evidence, for its high incidence of run-on and deficient lines, hypermetricism, and an iambic pentameter so subtle that verse and prose are often indistinguishable.⁵ Whereas in the earlier plays, formal rhetorical patterns, extended similitude and wit play, created a conspicuous texture of language, often displayed for its own sake, in The Tempest, rhetorical figures and rhythms have been subdued to decorum in a style which “simulates the language of men in a state of profound sensation” (Kermode, p. lxxviii). Whereas in the tragedies, imagery is indispensible to imaginative conception, fraught with a symbolic meaning so central that we could not understand the play without it, it functions, in The Tempest, to evoke a background of nature, and, relegated primarily to the language of Caliban, serves a more “decorative”, less integral purpose.⁶ The style of the play is—in Perry Miller's terms—a “clear window” through which meaning emerges unaffected, rather than the “stained glass” of Shakespeare's earlier style, through which meaning is refracted and modified.⁷ Not that the language is without rhetoric, but that rhetoric is strictly subservient to drama; nor that it is without artifice, but that it is, in fulfillment of Sidney's ideal, an art that “hide[s] art”; or, of Puttenham's, an art “most admired when … most naturall”;⁸ and, like Hermione's statue, an art which “itself is Nature” (WT, IV.iv.97), it provides in itself a resolution of the antithesis of art and nature with which the play is concerned.

The language of Shakespeare's late plays may be seen in relation to seventeenth-century tendencies toward the plain style, though it is also a style toward which he had long been inclining, in the interests of both dramatic decorum and “truth”. From the time of Love's Labor's Lost, he had been renouncing, while revelling in, his “trick / Of the old rage” (V.ii.416-17), associating verbal extravagance with youthful exuberance, joyous but irresponsible. Throughout, he has been concerned with questions of language—what it helps us to do and keeps us from doing, its truth and validity, its falseness and distortion, its power to pervert our perceptions of ourselves and one another. The plays evoke a sense of creative and destructive potentials of language, a dialectic which may be seen against the background of the linguistic revolution of the age, the shift from sixteenth-century belief in language and eloquence to seventeenth-century nominalism and an ideal of the plain style, but which also reflects universal complexities.⁹

Paradoxically, Shakespeare, the supreme expression and embodiment of Renaissance eloquence, implies a recurrent scepticism of his own verbal medium,¹⁰ a scepticism which grows more pronounced in the late tragedies, plays in which virtue and love are nearly silent: thus Cordelia can say “nothing”, “love, and be silent” (I.ii.89, 63); in Othello, “the bruis'd heart” is “pierced through the ear” (I.iii.217-18) and “all that is spoke is marr'd” (V.ii.357); and in Coriolanus, a play remarkable for its harsh, unlovely tones, the one virtuous character is referred to as “gracious silence” (II.i.192). In fact, an approach to experience is implied which suggests that the highest reality is a wordless reality, beyond our powers of articulation—an approach which, taken to its logical conclusion, would end in silence, but which first finds expression in the “excellent dumb discourse” (III.iii.39) of The Tempest. An association of sincerity with simplicity is stated here by Miranda in terms which recall Juliet's: banishing “trifling” and “cunning”, she declares her love in “plain and holy innocence” (III.i.79-82)—and to her ideal the style as a whole is remarkably true. This is a play which achieves its most stunning effects from the breath-taking simplicity of a song—a song that “kiss'd the wild waves whist” (I.ii.378).

The play opens with a vivid dramatization of the ineffectuality of language: “What cares these roarers for the name of king?” (I.i.16-17). The opening scene suggests various attempts to deal linguistically with the terror of storm and shipwreck: by means of rational discourse, imprecation, injunction, invocation of the king's name, a plea for silence, and, finally, for prayer. The “master” orders the boatswain to “speak to th'mariners” (3), in an attempt to establish control through rational discourse; the “master”, however, disappears, and though he reappears in the last scene, never speaks again. In the confusion and panic that follow, rational discourse degenerates into cursing and howling. Antonio and Sebastian accuse the others of being—what they themselves are—“blasphemous, incharitable” (40), “insolent noisemaker” (44). The boatswain calls for “silence” (17) and curses their cursing (“a plague upon this howling!” [36]), taunting Gonzalo with the ineffectuality of the authority he invokes: “you are a councillor; if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present … Use your authority” (20-2). Finally, as the ship splinters, their recourse is prayer: “All lost! To prayers, to prayers! All lost!” (51). The scene has taken us through various verbal responses to an uncontrollable terror—from the retributive through the redemptive, from futile cursing, attempts to control, to a final relinquishing of secular authority and language in the gesture of prayer.

As such, it provides a microcosm of the play as a whole, which similarly explores various linguistic potentialities, both positive and negative, to end, finally, in a plea for prayer. Concerns with language are present in The Tempest in several ways familiar from earlier plays; in this respect, as in others, it provides a summation and end. The play evokes a sense of both creative and destructive powers of language, opposing an earlier Renaissance concept of language as expression of the human and civilized, as condition of knowledge and educator of thought, to the modern, sceptical possibility, that language, bearing no necessary relation to reality, may be inadequate to our deepest knowledge and intuition. But whereas in tragedy, the gap between world and word is a tragic condition, and distortions inherent in language confound understanding with tragic effect, in this play, the emphasis is not on its tragic implications, but on the limits of language before wonder and grace. The dialectic is not so much resolved as transcended, as the play turns to modes of expression and concerns other than the verbal.

It is, of course, Prospero's art that will calm the tempest and “command these elements to silence, and … peace” (I.i.21-2), though his is not the secular authority of princes, nor is it verbal. By means of his “so potent art” (V.i.50), he puts the creatures of his world through the “heart's sorrow” that brings them to “a clear life ensuing” (III.iii.81-2), leaving most of them “new created … chang'd” (I.ii.81-3): his “project” is no less than their redemption. Implied by his power is the humanist conception of art, that expressed by Sidney, as a means to “the highest end of Knowledge … the knowledge of a mans selfe … with the end of well dooing and not of well knowing onely”, able to bring us to “as high a perfection as our degenerate souls … can be capable of” (Defense, p. 108). But Prospero's art is not “poesy”: in fact, it is as much as possible dissociated from language; the healing, redemptive powers attributed to art by this play do not extend to its verbal forms.¹¹

On the one hand, the source of Prospero's power is his “book” (III.i.94; III.ii.95; V.i.57), the “liberal arts” (I.ii.73), an association which would seem to indicate dependence on language; on the other hand, we know that his “high charms” (III.iii.88) and “airy charm” (V.i.54) depend upon silence. These books, “volumes that / I prize above my dukedom” (I.ii.167-8), though the cause of his loss of power, contain also the secret to recovery: but he seems to be doing something different with them now. Prospero, a die-hard educator and reformer (a “schoolmaster” [I.ii.172]), is continually educating the creatures of his world. We hear of his efforts in the past, with Caliban and Miranda; we see his successes in the present, with nearly all the other characters; and the lessons of the past are described—as education was in the Renaissance—in terms of language. Prospero taught Caliban “how / To name” (I.ii.334-5), and his description evokes the early Renaissance ideal of language as expression of the rational and civilized, with creative power analogous to that of the Word:

When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes
With words that made them known.

(I.ii.355-8)¹²

Prospero's success with Miranda is contrasted to his failure with Caliban: Miranda demonstrates her ability to call things by their proper names (I.ii.60-1, 121), whereas Caliban's response is unregenerate: “And my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse” (I.ii.363-4).

But this humanist conception of education as language is evoked as an ideal against which we measure the actuality. What we actually hear is Prospero using language as a means of control and coercion: his commands, to Ariel and Caliban (“Speak”, “thou liest” [I.ii.314, 257, 344]), to Ferdinand (“a word … a word” [442-4, 450, 453]), and to Miranda (“speak not” [503]), crack like a trainer's whip. Verbal authority is associated with the threats and coercions characteristic of his relations in the early part of the play, but later, after Ariel consents to be “correspondent to command / And do my spriting gently” (I.ii.297), he enacts Prospero's commands faster than language—“before you can say ‘come’ and ‘go’” (IV.i.44)—and “cleaves to” his thoughts: “Come with a thought” (IV.i.163-4). In fact, Prospero's “high charms” and “airy charms” are so far dissociated from the mediation of language that they depend, not on speech, but on silence. In the performance of the masque—which is a direct “enactment” of his “fancies” (IV.i.121-2)—silence is stressed as necessary to the working of the charm (“No tongue! all eyes! Be silent”, “silence! … Hush and be mute, / Or else our spell is marr'd” [IV.i.59, 124-7]), and it is his speaking that destroys it and disperses the spirits: “Prospero starts suddenly, and speaks; after which, to a strange, hollow and confused noise, they heavily vanish” (IV.i.138).

Prospero's magic involves nothing like the incantatory spells of the witches in Macbeth, equivocating, “imperfect speakers” (I.iii.70) whose charms control nature by describing it. His art—and, by analogy, Shakespeare's—turns to other modes: spectacle, show, and “heavenly music” (V.i.52). Many of his effects involve mimesis—the storm is “spectacle” (I.ii.26), the spirits assume shapes and guises—but, on the whole, it is a mimesis which relies little on language. The one exception, the masque, makes use of a style so flat and uninteresting that some critics have questioned whether it is Shakespeare's, but which may be understood in terms of the refusal to exploit the potential of language in a form in which it is merely supplementary to spectacle and song—and, as in the masque, so in the play as a whole. The “several strange shapes” which beckon the king and his party to eat “with gentle actions of salutations” (III.iii.19), communicate by “shapes”, “gesture”, and “sound” (37), expressing,

(Although they want the use of tongue) a kind
Of excellent dumb discourse.

(38-9)

Prospero's finest creation, the love of Ferdinand and Miranda, is, similarly, presented as a spectacle, framed and revealed as a show: drawing the curtain, he “discovers Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess” (V.i.172). It is a “work of life”, like Hermione's statue, and, like the statue, it provokes wonder: “A most high miracle!” (V.i.178).

Though Ariel, appearing in the guise of a harpy, pronounces his warning by means of words, he is heard only by Alonso, and heard in such a way that the very elements seem to speak:

Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounc'd
The name of Prosper; it did bass my trespass.

(III.iii.96-9)

This is one of numerous references to the eloquence of things nonhuman and nonverbal. Though Prospero and his art make little use of language, the play is, as Caroline Spurgeon calls it, a “symphony of sound”.¹³ The air is full of threatening sounds: howling, barking, crowing, groaning, bellowing, chattering, hissing, “a din to fright a monster's ear” (II.i.314), “a strange, hollow, and confused noise” (IV.i.138). It is also full of loving sounds: twangling and humming that “give delight and hurt not” (III.ii.136-7), roaring seas and sighing winds “whose pity, sighing back again / Did us but loving wrong” (I.ii.149-50).

Through it all are the “solemn air[s]” (V.i.58) and “marvelous sweet” (III.iii.19) strains that will prevail in the harmony of the conclusion. It is primarily music, the mode which is, as L. C. Knights observes, “furthest removed from the discursive”,¹⁴ that is Prospero's means of healing: a “solemn air” is “the best comforter / To an unsettled fancy” (V.i.58-9). Song moves wonder in some, leads others through forthrights and meanders—“As they smelt music” (IV.i.178)—and evokes visions even in Caliban. By means of “heavenly music” (V.i.52)—heavenly because its harmony reflects that of divine order—Prospero “work[s]” his “end upon their senses” (53), and even Caliban, recalcitrant to verbal coercion, responds thrillingly. One suspects that after a lifetime spent, like Prospero's, in efforts of educating, Shakespeare has come to a sense of the inefficacy of verbal instruction to improve men's lives, and of the value of modes which appeal more directly than language. But consistently, in proportion as visual and musical effects are heightened, poetic and rhetorical effects are absent or subdued: the art of Prospero “gives to aery nothing / A local habitation” (MND, V.i.16-17), but seldom a name; indeed, he is most eloquent in his abjuration of art, in lines which summon his spirits to dismiss them.

The characters' responses to Prospero's art and to the qualities of the isle are measure of their moral potential. Reason is less adequate to dealing with this world than imagination; and, as elsewhere in Shakespeare, problems of knowledge have implications concerning language. Shakespeare has created in this play a world of epistemological perplexities, “subtleties … that will not let you / Believe things certain” (V.i.123-4); what understanding is possible is not through the reason or senses, which are everywhere confounded, inadequate to the shifting, elusive qualities of the isle. The dialogue of act II, scene i establishes this crucial distinction: though Antonio and Sebastian are capable of factual and verbal precision, what they say of Gonzalo is true of them: though they “miss not much”, they “mistake the truth totally” (57-8). Their perceptions are consistently mercantile: to Antonio, “dollar” suggests a unit of economic exchange, whereas to Gonzalo, “doler” is an emotion or quality—grief (19-20).¹⁵ Their quibbling contempt withers and destroys, and they perceive “tawny” and “rot” where Gonzalo, wrong about the location of Tunis, illogical in his ideal of commonwealth, brings forth lush green (48-55) and a dream of the golden age—and more than a dream, since it was his charity that worked in conjunction with Providence divine (I.ii.159) to save Prospero and Miranda. The villains, again, suggest a significance beyond what they intend: “His word is more than the miraculous harp” (II.i.87). The harp of Amphion, associated by Sidney (p. 100) and Puttenham (p. 22) with the power of music to civilize, is an appropriate allusion for Prospero's imagination as well as Gonzalo's: transforming, creative powers which cooperate with providence to bring about the “brave new world” (V.i.183) of the conclusion. Reason, which “comprehends”, is a lower faculty than imagination, which “apprehend[s]” (MND, V.i.19-20); and Shakespeare suggests, in a way familiar from earlier plays, that rationalistic standards are inadequate to qualities like grief and love, which cannot, as Prospero says of Gonzalo's honor, “Be measur'd or confin'd” (V.i.122).¹⁶

As elsewhere in Shakespeare, the villains are reasoners, explainers who explain away the miraculous, yet who actually use rationality in the service of irrationality.¹⁷ Their epistemology is associated with a particular kind of verbal abuse: they are “worders”¹⁸ who use language to create appearances which disguise and construe. Thus Antonio's temptations (II.i.246-89) make use of the most conspicuous rhetorical effects in the play: his elaborate amplification in the description of the distance of Tunis, his equivocation (“No hope, that way, is / Another way so high a hope”), the obscurities by means of which he implies his purpose without stating it, his melodramatic use of the acting metaphor, make him seem, in language, as in action, like a character from the fallen world of an earlier play. His rhetoric recalls the “glib and oily art” of Goneril and Regan (I.i.224), the “painted word” of Claudius (III.i.52), the poisonous conceits of Iago (III.iii.326). We hear, also, that “like one / Who having into truth, by telling of it”, he “Made such a sinner of his memory / To credit his own lie” (I.ii.99-102), terms which suggest the function of language in self-deception as in the deception of others. Hawkes associates this kind of linguistic abuse with the “ratio inferior”, that faculty which depends on sense data and discourse; but there is another tradition which is, I think, equally relevant, a tradition from Plato through Montaigne, which associated rhetoric with the passions.¹⁹ The two are not mutually exclusive: rhetoric is associated both with tainted passion and barren reason, and with the mixture of the two in that Shakespearean compound, in what Heilman calls that “basic Shakespearean definition of evil: the sharp mind in the service of uncriticized passion” (p. 222). But it is clear that, philosophically, the repudiation of reason and rationalistic standards implies a position of linguistic scepticism: the question whether qualities can be quantified leads to the question whether they can be named or even talked about—the question central to King Lear, where the most profound insights are expressed, not within the confines of rational discourse, but in the language of the mad king and fool, and the most profound feeling, in Cordelia's “nothing”.

The association of language with a lower faculty and form of knowledge accounts for the presence, in The Tempest, of a brute beast of unregenerate nature who speaks some of the most powerful language in the play. Caliban has learned, contrary to his claim, more than “how to curse”: he has learned language of great elemental power, and though I would not call it the great poetry that some critics have, in his words, the “clust'ring filberts”, “pig-nuts”, “jay's nest”, “scamel”, and “nimble marmazet” (II.ii.168-72) stand out, clear, fresh, and precise; it is in his language that the island lives. He is even once capable of expressing something “more than natur[al]” (V.i.243):

                                        … the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak'd,
I cried to dream again.

(III.ii.135-43)

In fact, Caliban is the only character in the play who describes the wonder of the island: the humans merely exclaim at it; and Ariel's language is in another realm, its effects all fire and air. Though Prospero may control nature, he does not describe it, and on the one occasion when he might, in the language of the masque, the images are threadbare, conventional, and uninformative, evoking nothing of the island we know through Caliban; if we had only his words, we would know nothing of its “fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile” (I.ii.337). Prospero admits that they need Caliban: “he serves in offices / That profit us” (I.ii.312-13). So do we: he is essential to our knowledge of this world.

Caliban's language is, however, confined to the concrete, and, deriving its power from the phenomena it describes, it lacks the capacity for abstraction or reflection. Even at the end, when he has learned to “seek for grace” (V.i.296), he still shows no ability to rise above the literal, no capacity for metaphor—even as rudimentary a capacity as that arch-literalist Bottom, who ascends to the level of a pun (MND, IV.i.215). Caliban remains at the first of the three levels of development of language described by Ernest Cassirer, at the level of “copy”.²⁰ Stil, if this creature on whom “Nurture can never stick” (IV.i.189) is capable of such powers of description, then “nurture” must involve something more than language. In fact, Puttenham, rather surprisingly, associates “nature” with language, supporting his argument for a “natural style” by claiming that “the feats of language and utterance hold as well of nature to be suggested as by art to be polished and reformed” (p. 312):

But what else is language and utterance, and discourse and persuasion, and argument in man, than the vertues of a well constitute body and minde, little less naturall than his very sensuall actions, saving that the one is perfited by nature at once, the other not without exercise and iteration?

(p. 311)

Words are, as Prospero calls them, “natural breath” (V.i.157) in a play which is concerned with “more than nature” (V.i.243), yet they are a medium to which we are bound, that “serves in offices that profit us”, necessary in our dealings with the world and one another. In the complementary styles of Prospero and Caliban, something of the limits of both nature and nurture are suggested: nature without nurture remains confined to the concrete and physical, but nurture, removed from nature, may become etherial and abstract. Reality—and the art of Shakespeare—encompasses both, as The Tempest includes Prospero and Caliban.

Though language is the substance of the childhood educations of Miranda and Caliban, the most important lessons of the play are in no way, implicitly or explicitly, associated with language. The “nurture” with which the play is finally concerned, the revelations and transformations which occur in the last scene, are not described, in fact, they are hardly even articulated; and language is mentioned only in relation to its insufficiency. The king and his party are entranced, “spell-stopp'd”, their senses confounded, their brains made “useless, boil'd” (V.i.60-1); and, when Prospero releases the spell, their astonishment takes the form of startled outburst and exclamation:

All torment, trouble, wonder, and amazement
Inhabits here.

(104-6)

These are not natural events; they strengthen
From strange to stranger.

(227-8)

This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod,
And there is in this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of.

(242-4)

This is a strange thing as e'er I looked on.

(290)

A most high miracle!

(178)

The reiteration of the one adjective “strange” indicates a response they can hardly express. Prospero stresses the inadequacy of reason and language to contain their “admiration”:

                                        I perceive these lords
At this encounter do so much admire
That they devour their reason, and scarce think
Their eyes do offices of truth, their words
Are natural breath.

(152-7)

The suggestion that reason is useless to what they are trying to understand, that it is “devoured”, recalls an earlier, striking use of this word: “a grace it had devouring” (III.iii.84)—which, referring to the disappearance of Ariel's banquet, had resonances beyond its context—with its suggestion of “devouring grace”. Grace is the subject of this last scene, which “devours” reason and language, to which words, mere “natural breath”, are inadequate.

Gonzalo's stark, simple list of what has been lost and found is the fullest attempt to anyone to verbalize the experiences of the play:

                                        … in one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost; Prospero, his dukedom
In a poor isle; and all of us, ourselves,
When no man was his own.

(V.i.208-13)

Appropriately, he reaches for a visual image—“set it down / With gold on lasting pillars” (207-8)—and, in their bare, forthright strength, we can actually imagine these lines being cut in stone. Their power is, like others in the play, an effect of breathtaking simplicity. The sense of wonder in this scene recalls that in the final scenes of The Winter's Tale: the meeting of Leontes and Perdita was “a sight which … cannot be spoken of”, “which lames report … and undoes description” (V.ii.42, 59), and Paulina approves Leontes' response to the statue: “I like your silence, it the more shows off / Your wonder” (V.iii.21-2).²¹

Gonzalo's response to the boatswain constricts our vision, suddenly, to the concerns of the first scene, as measure of how far we have come. His appearance seems to validate Gonzalo's prophecy that this man was born to be hanged, but he speaks of the fulfillment of prophecy in somewhat disturbing terms:

I prophesied, if a gallows were on land,
This fellow could not drown. Now, blasphemy,
That swear'st grace o'erboard, not an oath on shore?
Hast thou no mouth by land?

(V.i.217-20)

These references to oathes and blasphemy take us back to the terror of the play's opening, recalling the futile, self-defeating gestures of lost souls striking out in wrath at the elements and one another. The association of “swearing” and “gallows” is appropriate, since cursing is the linguistic analogue of the ethic of retribution. But, in a providential order governed by grace, curses have been neutralized or transformed. We have heard from Ferdinand,

Though the seas threaten, they are merciful;
I have curs'd them without cause.

(V.i.178-9)

Caliban, too, had learned “how to curse”, and, in the self-defeating gesture of a Richard III and Macbeth, had cursed himself (I.ii.339), but even he speaks, in his last lines, of “grace”. Gonzalo's reference to “swearing” and “gallows” is discordant and incongruous in the midst of the rejoicing and forgiveness that floods this scene, evoking an alien standard, an ethic and spirit repudiated by Prospero and the play as a whole. It reminds us how far we have come, from terror to wonder, from retributive to redemptive language and gesture.

Referred to in Macbeth as a “heavenly gift” that “speaks” its bearer “full of grace” (IV.iii.157-9), prophecy implies the validity of modes of knowledge other than the rational, as well as the existence of an order that can be so known. Prospero, we recall, has “prescience” (I.ii.180), and the play affirms such an order, accessible only to faith, and allows us a glimpse into it. We have been allowed to participate in the providential perspective by sharing Prospero's vision; we have watched the characters stumble through “maze[s] … forth-rights and meanders” (III.iii.2-3); we know that the glass through which they see darkly will be cleared as they come to understand the events of the play as we have. As in the final scene of The Winter's Tale, the idea of the oracle becomes prominent—“some oracle / Must rectify our knowledge” (V.i.244-5)—though in this play, it is a human oracle, Prospero himself.

Negative or destructive potentials of language have been evoked and contained by The Tempest, but are neutralized, transformed, and finally transcended: language is irrelevant, finally, to our highest intuitions and experiences of “wonder” and “grace”. Though Shakespeare has intimated this largely by means of language, his style is a “rough magic” that leaves unexploited the resources of his medium, the rich potential of imagery and metaphor, and achieves its most stunning effects from the simplicity of straightforward statement or song. We can compare similar assertions of the inadequacy of language made in The Tempest and in Antony and Cleopatra: Enobarbus says Cleopatra “beggar'd all description” (II.ii.198), Antony claims “beggary in the love that can be reckon'd” (I.i.15), and then each proceeds to eloquence on the subject. Enobarbus' description of Cleopatra, like Cleopatra's of her “Emperor Antony” (V.ii.76), makes use of a language of paradox and hyperbole that reaches beyond its own limits to express the ineffable. But Prospero says Miranda “outstrip[s] all praise” (IV.i.10) and then is silent. The Tempest attains the “new heaven, new earth” (A & C, I.i.17) glimpsed within Antony and Cleopatra, redemption in this life, within time, only its means are not verbal, but “a kind of excellent dumb discourse”. Before wonder and miracle, we can only “admire” and be still—a response appropriate to the play as well, one suggested by the sense frequently expressed by critics, of the inadequacy of reason and language to its spell.²²

A qualification is, however, suggested by the silence of Antonio. If silence signifies the grace of Cordelia or Virgilia, it can also signify the damnation of Iago and Goneril—“What you know, you know” (Oth., V.ii.303); “Ask me not what I know” (KL, V.iii.161)—for, in the dialectic of Shakespeare's thought, nothing is merely one thing. Prospero's last lines, his promise to relate “the story of my life” with “discourse” (304-5), suggests the importance of language to society, to the human community from which Antonio is excluded—its rational, civilized, and entirely necessary functions. If language is inadequate to ultimate revelation, it is nevertheless necessary in our dealings with others, in our return from this magic island with its intimations of immortality, to our daily lives.

At the end of the play, as at the end of the first scene, the final response, to wonder, as to terror, is prayer—“And my ending is despair / Unless I be reliev'd by prayer” (15-16)—not as a verbal, but as a silent gesture of hands. The play concludes in language so stark and unlovely that E. E. Stoll “hope[s] that these sorry lines are not by Shakespeare”.²³ But this bare, humble plea for prayer speaks to a truth beyond eloquence, and follows from the sense of language implied by the play, and from the linguistic scepticism of the late tragedies. It is difficult, finally, to avoid associating this sense of language with the central gesture of the play, the abjuring of art: Shakespeare has reached the limits of his medium, and there is support for this interpretation in his virtual silence in the several years of life remaining to him.

Notes

1. Intro., Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Tempest, ed. Hallett Smith (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1969), pp. 8-9. Wolfgang Clemen comments on the scarcity of metaphor—“those passages in which something abstract (e.g. an intellectual quality or attitude) is interpreted by an image, are rare and occur much more seldom than in the tragedies”—and notes “less density and continuity of imagery”. The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1951), pp. 192, 180. Frank Kermode notes the “paucity of imagery” which “gives the event itself primary significance, and requires that verse and image shall not be such as to distract the attention to it”. Intro., The Arden Edition of The Tempest (London: Methuen, 1970), p. lxxx. G. Wilson Knight describes the language as “poor in metaphor”: “Here the poetry is preeminently in the events themselves, which are intrinsically poetic … There is less need if [metaphor] in that the play is itself metaphor”. The Crown of Life (1947; rpt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), p. 224.

2. Shakespearean Tragedy (1904; rpt. Cleveland: World Publ., 1963), p. 151.

3. IV.i.118-19, The Tempest, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). All further references to Shakespeare's plays are to this edition.

4. Though some critics find the style of the late plays thin and uninteresting, it is more likely an indication, as Knight's and Kermode's terms suggest, that Shakespeare is doing someting different with language. This is what Charles Olson means by his description: “He [Shakespeare] isn't picking up his objects (words) … either for their music or image. He gets both by going in further to the word as meaning and thing, and, mixing the governing human title and experience … his effect is the equivalent of his act … We are in the presence of the only truth which the real can have … we are in the hands of the mystery.” “Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare's Late Plays”, Selected Writings of Charles Olson (New York: 1966), p. 45. See also W. T. Jewkes: “For at the core of this play is a silence more still than any of the silences in the late plays.” “‘Excellent Dumb Discourse’: The Limits of Language in The Tempest”, from Essays on Shakespeare, ed. Gordon Ross Smith (University Park: Penn. State University, 1965), p. 210. Although Jewkes' general sense of the play is the same as mine, our interpretations differ in most particulars, and in the significance we ascribe to things.

5. Kermode, p. lxxvii.

6. Clemen characterizes the language of the romances generally: “We seldom find that type of impassioned, abrupt and supremely concentrated imagery, in which the images seem to run into one another, and in which, according to Dowden's still valid phrase, ‘the thought is more rapid than the language’. Instead … [we have] fully executed imagery [which] … recalls the manner of Shakespeare's early plays. We also have more of descriptive and graphic imagery which helps to create the right nature-atmosphere in these plays … we have … a stronger contrast between scenes which contain scarcely any imagery at all and other scenes where we find long passages packed with images like colorful carpets.” Devt. of Shakespeare's Imagery, p. 108.

7. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939), p. 349. The context is Miller's contrast of Anglican and Puritan sermon styles. Rosemond Tuve sees the relegation of imagery to background or embellishment in metaphysical poetry as related to the separation of logic and rhetoric which was a consequence of Ramism. Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (1947; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 331-53.

8. Defense of Poesie, English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance, ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr. (New York: Appleton Century Crofts), p. 143; The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Edward Arber (London: Westminster Constable, 1895), p. 313. This ideal, stated in Puttenham's last chapter, is, however, somewhat contrary to the general tenor of his work, which recommends a style of tropes and figures in the high Renaissance tradition of eloquentia and copia.

9. Whereas the Middle Ages conceived of language as corresponding to the structure of reality, the seventeenth century saw it as an arbitrary, conventional system with no necessary relation to the nature of things. For backgrounds in sixteenth and seventeenth-century attitudes toward language, see R. F. Jones, “The Moral Sense of Simplicity”, Studies in Honor of Frederick W. Shipley, by his colleagues (St. Louis: Wash. University Press, 1942), pp. 265-87; The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought from Bacon to Pope (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951); Morris Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, ed. J. Max Patrick et al. (Princeton University Press, 1965); Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961); J. Walter Ong, Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958).

10. Lawrence Danson, Tragic Alphabet: Shakespeare's Drama of Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974) and Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare's Talking Animals: Language and Drama in Society (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974), discuss linguistic scepticism in the plays of Shakespeare.

11. In this, I disagree with M. M. Mahood, who claims that the play's affirmation of faith in art implies a corollary belief in language: “The world of words had once seemed to Shakespeare tragically incompatible with the world of things. Now he finds in the world built from Prospero's words of magic the truth of what we are. Belief in words is foremost among the lost things which are found again in Shakespeare's final comedies”. Shakespeare's Wordplay (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 188. The “brave new world” of the conclusion is not “built from Prospero's words”, but from nonverbal forms, music and show.

12. This description of education in language recalls Peacham's description of eloquence: “even so the precious nature and wonderful power of wisdom is by the commendable art and use of eloquence, produced and brought into open light”. The Garden of Eloquence (rev. ed., 1953), ABiij. Ernest Cassirer describes the relation of language and thought in similar terms: “By learning to name things a child does not simply add a list of artificial signs to his previous knowledge of ready-made objects. He learns rather to form the concepts of those objects, to come to terms with the objective world.” Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), p. 132. The Renaissance idea of language as character—“orato imago animi”, derived from Cicero and Quintilian; or, “mentis character” (Puttenham, p. 161)—is suggested when Miranda assures Ferdinand, “My father's of a better nature … / Than he appears by speech” (I.ii.497-8). That language is expression of the human and civilized is implied in Stephano's response to Caliban's language, “Where the devil should he learn our language?” (II.ii.66), and Ferdinand's to Miranda's, “My language? heavens!” (I.ii.429).

13. Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 300.

14. “The Tempest”, in Shakespeare's Late Plays: Essays in Honor of Charles Crow, ed. Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974), p. 19.

15. Through to the end, Antonio and Sebastian are concerned with the marketability of the island (V.i.264-6). Stephano and Trinculo are similarly differentiated: Stephano thinks of bringing Caliban home for money, whereas Trinculo is prompted to philosophize about social injustice (II.ii.31-3, 67-8)—responses which are consistent with their responses to the island elsewhere.

16. Words are, similarly, inadequate to comfort grief, as we see from Alonso's refusal to accept consolation: “You cram these words into mine ears against / The stomach of my sense” (II.i.108-9). The inadequacy of language in the face of brute facts of nature is suggested also by the weakness of oathes to enforce chastity (IV.i.52, 95 ff.).

17. Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare and the Reason (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 199. See also Robert B. Heilman, Magic in the Web: Action and Language in Othello (Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1956), pp. 61, 221-2.

18. The term is Cleopatra's, speaking of Octavius: “He words me, girls, he words me” (V.ii.191). Terence Hawkes also discusses this characteristic of Shakespeare's villains, Shakespeare and the Reason, pp. 50, 86, 164.

19. See Joseph T. McCullen, “Renaissance Rhetoric: Use and Abuse”, Discourse, 5 (1962), pp. 252-64; and Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967), passim.

20. According to Cassirer, language progresses from copy to analogy, from analogy to concept and symbol. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (1955; rpt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), I, 186-97.

21. There are further references to the inadequacy of language in this scene: “I make a broken delivery of the business … There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture”; “Such a deal of wonder … that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it” (WT, [The Winter's Tale] V.ii.9-15; 24-5).

22. Mark Van Doren suggests that this is a play “about which we had better not be too knowing”, Shakespeare (Garden City: Doubleday, 1939), p. 281. Francis Fergusson notes that “the best critics warn us not to try to interpret the play”—a sobering and suitable warning—and calls it “a reverie with a power of suggestion like that of music”. Shakespeare: The Pattern in his Carpet (New York: Dell, 1958), p. 306.

23. PMLA, XLVII, p. 704; see Kermode's discussion, p. 134.