William Shakespeare : The Tempest 9781847600301

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Running Head  

Literature Insights

General Editor: Charles Moseley

A Guide to

William Shakespeare The Tempest C. W. R. D. Moseley

‘The dream failed, in the end; but it was not a foolish dream to have, nor is it one from which we wake without regret.’

Publication Data © C W R D Moseley, 2007 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published in 2007 by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-030-1

William Shakespeare: The Tempest C. W. R. D. Moseley

Literature Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

A Note on the Author Dr Moseley is Fellow and Tutor of Hughes Hall, Cambridge, and Director of Studies in English for that College and for St Edmund’s College. He teaches Classical, mediaeval and Renaissance literature in the English Faculty of the University of Cambridge, and is the author of many books and articles, not all in his specialist fields. He has lectured frequently in the United States, and has travelled widely in the Arctic, and is a member of the Arctic Club. He has been elected to Fellowship of the Society of Antiquaries of London and of the English Association. He is also a member of the Society for Nautical Research. In this series, of which he is General Editor, he has so far written an Insight on Shakespeare’s Richard III, and also English Renaissance Drama: a Very Brief Introduction to Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time, which he hopes you will enjoy and find useful.

Acknowledgements I owe a great debt to my pupils in Cambridge over the years, who have helped me to form and sometimes abandon my ideas about this play. I am also very grateful indeed to Professor Stuart Sillars, who read an early draft with his usual extreme perceptiveness and tact, and suggested several lines of thought which I had not noticed. Errors and follies that remain I acknowledge mine.

Contents A Note on the Author Introduction Shakespeare, the King’s Men and the Court The Tempest: Genre, Plot and Structure Synopsis Genres and modes Theatrical language and illusion Setting Time and the design of The Tempest Structure, staging and symbol The Magus, the Philosopher Prince, and Prospero’s Estate Educating Miranda: The Tempest and education Caliban After the play. Inconclusions and Anxieties Afterlife, and Further Reading Hyperlinks John Dee Divine Right Virtues of Prince King’s Two Bodies Trojan Aeneas/ Troy Astraea and Apocalypse Revenge and the revenge play Three Unities Fortune Emblems Truth daughter of Time Humanism Machiavelli / The Machiavel Of the CANNIBALLES

Introduction I am attempting the impossible, which is always entertaining. The Tempest has over the years generated an enormous variety of critical response and debate, often badtempered and highly politicised. Ways of staging it are as varied as critical responses, ranging from the twee to the bizarre: Prospero’s Island was relocated to the Arctic at Stratford-on-Avon in 2006. Sometimes, nowadays, those ways are all too predictable when directors claim, as they often do, something called originality. I am going to try to get behind all that. I want to consider what issues The Tempest would have suggested to its audience at its first recorded performance before the King in the old Banqueting House in Whitehall on 1 November 1611, when all the things that have developed its cultural baggage over the last four hundred years had simply not happened—and a lot of things had, which we have forgotten. So early twenty-first century discussions of theatricality, of power, sexual and racial politics, of post-colonialism, post modern issues—all the things which we can quite legitimately make the play discuss for us in the theatre now—will not get much space here, even though they can be very interesting and are often the way that most students first approach this widely-taught play. The Jacobean play cannot be talking about them, and, in the terms we see them, they would have completely mystified Shakespeare’s audience. Yet I am very aware that I cannot completely divest myself of the assumptions of my generation: as T. S. Eliot said, in every statement about the past we make there is an unquantifiable amount of error. We can’t simply un-live the centuries that have made us what we are; we can never know what it was like to be our ancestors. In a real sense, their planet circled a different sun. But we can—should—make that imaginative effort of visiting another mindset. Not to do so is to make the literature and art of the past a mere echo chamber for our own obsessions. We read what has come down to us to measure, and test, our own certainties against ones that were once just as firmly held as we hold ours. Our forebears certainly thought differently to us about the world, God, politics, love, death, the self, and they may have a good deal to tell us. This play certainly looks at the way  See Section 7, ‘Afterlife and Further Reading’, for some suggestions about choosing modern editions.

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humans treat other humans, at issues of power, and its use and misuse, but it does it on its first audience’s terms. And they did not suddenly invent our ideas when they wrote plays or poems, or painted the pictures that stare silently out of time at us, challenging and disquieting. Their drama is based on those different assumptions, but then as now those assumptions are in a constant process of change, criticism and development. When you grasp the code, you see that they are all continually discussed in pamphlet, painting, poetry and drama. Theatre was one of the only ways of publicly examining through the agreed fiction of the stage things that matter: but it had to be done obliquely. And remember the useful concept of intertextuality; plays reply to plays, poems reply to poems, and plays are not only the fun they certainly are: they explore some very serious, topical issues. Any reading or production that does not acknowledge the ‘doubleness’, the contradictory voices of the play—as of many of the good plays in this period—must be inadequate. In Twelfth Night, Sir Andrew Aguecheek is a mere gull, a fool belonging to a stage genre of fools, and deserves all he gets. But when in 2.iii he suddenly responds to Sir Toby’s complacent claim that Maria adores him with ‘I was adored once, too’, it is impossible to play it in any way that avoids sudden plangent pathos that momentarily suspends the comic buffoonery. Just so Caliban: a stage grotesque, yet he has some of the loveliest, most moving, lines in the play. In Shakespeare’s drama, it is often the case that contradictory things are both true at the same time (As it can be in life: nothing is simple, and many notorious tyrants have been wonderful with children and dogs, and even loved.) Henry V is a Machiavellian thug and a ‘mirror of all Christian kings’ (2.0.6), depending on where you see him from: the play allows both things to be true. Let us keep that in mind in approaching this most beautiful of plays. It would be very helpful indeed if anyone using this little book had read my English Renaissance Drama: A Very Brief Introduction to Theatre and Theatres of Shakespeare and his Time (hereafter Very Brief Intro.) in this series, where the issues I have just raised are explored much more fully than I have room for now. What I shall now go on to say assumes some knowledge of the issues discussed in that book.

Shakespeare, the King’s Men and the Court We do not know a lot about Shakespeare the man—we know much more about, say, his friend and rival Ben Jonson. We know he was born in Stratford-on-Avon, probably in 1564, and died there in 1616, a rich man: a lot of people made a lot of money out of the theatre (see my Very Brief Intro.). We know about his children, a little about his family, a little about his property. We are pretty certain he went to the local very good grammar school. His father was a prominent citizen, who remained a (Roman) Catholic despite the swingeing penalties imposed on them by the authorities, and that Shakespeare’s cousins included the Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell. We do not know Shakespeare’s religious views, or, indeed, what he thought about a lot of things. You certainly cannot derive a comprehensive view of his opinions and values from his plays, for to write a play is not to open your soul but to create a world for your different characters to live in. We have his will, but no letters. We know he acted, we know he was connected in some way with the circle round the young earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated, possibly in the hope of direct patronage, those wonderful, fashionable, slightly flashy, poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. We know people rather liked him, and admired him: ‘sweet Mr Shakespeare’, ‘our Roscius’—Roscius was a famous Roman actor—and said things like ‘the sweet wittie soule of Ovid liveth again in our Master Shakespeare’. We know Ben Jonson had a qualified respect for his work, and thought he wrote too fast and was rather slovenly. He wrote a lot of plays—we may not have all of them—some in cheerful collaboration with other writers, and was through and through a man of the theatre. But  Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, (1597)  The ‘authorship question’, ‘who wrote Shakespeare?’ need not detain us. The Baconian or Oxfordian positions depend on massive conspiracy theories with no hint of the leakiness that we see as a matter of course in all conspiracies, conspiracies that were wholly successful for all Shakespeare’s lifetime and long afterwards. We are asked to believe they were only penetrated in the mid nineteenth century by the perspicuity of Miss Delia Bacon, an American lady with no academic training and no fulfilled pretensions to scholarship. The Oxfordian case has attracted a multiplication of conspiracy theories from the gentle to the lunatic, and recent attempts to suggest that the authorship question is academically respectable are just plain wrong: it is not. Those who argue that Bacon wrote Shakespeare can never have read Bacon. As G. K. Chesterton said, there is only one sense in which bacon wrote Shakespeare, and that is alimentary…

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he remains, as a man, an enigmatic figure. All we can say is that he was a man of the late Renaissance in the peculiar form it took in England, and we do him a disservice to pretend otherwise. Shakespeare’s known career splits into two more or less equal halves: 25 plays and the poems in 12 or so years in the reign of Elizabeth, and 9 years or so and 12 known plays under James. Let us start by glancing at how that change of Prince might have affected how he writes, and what he writes about. This is not to ignore the idea of a dramatist consciously or unconsciously developing and changing, and exploring ideas, but is an attempt to insert into understanding that process an awareness of the dynamic relationship with the market and public taste, and alertness to the preoccupations of power. For nobody owes a writer, even if he is Will Shakespeare, a living—and once upon a time he was without that enormous posthumous clout we take for granted. He certainly was one among many in 1603, with some of the work we most value still to come. Shakespeare operated in a small and intensely commercial world, and public taste takes its cue from the issues raised and the fashions followed in the courts of princes. Several plays show the influence of court taste and the characteristic preoccupations of James’ reign, and feed back to the Court an appraisal of them. So how did the way people looked at things change with James’ accession? First of all, there was relief: relief that the uncertainty as to who would succeed was over, and relief that the succession had in the event been uncontested—many, as Francis Bacon tells us, feared it would not be. For Elizabeth all her life refused to indicate whom she wanted to succeed her—not that it was exactly her choice, constitutionally—and the legal position was tangled: a major area of controversy in the late 90s was the legality of the succession, and the conflicting claims of the descendants of Henry VII, or the Plantagenet claim represented by the charismatic Infanta Isabella of Spain. There was uncertainty and anxiety, and despite the links Elizabeth’s minister Cecil and others had formed with James, a civil war for the crown was possible. Anxieties are soon forgotten when they do not fruit. James’ arrival brought further changes. For he was followed south by his Queen Anne of Denmark, and later still by his elder son, Prince Henry. What must it have felt like to have, for the first time since 1549, a Royal Family? No-one under 45 had ever known any other govern 

See my Very Brief Intro. Bacon, Works, ed. Spedding, pp. 276–7: The Beginning of the History of Great Britain: ‘After Queen Elizabeth’s decease, there must follow in England nothing but confusions, interreigns, and perturbations of estate, likely far to exceed the ancient calamities of Lancaster and York.’

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ment but that of the sole empress, Elizabeth, a prince without peer as she was without heir. But she was a prince on the most insecure throne in Europe at her accession, a prince de-legitimized and deposed by Pius V in 1570 as ‘a bastard of a notorious courtesan’. She was vulnerable all her reign to conspiracy. Conspiracies centred on her rival, Mary of Scotland, or on other claimants to the questionable throne of the Tudors. But in 1603, there is a secure Protestant monarch as king of all three realms in Britain, recognized by a Pope hopeful that he would soon convert (like Henri IV of France) to Catholicism, a king courted by the princes of Europe, determined to be a peacemaker with the Catholic power of Spain, and blessed already with a numerous progeny in the glamorous and precocious Prince Henry, Prince Charles—though little and sickly—and the strong minded Princess Elizabeth. The baby Princess Mary was born in England (in 1606). For a large section of the English, the Catholics—and Shakespeare was perhaps one of their number—here was a prince who, it seemed, might offer relief from the penal sanctions under which they had suffered for so long, and they enthusiastically welcomed him. The Protestants recognised in him a theologian who had argued in their cause. And those royal children: that assurance not only of stable succession, but of a future in the young—a topic to which I shall return. At a stroke, James’ accession made all those plays, including some by Shakespeare, that in veiled terms addressed the topical issues of succession, legitimacy and the nature of the crown—Richard II, King John, Henry IV, Henry V, Oldcastle, Edward II—obsolete in at least that respect: if they had a future in the theatre, it would have to be on other merits. Some old jokes won’t work any more: for example, you had better be nice to Scots! Hitherto, Scots had been on the whole comic on the Eliz stage: they could not speak English properly, rather like Frenchmen; they were foreigners. But now the King himself talked funny, and was a foreigner, and put a lot of Scots in positions of power and influence in England—not without generating resentment, of course. Popular preoccupations, to which the commercial drama must respond as much as to court taste, changed, and we should never forget how responsive to those changes dramatists are—indeed, they themselves shared them. The political map of England, then, is unrecognizably different. It has a future of hope and not only a past of glory. James was genuinely learned, and despite the bad press he has had for centuries—largely growing from stories put about by men disappointed of the favour they thought was their due—he was no fool. Unquestionably,  See Honigmann, E. A. J. Shakespeare: The Lost Years (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2nd Edition 1998); Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare (London, 2005); Claire Asquith, Shadow Play (London, 2006)

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he had a better idea of the real issues in European politics than most. James hated war and, though a reckless rider to his hounds, feared the very sight of weapons—his stormy childhood gave him good reason to. His ambition, like his son’s, was to end ‘these jars in religion’, and, intelligently recognising England’s crucial position in Europe, to broker through the marriages of his children to the heir of Catholic Spain and the leader of Protestant Europe a lasting European peace between the power blocks that were closely identified with the religious divide. For many feared war rightly: religious conflict in France over recent decades had been terrible, and many saw the storm clouds gathering for what would be the most devastating European war to date, that would in the event last Thirty Years. Could wise rulers avoid that conflict? He was also an authority on witchcraft or Goetia (witchcraft), on astrology, and was interested in the wholly respectable and serious art of Magia—the art whose aim was to call the unseen powers of God’s universe to ‘the effecting of all things possible’, as Francis Bacon, who would be his Lord Chancellor, put it. This was the art of the real John Dee, the old Queen’s protégé, and we see it in Shakespeare’s Paulina and, magnificently, Prospero. A common current concern, as it had been in the times of Elizabeth and her father, was the nature of the ruler and his relationship to his people—and no one wrote more fully and spoke more fluently about the ruler and his duties than King James. James had thought deeply about the sources of the authority of the prince, and he was no mean theologian: he could argue the hind leg off a bishop before breakfast and settle the hash of a presbyter for lunch. It is with him that we get the fullest and most extreme statement of that often misunderstood idea, the Divine Right of Kings; Divine Right and the mystical side of kingship are now prominent in the nation’s political and social consciousness. And he was clear, for example in a little book Basilikon Doron he wrote for six-year-old Henry (which went through six editions after he became king), just what virtues a Good Prince was expected to have. Nobody could have been unaware of James’s prescription for kingship, who cast himself as the new Solomon, the new Augustus, who would usher in an era of peace and prosperity. More than a few—but certainly not everybody—took this seriously. Complimentary poems of 1603 by Petowe and by Rowlands had titles like England’s Caesar and Ave Caesar, and when he entered the City of London in 1603 the elaborate pageant at Temple Bar hailed him as Augustus novus—‘Augustus united the three parts of the world in peace, James the three parts of Britain’. He adopted the motto from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount beati pacifici—‘Blessed are the peacemakers’—and

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almost immediately on his accession made peace with Spain (a sensible move, if only economically, but not to everyone’s emotional taste). He cast a commemorative medal to mark the treaty which like his coronation medal styles him Jacobus d’g’ mag’brit’franc’et hib’rex—‘James by the Grace of God King of Great Britain and France’. For James was now King of two realms, King of Great Britain, and sought to forge Scotland and England into one country: he recognised that a common coinage was a major step forward, and issued a gold coin called a ‘unite’, with the motto iacobus d.g. brit. franc. et hib. Rex and on the other side faciam eos in gentem unam [Ezekiel]. Henricus rosas regna Iacobus [iunxit]. He invented the Union Jack. And it may be that Shakespeare’s interest in ‘British’ topics in King Lear (where the kingdom is divided with disastrous effect) and Cymbeline (where Rome and Britain are reconciled) is a tactful tipping of the hat to that. Courts are places of ceremony and ritual; Elizabeth’s had been, James’s was more so. ‘Magnificence’ was expected of a Renaissance prince, a magnificence that extended to the glamour of his court and its festivals. James’ taste as a patron was lusher and certainly much more expensive than Elizabeth’s. James was in a very real sense the Player King. (He remarked to Prince Henry, ‘Princes and great persons are called to play a part upon a great stage’.) But metaphor apart, he recognised the effect of ritual, ceremonial and performance in the creation of the consent in a common myth by which power is maintained and wielded. That round of hugely expensive entertainments and masques at court on major occasions and festivals grew from this perception. ‘Masques were major political events, often inordinately costly, where the court displayed not only to itself but also to foreign ambassadors and diplomats who eagerly sought invitations…’ ; and in nine cases out of ten they rely on that fundamentally symbolic or allegorical expression and understanding that we see spectacularly in the ‘Rainbow’ Portrait of Elizabeth in Hatfield House (next page). And the ‘Apotheosis of James I’ in the magnificent ceiling painted by Rubens in the new Banqueting House in Whitehall built from 1619 by Inigo Jones, where the symbolic painting, which links his rule on earth to the order of the heavens, is not complete until 

The English monarchs had claimed France from the time of Edward III, and did not relinquish that title till 1763.  ‘I shall make of them one people. Henry united the roses, James the kingdoms’.  The portrait, with several others of the Queen, can be seen at http://www.marileecody.com/eliz1images.html. There is an illuminating discussion of its symbolism and its agenda in Roy Strong, Gloriana: the Portraits of Elizabeth (2003).  For a glimpse of the magnificence of the room go to http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/ Banqueting_House.html, but try to go and see it properly

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the real king takes his seat beneath it. The King’s Two Bodies are here made explicit. ‘In its iconographic power and allegorical mode the masque was supremely able to make clear statements about royal prerogative and the magical, mystical power of the divinely appointed ruler.’

For Ben Jonson, who, in uneasy partnership with Inigo Jones, wrote many of the very best, the masque was a way for ‘princes and great persons’ to ‘lay hold on more removed mysteries’ by watching, or taking part in, or being drawn into, actions where allegorical personages and roles mingled with the everyday. The generally neo-Platonic outlook of the period, an outlook that maintains that the everyday and the particular express the Ideal and the unchanging Archetypes, allowed Jonson, Jones, Daniel and others to maintain that the long term objectives of the masque were  

K. Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatres (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987) p.161. Jonson summarised his vision of the high function of the poet in his preface to Hymenaei, danced on 5th January 1606: ‘It is a noble and just advantage that the things subjected to understanding have of those which are subjected to sense, that the one sort are but momentary, and merely taking; the other impressing, and lasting... royal princes and greatest persons (who are commonly the personators of these actions) not only studious of riches and magnificence in the outward celebration or show ... but curious after the most high and hearty inventions to furnish the inward parts ... which should always lay hold on more removed mysteries.’ (italics mine).  Again, not without dissent from people who in the end turned out to be the harbingers of a new age, like Francis Bacon or Peter Ramus.

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to affect moral and political behaviour and the political education of the court, and further the establishment of a fundamental harmony of monarch and people. This purpose, in the end, failed utterly: but it was not a foolish purpose, for people are affected by what they watch, they are affected by the parts they play, the lines they learn, the dances in whose patterns they move. Masques were often topical, designed for one specific occasion, public or private: for example, Prospero’s Masque of Goddesses (4.i.60ff.) for Ferdinand and Miranda would lose all relevance once they are actually married. The illusion of the masque often embraces the real role of one or more of the people within it or in its audience—James I for example, a spectator watching from his chair of state, is suddenly drawn into the symbolic structure of the masque when the ballet of Faith, Hope and Charity ends with those figures doing homage at his feet. Similarly, Ferdinand and Miranda watching the Masque of Goddesses are not exactly observers, not exactly participators, but receivers: without their presence, this masque is meaningless. (The same metatheatricality is exploited in the Epilogue ‘spoken by Prospero’—the italics are mine to stress that the Stage Direction suggests that we should see the speaker in a sort of in-between state, not fully in the role, and so talking to the audience, yet not fully divorced from it, like Rosalind in the Epilogue to As You Like It.) Samuel Daniel wrote the first major masque of James’ English reign The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, danced at court on Epiphany 1604. The Vision is a dream world where the characters are called up by Night and Somnus (Sleep). Somnus, we are told, has two wands, one black (for confused dreams) the other white, to produce ‘significant dreams’, and the white is the wand operating here. Daniel wrote to the Countess of Bedford that the visions in the masque are but shadows: ‘these apparitions and shows are but as imaginations and dreams that portend our affections’—exactly the idea Prospero uses to Ferdinand in The Tempest. The 12 goddesses have abandoned Greece for ‘this western mount of mighty Brittany’ where James now reigns, another Trojan Aeneas. The Goddesses are ‘hieroglyphics for our present intention’ i.e. James and the royal family. ‘Concordia’ (Peace) was in a parti-coloured mantle of crimson and white (the colours of England and Scotland joined)...’ The goddesses ‘present the figure of those blessings, with the wish of their increase and continuance, which this mighty kingdom now enjoys by the benefit of his most gracious majesty, by whom we have this  Victorian critics took their cue from this fudging of role and real actor to suggest that Prospero was a short of figure of Shakespeare himself, saying farewell to the stage, and this idea has stuck. It is not wholly convincing, and of course there is some doubt about whether The Tempest was indeed his last play.

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glory of peace with the accession of so great state and power.’ Daniel’s goddesses are clearly politically significant; the music of the masque symbolises the concord of the united kingdom, ‘the land of civil music and of rest’, and the final word is that the ‘real’ effect of the blessings only ‘represented’ in the masque will be ‘vouchsafed in the king and the kingdom.’ So in this allegory the monarch is credited with something like supernatural power, and this links the discourse of politics with the idea of the magus/monarch, with the idea of the Prince tuning his realm into bountiful harmony. James embodies the power which Somnus in Daniel’s Masque invokes for him with his white wand by summoning the goddess-virtues, thus banishing the forces of black magic (the black wand) and, in terms familiar to any who had read that great statement of the late Elizabethan ideas of the Prince, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, hellish Archimagean deception. The masque’s culmination in a dance of goddesses ‘consisting of divers strains framed unto motions circular, square, triangular, with other proportions exceeding rare and full of variety’, not only symbolises, as Renaissance dances can do, harmony human and cosmic, but, as the prefatory letter explains, reminds us of the inseparability of dance, music, mathematics, and magic: and power. This all sounds very solemn. In fact, in most masques there were usually one or more episodes of grotesque comedy, of the anarchic, with cacophonous music: the Anti-masque. This disorder never wins, of course: it is contained within the polite fiction. But one should stress that even in the most rarefied and improbably highminded fiction, acknowledgement is made of its opposite, of its counter-discourse. Nor should we forget that even on the most solemn occasions in the most exalted masques people who were playing the really serious parts could behave deplorably: certainly bathos was common, the grandiose ritual being (in more than one sense) dissipated in a fit of the giggles from the drunken ladies, or even in the collapse of the bibulous monarch himself. Elizabeth’s godson, Sir John Harington, describing the spectacular masque put on in 1606 for the visit of Christian of Denmark, says ‘Charity came to the King’s feet… she then returned to Faith and Hope, who were sick and spewing in the lower hall’, while Peace, also drunk, was on the stairs beating everyone with her olive branch. Even allowing for exaggeration, the occasion can have been neither dignified not high-minded.  Archimago is the enchanter and deceiver who traps Red Crosse (later recognised as St George.) His tool Duessa stood both for Mary of Scotland and for the Roman Church.  The grotesque rout of satyrs of which Comus’ randy crew in Milton’s masque is the most compelling instance.

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Be that as it may, James’ was not the only court to have an immense appetite for this expensive hybrid form, mixing music, the visual arts, dance, and drama in complex statements of a common mythology of rule and power, and someone had to provide it. Here was work for indigent poets; here was work for the theatre companies. ♣ James recognised the importance of the drama in the articulation of public concerns—it was, after all, with sermon the only thing resembling a mass medium. One of James’ first cultural acts as King was to centralize control of the theatre companies, taking over patronage of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the premier dramatic troupe. (Other members of the family followed suit with the other companies.) This made Richard Burbage, John Hemminge, Henry Condell, Robert Armin, Augustine Phillips, Will Shakespeare and others royal servants: this action both raised their social status and signalled a royal interest in dramatic entertainments that merely literalised the inherently theatrical and performative nature of James’ conception of the role of Prince. And conversely, the link between the players and the court entails an alertness to court taste, interests and preoccupation as well as, as always, an alertness to what the paying public at the Globe will buy. The King’s Men were involved not only in performing plays at court on important occasions, but also in taking part in the masques specially written to celebrate, and, so to speak, mythologise, particular occasions. While the major mythological roles were danced by the nobles, even the royal family, in the antimasque professional actors were employed. It’s inconceivable that the fashion should not have affected what the public got at the Globe, and more especially, the Blackfriars Theatre—a small, indoor, upmarket theatre close to court—after the King’s Men finally got the use of it in 1608. It would be most surprising if, in Shakespeare, a writer intensely alert to the main chance, we were to find no trace of James’ interests, his ideas of monarchy, his political agenda, and his artistic taste—and avoidance of what he did not like. For the first years of the new reign, Shakespeare stays with the current fashion for tragedy: it pays. But look at the topics: Macbeth, a Scottish Play, Lear a British play, Coriolanus a Roman Play—and Britain is heir of Rome as well as the new Troy—and Antony and Cleopatra plays straight to the Augustan theme and the birth of Empire,  They had owned it for about 8 years, but were prevented from using it for their own plays because of the objections of local residents.  Performed at Court: and interestingly it is possible to see more than a few antimasque elements in the Three Witches, their grotesque cookery, their grotesque dance, their doggerel songs – and their beards!

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to the making of a new world under Augustus, and to the recent visit to Britain’s very own self-styled Augustus of his glamorous Antony-like brother-in-law, Christian of Denmark. (It also quietly asks some awkward questions about what it costs a man, what he has to give up of his humanity, to be an Augustus.) But then the fashion slowly changes, to a taste for romance, for tragicomedy like Mucedorus. Notice how, with Shakespeare, tragedy subtly alters into what I call post-tragedy—what happens after: Cymbeline’s fate in his Romano-British play is so close to Lear’s, but ends with restoration and healing; Pericles looks to a future validated by his daughter and the restoration of his wife; Winter’s Tale, after its Othello-like tragic first three acts, adds the union of kingdoms to that great theme of reconciliation and forgiveness as the proper concomitant of rule, as does The Tempest, presided over by a Magus Prince, Prospero (see below): all the thrust is towards the hopes of the future for reconciliation and forgiveness and restoration. And those remarkable late plays—Cymbeline, Pericles, WT, Tempest, Henry VIII—all conclude not with an ending but a beginning: a hope for a golden future, mediated through a young girl. (We never find out whether those hopes are fulfilled…) In all of them she, far from merely passive and indeed often strong-minded, is endorsement of a reconciliation and a glance to its desired future fruiting. In the case of Henry VIII, the child Elizabeth is a baby—Shakespeare can’t alter history. But in all the others she is a young woman, quite specifically sixteen years old. Is it coincidence that in 1586 James’ mother Mary was executed for treasonous designs on the English throne, and that sixteen years later James ascended that throne, bringing two kingdoms together in peace and, he hoped, bringing peace to a warring Europe? Perhaps: it may be accidental, but it looks topical, and it was certainly tactful. But those young women also remind us of how, in the Last Days, before Apocalypse, according to Ovid’s Metamorphoses which every schoolboy knew, the virgin Astraea, goddess of Justice, and last of the immortals to leave the earth after the golden age, would return to the earth, and justice would prevail. For at court or at the Globe, Shakespeare’s contemporaries were very accustomed to thinking symbolically, allusively, indirectly, recognizing, as we all should, that sometimes the only way you can grasp a complex and inexpressible idea is by looking not  Often called the Romances. The term was first used of them by Edward Dowden in the nineteenth century, and has quite usefully stuck.  Winter’s Tale and Tempest conclude with the unification of two realms, and Cymbeline reconciles Rome and Britain. Coincidence?  It cannot be stressed too strongly that Ovid’s poem was extremely well known, and a very frequent point of reference in popular drama. Studied in schools in Latin, Arthur Golding’s fine translation made it available in English, and it is a source for several major English poems and plays.

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straight at it, which you can’t do anymore than you can look directly at the sun, but at its reflection in something else. They would instantly recognise, for example, that the names in this play, as in others, are massive clues: Miranda = ‘she who is to be wondered at’, Prospero = ‘I hope for the future’, with a pun on ‘prosperous’, Caliban an anagram of ‘cannibal’. Those are not names we should disregard lightly in valuing the characters in the play. But they do not make it a simple, cheery, dose of reassurance. It is too wise a play for that.

 And so often elsewhere: Winter’s Tale has Perdita, ‘she who has been lost’ and Hermione, ‘the gift of the God’; Macbeth is armed by Seaton (pronounced ‘Satan’) for his last battle, as Antony is unarmed by Eros. Titus Andronicus’ punning and allusive names could keep us quite busy; in Henry VI the disgraceful Jack Cade is caught (where else?) in the Garden of Iden.

The Tempest: Genre, Plot and Structure Synopsis It does no harm to summarise the story: as Aristotle says in the Poetics, you can have a play without character but you can’t have one without plot. Before the Play (the ‘pre-plot’) Prospero, duke of Milan, neglected his job as ruler in favour of the study of magia (see above for hyperlink), and has been deposed by his brother Antonio. He was cast adrift in a boat with his daughter Miranda. They have been cast up on a remote island. This was the place of banishment of the witch Sycorax. Prospero, through his high magic, has released various spirits (including Ariel) formerly imprisoned by the witch, and these now obey him. He also keeps as servant the witch’s son Caliban, a misshapen monster, the only bodied inhabitant of the island, who had initially welcomed him and shown him the resources of the island. Prospero and Miranda have lived here for twelve years. Act 1 Prospero by his art causes the wreck of a ship carrying Antonio his deposer, Antonio’s ally Alonso, King of Naples, with Alonso’s brother Sebastian, Alonso’s son Ferdinand, and his counsellor ‘honest old’ Gonzalo who had helped Prospero when he was banished. They are returning from the wedding of Alonso’s daughter Claribel in Tunis, the former Carthage. Act 2 Though all are saved, Fer­dinand is thought by the rest to be drowned; he in turn thinks they are. According to Prospero’s plan, Ferdinand and Miranda are thrown together, fall in love, and plight their troths.

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Act 3 Prospero pretends to distrust Ferdinand and sets him to carrying logs. On another part of the island Sebastian and Antonio plot to kill Alonso and Gonzalo. Caliban offers his services to Stephano, a drunken butler, and Trinculo, a jester, and per­suades them to try to murder Prospero. Act 4 As their conspiracy nears him, Pros­pero breaks off the masque of goddesses wishing the couple a happy future, which Ariel has been presenting to Ferdinand and Miranda. Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo are hounded off and Ariel brings the king and his courtiers to Prospero’s cell. Act 5 There he greets his ‘true preserver’ Gonzalo, forgives his brother Antonio, (provided that he restore his dukedom to him), and re-unites Alonso with Ferdinand, who is discovered playing chess with Miranda. While Alonso repents for what he has done, Antonio and Sebastian do not speak directly to Prospero, but exchange ironical and cynical comments with each other. The boat­swain and master of the ship appear to say that, magically, it is fit for sea and the crew is safe. Before all embark for Italy, Prospero frees Ariel, renounces his magic, and leaves Caliban once more alone on the island. Genres and modes The Tempest, generically, must be classed as pastoral drama, though Shakespeare as usual goes in for genre-bending. In some ways its closest analogue is Milton’s Comus (1637)—Milton loved Shakespeare, whom he calls ‘my Shakespeare’ in the prefatory sonnet he wrote for the second Folio. In Comus the Children are lost in the Wood, and all are tested according to their measure before they finally reach their father’s house. The Attendant Spirit watches over them by his art, and the central opposition is between the seductive delights of sense offered by Comus and the Virtue the Lady has learned. Pastoral as a mode has its roots in Classical poetry, especially that of Vergil.  Helen Cooper, Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer; 1978); William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, (London, 1935) and L. A. Montrose, ‘Of Gentlemen and

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Nobody ever took seriously the idea of a perpetual spring where shepherds sat around all day making love and poems, while the sheep (animals notably accident-prone) looked after themselves. (Thus always present is the potential for self-parody and arty self-reference.) Partly because of its deliberate echoes of the Golden Age, demanding comparison with the mucky present, the pastoral in poetry could be used as a lens through which to examine, obliquely, refracted, the issues of ‘now’. Thus Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics often address not only big and permanent human issues like life, death, love, fame, and what art is for, but also the issues raised by Augustus’ settlement after the century of the Roman civil wars. Thus pastoral can be an intensely political mode, precisely because it pretends not to be. The spread of the taste for pastoral in the sixteenth century owes much to the popular anthologies of courtly poetry, like Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) and England’s Helicon (1600). Playing the sophisticated game, these spread courtly taste beyond the court. It was popular especially because in a time often of tension it mediated class differences, mystified conflict, and offered comforting fictions, as William Empson said, that hold out a possibility of resolution. (And fantasies of community: which always appeal to the privileged few.) In drama, Pastoral can do many of these jobs. The setting of a scene, or a whole play, in the country rather than at court implies a dialogue between them, a testing of values: exactly as we see the issues of court relocated in As You Like It, or the sheep-shearing scene in A Winter’s Tale allows the confrontation of issues of nature (heredity) and nurture (or upbringing and training), and the way in which children are trapped by, but may be able to resolve, the actions of their parents. Love is often a major motif—between country folk, or between a townsman and a country lass (Florizel and Perdita, or, parodically, Touchstone and Audrey), or between two city people who find themselves temporarily in the country. Because it is removed from the city or court, the characters can explore issues in a setting where social roles are set aside, exploiting possibilities not available in their usual world, where they are known—hence disguise is often a feature—and have social responsibilities, and have to observe codes of behaviour (e.g. in dress). Pastoral settings, where we are miles away from any naturalism, also allow the inclusion of the supernatural with ease: woodland spirits, magic, fairies, coincidences. Anything can happen, and does. In drama, it allows much opportunity for music, song, and dance. In addition, it is worth considering what The Tempest is not, but could have been. Shepherds: the politics of the Elizabethan Pastoral form’, English Literary History, 50 (1983) pp.415–61.

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It was written at a time when the fashion for plays of bloody revenge was not over— plays like Hamlet, or Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, or George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois (1607), and The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1613) feed on this taste for rather sensational drama, as highly formulaic as the Western. Prospero mentions revenge and justice quite a lot, and he could have been the man who exacted strict retributive justice on those who had deposed him. The storm alone could have ‘found out his enemies’, as Lear vainly hopes in his play. But the emphasis is all on not revenging, and I am tempted to see a deliberate playing of this play off against the fashion, indeed, in a sort of dialogue with it: our expectations of what will happen are up-ended, just as Clint Eastwood’s intelligent Westerns play games with expectations set up by those of John Ford or Howard Hawks. Theatrical language and illusion The Tempest is high fashion, ‘arty’, avant-garde, designed for cognoscenti. It is more full of music and illusion, and demands more elaborate costume, stage machinery and music—the very elements of masque—than any in the entire canon. Ariel, for example, according to the Folio stage directions (unusually full) which may well preserve playhouse practice, has to appear in something that would make him recognisable as a ‘daemon’, a supernatural (1.ii.188); then like a (feminine) water-nymph (1.ii.318); then ‘invisible, playing and singing’ (1.ii.377); again ‘invisible’—yet obviously not to us—at 2. i.291 and 3.2.39; ‘like a harpy’ (3.iii.53); as himself (4.i.33,163,193); and of course as himself in Act 5 when he helps Prospero robe as he was ‘sometime Milan’ and receives his congé. The talented actor and singer who played Ariel had at least 4 quick changes into distinctive clothes, and spectacular and subtle visual and sonic effects are absolutely demanded elsewhere in the play. For example, the storm of Act 1 is clearly visual as well as auditory—Jacobeans knew how to make good fireworks for lightning. The banquet scene of 3.iii.17ff, given that there is a lot of dancing, and elaborate props, must take a good long time, and there is a dance, before Alonso speaks. Its disturbance by Ariel ‘like a Harpy’ is equally spectacular (see below). The masque of ‘goddesses’ (4.i.60) requires machinery to lower Juno (cf. Jove in Cymbeline, or Hecate in Macbeth), and a dance of reapers and nymphs. At the end of 4.i is the ‘antimasque’ of the ‘hounds’ hunting Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano off the stage. In fact, the play’s dramatic language is up to the  and in an age before Velcro and zips, when breeches were held up by little tags that had to be tied to a doublet, the playwright had to give enough time for those complicated changes to be made.

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minute, and as Frank Kermode said in his very fine introduction to his Arden 2 edition, it’s a play that though it could be acted at the Globe, has its natural home in the much smaller indoor Blackfriars, close to Court; or at Court itself, as on 1 November 1611 and 13 February 1613. In the Blackfriars the company had a classier, richer, seated audience, the opportunity to use much more music, and artificial light. As a result, there was much greater possibility for dramatic illusion (which often, as in Prospero’s epilogue to this play, would self-referentially call attention to itself as illusion). In short, the company’s new plays could now approach much more closely the spectacle fashionable in court masque. It in precisely these later plays of Shakespeare that we begin to see a significant move towards seeing a play, as a ‘spectator’, as distinct from hearing it—in other words, where the visual language of the play begins to work as hard as the verbal. The play is unusual in that it’s one of the few to represent the masque convention positively. Other dramatists less close to Court tend to make masque an indicator of the corrupt deceit of courts—what you see is not what you get. For example, consider masque in the plays of Marston, or Tourneur, or Webster, or Middleton: ‘treason’s licence, ‘tis murder’s best face when a vizard’s on’. What the mask disguises in such plays is not a God-King but a revenger who reveals the extent of human pretence and pretension. A good example is the opening of The Revenger’s Tragedy, or the ‘masque’ of madmen in The Duchess of Malfi or The Changeling. But a court dramatist could not do that! Shakespeare has woven a lot of masque elements into this play, though with a psychological insight far beyond any court revel, even one philosophically ballasted like Jonson’s, Campion’s and Daniel’s could be. The use of masque elements, furthermore, is a way of separating the illusions within the play from the illusion of the whole play. But it is more than that: it alerts us to the importance of the generalised and abstract ideas that lie behind the—shall we say?—story, and underlines that the whole play is an illusion whose meaning, like that of the real world, is not obvious. The art of Prospero, which I discuss below, and of the dramatist who created him, is derivative from and symbolic of the Art of God who created the world we have to interpret.

 Elizabethans talked about ‘hearing’ a play: that is what ‘audience‘ means. The conservative Ben Jonson was very scathing about the new fashion for visual effects, always claiming the words were what mattered. On this important shift, and on ‘hearing’ a play, see my Very Brief Intro.

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Setting The Tempest is one of only two plays in Shakespeare’s canon scrupulously and selfreferentially to obey the Three Unities of Action, Time and Place. Consider Place first. Where is Prospero’s island? If we want to be literal, it must be near enough to the coast of Italy for a boat with a deposed duke and his daughter to drift there, and also near the line of a reasonable course between North Africa and Naples. To such a vague locale add another element: in 1610 narratives of the wreck in 1609 of Sir George Summers’ Sea Adventure on Bermuda caught the public imagination, and it has long been recognised that the ‘Bermuda pamphlets’ describing the strange experiences of weird and apparently supernatural sounds of those who survived on that bare island are among the important sources of the play. The island also has a good climate, fertile ground, and fresh waters, ‘everything advantageous to life’—as Gonzalo sees it, an echo of the Earthly Paradise, and many voyagers to the Americas in the sixteenth century had used just that imagery to describe the places they found, and where many of them saw things and had experiences which they had no language to describe except the ancient myths and marvels of the Old World. So the island must be literally in the old world, in the Mediterranean, but on it are inscribed echoes of Eden both in the past and in the distant present. The play’s adherence to the Unities demands Unity of place: a single setting. In most of Shakespeare’s other plays we have a deliberate plurality of locales: the characters are moved from the everyday world of court and politics to a ‘no-place’ (the literal meaning of ‘Utopia’) where they undergo a testing, a rediscovery, before the play resolves itself in a dénouement where they return to their original setting. As You Like It takes everyone to Arden before most of them return, changed, to the world of the court. In Midsummer Night’s Dream, the lovers and Bottom undergo in the Wild Wood an experience that changes them for ever but which none can quite understand. That most financial of plays, Merchant of Venice, takes the principals to the Hill Beautiful (= ‘Bel-mont’), a place straight out of the romances, where Portia waits to be won according to her father’s will, and when she is so won, she is released into the grubby bond and law-ridden world of Venice to find a way through its impasse. More interestingly, in a national political parallel to the gender and domestic politics of the comedies, the deposed Henry VI is shown wandering in a wilderness, where he sees at last what his misrule has led to. It is when Lear is in his wilderness  The other is The Comedy of Errors, from the early 1590s, and perhaps his first play, as the Tempest is his last, so far as we know.

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on the wind-scoured heath that he grows to a mature understanding of himself, and what power means. All these places are as much countries of the unexplored mind as they are a ‘heath’, a cliff near Dover, Arden, or what have you. It’s difficult not to see Prospero’s Island as an extension of this motif. But here, of course, we only hear about the court in the past, and anticipate it as the place where in the future the hard work of ruling has to be done. In this play everyone is brought to a place of testing, of self-discovery if they are capable of it—and some are not: Trinculo, Stephano, Antonio, Sebastian go away unchanged, for there may be little to discover. (Free will, as Shakespeare so often underlines, is a double-edged thing.) From the start the latter pair do not want to be changed, secure in their complacent negativity, reductive of any vision, where they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Their interjections when Gonzalo is praising the island in 2.i show how little they see, and in their clever-cleverness how blind are their moral eyes. The Island is the place where Prospero has learned that he took too little care of his state (cf. King Lear, 3.iv.32ff.), and has learned that rule is about responsibility and Prudence (see below). He has learned the emptiness of mere revenge, which he feigned to exact in the storm. He has learned that the greatest power is to know how to renounce it. Alonso understands his own guilt and seeks pardon; Ferdinand grows from a boy into a fitting husband for Miranda, who herself has there grown to a maturity which she now has to deploy into the deceptive Brave New World—new to her, though it is as old as time—where not all is as it seems. Even Caliban, the original inhabitant, seeing his master against a context of other men, grows at the end to a new moral understanding where, his anger dissipated, he ‘will be wise hereafter/And seek for grace’ (5.i.294). This island, then, like the wild wood of mediaeval romance, is a place of testing and remaking, of growing self knowledge. (It may well be so for the audience too, in the communal dream of seeing the play, from which we may wake only to cry to sleep again.) Indeed, as Gonzalo puts it: …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 Where no man was his own. (5.i.208ff.)

 Almost certainly, but it depends on how the actor plays his silence at the end.

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Time and the design of The Tempest The representation of time has been a problem for artists since the Lascaux painters attempted to convey a sense of a narrative. So for Shakespeare: the representation of time in his plays is a real structural problem, which he solves in different ways at different points in his career. He seems to have become increasingly interested as he grew older in the very notion of time. It is of course there in the Histories, much of whose dynamic is the effect on ‘child, child’s children’ of current crime, revolt and upheaval. Richard II recognised ruefully in his final speech before he is murdered that time not something to be taken lightly: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.’ In Macbeth, as in Richard III, there is an awareness of the future in which they will have no part: in their plays both have symbolically killed the children who are the pledge of the future. A generation brought up on the Geneva translation of the Bible could not fail to know the terrible warning in Exodus XX: ‘I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.’ Shakespeare’s Histories demonstrate no less. But in the very next verse is the idea of God’s mercy: and mercy sets aside strict justice, the entail of suffering just promised. One issue which Shakespeare seems to be examining in these post-tragic plays is the possibility of reconciliation, of restoration, of regeneration, that free from that curse. For it is clear that in all of them the initial trajectory is tragic, and the play could have ended there: Winter’s Tale with Hermione’s death and Leontes’ despair, Cymbeline with the triumph of Cloten and his odious mother, with Cymbeline following Lear onto the blasted heath, and Tempest with Prospero, neglectful of his kingdom like Lear, cast out with his daughter at the mercy of Fortune and the winds… But they were ‘blessedly holp hither’ (1.ii.63): in these late plays some characters at least discern a benevolent and beneficent Providence operating to heal and restore: in the histories some characters also discerned the hand of Providence, but that hand had chastised and scourged. These plays suggest there is after all a future of hope and forgiveness—though we never find out how total it is. Somehow, Shakespeare has to make us believe in that potential for real tragedy as genuine (or else the wiping away of tears is worth nothing), and at the same time in the genuine possibility of its healing. To use J. R. R. Tolkien’s word, he has to make us believe in the ‘eucatastrophic’  The Bishop of Carlisle in Richard II, 4.i.149

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moment when against all the odds things come right and the dark sky is rent with the light of unexpected joy. Further, those two elements must by definition be separated by enough time for the child that is the vehicle of the healing to grow up. In Winter’s Tale and Tempest he uses two very different but equally elegant solutions to bring together the two temporal locations of the play over a ‘wide gap’ of time (Winter’s Tale, 4.i.7). The solution in Winter’s Tale is to divide the play into two exactly equal halves, the first half tragic in tone, imagery and direction, the second comedic. (The first half closes with storm and shipwreck: the very motif that opens The Tempest.) He holds these two halves together by the allegorical figure of Time, who could have stepped straight out of a masque, with his hourglass. Time is not in any sense ‘in’ the play; he acts as the impresario both of what we have seen and of what we are about to see, demanding that we see the relationship between them as not simply sequential but as two halves of a complete whole; without one, not the other. In The Tempest, the solution is even more brilliant. ‘The dark backward and abysm of time’, the lost twelve years since Prospero was expelled, his expulsion itself and what led to it, are all rolled up into the history that we see Prospero teaching the now sixteen year old Miranda. This allows the play’s action to be very rapid: and it is emphasised (cf. 1.ii.240, 3.i.95–6, 5.i.3) that the time taken by performance is exactly the time taken by the represented events. This is keeping to the Unity of Time with a vengeance, with an élan that completely disproves the old slurs about Shakespeare often being a slovenly plotter. As it happens, a few months earlier the Kings’ Men had staged Jonson’s Alchemist. It is set in the Blackfriars district in the here and now (actually slightly in the future), and it too has bravura use of the Three Unities, the represented time being the playing time. It looks as if both Jonson and Shakespeare were expecting an audience alert to up-to-the-minute, fashionable form. But Shakespeare differs from Jonson in that where for Jonson time is a mere condition, a setting, in Winter’s Tale and Tempest Time is a force, a dynamic—and in one case the interpreter of the whole. People of Shakespeare’s generation were very familiar with the idea of Apocalypse, the end of Time, and a lot really thought they were living in the Last Days. They  See the discussion in his seminal lecture On Fairy Stories (1936), many times reprinted.  Renaissance art is often structured, and coded, in ways we find strange, and do not even notice. Time, whose speech is at the mathematical centre of the play, turns his glass, and with it the movement of the play away from winter towards spring, at the exact middle of a 32 line speech: ‘I turn my glass, and give my scene such growing / As you had slept between’.  It was first performed in Oxford because the London theatres were closed due to plague.  C. A. Patrides, Premises and Motifs in Renaissance Thought and Literature, (Princeton, 1982); Walter Ralegh’s Title Page, designed by Ben Jonson, for A Historie of the World (1616) represents

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imaginatively mapped those Last Days from the Book of the Revelation of St John the Divine. There would be wars and rumours of wars, but in the end the return to a new Heaven and a new Earth of peace and justice, and the wiping away of all tears from the eyes of the just who have suffered so much. And in that new world, ‘brave’ or not, the Bible says, we shall know even as we are known: know our true selves. Gonzalo’s language echoes that idea in words just as memorable, and underlines that one strand of the play is the voyage to self discovery, for those who can make it. The word Apocalypse in Greek means the ‘revealing of what was hidden’, the ultimate disclosure of truth. It is difficult not to see those Apocalyptic imaginings as affecting these plays, especially The Tempest—not least in the way they would be watched, if not written. Of course, not only Christianity imagines the end of Time, and the making of all things new after the cataclsym. Shakespeare knew his Ovid backwards: nobody with a grammar school education could not do so. His poems and plays are full of echoes of the great Roman poet’s work, and especially of the Metamorphoses—‘The Changes’ or ‘The Transformations’. Ovid’s theme in is how change, transformation, regeneration as something new, is the hallmark of the whole cosmos, an unending process of change and renewal. This can be seen in the transmuting of mortals into immortals, of men and women into other creatures as a consequence of what they have done, and of the rise, fall and regeneration of empires: without the Fall of Troy, terrible and tragic, no present Rome and no hopeful future. All these ideas come together in the climactic Book XV, where Time and Nature are both destructive, ploughing wrinkles in the cheeks of Helen, eating up their children, and at the same time fertile, generative, creative and healing. Once again we have that idea we have already noted of contradictory things both being true: Time ‘please[s] some, but tr[ies] all’ (Winter’s Tale 4.ii.1). Time destroys, time creates. But is this simply a natural; process, as meaningless as the tide, or is it purposive, providential? This is one of the questions the play forces us to ask, and it gives material for answers both in the negative and the positive. In the end, perhaps the question is more important than the answers: ‘Was Milan thrust from Milan, that Milan’s heirs / Should be kings of Naples?’ There can be no certain answer: only the possibility of one.

two events on the surface of the glove held up by History: the Expulsion for Eden, the beginning of history, and the first Armada sailing up the Channel in 1588, which many saw as the first battle of Apocalypse.  Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, 1994).

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Structure, staging and symbol We have seen that consideration of a formal device, the unities, leads us into discussion of a major area of philosophic interest in the play: one of its themes, in fact. For structure is indeed meaning. We have largely forgotten, in the aftermath of Romantic redefinitions of art and poetry and the form proper to them at the end of the eighteenth century, the Renaissance and Classical fondness for balance and symmetry in art, music and poetry, and for the way form could convey emphasis and meaning. The ‘central place’, be it the focus of sight lines in a painting, the central entrance of a classically designed building, or the middle scene of a play or the middle lines of a poem is often important. So when looking at Renaissance drama, it can be helpful to ignore the Act divisions (which in a lot of cases are imposed when the play gets printed, and are mostly imperceptible in actual performance) and think of plays as a sequence of scenes. True, in the indoor theatres, the five acts imitated from Senecan tragedy did allow a break for the candles to have their wicks trimmed to stop them smoking, and this was beginning to affect the way plays were structured. But the point still holds, and it is very useful to treat The Tempest in this way, and to look at the pattern the scenes make. There are nine scenes: Scene 1 1.i: Prologue: Storm and shipwreck: DISORDER. Very elaborate (for the time) staging, creating some measure of illusion, is suggested by that stage direction, ‘enter mariners wet’ Scene 2 1.ii. divides in two groups of three movements: Miranda and Prospero; Ariel and Prospero; Caliban and Prospero. These first three are all recapitulations, summarising the plot before the play, and in all Prospero’s conduct and action is crucial. All structure the ambiguousness of experience into narrative. All three stress Prospero as educator, enabler, but the different ways in which the three respond to that action. Then: Enter Ferdinand (Ariel’s song).  Those who wish to go into this deeply interesting matter further could start by looking at Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, 1970).  See my Very Brief Intro.

The Tempest  30 Ferdinand meets Miranda. Ferdinand and Prospero—intervenes with Ferdinand (Prospero’s magic power is shown again.) Scene 3 2.i Alonso and his followers (Gonzalo’s speech alludes to the Golden Age motif, and to the Utopian societies many thought lay in the New World. Sebastian and Antonio’s cynical asides demonstrate, rightly, I think, the internal inconsistencies and contradictions in such visions: they do not fit the messy untidiness of human society.) Sebastian and Antonio’s plot: a recapitulation of the pre-play plot to depose Prospero. Ariel’s song—intervenes with Sebastian and Antonio (Prospero’s POWER again, but Ariel is acting with initiative as a loyal servant) Scene 4 2.ii. Caliban brings logs unwillingly: (14 lines) Introduction of the clowns, Trinculo and Stephano (comic parallel to the noble Neapolitans). Caliban’s welcome to them (performs fealty action of kneeling) echoes his earlier welcome (which we only hear about) of Prospero. The three constitute a grotesquely comic parody of the State. Scene 5: CENTRAL SCENE 3.i Ferdinand, bearing logs willingly (14.5 lines) Miranda and Ferdinand plight their troth. (Witnessed by Prospero, it constitutes a legally binding marriage verba de praesenti in Renaissance law.) Note the highlighting of this scene by the balanced structure round it. Scene 6 3.ii. Caliban, Stephano, Trinculo Ariel teases and confuses them; their loss of reason in drunkenness. The human in its decline to the animal; language descends into mere syllabic noise. Scene 7 3. iii. Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio, Gonzalo:  The name of the fictitious island in the New World created by St Thomas More in his book (1516) deliberately means both ‘No-Place’ and ‘happy place’.

The Tempest  31 the BANQUET MASQUE—apparent order suddenly overturned by disorder, by Ariel’s irruption. Scene 8 4.i the MARRIAGE MASQUE—suddenly interrupted by recollection of the plot against Prospero, and followed by ‘antimasque’ of Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo—order/ disorder again Scene 9 5.i. Prospero: enter to him the company; their moral anagnorisis. Interpretation: the unmasking (‘Apocalypse’, literally).

Prospero’s

Reconciliation, forgiveness, and as a consequence hope for the future

Then Ferdinand and Miranda are ‘discovered’ in Prospero’s Cell. The Release of Ariel, Prospero’s acceptance of responsibility for Caliban and what Caliban is, and Caliban’s resolve to ‘hereafter…seek for grace’ Prospero’s renunciation of Magic and power: ORDER and NORMALITY restored.

The play moves from the elemental chaos of the opening to a restored order. The opening and closing scenes highlight each other, while in the chiastic centre the betrothal is the key to the eventual denouement. In its movement to the restoration of harmony the play is punctuated by those masque-like set pieces, depending heavily on visual spectacle, and we should think how that first audience might respond to their staging. In scene 1, the ‘Ship/storm/wreck’ motif is a prime symbol of the changes and chances of Fortune illustrated in so many emblems of the period (see illustration, next page), and the vicissitudes of the Ship of State. All rank, by which humans structure their societies, is overturned—‘what care these roarers for the name of king?’—and we have a picture of Chaos from which order has to be made. It also anticipates the topsyturvydom of the island, where nothing is what it seems. There are anti-masque elements in the cacophonous noise, of course; and it is interesting to compare this catalysing storm with equally significant ones at crucial points in King Lear and Winter’s Tale. This scene alerts us to a number of key thematic issues before we even start the plot. It is a perfect symbol of Chaos and upheaval that is both meteorological and political: and, as we do not know on first seeing, it is generated by Prospero’s Art (1.ii.25–30).

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‘To these Fortune is a parent, but to these a wicked stepmother.’ An emblem picture from Theodore de Bry’s Emblemata (Frankfurt, 1592)

Scene 7 (3.iii), the Banquet, falls into three parts, divided by the three spectacles managed by Ariel, and works on three levels: the spectacle and its symbolism, the response of Alonso’s company to it, and the way we are led to understand their response. Thus part of interest lies in watching people respond to illusion—a self-reference typical of the play. The staging clearly demands complex scenery, machinery and visual effects. The scene opens, naturalistically, with the company divided into two moral groupings that echo what has been revealed in 2.i—Alonso with Gonzalo, Sebastian plotting murder with Antonio. Then, to the accompaniment of the ‘solemn and strange music’, symbolising a harmony the scene’s first lines do not show in human affairs and signalling the importance of what is to come, the human characters are upstaged first by Prospero unseen by them ‘above’, on a level that stresses his overall control and his capacity to test and judge, and then for several minutes by the ‘strange shapes’ setting a table, laying out the ‘banquet’ (i.e. delicate meats and sweetmeats taken after the main meal) and dancing their invitation to eat. The relation between the watchers and this action is exactly that between an audience and a masque. (Indeed, it would not be difficult to find in the records of Renaissance ceremonial examples of invitations to formal feasting in exactly this mode.) But it is given an ironic twist by the audience watching the watchers being taken in by the illusion of Prospero. Prospero as impresario, so to speak, comments as a Chorus on the reactions of the Neapolitans to what they have seen; and those reactions to the masque show that it has challenged them to understand what they are: one of the major themes of the play.

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The symbolism of eating is fundamental. Alonso and his company are, it seems to him at least (‘Give us kind keepers, heavens’, 21), offered, by grace, heavenly food. The links to the Mass, or Eucharist, are clear. Eating this heavenly food in company is not only a symbol of harmony and communion but also of worthiness to partake; the Prayer Book, which every member of Shakespeare’s audience knew, stresses that to eat and drink unworthily is to eat and drink one’s own damnation. But Antonio and Sebastian react merely with scornful flippancy: Sebastian shows himself as a clumsy sensualist—food is merely food, and has no further significance: … No matter, since They have left their viands behind; for we have stomachs. (40f) He laughs at grace, and Antonio turns the miracle into a cheap joke about traveller’s tales: ... travellers ne’er did lie, Though fools at home condemn them (26f) Neither sees beyond mere appearance. Gonzalo, by contrast, recognises with awe that the strangeness of the figures who served the food was accompanied by indications of a moral goodness rare among human beings: the strange forces judgement of the familiar. Alonso recognises his own unworthiness to taste it: ‘Not I!’ It is when he overcomes this misgiving, and he, Sebastian and Antonio presume to eat, that the banquet disappears in an antithesis of music, the noises of storm symbolic of disruption in microcosm and macrocosm. Again, the coup de théâtre is elaborate. The stage direction (line 52) draws closely on Virgil’s Aeneid III.225–228. at subitae horrifico lapsu de montibus adsunt Harpyiae et magnis quatiunt clangoribus alas, diripiuntque dapes contactuque omnia foedant immundo; tum vox taetrum dira inter odorem.  It is not necessary to read this as further evidence of Shakespeare’s Catholic sympathies or to point to the fact that Mass was celebrated fairly regularly in Whitehall by a Jesuit, Father Abercrombie, for James’ Catholic queen.  Gonzalo is exploiting (as Miranda does when she exclaims ‘O brave new world / That has such people in it’) the Renaissance assumption that the outward from of a thing ought to reflect its inner nature. But there is another of those ironies that the play abounds in: these are spirits in an illusion by Prospero. Nothing in this play is what it seems.

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[But the Harpies swiftly appeared, tearing down from on high, and clash their wings with great clangour, and snatch away the food, dirtying everything with their foul touch, and then shriek horribly, making a disgusting stink.]

Ariel’s appearance ‘like a Harpy’ (the clever illusion of which Prospero later emphasises—‘Bravely the figure of this Harpy /Hast thou performed, my Ariel’, 84–85)— directly borrows from Virgil, who describes the harpies as birds with the faces of women, pallid with hunger; their hands are crooked claws, and their bellies emit filthy excrement. He must have been dressed in some manner that would signify the standard visualisation of these creatures: the illustration below is from Henry Peacham’s emblem book Minerva Britanna (1612), a book which is on the whole unoriginal in its visual language, and which was taken almost immediately by discerning people, even being used as a pattern book for the decoration of the ceiling in Blickling Hall, Norfolk.   In the Renaissance Harpies were often interpreted as agents of divine vengeance, and clearly this is part of Prospero’s symbolism, and part also of Gonzalo’s and Alonso’s understanding. But the Virgilian link is yet closer: Aeneas and his companions land on the Strophades after a long, storm-tossed journey seeking their promised land. Killing the wild cattle they find there, they prepare a meal, only to have it twice ruined by the harpies. Then, fruitlessly, they take up arms to defend themselves against them, but can harm no feather of them. Celaeno, the leading harpy, reproves their foolishness in attacking them, and promises that they will come to their destined Italy only after more suffering and hunger. Shakespeare’s age knew its Virgil very well indeed. It often read the Aeneid not only as symbolic of man’s moral progress through the storms (and shipwrecks) of life to the recognition of his true good, but also as a discussion of the proper qualities of the ruler. Such an audience could hardly not spot the parallel with Alonso and his company: they are voyaging from the Tunis that Gonzalo identifies with the Carthage of Dido, where Aeneas underwent a temptation that nearly deflected him from his destiny, to their home in Italy. They are ‘wrecked’, cast ashore in an isle full of noises,  A very significant stage direction, one of the few in the sole text (the 1623 Folio)  Peacham went to meet James on his progress south with MSS of his emblematic work on James’ Basilikon Doron to show him, hoping (unsuccessfully) for patronage.

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and their hunger is balked of satisfaction by the appearance of a ‘harpy’, against whom they take up fruitless arms, who reminds them of their guilt and promises them hardship and remorse. The parallel suggests to us a way of seeing how Prospero interprets their voyage and what he is doing to them; if they are all as fond of Virgil as Gonzalo is (2.i.76ff), it suggests a way the wiser in the company may interpret what they have just suffered. The stately opening of this scene gives way to the ‘anti-masque’ ugliness of Ariel’s appearance. After both, its audience’s reaction is central to our interest; and after a clap of thunder, recalling the thunder through which Jove spoke, Ariel vanishes and the spirits return to remove the table, with soft music and dancing. The elaborate visual effect, therefore, helps to focus the meaning of the scene. In the disruption of the banquet there is the obviously symbolic destruction of a feast (as in Macbeth), commonly an expression of community and political harmony. The advantage of using masque techniques is obvious: it allows Shakespeare to introduce three visual spectacles with overt symbolism that can be directly, explicitly and decorously applied to the action they interrupt; it allows him to move into a non-naturalistic mode of signifying complex moral issues which the normal action of a play, which at least on the surface has to remain naturalistic, would not allow. The scene’s techniques force us to watch the reactions and interpretations of the watchers; and by keeping Prospero as impresario visible throughout, Shakespeare can remind us not only of Prospero’s control of an illusion that others can only perceive as experienced reality, but also of his relationship to the playwright who is creating the total illusion for us. The scene’s conclusion is the self-recognition of Alonso, without which he cannot go on to reconciliation with Prospero, and the folly of Sebastian and Antonio, whose nurture (see later) does not prevent their nature going bad. What tests one man and leads him to growth pushes two others towards a moral self-destruction worse than any ignorance of Caliban’s. The following scene, 4.i, divides into two halves: the Marriage Masque, and the foiling of the conspiracy of Trinculo, Stephano and Caliban. In ll.1–31 Prospero bestows Miranda on Ferdinand, with the strictest injunctions to follow virtue and not allow baser nature to overcome moral restraint. The ideas of fruitful and unfruitful agriculture in lines 13ff.— No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall to make this contract grow; but barren hate, Sour ey’d disdain and discord shall bestrew

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The union of your bed with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it both’ — are closely linked to the images of fruitfulness and plenty in the celebratory masque that follows. It is exactly like those composed to honour such real occasions as royal marriages or engagements. It is prefaced by a command, like Paulina’s in Winter’s Tale (5.iii.94ff), for the reverence (‘No tongue! All eyes! Be silent.’(59; repeated at 126–127) essential to acts of magia; this underlines the importance Prospero attaches to what he has devised. And as Prospero says these words, soft music plays, echoing the harmonies of heaven, and Iris, messenger of the gods, enters. In elaborate recitative she invites Ceres, the goddess of crops and harvest, to descend, and, with Juno, patroness of marriage, to bless the marriage contract that Ferdinand and Miranda have just pledged before Prospero. The symbol of Iris, messenger of the gods, is the rainbow (71), sign of God’s grace to man. Her verse, like that of the masque generally, sounds a new note in the play: it is noticeably stiffer, more ceremonious, more formal and elaborately rhetorical than elsewhere—a rhetorical mode typical of pageant verse, and perfectly fitted for singing, as it probably was and often is. Iris’ decasyllabic couplets are structured into an elaborate apostrophe whose sense is not completed until the commands to Ceres of lines 70–74; the language bombards us with ideas of agricultural plenty appropriate to Ceres’ patronage of crops and flocks. Iris’ closing lines are accompanied by the coup de théâtre of the descent, with her peacocks, of Juno, queen of the gods and patroness of marriage, from the ‘Heavens’ (both the theatrical and the cosmic) to take her part in this masque of blessing. As she asks why she has been summoned, Ceres returns with interest Iris’ ideas of fruitfulness and the richness of the earth’s bounty. But when asked to celebrate this ‘contract of true love’, she is careful first to enquire whether Venus, goddess of love is present. Ceres’ old enmity to Venus sprang from the fact that Venus had made Dis (Pluto), god of the underworld, ravish her daughter Proserpine. Proserpine’s departure to Hades caused unfruitfulness and dearth, and only when she returned for her visit each spring did the earth bloom again. The inclusion of this idea is significant; for Caliban, a thing of darkness, had attempted or desired of Miranda the thing that ‘dusky Dis’ had achieved, and it is specifically against giving rein to such sexual desire that Prospero had warned Ferdinand openly. Such love has to be sublimated to  The ‘peacocks’ of l.74 probably were represented by stuffed specimens. Juno’s peacock‑drawn chariot is so standard a feature of her iconography that it can hardly have been left out. In Cymbeline V.4, Jupiter descends from the heavens on an eagle.

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a higher, intellectual, love before it can be used properly: otherwise it blasts with sterility. (This is, incidentally, perfectly sensible Renaissance moral philosophy.) So Iris reassures Ceres that though indeed there was temptation between the lovers, Venus and Cupid have gone (94ff.): Ferdinand and Miranda have mastered their desires. Prospero is reinforcing the point made earlier, that innocence is good in itself, but virtue is the fruit only of that innocence being tested. Juno and Ceres now move into songs of blessing: twelve lines of octosyllabic couplets promising personal happiness to the couple and prosperity to their land. In them the Golden Age is glimpsed again, but the precariousness of this vision is delicately hinted by Juno and Ceres using verbs not in the future indicative but in the optative subjunctive mood. These are not predictions but wishes, dependent on the conduct of Ferdinand and Miranda. Thus the masque is being used once again both as interpretation and as injunction. Prospero is reinforcing the direct lesson of ll.1–30 by something imaginatively much more gripping, memorable and fruitful because of its ambiguity. We may, I think, be sure that this is why Shakespeare makes Ferdinand interrupt at line 118. The next ten lines shift the focus back from what we are watching with Ferdinand and Prospero to watching how Ferdinand reacts. The dramatic texture becomes more subtle by this, for we are reminded, as Prospero reminds Ferdinand, that it is not goddesses but Prospero’s servants, ‘spirits’ he has called ‘to enact My present fancies’, to perform ‘some vanity’—his masque of blessing. (The word ‘vanity’ perhaps anticipates, as we shall see, his later rejection of his ‘rough magic’. His readiness to use this art is coupled with the recognition that its mastery is only an interim stage on the way to his ultimate goal, moral perfection.) It is not the blessing directly of heaven: the performance is no more than a very elaborate speech of the Father of the Bride—Prospero saying ‘Bless you my children’. The masque is his way of saying the unsayable, of expressing through elaborate symbol and metaphor both the depth of his love for Miranda and his hopes for the future of the pair who, as rulers, will be responsible for the husbandry of their realms. As Ferdinand’s reference to Paradise (‘makes this place Paradise’, 124) hints, he seems to have recognised in Prospero the type of the Philosopher King, who by his virtue and wisdom is nearest the gods. Thus in a sense Prospero’s blessing is the blessing of heaven, which must be taken out of the enchanted island and put to work. Moreover, the masque stresses a central interest in the play, the resolution of which is utterly dependent on this marriage, namely the ruling both of natural desires by intel It is ever so easy in the theatre to forget they are Prospero’s spirits.

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lect and of kingdoms by virtue. That Ferdinand and Miranda will be able to do this is, I think, indicated by what happens when Prospero suddenly ends the masque: at line 164 they leave him, and go into his cell, and the next time we see them they form the climactic tableau that resolves the entire play, when Prospero is known for what he is, when Alonso has his son restored, and when the political wrongs are righted. When Prospero draws the curtain on them, they are discovered playing the noblest of games, chess, a game which for centuries had symbolised the love-battle. (Chess is often shown on wedding chests—the ancestors of the ‘bottom drawer’ where a bride stored her linen and her trousseau— and mirror cases.) At chess the sexes met on equal terms, and it is a game of not only the obvious symbolism: in some cases the lady’s pieces can symbolise the feminine courtly virtues, the man’s the male. Yielding and victory are meaningless terms because each depends on the other, and impulse is subject to rigid rules. After the blessing Iris summons chaste (‘temperate’) nymphs, the Naiads of rivers and streams, to dance with the harvestmen to celebrate these nuptials: in the graceful dance, image of order, the plenty of harvest and the heat of summer harmoniously combine with the cool moisture that makes the fields fruitful. In this dance, watched by Juno, Ceres and Iris, there is an increasingly confident foreshadowing of joy. But in the very moment of its execution, Prospero’s memory suddenly recalls the planned rebellion of Caliban: and the masque ends in confusion. Just so would the rebellion of the baser nature wreck the harmony of a marriage of true minds. It is clear what sort of masque it is that Shakespeare has given Prospero: it is to serve as a prothalamion, a celebration of the coming formal nuptial, a proclamation of its ideals, and an emphasis of its preciousness. Its interruption, however, complicates the issue somewhat, for it recalls that despite this harmony there is still discord in the island. This scene as a whole falls into two parts: the trothplighting, projected allegorically into a future that, given purity, will be fruitful, and the conspiracy to seize power of Stephano and Trinculo, unable to rule themselves, with Caliban who attempted to ravish Miranda. These two areas meet in Prospero’s mind. But those who served in the masque are now turned against the confederacy of the impure, and at the end, in a sort of knockabout anti-masque, Stephano and Trinculo take all appearance for real Editors have suggested many different explanations for Miranda’s ‘Sweet lord, you play me false’ (5.i.172). We can be certain that it would have been clear to the original audience who would have seen the move made. It is also certain that that move would not detract at all from Ferdinand’s nobility.

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ity until finally they are hunted by spirits in the appropriate form of dogs. Those dogs we have met before: in Ovid (Metamorphoses, III.198ff.), Actaeon saw Diana bathing and, changed into a stag, was torn to pieces by his own hounds—a story usually interpreted as the destructive consequences of untamed desire. And does not Orsino in Twelfth Night (1.i) use the same clichéd metaphor from the same source? O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first, Methought she purged the air of pestilence! That instant was I turn’d into a hart; And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, E’er since pursue me Those animal desires comically ruling the drunken and greedy Trinculo and Stephano, and Caliban, remind us that underlying the entire play and its examination of how people respond to experience and the challenge of illusion is the idea of man as a thinking animal, distinguished from the brutes only by Reason and its mark, Language. The danger of him regressing into animality is ever present, and the civilised man who goes savage is worse than the savage who never was anything else: Stephano and Trinculo are far more repulsive than Caliban, and Antonio and Sebastian, who have both birth and nurture appropriate to it, have even less excuse for their evil. Caliban, a stage-figure straight from the romance tradition of the wild man, shows the deeper corruption of the civilised when they go bad; yet he himself is dangerous, like Spenser’s Salvage (= ‘wild’) Man in The Faerie Queene—instinctively helpful, but also liable to give way to his untrained and animal impulses in rape and violence. The climax of the play, in three parts, also deploys some important visual motifs supported by the lexis. First, the drawing of the curtain shows Ferdinand and Miranda to the reconciled Alonso and Prospero in a tableau of order and right conduct. To Ferdinand and his father, each sees the other as, against all hope, returned from the dead. The moment and technique is very similar to the revealing of Hermione’s statue in Winter’s Tale (5.iii.98ff.)—which turns out not to be a statue but the living woman, restored to the husband who thought her dead and to the daughter she thought dead. The visual language in both plays refers us to another common emblem: of Truth, the Daughter of Time, recovered in the end from the prison where she has been hidden. Both Winter’s Tale and Tempest refer us to this, to the new understanding it marks of what went before, and to its emphasis on a righting of wrongs in the past—highly germane to the plays’ themes. It is very noticeable that in the lines after this moment there is a very heavy semantic stress on words redolent of religious ideas: ‘blessing’, ‘mira-

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cle’, merciful’, ‘goddess’, ‘immortal Providence’, ‘forgiveness’, ‘blessed’, ‘Amen’. These come to a climax in Gonzalo’s seeking heaven’s blessing on the couple and seeing the hand of Providence in all that has happened, pain as well as joy. Next, the seamen arrive, led by Ariel: Miranda was told, of course (1.ii.30), that the storm caused ‘not so much perdition as a hair’, Finally, the clowns arrive, dressed in their stolen robes, with the grotesque Caliban, whose strangeness immediately makes Antonio think he might be ‘marketable’ (265) (exactly the reaction of Stephano, 2.ii25). The grotesques by their contrast in a curious way validate the high seriousness of the preceding moments, which would have been too high a note on which to end the play. But their ludicrous clothes—which would not be ludicrous on Prospero—are important. Clothes, markers of rank, status, and often profession, are never mentioned without reason by Jacobethan playwrights (see my Very Brief Intro. on clothing and sumptuary laws.) It is interesting how much costume has been mentioned, or used, in this play: the spirits’ costumes, Ariel’s disguises, the clowns’ seeking to make the sign of power its substance by stealing clothes, and most importantly of all, Prospero’s three appearances in three different guises: as mage; his divesting himself of the mage’s robe he must wear: ‘lie there my art’ (1.ii.25); and finally his appearance as he ‘was sometime Milan’, in the garb of his noble rank (5.i.86). Each stage marks his progressive and in the end final renunciation of the power that he could have used to exact revenge on his enemies, his progressive relinquishing of a supernatural power without which he makes himself as vulnerable as he ever was to the plots and stratagems of evil men. ♣ The play puts stress on the way the willing illusion of masque, and of theatre, is watched, how the audience and participants are taken in, and not, in a ritual act that enables them to understand the significance of the everyday. The elaborate spectacle of the shipwreck makes a real attempt at a naturalism that a greatly original play, like Henry V, totally disclaimed—‘enter mariners wet’, says the stage direction. In the play, it took Miranda in completely. Yet it is, it turns out, art, and as real, and unreal, as all art. And as important.

 How does Sebastian say that half-line (177)? If seriously, his mask of cynicism momentarily cracks: but not for long.  See the opening Prologue, which stresses the impossibility of realistic representation and the need for imagination.

The Magus, the Philosopher Prince, and Prospero’s Estate Which brings us to the philosopher, the magus, Prospero. Since Antiquity, theorists have had a yearning for the Prince who would also be a Philosopher—or vice versa. Prospero gets a hard time nowadays, but it is demonstrable that an age with very different ideas about power, democracy, colonies and rule than ours (though with practices not much different) would have found in Prospero a complex but entirely positive picture of the Philosopher Prince on which then to build questions and ambiguities. Prospero has acknowledged and mastered his earlier fault of too much selfish study; he has mastered himself, as he controls his anger and seeks reconciliation and healing. He has by his art mastered the spirits of the air to cooperate with him in government—and nobody ever said the Kingdom of Heaven was a democracy. And he has attained the greatest power of all, to know how to renounce power at the right moment. His art allows him the power to be judge, yet to set strict retributive justice aside in healing and forgiveness—if people like Antonio will accept it. His art allows him to know the past, and to foresee and influence the future, yet without removing the freedom of his children or servants—a figure, almost, of Prudence, that great Renaissance political ideal, which one so wishes today our politicians would aspire to understand—or even know it exists. In all these aspects what Prospero is feeds straight into James’ idea of himself as the healer of past wrong, the architect of a new order, the healer, the reconciler, the just and prudent prince. Prospero is certainly not James: but he is the sort of Prince James might properly aspire to be, and whose Two Bodies are united—the human being of fallible desires and yet eternally significant will, and the superhuman, immortal nature of the Prince. Prospero is not the only magus in Renaissance drama, or in Shakespeare: Marlowe’s Dr Faustus shows us one who has gone rotten at the core, Subtle in Jonson’s Alchemist is pretending to be one, and in Shakespeare there’s the powerful figure of Paulina in 

The fine painting by Titian, ‘An Allegory of Prudence’ in the National Gallery London, demonstrates, with the three faces on a single head, the knowledge of the past, understanding of the present, and foresight for the future that is the prerequisite of wisdom. It can be seen here at The National Gallery.

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Winter’s Tale and the not unimpressive figure of Glendower in I Henry IV, who can ‘call spirits from the vasty deep’. Those spirits, like the ones who serve Prospero on the island, have an ancient ancestry: the Greeks called them ‘daemons’, who might or might not be well-disposed to man, and who had their own areas of responsibility in woods and fields and running brooks. Later Jewish thinkers articulated a theory of the angels, God’s ministers, each with their own peculiar task, clearly affected by this: the angels were pure spirits, were everywhere, and they too could fall into evil by turning away from God (and become devils or demons). In mediaeval and Renaissance thought (‘natural philosophy’) the place of man on ‘the isthmus of a middle state’ in the ladder or hierarchy of Creation between the realms of matter and pure spirit was a cliché. The spirits above men, who filled this world with the unheard sound of their wings, were pure spirits, Intelligences, who had simultaneous knowledge of all that happens, understood the causes of things, the power to move through space in no time, to manipulate the natural world, to influence human wills to good or evil; and they were physically invulnerable. But a magus who has mastered his art, and is in a state of grace (so Marsilio Ficino, or Cornelius Agrippa) can invoke their services. They cannot be commanded, though they can be trapped, as Ariel was by the evil witch Sycorax, and imprisoned in the knotty entrails of an oak, from which Prospero releases him. The figure of Ariel is one key to understanding how audiences would have taken Prospero. He is recognisably one of the Intelligences: remote from materiality, and therefore passion, and so only able to have an imaginative glimpse of what he might feel were he human (5.i.20) (His remark ‘Do you love me, master? (4.i.48)’ may be simply curiosity: can a Man love a being from a different Order?). He is powerful: and through Ariel and ‘the constraint of his own worthiness’ Prospero is able to gain the services of other spirits with whom he has no direct contact. (Thus if Prospero is impresario, Ariel is Stage Manager.) Now of course in the play Ariel is under some constraint by Prospero: his eventual freedom is promised, and this bargain is more usual in cases of goetia (black magic)—when it always rebounds on the person (like Faustus) who thinks he has control. But the careful way in which Shakespeare has mapped Ariel against the pneumatology of the period indicates that he, and his rela A useful short Biography of Marsilio Ficino can be found here and a series of more or less useful links on the site http://www.renaissanceastrology.com/ficino.html  The magus Cornelius Agrippa describes an Intelligence as ‘immortall, unsensible, assisting all, having Influence over all’ (Occult Philosophy, 1509–10, III.xvi). For Agrippa see two sites: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01231c.htm http://www.epistemelinks.com/Main/Philosophers.aspx?PhilCode=Agri

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tion with Prospero, is to be taken positively, as an endorsement of Prospero’s mature wisdom. He is emotionally neutral, a ‘natural’ force with whom cooperation is possible, but who in the end must be released, as all things must be given their freedom to find their own end, be it perfection or its opposite. The magus and the alchemist were in exactly that business of helping things along the road to their fullest being. Audiences were remarkable knowledgeable about the technicalities of magia and its related art, alchemy: Jonson, Chapman and Marston’s Eastward Ho! expects the audience to have such knowledge, and in The Alchemist Jonson gives Subtle an extended and very technical description of that art. There would have been no need for suspension of disbelief for a Renaissance audience watching The Tempest: they believed that there might be people like Prospero in the offing, in the courts of the great: think how Dr John Dee, who is one of the models for Prospero, I think, had an enormous reputation, being consulted by Queen Elizabeth, the Sidney circle, invited to Prague by the Emperor Rudolf, and nearly poached from Elizabeth by Ivan the Terrible. Or think of Marsilio Ficino, or Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, familiarly known as Paracelsus—people whose work has affected the world we live in. We must remember that serious magical endeavour and serious scientific endeavour are twins of the same birth: and that a distinction between science and magic would have been conceptually impossible in Shakespeare’s lifetime. The endeavour of the religious mystic had been to subdue the self to reality, by prayer and self-discipline and knowledge. For the Renaissance, the problem was how to subdue reality to man’s wishes, to ‘the effecting of all things possible’, to use Bacon’s phrase again, to ‘restore the damage of our first parents’. The magus sought by studying arcane lore, by understanding the secret musical and mathematical harmonies and correspondences that linked all creation, by self-discipline, the power of harnessing good spirits to the restoration of the world’s pristine perfection. He was seeking to work with a natural process, to accelerate it, to help the work of God. He was seeking to resume the power over material and spiritual nature lost at Adam’s Fall: and if he won this power, moreover, it was dangerous: it could make him angel or devil. Its  Two sites on Paracelsus are: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/paracelsus/paracelsus_2.html and http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/p/paracelsus.html  Bacon is one of the founders of the modern materialist ‘scientific’ empirical outlook – a greatly significant figure.  The art of theurgia, as distinct from goetia, using bad spirits, which we might call black magic.  Compare Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man. This oration, crucial to understanding the Renaissance view of man, is available online at the University of Michigan: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Mirandola/.

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possession, therefore, must be accompanied by a corresponding growth in the holiness and wisdom of the magus’ mind, and we see exactly this stress in the writing, and life, Florentine scholar and magus Marsilio Ficino. On the other hand, he whom we should call the scientist—Bacon, for example—sought power too, but not by the same means; his search came to be for techniques derived by induction from observation of the way matter behaved. Yet its end, just as practical, was much more limited. While the magus might in the end seek wisdom and renounce power—seek, in other words, disinterested knowledge, Francis Bacon condemns such an attitude as using ‘as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be a spouse for fruit’. For Bacon and the empirical scientists who have descended from him, the world is just something to be manipulated. For a Renaissance audience Prospero’s having this power would be proof enough of his moral goodness. But in seeking it Duke Prospero neglected the public duties of his role, and had been the victim of an intrigue he could not control. Now, having achieved a mastery over himself symbolised by his mastery over the island and its spirits, and acknowledging that within himself there are things of darkness, an impulsive and choleric nature, control of which is essential to true nobility (cf. 5.i.275– 276), he can repair the damages in the dark backward and abysm of time in a future where men of sin are brought to a knowledge of themselves. The new‑found harmony can be expressed in a marriage that finally reconciles two antagonistic royal houses. That marriage is more than a neat political solution, for in magia, a central principle is that gender is in all things, from chemical elements to spirits; harmony, perfection and stability is achieved through marriage, the balancing of masculine and feminine in a new whole. Prospero’s manipulation, therefore, is a means to the achievement of a proper moral and political balance between, on the one hand, human impulse and will—nature—and, on the other, the intellect that must rule this little kingdom of man—nurture. And in the end he has to achieve the highest power of all, to know how to renounce power—‘This rough magic... I’ll drown my book... break my staff’ (5.i.33ff). And do it: which will immediately make him vulnerable. Yet without doing so, without allowing those he has manipulated their freedom, as he frees Ariel, how can it be known that the educative process through which they have been has been any good at all? A Prince has to rule people, not automata. Prospero had a second chance: Lear did not. That second chance was on the island, and I want now to highlight an issue that is easily overlooked by us who do not have  There is a very helpful discussion at http://www.iep.utm.edu/b/bacon.htm  The Advancement of Learning, in Works, ed. Ellis and Spedding, I, p. 60

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some of the early seventeenth century attitudes to landscape and place. This will need a brief filling in of background. Those years saw the development of what is effectively a new genre in English poetry, though it has Classical antecedents in Martial and Horace, the landscape, ‘estate’, or ‘Country House’ poem. Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ (?1612) is arguably the finest example, and it was one no-one afterwards could ignore: Thomas Carew bounces ‘To Saxham’ (1629) off his readers’ presumed knowledge of it. So with much more complex irony does Andrew Marvell with ‘Upon Appleton House’ (1651), and Alexander Pope in Windsor Forest (1709). Jonson’s poem is not just the finest ‘thank you’ letter in the language; it is about right government, community and education as well as how nice a time he had as guest of Sir Robert Sidney. The estate is seen as a microcosm of the state and of what Man should be in the world. It is—how could it not be?—hierarchical in its values, for that was how the whole creation was seen. It sets up a programme all other poems in its family follow. It tours the estate, noting its almost Edenic plenteousness, where all its products and animals offer themselves to Man for his service. Having toured the woods and fields and waters, we then in the centre of the poem meet the people, who are properly looked after by their lord, and in turn give back their love and duty. It closes with a very important paragraph on the proper management of a house for the arrival of the unexpected guest (King James? Or the King of Kings?) and the proper education of the young. Finally, the subtext of the poem is darker: for Penshurst, portrayed so positively, has been described in negatives, what it is not, and we see that the real point of the poem is the corruption, disjunction and fragmentation through pride and greed of the current English polity. Now the poem does draw on older models, including tropes on descriptions of Eden, and from them it takes features (imitated in its descendants) like the actively generous landscape bringing forth its fruits of its own will for Man’s service, and the enumeration of the Four Aristotelian Elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water as they manifest themselves in the estate. The Earth is the fertile ground and its crops and herds, the Air its aspect and climate and birds, Water its fishponds and rivers, and Fire in what fire is made from, its woods. The harmony of the elements is a figure of the harmony and good government of the people, the marks by which the young are taught for the responsibilities that will be theirs one day. The four elements are part of this alchemy—as they are the material the alchemist sought to wed into harmony, as the lord and ruler sought to tune (actively) his realm into harmony.  Many would see Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) as in the tradition too.  See above on the importance of the central position in Renaissance art and poetry.  The Latin phrase is sponte sua: cf Ovid, Metamorphoses, I. 90.

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Now consider The Tempest. It was written for audiences who had just seen the same actors in Jonson’s Alchemist: they knew all about alchemy and magia. They were aware of the materials from which Jonson had built ‘To Penshurst’, because they shared that culture and assumptions. The Play starts emphatically with disordered Water and Air in the Storm, but when we get to the island proper we are reminded in time that Caliban showed Prospero the fresh springs and the fertile places of the island—as he promises to show the clowns. Gonzalo dilates on the Edenic fertility and good air of the country. A key figure in the play is Ariel: his punning name is obvious, and his element is air. He has been released from his prison into a conditional—and later a full—freedom by Prospero. Caliban is called ‘thou earth’, and has to be controlled. Finally, we see the contrasting young males, Ferdinand and Caliban, in exactly matched scenes, carrying logs for the Fire. And the play emphatically concerns itself with education for rule. It seems to me that these parallels—the Elements, the Edenic echo, the interest in education and the future (which I explore more fully later)—between Jonson’s poem and the play suggest that Prospero as Magus/Ruler is being tested on and by the Island. Just as the training at Penshurst fits the young Sidneys for the wider world, so the island tests and trains all who come there. Prospero has to orchestrate (the word is deliberate) the elements of this island sp that the Alchemical Marriage which will signal a new dawn can be achieved. It is not merely fanciful to see Ferdinand and Miranda’s union as elemental as well as political and passionate. Without that (rationally controlled) desire, Virtue does not translate itself into that action which is proper to those who are stewards of the world. ♣ To James and those close to him, whose interest in magia is demonstrable, the figure of Prospero is extraordinarily resonant. The Good Prince should have proper, selfless, dominion over himself and his subjects as the magus has over spirits, and should be, in good Renaissance theory, a Healer who tunes his realm into a harmony, a ‘concord of this discord’ (Midsummer Night’s Dream.5.i.60). And God knows there was discord enough for James to reconcile.

 Very significant is the fact that James revived the ancient practice, lapsed since Henry VI, of ‘touching’ those sick of ‘the King’s Evil’ – scrofula. The hands of the King were those of a healer.

Educating Miranda: The Tempest and education I turn now to another issue, which would have much concerned that first audience: education. This is in fact part of a larger debate, which much exercised men and women. In the forming of the personality, what exactly is the balance between ‘Nature’—that with which one is born, which one inherits, which is Instinctive—and ‘nurture’—one’s upbringing, how and what one has been taught, including the use of Reason? Could everyone benefit from nurture? If people were properly educated, did that mean they would automatically be good? How was it that ‘Good wombs have born bad sons’ (1.ii.119)? Does nature not run true? And that raised the other question of the deceptiveness of appearance, how the polite may not necessarily be civilised, and may hide a savagery within (like Goneril and Regan). When we first meet Miranda, she is being instructed, and no play of Shakespeare’s engages more with the business and purpose of teaching and the possibility of learning. Education is not something Renaissance men and women regarded as uncontroversial; least of all did they regard as of small concern the education of one who was to be a ruler, a Prince—as Miranda, as Prospero’s heir, should be—and there is a long and ancient tradition of the Education of a Prince. (Perhaps we ought to think about the education of rulers ourselves—we could hardly do worse than we are doing at the moment.) What is the interaction between what is taught and the person being taught? ‘What do we have to learn from books?’ is a question posed by The Tempest, not least when we consider how Duke Prospero was not helped at all by being learned in books not men. His books are seen as signs of tyrannical power by Caliban (3.ii.93): is education no more than a tool for control? Are there some things to be taught to some, and others to others? What input is there from the learner? And what are the status and the authority of the teacher? Can teaching be dangerous? These big questions need seeing in the context of some Renaissance thinking about education—what it was for, and who could benefit from it. The Renaissance humanists, steeped in Classical learning and very concerned with the value of human knowledge and achievement, provide a body of relevant writings and an interpretative method. First, there is the question of the appropriateness of teaching and knowledge

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to individual’s status, rank and capacity. The proper education of a Prince or ruler, which had been discussed since Plato, and since Alexander the Great was taught by Aristotle, is a long and well-worn tradition. It enjoined so far as was possible that the ruler should have some grasp of the Seven Liberal Arts Grammar or literature, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithmetic (= number theory), Music, Geometry, and Astronomy but also be learned in History so that he might achieve the virtue of Prudence (memory of the past, understanding of the present, foresight for the future) most necessary to a good ruler: and Prudence is defined as a three-part virtue: knowledge of the past, understanding of the present, foresight for the future. Above all the ruler should learn self control, and to avoid turning into a tyrant, should rule for the common good, not the interests of any one group, least of all himself. It is this tradition to which Shakespeare alludes in King Henry IV, and which Machiavelli tacitly rejects in The Prince, and into which James inserts his own Basilikon Doron. But the rise of humanism brought some changes of emphasis: 1. In broad terms, the humanists’ uneasiness about the disinterestedness of courts, and the possibility of rational thought and choice in them, and their awareness of the observably common mismatch between rank and power, led to that humanist satirical critique of courts we see in writers like Erasmus. One of the commonest metaphors is the Ship—the Ship of State, tossed by the winds of fickle Fortune. John Skelton, tutor to the future Henry VIII, wrote a fine poem, The Bouge of Court¸ satirising the distractions, deceits and dangerous instability of Court, where desert was not rewarded, and sets it on just such a Ship of Fortune or State. 2. There was much discussion of the possibility of the reform of society and of institutions through an individual action, and of individuals through wise education. This optimistic view generated a large body of theoretical writing about education, as well as the reform and refounding of schools and col ‘Liberal’ in the sense of ‘proper to a person of free status, not a slave’.

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leges. The humanists wrote about nothing more often: More argued for the inclusion of women in the educational process and his own daughters were impressively educated; his friend Erasmus, in De Pueris Instituendis, wrote on the need for love, not flogging, in education: and this discussion might certainly reflect on Prospero’s educating of his daughter as well as on his control of Ariel, and his threats to Caliban. 3. It had been axiomatic for centuries that Man was a creature of three natures, or souls: a vegetable soul, which all living things had, which distinguished them from mere stones; a sensible soul, which allowed feeling and movement, which Man shared with the animals; and a rational soul—Reason—which in the material Universe was unique to Man. The lower human nature, the animal, must be ruled by Reason and Art. The emphasis in humanist writings was on the teaching of the pursuit and practice of Virtue. But passive virtue to the humanist is not enough. As Philip Sidney said, ‘the end of virtue is virtuous action’—action in the public, political realm: and here Sidney, and Erasmus, and Juan Luis Vives who taught at Oxford, are reiterating what Cicero had said centuries earlier. Virtue is not virtue till it acts. So with virtue goes the idea of responsibility, stewardship. So humanist treatises on The Education of a Christian Prince (like Erasmus’ Institutio Christiani Principis), in strong contrast to Machiavelli’s vision of education for, simply, power without consideration of morality or public good, stress Good Government: they form a strong tradition, very familiar to James’ subjects. Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier, Sir Thomas Elyot’s the Book named the Governour, are in the immediate ancestry of James’ own Basilikon Doron. Consider now the detailed engagement of the play with these matters. The play relentlessly returns to that motif of learning, instruction and teaching—indeed, the whole plot turns on the fact that Prospero was so engrossed in his books that he neglected his dukedom. Act 1 has constant recourse to the idea of education—of the Prince, of servants, of children, of slaves. We have Prospero teaching Miranda and testing Ferdinand so that he teaches himself, and then instructing him directly and through the masque of goddesses he stages; Miranda, once upon a time, teaching Caliban. Furthermore, in Gonzalo attempting to instruct the cynical Sebastian and  Dean Nowell of Westminster had a hand in redrafting the statutes of a lot of the refounded grammar schools that replaced the Church schools.  Machiavelli’s book (1513) (http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince00.htm) cannot be fully understood without seeing against the tradition of ‘Education for a Prince’ books it rejects.

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Antonio with what reads like a cross between Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Ovid’s Golden Age as reconceived in Montaigne’s essay ‘Of the Canniballes’, we have a restatement of conventional humanist wisdom about human virtue and perfectibility. And this is immediately undercut by the other, sceptical, humanist tradition of the disruptive, multivocal, satiric in the sneers of Antonio and Sebastian—the counter discourses of humanism, the pessimistic and the optimistic, are deliberately held together. Later in the play there is the parody of teaching and learning in Trinculo’s and Stephano’s treatment of Caliban, and indeed all the Neapolitans instructed by the travails visited on them by Prospero: so that, as Gonzalo says, they find ‘ourselves/ when no man was his own’ (which echoes the precept inscribed in ancient times over the portal of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, ‘Know thyself’). And we should add ourselves, perhaps: the audience, being taught by the whole experience of the play: for if art is not moral it not worth anything. Furthermore, no play looks so hard at how education is received by the educated—whether it is successful. Ferdinand who willingly embraces the correction and testing of Prospero is at the opposite end of the scale to Caliban, and Alonso who finally comes to an understanding of what he has done, and a repentance for it, is at the other end of the scale to his brother who can only sneer. This is a play that asks some hard questions about education, and what answers it does offer may be unpalatable to modern political and social sensibilities. ` The humanists—Erasmus, More, Vives—put a lot of stress on the right of women to education: Roger Ascham did a pretty good job with Elizabeth Tudor and Lady Jane Grey, both mirandae—‘wonders’—in their linguistic and literary fluency and their general education in history and philosophy. In Miranda it might be tempting to see echoes of such learned women, one of whom made it to Prince and the other nearly did. But that is unnecessary, for James’ own daughter Elizabeth was well educated, like many of her rank. More to the point is that Miranda is being educated for rule. Though she may, like Perdita, or a dozen years earlier Portia, remind us of Astraea, the return of the golden age, this Astraea is to be married, as is Perdita, as heir to a state, and must discharge the responsibilities properly and in the interests of the commonweal. She has to be taught Prudence, and know her past, for without that knowledge, her understanding of the present must be flawed, and her foresight for the future weak. She has to learn to know people, to judge not simply by the appearance  Some nowadays might disagree: but this was the view held without any serious demur from antiquity to the later nineteenth century – a period which includes the Renaissance, of course.  and Ferdinand, for that matter. They are being educated both for marriage and for rule. Prospero teaches them the importance of self-rule both directly and through his stage-managing of what they perceive; they have to recognise that it is their job to control the evil in their world.

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of the Brave New World. Prospero’s stern speech of recapitulation to her in that long second scene of exposition both accepts the weakness of the instructed’s flesh—she becomes sleepy and inattentive—and the necessity of controlling it—as indeed she does. The play marks in epitome the trajectory of Miranda from uninstructed child to discriminating woman who can hold her own with, and criticize, her husband in the game of chess, symbolic both of the love battle and of the game of politics. Miranda did make one serious mistake: she tried to educate Caliban. But Miranda’s teaching was quite inappropriate education. The only education she as a prince had received was inappropriate for him, and it turns him from how he started, in the pre-plot of the play, as a recognisable type, the Noble Savage, into ‘filth’. He was educated beyond what his nature could bear, and the result was nearly disaster when he tried to rape Miranda and he regrets he did not succeed (1.ii.350). However distasteful we might find this, many of our forbears would indeed regard some natures as incapable of taking ‘nurture’, receiving a ‘print of goodness’ (1.ii.354): to educate beyond a person’s station, or not appropriately to it, was a receipt for trouble. But there was a good deal of uneasiness nevertheless: was it ever enough to say of anyone that on their ‘nature no nurture can ever stick’ (4.i.188f.)? Could education be positively harmful? Whose responsibility was it if it were? And furthermore: when their self-control does not work, how do you control people? Prospero controls Caliban by education—or rather with the threat, as too often in the school, of physical punishment which might so easily become its substitute. Stephano controls him by alcohol: is there a moral difference? Is education no more than political control? Ferdinand is the antithesis to Caliban: he willingly carries those logs, in a scene exactly balanced with that where Caliban has to be forced to, knowing that in doing so he serves his love. He accepts Prospero’s rule willingly. He watches the masque of goddesses knowing full well that it is an elaborate spectacle staged by Prospero to capture his imagination, not only with a hope of a prosperous future, but with the warning that that prosperity is contingent upon self control, the control of the very appetites, the ‘fire in the blood’, to which Caliban gave in when he tried to rape Miranda. (As Aristotle said, the taking of a maidenhead is more fitting for a coalheaver than a prince.) Indeed, Ferdinand is in the short spell, the fast forward of this play, undergoing the Education of a Prince. And just at this time, the learned James is seeking to build a European peace on the marriages of his children. Erasmus distrusted political marriage, both as not good for people and as insecure in politics; but the British Solomon was all too ready to use them in his statecraft, and mark such a marriage, in due course, by command per-

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formances of the wholly relevant plays, The Tempest and Winter’s Tale. Just as, in the Play, Prospero stages a play, played by the spirits, the exact analogue for the actors in their illusory roles, so James stages these plays for his son in law. So what about the educator, Prospero? There are a lot of hints of Jacobean worries: the words Prospero uses of his former self are curiously double-edged: ‘stranger’, ‘transported’, ‘rapt’, by his studies. In fact, the excitement of study led him to ignore, when duke, exactly those duties of a ruler in which he ought to have been educated, and he unwisely chose a perfidious subordinate. This neatly picks up the Jacobean fear of sycophantic schemers misleading the theoretically desirable ‘philosopher’ king and touches on the great an theme of the cost of power, the diminution of the self’s freedom that it entails. In Milan his negligence educated Antonio into revolt—into, as the play puts it, ‘sin’. On the Island he is Ascham to Miranda’s Elizabeth—a good humanist schoolmaster—self-defined. But what is he teaching her? What is he teaching Ferdinand? History, certainly, but self control, self-mastery: and he recognises it may be fragile (4.i.51ff.). What has he learned himself? Prudence? To eschew vengeance: to offer forgiveness knowing it may not be taken; to achieve that final wisdom, the contemplation of the mortality that awaits every one of us, and for which the whole of life is a preparation. For if one end of education and virtue is virtuous action, the other is, as Prospero says (like many before him), prayer. The great Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino stressed that the final goal of magia and the power it gave was the abandonment of that power for prayer: the soul moved another rung up the ladder. The progression from ratio (reason) to oratio (prayer) to imitatio (of Christ) has good Humanist precedent, not least in the great Erasmus. But a choice may be necessary between a theology of Works, of action, and a theology of Grace, or receptiveness and contemplation. The discussion circles round a theology of salvation by works, which is in the end bound to fail, as the Reformers of the sixteenth century stressed, for no man can by works wipe out the stain of original sin. Prospero’s power was active, controlling, and it was a power of words and knowledge. His renunciation of his power, his opening himself again to his enemies, is passive. Those enemies are now, he hopes, reformed, educated by what they have been through—but he has no guarantee. Nor do we. .

 In so many ways Prospero’s past could so easily be seen as Lear’s present.Prospero and Miranda on the island are Lear and Cordelia in prison transposed into a major key…

Caliban It has been recognised at least since the 1930s that early modern writers in England not only had a good deal of information coming to them about regions and customs well beyond the margins of Europe, but were intrigued and fascinated by such material and expected their audiences to be too. Writers looked towards the East, as well as, more obviously, to the West—to the Islamic world, and the Ottoman Empire in particular. Shakespeare is no exception; scholars have long recognised his interest in the world beyond England’s shores, notably Europe of course and, in the wake of New Historicism, the Americas. Consider how the figure of Caliban might be positioned in a Jacobean mindset. First let us try to clear our minds of the experience of empire and colonialism over the last three centuries: that had not happened yet—though the first seeds of it were being sown—and Shakespeare, however great he was, did not second-guess decolonisation, or the fashionable political attitudes of the twenty-first century. For him as for his contemporaries, the idea of slavery was not automatically repugnant—though how slaves were treated might indeed arouse very strong passions and moral indignation. Shakespeare and his audience would certainly have read accounts of the New World, he would have known about Walter Ralegh’s attempts to found a colony in what became Carolina, and he would have known all the arguments economic, political and religious for colonisation and expansion overseas put forward by Richard Hakluyt in his Principall Voyages and Navigations of the English People (1589; 2nd ed. 1598–1600) and Divers Voyages touching the Discoverie of America (1582). (What he actually thought of them we have no way of knowing.) Moreover, he would certainly have been aware, as were most of his countrymen, of the continuing protests about the way the Spaniards treated the natives in their New World colonies. These protests were from within the colonising culture, so to speak: men who were part and parcel of the enterprise of the West, but who found themselves roused to indignation on religious or moral grounds. They were often friars, Franciscan or Dominican, and they abhorred not only the physical exploitation of the natives and the cruelty  For a succinct explanation of this term, see http://www.sou.edu/English/Hedges/Sodashop/RCenter/Theory/Explaind/nhistexp.htm

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with which they were sometimes treated but also the reluctance of some of the conquistadores to let them be converted to Christianity, when they would immediately acquire rights they did not have as heathen. (There is no protest about colonisation or Empire per se.) These protests were sincere and passionate, starting as early as the first generation of settlers with the writings of the Franciscan Bartolome de Las Casas, who spent a lot of time in New Spain. Versions of Bartolome’s book circulated in England. It fed a lot of anti-Spanish (which overlaps with anti-Roman Catholic) feeling, perhaps encouraging a certain smugness about their own moral superiority among a Protestant nation as yet without colonies to exploit of its own. The Tempest most certainly does touch on the issue of ‘plantation’, as colonisation was called, for Gonzalo prattles on about his ideal commonwealth to divert Alonso, and Stephano and Trinculo find themselves, as they think, without the restraint of their superiors in an isle where they have a ‘servant monster’ to exploit: and the benevolence of Gonzalo’s hypothetical rule is balanced by the viciousness, however comic here, of the rule by mere appetite. But the issue in the play is the use of power, not the rightness or wrongness of plantation simply. So to Caliban. First: who played him? His grotesqueness is deliberate, and it is not only, according to good Renaissance theory, one more example of the outer appearance being a clue to the inner nature. It is also comic. Caliban is the clown’s part, and he is seen as comic and grotesque by the Neapolitans when they see him in the last scene, just as Trinculo and Stephano saw him as comic and marketable. When he joins with Trinculo and Stephano, the other clowns, we see them as the anarchic, the carnivalesque, at loose within the controlling structures of Prospero and Alonso’s normality: the authority validated by that which subverts it. (At the end, Alonso and Prospero each have to acknowledge their responsibility for the rogues within their polity.) Significantly, the ludicrous ambition to set themselves up as a rogues’ kingdom underlines the dialectic between true and false rule, and symbolically makes explicit the disorder that is politely institutionalised in Antonio’s usurpation and Alonso’s complicity. Their cacophonous song, their grotesque dressing and physical behaviour belong to a clear comic stage tradition. Indeed, those three clowns we may have seen together before: they may well have been the witches in Macbeth—parts I am certain were played by the clowns—and Autolycus, the shepherd and the clown of Winter’s Tale. In these clowns, however, we have a lot more than the simple ‘comic relief’ that  Which we are, of course, meant to find deplorable. They are far nastier than Caliban even if they are less physically grotesque.

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once upon a time used to be the knee-jerk explanation of such elements in a play. They certainly belong to a comic tradition, but they interrogate it at the same time. What happens when you take clowns out of the usual safely controlling structures of court or city, and let them loose on an island where they believe themselves to be alone and in total control? What happens when clowns have power? Mayhem follows: a mayhem symbolised in their ludicrous (and comic) appropriation of the clothes that are far above their station or capacity, and seen in their fundamental cruelty and exploitativeness of attitude to Caliban. Just so, as Shakespeare’s generation knew (if only from their reading of Bartolome de las Casas and his successors), the New World had attracted rogues and cheats: the antithesis of good stewardship. So Caliban is a key figure, clown or not. He illuminates by contrast the world of art, nurture, civility. That world also contains the malice of Antonio, and the guilt of Alonso, and the greed, ambition and lust so grotesquely sounded by Stephano and Trinculo. Like the shepherds in Pastoral (see above) he is the ‘natural man’ against whom the civilised is measured. But we don’t get here the usual pastoral opposition between civilised decadence and natural virtue, though the viciousness of Antonio and Sebastian and the funny but horrible greed of Trinculo and Sebastian are indeed highlighted by Caliban—for whom, as the victim of that cruel greed, we are certainly meant to feel some pity. Caliban was by nature helpful when Prospero and Miranda arrived. But lacking control of his desires, he is irrevocably born to service and not freedom, and he is the fruit of a union of representatives of evil magic in stark antithesis to Prospero’s noble and benevolent Art. In one sense, his ugliness is a moral badge, versus beauty. Yet beauty—the beauty of the men of the ‘brave new world’ Miranda sees—can be deceptive, as Prospero carefully warns her. Caliban is certainly a crucial figure in the play, both as comic and as part of the symbolic design and structure. But he is not (as some directors make him) the hero, the virtuous native or Noble Savage dispossessed by wicked imperialists. He is neither noble nor virtuous; and he is not the occluded hero: he speaks less than 160 lines to Prospero’s 620 or so. (Ariel, interestingly, if we include his songs, has almost the same number of lines as Caliban, and this might suggest a deliberate symmetry between these two figures of Earth and Air.) Caliban is explicitly the antitype to Ferdinand—they even enter in consecutive scenes performing the same task of carrying logs (for Fire) and speak the same length of speech. His part in the moral design of the play must be taken into account when we characterise him. He, the disappointed rapist, is there to underline by contrast  The play has in all about 1744 lines. Miranda has 72 and Ferdinand 59.

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Ferdinand’s fitness for Miranda’s hand and for eventual rule. But he is also there to indicate the necessity of the rule of nature by the power of intellect: Prospero would be grossly failing in his job if he did not control him. Now this is indeed very much the attitude of some of the early colonisers—not all—to the Native Americans. We would see it as appallingly patronising; an earlier age—indeed, as late as the early twentieth century—would see it as benevolent and necessary. For Caliban certainly has his ancestry in the way the peoples discovered across the Atlantic in the previous hundred years were viewed. Some, like Michel de Montaigne, in his famous essay ‘Of the Canniballes’, used the savage (= simply ‘wild’) to highlight corrupt Europeans who are far, far worse than savages because they ought to—do—know better: though the idyllic savage state Montaigne describes deconstructs itself, as he well knew, into contradiction, just like Gonzalo’s imaginary ‘plantation’ of the isle. At the same time, it was conventional wisdom that the savage needed ruling: he might be instinctively helpful, like the ‘Salvage Man’ in Spenser’s Faerie Queene who helps Una when she is alone in the forest, but without rule of his nature by nurture and intellect, of which he may be incapable, he is at the mercy of his desires and emotions. All the fashionable talk of Prospero usurping Caliban’s possession of the island is simply beside the point: that would not even have been a moral issue worth discussing for the first audience, though, interestingly, Shakespeare gives Caliban a rancour and a hint of pathos about it that we can (perhaps too easily) see as prophetic of what is to come. More to the point, in a play so much concerned with education and what it does to the educated and the educator, Caliban is made to undergo an interesting process of growth. Miranda attempted to teach him, but the education she offered was inappropriate to his nature and status: ‘you taught me language, and my profit on it is /I know how to curse’. Language was seen as the mark of Reason, what distinguishes mankind from beasts; yet to give Caliban language has on this showing made him less innocent than he was before, more beastly in his desires and thoughts. (This is worrying enough; and, indeed, here the play might seem to anticipate some twentieth-century insights about the language of the coloniser learned by the colonised is an instrument of domination.) The humanists warned not infrequently about the dangers of an inappropriate education which the pupil could not handle, and the play must suggest the question whether this cursing is Caliban’s natural maturity through language, or the result of Prospero’s teaching method. How far is Caliban’s Nature ruined by Nurture? Yet the irony is that while we hear him curse—often—he also has some of the most beautiful utterance in the entire play:

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Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices That, if I then had waked 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 waked, I cried to dream again. (3.ii.XX) He could not articulate this, even conceptualise it, without language. Through these lines, the irony extends to a glimpse of an alter-Caliban: the Caliban who welcomed the persons washed ashore on the island, and whose reaction might have been like Miranda’s when she first saw the Neapolitans. That Caliban is now utterly lost by the pressure of the events of the play. Even so, the script underlines that he remains ‘earth’, the basic, the elemental, the natural servant. Prospero has to admit that he is legally and morally responsible for what Caliban is at the end of his tenure of the island: ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’. The word ‘thing’ is very dismissive, and his appearance would confirm it for the audience, but the line accepts the awesome responsibility of the powerful for the powerless—would that rulers did nowadays! But at that very point there is a change in Caliban: he recognises a grandeur in his master—‘how fine my master looks!’—and the folly of his devotion to Stephano and Trinculo. This is education indeed: and almost his last line in the play is a resolve for the future which is moral: ‘I’ll be wise hereafter, and seek for grace’. The verse stress falls heavily on that word ‘grace’, the peculiar resonances of which in the consciousness of the Jacobeans, fuelled as it was by religious controversy, are lost on us: but this is a defining, and wholly optimistic, moment. Even Caliban has in the end learned from his experience: and he is alone on his island once more, but this time with the potential for moral action and self-understanding.

 Another of Shakespeare’s clowns had difficulty with expressing a beauty and an experience beyond his linguistic armoury. Bottom and Caliban may make an interesting contrast and parallel.  His identification with one of the Four Elements, as Ariel is with Air, is important: see above, on the ‘Estate Poem’.

After the play: Inconclusions and Anxieties It was a common assumption in sixteenth century political thought that the order of the heavens was reflected in, and in dynamic relationship with, the order of being, and in the human polity on earth: see the discussion in my Very Brief Intro. This gives rise to the idea of ‘correspondences’, a rich source of metaphor—and more than metaphor: the whole creation is metaphorical. The king is a sun, his nobles are stars, and so on, and there is no better illustration of this point of view than the frontispiece of John Case’s Sphaera Civitatis (‘The Sphere of the State’), published in Oxford in 1588, where the Prince (Elizabeth) has got the whole wide world in her hands.   This complex of images ‘sun/king/order of heavens/order on earth’ is much used by Shakespeare, and nowhere more than in the Richard II—Henry V sequence. Richard deploys it on landing from Ireland in 3. ii: ‘…This thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke, Shall see us rising in our throne the east, His treasons shall sit blushing in his face, Not able to endure the sight of day… Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm off an anointed king … God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay A glorious angel; then, if angels fight, Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.’  Case’s book, a commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, is a systematic and angry attack on Machiavelli’s theory of self-interest as the real basis of politics. Case sees the monarchy of a perfect ruler as the highest form of government. Though Aristotle argued that women could not rule, Case portrayed Elizabeth as the capable guide of a harmonious state: in 1588 he could hardly do less.  Compare the Bishop of Carlisle in 4.i.124ff., and Bolingbroke at Flint Castle, 3.iii.61ff.

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But Shakespeare’s play examines how human society does not obey these rules of order, at least in the short term. It, like others, examines how the metaphor might be hopeful rather than factual. And in the sequence of History to which Richard II belongs, we know • that God’s angels did not fight for Richard; • that his conduct as a king was not that of ‘a god on earth’ as Duchess of York calls a Bolingbroke showing mercy in judgement, and he would not have deserved the support of angels; • that the usurper Bolingbroke was in fact quite a good king, who fathered Henry V, to Elizabethans the greatest of mediaeval kings So: if in the event in the stars in their course do not fight for the deposed rightful king as orthodoxy would maintain they would, that organic linkage between the polity and the cosmos is broken. This leads to a questioning of the basis of human hierarchies and of the validating cosmic (‘law of nature’) metaphor by which it is conceptualised. Either that linkage is not there at all, in which case we are in a much more problematic world, or, if there is such a linkage, we have got the way it works wrong. We might be living in a much more unfriendly universe, where the human polity, driven by ambition, selfish desire and the appetite for power is a sign of what the universe really is like. Shakespeare’s ‘political’ plays certainly address this question: in King Lear it lies near the heart. He is as interested in the criticism of the myths and their inconsistencies by which people construct their worlds as he is in their inevitable and powerful use. ♣ So there is no right reading of this play, in any sense: a good play is too various a thing for that, and members of audiences bring different preoccupations to watching it. The playwright and director Jean Cocteau once said that a film (or play) was a ‘dream dreamed by many people at once’. But waking up returns us to our diverse preoccupations and selves. What we feel—what our forebears felt—in the communal ritual of the play experience is often not what we feel when we think about it afterwards. Memory is subversive: the dream was real when we dreamed it, but it looks very different afterwards. Yet it affects how we see. Just as Ferdinand glimpsed through Prospero’s masque a truth inexhaustible and not reducible to precept, so we watching the play have been through an experience that in occupying real time has

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changed us irrevocably in a way that is not readily amenable to summary. Within the play those two masques not only operate as expressions of a complex moral reality but also make us watch how people within the play experience illusion. That reminds us to examine our response to the illusion of the whole, and its relevance and importance in what Sir Walter Ralegh called ‘this stage play world’ in which we live. Furthermore, the publication of the script as text in the First Folio of 1623, with more detailed stage directions than any other play in the volume, complicates the issues mightily. A text demands a wholly different sort of response or reading, and is designed to do so—though not by Shakespeare, who was dead when the volume came out. Plays-as-text have an existence in parallel to plays-as-played-script: they are not the same thing. Lukas Erne’s book has recalled us to a recognition that play-as-script may not exclude a planned play-as-text (We may have to revise our concepts of ‘the author’ to something much more complex and ambivalent.) That volume and all its descendants presume a single reader, able to pause, go back, cogitate, and analyse as no audience or even single listener can. (Indeed, a fairly standard examination question some decades ago used to be ‘“The plays of Shakespeare are more suited to the study than the stage”: discuss’.) The aporie of the text, the nature of the imagery, the deconstruction of the play and its ideologies, can be much more obvious. But whether they could have been made to stick in the seventeenth-century theatre—perhaps, when a reader saw a later performance—is a question capable of no certain answer. Centuries later, we can use critical and hermeneutic tools those intervening centuries have developed to pull things out of the play-as-book that might well not have been able to be conceptualised when the play was new. The hallmark of great art is that it can stand that treatment, and also challenge its certainties and methods. The play does have dark shadows. While the central antithesis in the play, as critics have never tired of iterating, may be between nature and the art of understanding life which the word ‘nurture’ sums up, it won’t reduce itself to simple formulas and easy answers. As soon as you rehearse some of the obvious issues— • • • • •

Man's relation to nature; Magia and its value; the nature of power and the authority and the legitimacy of hierarchy and rule; what power does to people; the fact that education may be positively dangerous, as well as not guaranteeing the moral improvement and virtue claimed for it;

 Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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• the problem of the amorality of those ‘New Men’ as they were called, like Sebastian, or Edmund, or Iago—loosely, the machiavels—who refuse to be bound by traditional morality — you cannot help noticing that while the play may suggest endorsement or otherwise, it is not quite univocal about any one. They were immediately topical for the play’s first audience. They really were argued about and discussed constantly, and in all sorts of media, and any impression we may have of a solid consensus is the simplification of hindsight. The play is also topical in its interest in reconciliation and forgiveness, in the healing of the sins of the past, and this was an urgent matter, for people feared, with good reason, for England the horrors they had seen in civil and religious war in France and Holland. The Tempest is a play very much about the future, but a future that acknowledges and heals the past: MacBeth kills his future, Prospero orchestrates (he hopes) the future he will not share. It is an honest play, though, not cheaply a cheerful one. Like Winter’s Tale, this post-tragic play asks hard questions about the possible value of suffering and loss: as Gonzalo asks (5.i.205f.) ‘Was Milan thrust from Milan, that Milan’s heirs should be kings of Naples?’ Is there is in such cataclysms a Providential guidance, a ‘Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will’? It’s all very nice that each man ‘found [himself] when no man was his own’ (5.i.212–3), but that has to be set against the realistic acknowledgement of the unchangeable consequences of past suffering and evil: Mamillius in Winter’s Tale is still quite dead, Prospero has still lost sixteen years, Caliban has learned enough words to allow him to curse. Yet there is hope: ‘to seek for grace’, an acceptance of the other, the things of darkness, and the offering of forgiveness. But, alas, forgiveness is powerless if it will not be accepted, and there is no certainty in the script that Antonio and Sebastian do accept it. For the play underlines that people have freewill, and coercion has its limits. Power is there, but people have to consent to it. What if the cynical Sebastians and Antonios, the Edmunds and Iagos are right, and authority, honesty and goodness are a sham? What if our positive perception of Prospero’s courtesy and generosity is no more than a result of the fact that he speaks in a better accent, and has a mastery of verse and spectacle others do not? How stable is the ending? There is a similar sort of unease at the end of many of Shakespeare’s plays, even the comedies, where the loose ends are not tied up and the reconcilia Another play first performed before the king, which openly (but not wholly without qualification) plays to his interests, ideals and values. A comparison of the two plays is actually quite intriguing.

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tion and conclusion is far from comprehensive. In Twelfth Night Malvolio ‘will be revenged on the whole pack’ of them. In Much Ado, the marriage takes place when we all know that Don John the machiavel is on his way back to Messina, with no guarantee he will be any different. At the end of King Lear, has Albany learned nothing? The Tempest is not an unqualified endorsement of the Jacobean myth, but an appraising repositioning of it into fiction, and it leaves lots of unanswered questions. What will be Prospero’s third thought? And will Ferdinand and Miranda rule justly, and be able to withstand the plots and intrigues about them? Drama allows us to have a second life where we think real thoughts, have real feelings, are changed by and learn from them, but the liabilities are limited. In the real world they are not. So should we look positively, or not, at this play? Should we see Prospero as simply despotic, the whole settlement of the end of the play as a sham in which is inscribed an indictment of parental and political power and colonialism? I think not, despite the dark shadows, and uneasy questions—that is par for the course, for all Shakespeare’s, indeed all serious, plays are very double-voiced. There are three important clues. First, when Prospero reassures Miranda that in the wreck there is ‘not so much perdition as an hair’ there is a very clear echo of St Paul’s promise to the mariners in the shipwreck off Malta that they will all be safe (Acts of the Apostles, Ch. 27, v.34). The miraculous and symbolic wreck is, in fact, ‘Providential’, planned and controlled. The second clue, at the end of the play, is what the ‘good old man’, Gonzalo says; he seems wholly to be endorsed by the action of the play, a wiser Polonius. When he sees Ferdinand and Miranda, he exclaims ‘Look down you gods, and on this couple drop a blessed crown’. King James’ Catholic subjects, of whom there were many, and Shakespeare was perhaps among them, cannot but have recalled the great Antiphon, Rorate Coeli Desuper, for Lady Day. the day that marks the Annunciation of the Incarnation to the Blessed Virgin Mary. These echoes suggest to me that the end of the play is to be seen as very upbeat, leading into a new future where even Caliban will seek for grace. But Antonio and Sebastian are still there in that new future, with that undiminished freewill, and Prospero has lost sixteen years: the cost of the past, and the risks of the future, are equally serious. Finally, we have pretty firm evidence that King James, his court and his Company of Players would have been quite mystified by the very negative readings of Prospero and his play that have dominated fashion for the last thirty or forty years. The play was chosen, with Winter’s Tale, as appropriate for Princess Elizabeth’s wedding festivities: and even Jacobeans liked to  March 25  Some have argued that the ‘Marriage Masque’ was inserted for that occasion. It is indeed possible,

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think that marriages might be happy, rulers just and futures bright. ♠ The rest is shortly told. James’ hopes in the end came to nothing. Prince Henry, on whom so many of those (and others’) hopes rested, died in November 1612. His sister Elizabeth married Frederick of the Rhine in the following February. But no reconciliation of Catholic and Protestant followed that marriage, no European peace, but the bloodiest European conflict, lasting thirty years, till the Napoleonic wars—in some ways even worse. Elizabeth and her Prince were catastrophically defeated by the Catholic Imperial forces at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620. Her beloved husband dead, she lived out her long life in poverty in Holland, winning the hearts and poems of many, the Winter Queen. Her brother’s beheading in 1649 finally destroyed the last shreds of old myth of the magus monarch, who by art and music and dance could bring his realm into harmony. The dream failed, in the end; but it was not a foolish dream to have, nor is it one from which we wake without regret.

for Shakespeare frequently revised and adapted his own work.

Afterlife, and Further Reading Fashionable critical orthodoxies ebb and flow with the moon, to borrow a phrase of Shakespeare’ own, yet each can often offer us an insight into that Protean thing that is the way we read. Even so, it ought to be remembered that every orthodoxy, from Freudian to Marxist to Structuralist to New Historicist to Postcolonialist to Post Modernist, is itself as provisional and indeterminate as that which its devotees propose (often over-confidently) to explicate. All can show us something, none can show us everything. Further, with drama there is a special problem: for we are not dealing with a text, complete in itself, but with a multifaceted experience, mediated though actors and now directors, where every single performance will in the nature of things be differently nuanced—and there are crucial areas of the play we can never know about. We can never know, for example, the tone of voice, or speed, in which lines were spoken by the first actors. Tone can totally reverse meaning. So it is depressing how many critics, and students, still write as if the only way we could talk about plays is as if they were simply books like any others. Editions In an ideal world, perhaps colonised by Gonzalo, all students would have, and read, all these editions. Each has its own strengths, and they are complementary. If you have reluctantly to choose only one, Lindley’s is perhaps the most comprehensive. Kermode, Frank, (ed.) The Tempest (Arden 2), first published 1954. The beautifully written introduction is still illuminating fifty and more years on, when styles, fashions, tools and emphases have changed. Kermode says (lxxxi) ‘There is disappointingly little memorable criticism of The Tempest’, having provided an essay that certainly is just that. 

Even the great Frank Kermode in his edition of The Tempest at times does this – for example (p.143–4): ‘Shakespeare was not the first to portray fairies as of less than normal human stature… ‘we have no difficulty in thinking of fairies as being of the size of Mustardseed, or of Ariel couching in the cowslip.’ Fine if we simply read: but Ariel and Mustardseed must have been played by full size actors. There is no doubt of that, and Mustardseed might have been, like Peaseblossom, played by one of the hulking clowns who played the mechanicals.

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Lindley, David (ed.), The Tempest, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). This fine edition has an excellent introduction, which allows fully for the Jacobean staging of the play. Likely to remain an important edition for a long time, like Kermode’s was—and still is. Orgel, Stephen, (ed.), The Tempest, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Very helpful on the masque elements of the play. Vaughan, Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan, eds., The Tempest, Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, (London: Thomson Learning, 1998). Like all the Arden 3 series, this is a very full and helpful edition, with a lot of material on the political and post-colonial readings of the play.

Some Renaissance Discussions of Education Ascham, Roger, The Scholemaster, (London, 1570), Book 1: The First Booke teaching the Bringing up of Youth*. Erasmus, Colloquies, (1518) ‘The Art of Learning’* Vives, Juan Luis, The Instruction of a Christian Woman* * available on the Web

Stages and stage craft Dessen, Alan C.: Elizabethan Drama and the Viewer’s Eye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) Gurr, Andrew: (1) The Shakespearean Stage (second edition) —— (2) Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). —— (3) and Ichikawa, Mariko: Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Most useful summary of the current state of knowledge in this problematic area.

Establishing a cultural and political context and reading the play Braunmuller, A. R. and Hattaway, Michael: The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 2nd Edition, Cambridge Companions to Literature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). An almost indispensable desk companion. It helps to fill in all those gaps that suddenly yawn as one is reading.

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Greenblatt, Stephen: Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, (New York: Routledge, 1990), especially pp.19–39. Greenblatt’s hugely influential work is unignorable, and has influenced a whole generation of critics, scholars and students. He invented, effectively, the concept of New Historicism, which has proved able to offer some penetrating insights into all sorts of traditionally placid areas. See also: —— : Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) A study of the ways in which Europeans of the early modern period represented non-European peoples and took over their lands. Kinney, Arthur F.: Shakespeare by Stages: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Very good on theatrical conditions, especially taken in conjunction with Gurr (1) —— : Companion to Renaissance Drama, (Oxford: Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, 2002) Maguire, Laurie: Studying Shakespeare (Blackwell: Oxford, 2003). This book, very helpful indeed for those seeking to get their bearings in the canon and its context, has an interesting discussion of the last plays, focussing on the idea of forgiveness, in pp. 213–221. Wells, S., and de Grazia, M.: The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Another useful companion. Some of the essays offer penetrating insights into the issues this book can only touch on. Peck, Linda Levy, ed. The Mental World of the Jacobean Court. (Cambridge, 1991). No book can ever recapture wholly the mindset of another time, but this one offers a good number of provocative and informative insights. Yates, F.: Astraea: the Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). Indispensable introduction to the ‘mythologising’ iconographies of the early modern period.

Discussing The Tempest Drakakis, John: Alternative Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 2nd edition, 2002). Among other things, includes two very interesting and thoughtful discussions of The Tempest in various contexts: see pp. 36ff., and the essay by Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, pp.195–309. Kastan, David Scott, Shakespeare After Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). See Ch. 10

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Rose, M.: Shakespearean Design (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972). Has a very concise and lucid essay on the shape of The Tempest. This was one of the first books to begin to remind us of the importance of Renaissance concepts of aesthetic form. Sherman, William H., and Peter Hulme, eds, The Tempest and its Travels (Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) Vaughan, Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: a Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) Vaughan, Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan, eds., Critical essays on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ (New York, G. K. Hall & Co, 1999) White, R. SD. (ed.), The Tempest: William Shakespeare, New Casebooks series, (London and New York: Macmillan, 1995) Wood, Nigel, ed., Theory in Practice: The Tempest (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995) as much about theory as about the play, but no harm in that. Useful to read with Kastan (see above)

Appendix: Some Dates 1603

Accession of James I: A DYNASTY in place; the first KING since Edward VI. James’ triumphal Progress south. His self-proclamation as a peace maker and a new Augustus uniting the three realms into ‘Britain’

1604 1605 1606

Peace with Spain

1607 1607 1608 1610

Parliament rejects James’ proposal for union of England with Scotland.

1610

Ben Jonson: The Alchemist (September) Jonson and Inigo Jones’ masque Prince Henry’s Barriers Jonson and Jones: Oberon

1611

Winter’s Tale (before May, when Simon Forman summarized it in his diary, and after January, when Jonson’s Masque of Oberon had its dance of 10 or 12 satyrs, echoed in Winter’s Tale (4. iv. 337).

1611

Tempest: First recorded performance 1/11/11 (wreck of Sea Adventure in 1610)

1611

James opens negotiation for his daughter Elizabeth’s marriage to Frederick, the Elector Palatine. The proposal split the court: the crypto-Catholics from the Queen down opposed, the Protestants (e.g. Prince Henry, Archbishop Abbott) very in favour.

1612, May

Proposal to make a double marriage of James’ children with the House of Savoy, or for Henry to marry Christine, sister of Louis XIII of France.

1612, Nov

Henry’s health weakening; ‘The Hope of Protestantism’ dies of typhoid(?) in November. Bishop Joseph Hall, in a sermon on the breakup of his household: ‘The glory of the nation, ornament of mankind, hope of posterity, a glorious saint, a Prince, whose countenance was able to put life into any beholder… composed of all loveliness, [he] infused an harmony into his whole family… the most loving and entire fellowship that ever met in the court of any Prince’.

The Gunpowder plot; repressive reaction King Christian of Denmark’s (James’ brother in law) visit. Jonson and Jones’ Masque of Hymen. Stagings of MacBeth and Hamlet before the kings Antony and Cleopatra; Coriolanus Pericles Creation of Henry as Prince of Wales. Talented and admirable youth, aggressively Protestant, with good idea of how to win public esteem. Marriage proposals, first with Spain.

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1613, Feb 14

Marriage of Elizabeth to Elector Palatine, leader of the Protestant party. Elaborate celebration: Twelve plays performed, including Tempest and Winter’s Tale. Plus three Masques—a feature of court life, but these were very elaborate indeed—and there were usually only three a year. Was the masque in The Tempest (re-)written for this marriage? Did Juno and Ceres turn from the lovers on stage to the lovers in the audience at 106—117?) (February to the end of October = nine months = a child/spring?)

Hyperlinks You may have visited the text on the following pages by following hyperlinks. They are included here (and bookmarked) for ease of reference



Intertextuality The term was coined by the post-Structuralist critic Julia Kristeva in 1966 to denote how a text’s meanings can be shaped by other texts. It can refer to an author borrowing and transforming an earlier prior text in his or her own work or to a reader’s recollection of one already experienced text in reading another. This useful term has come to have almost as many meanings as users, from those faithful to Kristeva’s original sense to those who simply use it as a high-falutin’ way of talking about allusion.

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John Dee John Dee (1527–1608) was a very innovative and influential mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, occultist, who was regularly consulted by the Queen and was from time to time part of the circle round Philip Sidney. He was a leading expert in navigation, and trained many who later conducted. (He coined the term ‘British Empire’.)He was an authority on alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy to which he devoted the last third of his life. He could have seen no contradiction between what we see as the worlds of science and magic. See also http://www.johndee.org/

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Divine Right This doctrine, originally erected in the early middle ages as a validation of secular monarchy against the claims of the Papacy, is based on the concept of a right based on the law of God and of nature. It came to argue that sovereigns derived their right to rule by virtue of their birth alone. Authority is transmitted to a ruler from his ancestors, whom God himself appointed to rule. Because the sovereign was responsible not to the governed, but to God alone, active resistance to a king was a sin ensuring damnation, and this is the tenor of the argument advanced in official Tudor publications like the First Book of Homilies (1547, and later editions) which was read in all churches. In England, James I and his son Charles I developed the claims based on divine right further, and claimed in the end, as no mediaeval monarch had done, that the King ruled above the law.

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Virtues of Prince …The king-becoming graces — As justice, verity, temp’rance, stableness, Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness, Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude… (Macbeth 4.iii.93ff) One of Shakespeare’s most tactful references to King James’ interests in that play written so early in his reign.

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King’s Two Bodies See: Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (repr.1997). The concept of these two bodies originates in the development in the early mediaeval period, in the light of discussion stemming form St Augustine’s The City of God, of a theology of kingship. It began to operate in England seriously in 1272 with the succession of Edward I, when England moved from, effectively, an elective monarchy to a hereditary throne. It is accompanied by a development of a ritual surrounding kingship (especially at coronation) which overtly borrows from religious ceremonial, and the mediaeval coronation rite is very similar to the ordination of a priest. The mysticism inherent in the idea of this second, political, body was partly a way to win support for primogeniture (inheritance of the title by the eldest child)—the body politic exists due to its being imbued with divine right—and any man who rules must be as a ruler above the simple concerns of the flesh, and rebellion against him is intolerable, as well as impossible. ‘The King can do no wrong’ is not a statement about the man, but about the man-in-the-office. Just so, the personal unworthiness of a priest does not invalidate the sacraments he dispenses. Edmund Plowden (1517–1584) a recusant jurist who was ‘singularly well learned in the laws of England’ (Camden), described this view of the crown: ‘For the King has in him two bodies, viz, a body natural, and a body politic. His body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a body moral, subject to all infirmities that come by nature or accident, to the imbecility of infancy or old age, and to the like defects that happen to the bodies of other people. But his body politic is a body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of policy and government, and constituted for the direction of the people, and the management of the public weal, and this body is utterly void of infancy, and old age, and other natural defects and imbecilities, which the body natural is subject to, and for this cause, what the king does in his body politic cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any disability in his natural body. (Les Comentaries ou Reportes de Edmunde Plowden, 1571)

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Tyrant/tyranny The simplest definition of a Good King is one who rules for the good of his people, of the common wealth, and mediates the Justice of God to them. The tyrant rules through amore suo as St Augustine put it – for his own pleasure and benefit alone.

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Trojan Aeneas/ Troy Aeneas, the hero of Vergil’s Aeneid and mythical founded of the Roman people, undergoes a series of tests in his poem during which he slowly and with enormous pain and trouble becomes a model of the virtuous Stoic hero. But the achievement is fragile: at the end of the poems the passions he thought he had subdued rush back, and he ends the poem covered in blood, having refused mercy to the heroic Turnus. The History of the Kings of Britain of Geoffrey of Monmouth (ca. 1135) maintains that the British Royal line, extending down to Arthur and beyond, is descended from the house of Aeneas of Troy. Britain thus becomes a successor state to Troy, with Rome, a legitimation of power and a respectable ancestry for a royal house of dubious past. Geoffrey’s work (which has no historical truth whatever) was accepted as the authoritative account of the history of Britain from the 12th to the sixteenth century; the Tudors were only too happy to use it to legitimise their shaky claim to the throne. Polydore Vergil, in 1531, disproved the story, but was not listened to; the myth was too useful, and lasted for a good seventy years more. Thus ‘Troy’ often stands for England, and English poems and plays of this period using Troy can be taken as covertly talking about England. London was frequently called New Troy in writing of the late 14th century (e.g. by John Gower). Michael Drayton in 1600 also calls London New Troy.

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Astraea and Apocalypse In Ovid’s Metamorphoses I. 150, at the end of the Golden Age of peace and justice the immortals leave the earth, and the last to go is the virgin Astraea, goddess of justice. She becomes the constellation Virgo, the constellation of Harvest, Virgo spicifera, bearer of corn, and sometimes depicted with a cornucopia. But the legend went that in the last days, before the end of the world, the golden age would return, and Astraea would once more dwell on earth. (It is this hope to which Vergil’s fourth Eclogue refers.) Many in Elizabeth’s time and country who saw the Apocalypse as imminent, and the first Armada as the first battle of Armageddon. Elizabeth, head of the reformed Church that saw itself as fighting the Whore of Babylon, servant of Antichrist, of Roman Catholicism, was openly identified by several of her prelates with the Virgin foretold in the Book of Revelation who would oppose Antichrist: and the common courtly identification of her with Astraea, as in the poems of Sir John Davies or the Rainbow Portrait at Hatfield is not pure hyperbole but as a metaphor by which contemporary political hopes and fears might be understood. For the Prince, the Queen, had two Bodies, one clothed in this muddy vesture of decay, mortal, the other, not visible to mortal sight, eternal and beautiful. It is that second body that is portrayed in the Astraea mode. The painting, like Davies’ poems, is emblematic, not representational, witty, allusive, coded,—and meaning has to be projected onto it by viewer who knows his mythology. The portrait, the poem and th4e compliments are part of a programme of construction of political mythology.

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Revenge and the revenge play In the years around 1600, the idea of revenge is used extensively in drama, and there is a special subgenre of tragedy called revenge tragedy, with quite rigid conventions and formulae. The issues are these:

1. In Deutoronomy xxxii, which St Paul quotes (Romans xii.19), ‘Vengeance is mine,

I will repay, saith the Lord.’ This is a promise: ‘I will repay’. It is also a prohibition: ‘Vengeance is mine – keep your hands off’. The predicament of the revenger as tragic hero is that he has enormous social pressure on him to exact what Francis Bacon called ‘wild justice’, but if he does so he breaks God’s command and risks damning himself. In other words, those who will not do God’s work become His tools: for the guilty are, in a blackly comic way, thus punished. But the revenger damns himself, as Hamlet fears… 2. The second issue is that which we find at the heart of most of the revenge plays. If the injured party must exercise Christian patience, to whom should he look for ‘justice’? To the State or the Prince, of course, for the Sate or the Prince is God’s vice-gerent on earth in much good renaissance political theory. But what if the state, as in Hamlet, Revenger’s Tragedy, Spanish Tragedy etc. etc. is itself the criminal…? 3. So do we take arms in such a case against a sea of troubles? But if we do (Hamlet, Vindice), we become as bad as that against which we are acting: the revenger of regicide becomes a regicide, the exacter of justice destroys all that that justice stood for by the very tools that were used against his family in the first place. 4. Early modern culture depended a great deal on private contract, fidelity, honesty – on honour. Honour might demand the exaction of revenge., Yet that revenge is internecine, and strikes at the heart of social peace – the very thing that those bonds between men and women were meant to maintain. 5. Finally, ‘wild justice’: can a State, which claims a monopoly of justice and violence, ever tolerate private justice? Yet if it forbids the exaction of a debt of honour, the maintenance of a self-image, it denies the very thing that cements it as an institution. The sixteenth and seventeenth century repetition of statutes against duelling suggest that 1) they were ineffective and 2) the problem was perceived as acute.

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Three Unities Unity of Time—the represented action should be no more than 24 hours; Unity of Place—the action represented should take place within a single building or a single city—ideally, one scene; and Unity of Action—no subplots: there should be simply one story. These rules were derived as ideals for drama to follow from apparent hints in the Poetics of Aristotle by the late fifteenth and sixteenth century Italian critics: Castelvetro is especially important. They had a great effect on neo-Classic drama, especially in France.

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Fortune The obvious unpredictability, changefulness, and impermanence of worldly life and affairs was allegorised by late Antiquity as the goddess Fortune. She is a common figure in mediaeval and renaissance art, and is usually represented as a queen, blindfolded, sometimes standing on a turning ball, often in the sea, with ships being wrecked behind her. Equally often she is shown blindfold, turning a wheel on which human figures rise and fall. The finest discussion of Fortune and her relation to the order of the world is in Book 2 of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, written about 524AD. This book was very well known – deservedly – for over a thousand years: it was translated by Alfred the Great, Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth, as well as a host of less august figures. Shakespeare cannot have been ignorant of Boethius’ discussion. In Book II of the Consolation, Boethius talks about Stoic philosophy. On the one hand, the tumult and emptiness of the world is shown through the allegory of Fortune; on the other, the necessity of fortitude and self-reliance for the wise man is demonstrated. Fortune’s fickleness is part of her very nature, and if she were not so, she would not be Fortune. She is made to defend herself; however much, she says, she gave men, they would never Engraving by Hans Sebald Behaim, 1541 be satisfied, and she gives only of her own and has a perfect right to take back what is her own. Change is necessary to life itself. Lady Philosophy, thus having shown that happiness can not be dependent on fortune, states the first prerequisite of happiness; to possess peace of soul and to be master of oneself amid the changes of Fortune; to recognize true and false ‘felicity’. She then discusses the specific gifts of fortune – riches, fame, dignity are all useless. But Fortune, says Philosophy, can teach men through adversity and show them who their true friends are. At the end of the book Philosophy states that there is something far greater than Fortune and her gifts, and in the last poem of the book first speaks of the ‘bond of love’ that binds the universe together. (Reading Boethius is highly recommended.) (to return to the main text please use the green button

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Emblems The small form of the emblem became extremely fashionable in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, like the equally fashionable small forms of the medal, the epigram or the sonnet, delighted in compressing much into little. Its strict form had three parts: a pithy motto or quotation (the inscriptio), an often enigmatical picture, and verses below (the subscription), and the complex meaning is contained in no one but in the way they react with each other. The emblems provided a common field of reference, a sort of shorthand that could be used in all sorts of areas from plays to poems to pageants to painting to interior decoration. A lot of early emblem books and handbooks of symbol are available in inexpensive reprints or on the Web. See for example Cesarae Ripa’s Iconologia, Alciato’s Emblematum Liber, or Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes. The discussions in E. H. Gombrich’s Norm and Form (London, 1978) and Symbolic Images (London, 1972) are invaluable. See also my A Century of Emblemes, Curiously Culled and Delicately Displayed (London, 1988)

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Truth daughter of Time The phrase originates in Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, and the topic is a very frequent one indeed in Renaissance art and in the small form of the emblem. Veritas filia Temporis is formulated many times as an emblem, where Truth recovers his daughter from the prison or well in which she has been falsely imprisoned. The illustration shows a page from Geffrey Whitney’s Collection of Emblems (1586).   Winter’s Tale (5.iii) is one more example of a powerful and polarising use of an allusion to emblem in staging a play. The vindicated Hermione is called out of her curtained recess, and is restored to a Leontes older by sixteen years. Hermione’s statue called into life not only refers us via delicate allusion to the awakening of art by art and grace in Ovid’s story of Pygmalion; it also composes itself on stage into something heavily dependent for its full emotional and moral force on the audience’s visual memory of this emblem of Truth as the Daughter of Time.

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Humanism The great intellectual movement known as humanism developed in Renaissance Italy and spread all over Europe. The humanists stressed the moral value of the Greek and Latin classics, which, despite their being written in a pagan culture, contained both all the lessons one needed to lead a moral and effective life and the best models for a powerful Latin style—and the use of words mattered, for from words came persuasion, and from persuasion, power and the political life. They developed a new, rigorous kind of classical scholarship, which they applied to Greek and Roman works, some long know, some recently rediscovered. Both the republican elites of Florence and Venice and the ruling families of Milan, Ferrara, and Urbino hired humanists to teach their children classics and to write elegant, classical letters, histories—and propaganda. During the fifteenth century, the humanists also convinced most of the popes that the papacy needed their skills—some popes were themselves notable scholars. Sophisticated classical scholars were hired to write official correspondence and propaganda, to create an image of the popes as powerful, enlightened, modern rulers of the Church; and to apply their scholarly tools to the church’s needs, including writing a more classical form of the Mass. The relation between popes and scholars was never simple, for the humanists evolved their own views on theology. Some argued that pagan philosophers like Plato basically agreed with Christian revelation. Others criticized important Church doctrines or institutions that lacked biblical or historical support. Some even seemed in danger of becoming pagans. The humanists laid great stress on the value of the human, on the importance of individuals, and on education. Many stressed the folly of many political actions (especially war), the inequity of women’s position, and their right to education as much as men. They also saw the end of education as the pursuit of virtue, and the end of virtue as virtuous action in the community.

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Machiavelli / The Machiavel Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) was a Florentine statesman, historian and philosopher, who in all probability would have been largely ignored except by scholars had it not been for a little book he wrote on the management of the state. Il Principe (1513) is undoubtedly the fruit of his deep researches into Roman history (especially the work of Livy), as well as an analysis of recent Italian history. It is an attempt to describe (and prescribe) how politics work in practice rather than how they should work in theory. The notion of an Order in the Universe which embraces and is mirrored in the human state is not so much rejected as ignored: Machiavelli is interested in providing a manual of effective political conduct for a modern ruler anxious to secure and maintain his position. (He is writing, of course, with particular reference to his idea­listic desire for a ruler who would unite a divided Italy and drive all foreigners from its territory.) Conventional morality—justice, honour, mercy, truth, all the King-becoming graces Malcolm lists in Macbeth 5.iii.91ff. ––are thrown aside. The sole criterion by which a ruler should govern is usefulness, and he sees the duplicity and intrigue by which Cesare Borgia operated as admirable because they were effective. The end justifies the means. The book caused an outraged reaction: some went so far as to claim it was inspired by the Devil, and a crop of replies reasserted the old values. Some people, of course, only knew the original through the replies to it, but by the middle of the century translations were circulating, in manuscript at least, in most of Europe. Machiavelli’s was one of those books that everybody professes horror of and reads under the bedclothes; his very name became an English noun, the Machiavel, signifying an utterly amoral, clever villain. The policies of a number of Elizabethan politicians—Thomas Cromwell, Cecil, Leicester—were influenced in some degree by his book, and Francis Bacon, Walter Ralegh and ; Christopher Marlowe all made some intelligent use of it, even if occasionally gingerly. The horror arose not only from moral principles, but from a re­cognition that no system has a defence against the man who refuses consent to it. Machiavelli’s ignoring of the obligations of Degree, and : his making the will of the Prince the highest moral imperative, both fascinated and appalled. Suppose a man like Edmund in

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King Lear were to deny consciously all moral restraints on his conduct, all constraints of degree; suppose he were to gain real power, and make the gaining and keeping of that power his only good. Theoretically, the whole creation would turn on him and restore a just and holy equilibrium. But there had always been examples of men who had done just that, and who had survived; some, even, had turned out successful rulers. As Queen Elizabeth’s godson, Sir John Harington, cynically put it, Treason doth never prosper; what’s the reason? If it doth prosper, none dare call it treason. An uncomfortable thought indeed, which eventually would lead to the unravelling of the seamless web of the old world view. One of Shake­speare’s interests in his history plays and tragedies is the testing of the validity of the model as a metaphor for how people behave politically. The question that will not go away is whether the model has any real existence apart from metaphor: whether it is not, in its moral application, just wishful thinking. Machiavelli himself in the popular mind becomes a devilish clever villain, a playhouse Machiavel.



Of the CANNIBALLES Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1544–92), Essais (1595) trans. John Florio (1603), From: 1.xxx, ‘Of the Caniballes’ Now…I finde (as farre as I have beene informed), there is nothing in that nation, that is either barbarous or savage, unless men call that barbarisme which is not common to them. As indeed, we have no other ayme of truth and reason,s than the example and idea of the opinions and customes of the countrie we live in. There is ever perfect religion, perfect policie, perfect and compleat use of all things. They are even savage, as we call those fruits wilde, which nature of her selfe, and of her ordinarie progresse hath produced: whereas indeed, they are those which our selves have altered by our artificiall devices, and diverted from their common order, we should rather terme savage. In those are the true and most profit­able vertues, and naturall properties most lively and vigorous, which in these we have bastardized, applying them to the pleasure of our corrupted taste. And if notwithstanding, in divers fruits of those countries that were never tilled, we shall finde, that in respect of ours they are most excellent, and as delicate unto our taste; there is no reason, art should gaine the point of honour of our great and puissant mother Nature. We have so much by our inventions sur­charged the beauties and riches of her workes, that we have altogether overchoaked her: yet where ever her puritie shineth, she makes our vaine and frivolous enterprises wonderfully ashamed... All our endevour or wit, cannot so much as reach to represent the nest of the least birdlet, it’s contexture, beautie, profit and use, no nor the web of a seely spider. ‘All things’ (saith Plato) ‘are pro­duced, either by nature, by fortune, or by art. The greatest and fairest by one or other of the two first, the least and imperfect by the last.’ Those nations seeme therefore so barbarous unto me, be­cause they have received very little fashion from humane wit, and are yet neere their originall naturalitie. The lawes of nature doe yet command them, which are but little bastardized by ours, and that with such puritie, as I am sometimes grieved the knowledge of it came no sooner to light, at what time there were men, that better than we could have judged of it. I am sorie, Lycurgus and Plato had it not: for me seemeth that what in those nations we see by experience, doth not only exceed all the pictures wherewith licentious Poesie hath proudly imbellished the golden age, and all her quaint inventions to faine a happy

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condition of man, but also the conception and desire of Philosophy. They could not imagine a genuitie so pure and simple, as we see it by experience; nor ever beleeve our societie might be maintained with so little art and humane combination. It is a nation, would I answer Plato, that hath no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no use of service, of riches or of povertie; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle; no respect of kindred, but common, no apparell but naturall, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corne, or mettle. The very words that import lying, falshood, treason, dissimulations, covetousnes, envie, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them. How dissonant would hee finde his imaginarie common-wealth from this perfection? ... Furthermore, they live in a country of so exceeding pleasant and temperate situation, that as my testimonies have told me, it is verie rare to see a sicke body amongst them; and they have further assured me they never saw any man there, either shaking with the palsie, toothlesse, with eies dropping, or crooked and stooping though age.



Magia Magia is the art of understanding and manipulating the seen and unseen universe by a knowledge of the secret harmonies and correspondences, musical and mathematical, that linked the whole web of Creation from the planets in their courses, raining down their ‘influence’ on earth, to the meanest herb that grows. It requires commerce with the unseen spirits of the universe, including the angels, the ministers of God Himself. Its goal is power, but a power to be used selflessly.   Magia, or theurgia must be sharply distinguished from Goetia, which we should call Black Magic. This seeks power too, but for selfish ends and by summoning up, and cooperation with, the powers of darkness. Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, based on a real person, Johann Faust, is an example of a magus who is tempted and falls into the practice of Goetia.   Renaissance people took the high art of magia entirely seriously. There would have been no suspension of disbelief for a Renaissance audience watching The Tempest: they believed that there might be people like Prospero in the offing, in the courts of the great: Dr John Dee, who is one of the models for Prospero, had an enormous reputation, was consulted by Queen Elizabeth, the Sidney circle, invited to Prague by the Emperor Rudolf, and nearly poached from Elizabeth by Ivan the Terrible. Much earlier, the great Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino, or the German Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, familiarly known as Paracelsus, were magi; and their work has affected the world we live in. Serious magical endeavour and serious scientific endeavour are twins of the same birth: and that distinction between science and magic would have been conceptually impossible in Shakespeare’s lifetime.   The endeavour of the religious mystic had been to subdue the self to reality, by prayer and self-discipline and knowledge. For the Renaissance, the problem was how to subdue reality to man’s wishes, to ‘the effecting of all things possible’ (Bacon). The magus sought the technique of doing so by studying arcane lore, by understanding of the secret musical and mathematical harmonies and correspondences that linked all creation, by self-discipline that made him worthy to help along the work of the spirits and Angels, and of God. He was seeking to resume the power over material and spiritual nature lost at Adam’s Fall. If he won this power, moreover, it was dangerous: it could make him angel or devil.Its possession, therefore, must be accompanied by a corresponding growth in the holiness and wisdom of the magus’ mind. (to return to the main text please use the green button

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The Tempest  90

Conceptual index

Action without words, 31 Agriculture and harvest, 35f. Alchemy, 44, 45, 46 Allegory, 27 Ambiguity, 7, 37 Angels and daemons, 42 Apocalypse, ideas of, 27f. Art and illusion, and reality, 40 Art as political tool, 13f. Audience, 23, 27, 31, 35, 40 Author, concepts of, 60 Authorship, 8 Bible, echoes of, 28 British themes, 16 Centre, 45; importance of, 27, 29, 31 Chaos and order, 31 Children, symbolic importance of, 27 Clothes, 40 Clowns, 54f. Colonisation, 53f. ‘Cosmic’ metaphor, 58f. Costume changes, 22 Country houses, 45 Crime, revolt, effects of, 26 Critical positions 6 ff. Dance as symbol, 38, and see the discussion of masque Disguise, 21 ‘doubleness’, 7 Drama and politics, 16 Dramatic language, 23 Education, appropriate, 47ff., 50

Fashion, 22, 27 Form and meaning 29 Free will, 25, 62 Freedom, 43, 44 Future, 61; hope and Providence, 26 Gender in all things, 44 Golden Age, 21 Government, right, 45 Grace and Works, 52 Hierarchy, 45 Humanists and education, 47ff. Illusion, 23, 32, 33 Isle, where it is, 24 James, accession of, 9ff; as monarch, 10ff; as Augustus Caesar, 11–12; selfimage, 41 King as player, 13ff. Language and rule, 56 Machinery, stage, 22 Man as Rational animal, 39 Man, idea of, 42 Marriage, political, 50f. Masque, attitude to, 14, 23; described, 14f. Mastery of self, 36f., 41, 46 Metaphor, sources of, 58; ‘cosmic metaphor’, 58f. Microcosm and macrocosm, 58 Moral restraint, 36ff., 41 Music, 32, 36, 37, 43 Myths, 59 Narrative and time, 26

The Tempest  91

Opinion, public, 16 Parody, 21 Pastoral, 20f.; and politics, 21 Peace policy, James’ 9f. Plato, 13 Player king, 13ff. Politics as art, 13f. Post-tragic, 17f., 26f., 61 Power, cost of, relinquishing of, 40, 41, 44, 51, 52; use of, 54 Preconceptions, 6f. Providence, 26, 28, 40, 61, 62 Prudence, value of for ruler, 48, 50 Reconciliation and refusal, 25, 39 Renaissance mindsets, 6ff. Responsibility, 49f. Revenge, 40 Science,43 Scots, 10 Self-rule 50 Shakespeare, what we don’t know about, 8

Shakespeare’s life, 8 Souls, three, 49 Sources, 24 Spectacle, 32, 35 Spectators, 23 Speech and language, 56 Storm and shipwreck, 27 Structure and meaning 29f. Symbolic names, 18 Symbolism, 12, 13, 32,33, 35, 37 Taste, 9, 22; court and ceremony, 12,13 Teaching, teachers and books, 47ff. Texts and scripts, 60f. Time and Nature in Ovid, 28 Tragedy, 26; revenge, 22 Transformations, 28 Vengeance, Divine, 26 Virtue and action, 49 Westerns, 22 Wildernesses, 24f. Will, 44

Humanities Insights The following Insights are available or forthcoming at: http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk/ General Titles An Inroduction to Feminist Theory An Introduction to Critical Theory An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms

Genre FictionSightlines Octavia E Butler: Xenogenesis / Lilith’s Brood Reginal Hill: On Beulah’s Height Ian McDonald: Chaga / Evolution’s Store Walter Mosley: Devil in a Blue Dress Tamora Pierce: The Immortals

History Insights The British Empire: Pomp, Power and Postcolonialism The Holocaust: Events, Motives, Legacy Lenin’s Revolution Methodism and Society Oliver Cromwell

Literature Insights Conrad: The Secret Agent Eliot, T S: ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ and The Waste Land English Renaissance Drama: Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time Gaskell, Mary Barton Hardy: Tess of the Durbervilles Ibsen: The Doll’s House Hopkins: Selected Poems Ted Hughes: New Selected Poems Lawrence: Sons and Lovers Lawrence: Women in Love Shakespeare: Hamlet Shakespeare: Henry IV Shakespeare: Richard II Shakespeare: Richard III Shakespeare: The Tempest

Shelley: Frankenstein Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads Fields of Agony: English Poetry and the First World War

Philosophy Insights American Pragmatism Contemporary Epistemology Critical Thinking Ethics Existentialism Formal Logic Meta-Ethics Contemporary Philosophy of Religion Philosophy of Sport Plato Wittgenstein History Literature and Philosophy titles also in preparation: India and the British 1757-1947 The Italian Risorgimento The New Deal Lord Palmerston World War II: the North Africa Campaign, 1940-43 Aesthetics Business Ethics Foucault Heidegger Islamic Philosophy Lacan Marxism Mental Causation Philosophy of History Philosophy of Language Philosophy of Mind Plato’s Republic Žižek Renaissance Philosophy Sartre: Existentialism and Humanism Wonder Austen: Pride and Prejudice Blake: Songs of Innocence & Experience and The Marriage of Heaven & Hell’ Chatwin: In Patagonia Eliot, George: Silas Marner