Finally, Hollywood and Shakespeare's theater share a penchant for make-believe and fantasy: neither is drawn to grittily realistic drama. Just as the historians of the future would gain a very strange view of early twenty-first-century culture from, say, reading the Harry Potter films or the Bourne Trilogy or Sex in the City as mirror-images of everyday life, so too it is over-simplistic to look for direct reflections of Elizabethan or Jacobean experience in the drama of the period. Early modern women did not dress in men's clothing to resolve difficulties, nor did all couples fall in love at first sight, nor did family disputes end in carnage, or women substitute for each other in a man's bed, any more than men have asses' heads or identical twins wheel round a city ignorant of each other's existence. The body-strewn stage at the end of Hamlet or Titus Andronicus is an indication of the literary genre of tragedy, not of a more violent society.
Drama, like Hollywood, is the world of pretense. People went to the theater not to see realist or familiar worlds represented, but rather to experience strange things: as Thomas Platter, himself a tourist visiting the Globe theater in 1599 observed, “the English for the most part do not travel much, but prefer to learn foreign matters and take their pleasures at home.”7 Like Hollywood, the theater district of Bankside was a sort of dream factory: as Puck tells the audience at the very end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, “think … you have but slumbered here, / While these visions did appear; / And this weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream” (Epilogue, 2–6). Apart from The Merry Wives of Windsor and the induction to The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare never set a play in contemporary England, and never in the metropolitan London of his audiences. In this he bucked the fashion for the so-called ‘city comedy’ of Thomas Middleton or John Marston, a genre still shaped by conventions and stock motifs, but one taking the morals and locale of London itself as its main theme. Instead, Shakespeare's plays draw extensively on literary sources and generic models, and almost all of his drama could be broadly classified as “adaptation,” reworking existing texts, omnivorously transforming his material into the new medium of theater.
The similarities between Hollywood and the early modern theater may seem to make this myth true: were Shakespeare writing now he would be writing for films. But there is one major difference between these two media that compromises this conclusion. The early modern theater was, particularly in the first half of Shakespeare's career, a theater of words, in which verbal artistry was more important than visual artistry (see Myth 8). The phrasing is indicative when, in The Taming of the Shrew the tinker Christopher Sly is persuaded he is a lord and is to be shown a play: “your doctors … thought it good you hear a play / And frame your mind to mirth and merriment” (Induction 2, 127–31). The opposite is true of Hollywood cinema, where images—locations, expressions, interactions—are more significant than dialogue in conveying meaning. Budding screenwriters are advised to keep their scripts short, at about a page a minute, averaging around 20,000 words. Only The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare's shortest play, is anywhere near the length of script required by a film. Shakespeare's plays move along at about 800–900 lines an hour in the modern theater, and thus they are around three hours long. Perhaps it is this relative unimportance of the script in Hollywood cinema that would make it ultimately impossible for a modern Shakespeare to choose this medium. So what would he write? Not novels (too directive); not poetry or theater (too elite). Maybe radio? The pictures, as they say, are better.
Notes
1 Tanya Pollard, extracting Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) in Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 121.
2 Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 52–4 (p. 52).
3 Quoted in Pollard, Shakespeare's Theater, p. 245.
4 John Manningham's Diary, 1602, quoted in King Richard III, ed. Janis Lull (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 24.
5 The revenging father in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy; see Myth 1.
6 Peter Thomson, “Tarlton, Richard (d. 1588),” Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
7 http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/16century/topic_4/tplatter.htm
Myth 20
The Tempest was Shakespeare's farewell to the stage
In 1740 a life-size statue commemorating Shakespeare was erected in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. The dramatist leans his elbow on a pile of books, and points to a scroll on which is written a variant of Prospero's valedictory lines in The Tempest (4.1.152–6): “The Cloud capt Tow'rs, / The Gorgeous Palaces, / The Solemn Temples, / The Great Globe itself, / Yea all which it Inherit, / Shall Dissolve; And like the baseless Fabrick of a Vision / Leave not a wreck behind.”1 The text serves as an epitaph for the playwright, and their original speaker in the play becomes a transparent mask for Shakespeare himself: the myth that Shakespeare wrote his own farewell in The Tempest here receives concrete—or rather marble—form.
The Tempest is one of Shakespeare's last plays. It tells the story of a magician, Prospero, who lives on an island with his daughter Miranda, having been exiled from his dukedom in Milan by his brother Antonio. Prospero causes Antonio, his friend Sebastian and ally Alonso, together with Alonso's son Ferdinand, to be shipwrecked on his island. With the help of his airy spirit-servant Ariel, Prospero subjects his enemies to various magical punishments, brings Ferdinand to woo Miranda, and finally confronts his brother, whom Ariel prompts him to forgive rather than chastise: “The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” (5.1.27–8). Vowing, in elegiac tone, to give up his powers and to drown his books of sorcery, Prospero prepares to return to Milan to take up his dukedom.
That this play might serve as a kind of allegory for Shakespeare as playwright is an interpretation with a long critical history—dating back to the first adaptation of The Tempest by John Dryden and William Davenant, Restoration dramatists adept in reworking Shakespeare's plays for the tastes of the late seventeenth century. Writing in the Prologue to their The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island (1667), they acknowledge “Shakespear's Magick” as the equivalent of Prospero's. The analogy is developed through eighteenth-century criticism, which entrenched the view of Prospero as a portrait of the artist as an old man, and, necessarily, constructed a highly positive reading of Prospero's character. Edward Dowden, writing at the end of the nineteenth century in an influential intellectual biography of Shakespeare, is exemplary:
It is not chiefly because Prospero is a great enchanter, now about to break his magic staff, to drown his book deeper than ever plummet sounded, to dismiss his airy spirits, and to return to the practical service of his Dukedom, that we identify Prospero in some measure with Shakespeare himself. It is rather because the temper of Prospero, the grave harmony of his character, his self-mastery, his calm validity of will, his sensitiveness to wrong, his unfaltering justice, and, with these, a certain abandonment, a remoteness from the common joys and sorrows of the world, are characteristic of Shakespeare as discovered to us in all his latest plays.2
Dowden's argument is beautifully circular, even syllogistic. Prospero reminds us of Shakespeare because his character constructs our idea of what Shakespeare must have been like: 1. Prospero is a good guy. 2. Shakespeare is a good guy. 3. Therefore Prospero is Shakespeare. (Or perhaps it is 1, 3, 2; or even 3, 2, 1.)
Despite the logical fallacy of Dowden's argument, there are, as Davenant and Dryden identified, parallels between Prospero's art of magic and the art of the theater. The play's first scene is a good example. The dramatic opening stage direction, A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard: Enter a Ship-master and a Boatswain, pitches us into the pitch and roll of the eponymous tempest, as the bewildered passengers on the storm-tossed ship listen to the mariners exchanging increasingly desperate and technical instructions: “take in the topsail” (1.1.6), “down with the topmast! Yare” (1.1.33), “we split, we split�
�� (1.1.59). We think we are in the middle of a “real” storm, but the next scene reveals that this was a theatrical illusion, magicked up by Prospero from the island to bring his enemies into his power. The seafarers were never in danger: the events looked believable but were created out of a few props and a believable script. As in a play, events happen, controlled by an unseen dramatist, to further a yet unknown plot. Throughout the play Prospero controls the other characters like a playwright, filling out their back-stories, creating encounters by bringing them together or keeping them apart, and creating a denouement in which all is revealed. He refers to his magic as “mine art” (1.2.292) and uses theatrical props—a disappearing banquet table, a line of glistering apparel (stage direction, 4.1.193), a play-within-a-play for the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda. And when he vows to give up his magic the speech, represented on the Poets' Corner monument, seems to draw on the language of theater, in particular in its evocation of the “great globe” (4.1.153; the name of the Shakespeare company theater on Bankside).
Saying that Prospero's role in the play is akin to that of a dramatist does not, however, mean he is a Shakespearean self-portrait. Other figures elsewhere in the canon share these qualities—Iago, the arch-plotter of Othello; the Duke who manipulates events in the guise of a friar in Measure for Measure; Paulina, the keeper of secrets in The Winter's Tale—and we might see the self-reflexivity of The Tempest alongside that of Hamlet or A Midsummer Night's Dream, both of which perform inset plays which occasion commentary on the nature of theater and the blurred lines between illusion and reality. But the idea that Prospero is a picture of Shakespeare has drawn strength from the persistent claim that The Tempest is the playwright's final play before retiring to Stratford. Prospero's farewell to his magic becomes Shakespeare's to the theater, and the Epilogue's poignant appeal for “release” (Epilogue, 9), forgiveness, and applause a final curtain-call for the King's Men's superannuated playwright.
In fact we do not know that The Tempest, written and performed in 1610–11, is Shakespeare's final play: no reliable external evidence can guarantee its order alongside the other late plays The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline. It is because we want the Epilogue to read as Shakespeare's farewell to the stage that we place The Tempest at the end of Shakespeare's career, and then use that position to affirm that the play must dramatize Shakespeare's own feelings. We know that he worked on Two Noble Kinsmen and All Is True with John Fletcher afterwards, so it was certainly not his last writing for the stage. In fact his last performed words may have been Theseus's rather unsonorous “Let's go off / And bear us like the time” (5.6.136–7) at the end of Two Noble Kinsmen (most scholars attribute the Epilogue to that play to Fletcher as co-author). And we also know that in 1613 Shakespeare bought property in Blackfriars near to the theater—the first time he appears to have purchased in London—thus giving the lie to the sentimental idea that he was withdrawing from the hurly-burly to the quiet of Stratford (and setting aside that the movement for Prospero is quite the opposite: he is returning from retirement to active life as Duke of Milan). It has been suggested that Prospero is Shakespeare the actor, retiring from the fray to concentrate on writing, perhaps on preparing his own complete works like his rival Ben Jonson (see Myth 4); relatedly, the position of The Tempest as the first play in the First Folio (1623) has been read as a recognition that in it Shakespeare asserts an authorial identity. But even if external evidence did not compromise the reading of Prospero as Shakespeare, it is still an anachronistic assumption that any early modern dramatist ever wrote autobiographically (see Myths 7, 10, and 18). Instead, as we have repeated in the essays in this book, the ability to see issues from multiple perspectives and to make competing world views equally compelling is intrinsic to successful dramaturgy, is encouraged by the rhetorical training of the Elizabethan grammar schools, and is appropriate to a culture in which literary expression was public and participatory rather than private and confessional.
The readings of The Tempest that draw on the play's place in an assumed chronology of Shakespeare's writings are not, however, unique to this play. Writing early in the twentieth century, Lytton Strachey argued strenuously against the chronological assumptions of Victorian scholarship. Strachey countered the general idea that the mind of the artist could be deduced from the character of the art, and in particular scorned the narrative that “after a happy youth [the writing of the comedies] and a gloomy middle age [the tragedies] he reached at last—it is the universal opinion—a state of quiet serenity in which he died.”3 The implications of Strachey's trenchant rejection of this explanatory framework are far-reaching. If The Tempest has benefited from assumptions about the aesthetic values of “lateness,” so too have other plays been pigeonholed though chronological evaluation. As one critic pointedly asks: “how many unexpected virtues would suddenly appear in The Two Gentlemen of Verona if it were proven to date from 1597, or … 1603? Its reliance on duologues and soliloquy, for example, no longer a mark of immaturity, might emerge rather as a strategically disintegrative gesture functioning as a check on conventional romantic momentum”: the counterfactual scenario here sardonically reveals that apparently chronological words like “early,” “late,” and “mature” carry implicit value judgments and predetermine our critical response.4 We prefer a chronology that places the mechanicals' bathetic love tragedy of “Pyramus and Thisbe” (the inset play in A Midsummer Night's Dream), in which the lovers mistakenly kill themselves each believing the other to be dead, after its more somber equivalent of Romeo and Juliet, but there is no external evidence to certify this order. We expect the earliest history plays, 2 and 3 Henry VI, to show immaturity when compared with the later ones, and, lo and behold, the plays' depiction of claim and counter-claim in the Wars of the Roses seems to support that expectation. Modern collected editions of Shakespeare's plays, in particular the Oxford Shakespeare (edited by Wells and Taylor) and the Norton Shakespeare which followed its text, often order the plays by presumed chronology. While this gives readers used to the generic divisions of the First Folio of 1623 some unexpected and fruitful juxtapositions—attitudes to battle and to courtship in the adjacent Much Ado About Nothing and Henry V, for instance, or the bleak fairy-tale of the revised King Lear (see Myth 24) alongside Cymbeline—it ultimately privileges an implicitly biographical reading: the chronology is that of the author's life.
Strachey proposes commercial rather than autobiographical imperatives: attentive to the fairy-tale aspects of Shakespeare's last plays, he argues that their happy endings show an awareness of genre rather than “serene tranquillity on the part of their maker.” If they reveal anything about Shakespeare's mind, it is that “he was getting bored”; “he is no longer interested, one often feels, in what happens, or who says what, so long as he can find place for a faultless lyric or a new, unimagined rhythmical effect, or a grand and mystic speech.”5 Whereas many scholars wanted to establish The Tempest as Shakespeare's last play and to read into that position a corresponding and culminatory wisdom, the play as the benign and humane pinnacle of his dramatic career, Strachey sees it here as a decline. Shakespeare is losing his touch, rather than ascending some mystical poetic throne. It's a view echoed in more prosaic terms a hundred years later in a newspaper article by Gary Taylor. Under the headline “Shakespeare's Midlife Crisis,” Taylor argued that after a period of high commercial popularity in the 1590s, Shakespeare's career after 1600 was in the doldrums. “Like many other has-beens,” Taylor continues provocatively, “Shakespeare in his 40s tried to rescue his sinking reputation by recycling his 20s and 30s.”6 His collaborations with John Fletcher become, in this revisionist argument, a desperate attempt by a worn-out writer to piggy-back on a younger one (rather than, as they have tended to be seen, the work created by an apprentice working under the supervision of the old master: see Myth 24).
So, reading The Tempest as Shakespeare's farewell to the stage is not supported by the evidence about Shakespeare's career, and imposes an anachr
onistically autobiographical framework on dramatic writing. It is also, as noted above, crucially dependent on a reading of Prospero's character as benevolent sage, attentive to his only daughter, using his learning to bring about harmony and reconciliation, forgiving rather than punishing those who have done him wrong. In fact, this positive interpretation overlooks problematic aspects of Prospero's characterization, and these can be discussed in relation to his “slave” Caliban.
Since at least the late nineteenth century when the scholar Sidney Lee discussed knowledge of the New World in early modern England, The Tempest has been connected with stories of exploration and, more distantly, with the early colonization of the Americas. This reading of the play has gained ground, particularly because of significant post-colonial rewritings—among them the Martinique poet Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête (1969)—of its parable of language, domination, and defeat. When the French/Madagascan psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni's book Psychologie de la colonalisation was translated into English in 1956, it had the title Prospero and Caliban. We might sum up the shift in criticism by pointing to the difference between Frank Kermode, introducing the second Arden edition of the play in 1954 with the brisk “it is as well to be clear that there is nothing in The Tempest fundamental to its structure of ideas which could not have existed had America remained undiscovered,” and Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan's perspective in the third edition of the Arden series in 1999: “the extensive and varied discourses of colonialism, many critics argue, are deeply embedded in the drama's language and events” such that the play is “a theatrical microcosm of the imperial paradigm.”7 A similar shift in interpretative priorities has taken place in the theater. After Jonathan Miller's 1970 staging of the play it has been hard to recover a sympathetic Prospero unmarked by colonial guilt. As reviewers described that landmark production, Prospero was “a solemn and touchy neurotic, the victim of a power complex” who “has arrogated to himself the god-like power of the instinctive colonist … by the end the cycle of colonialism is complete: Ariel, the sophisticated African, picks up Prospero's discarded wand, clearly prepared himself to take on the role of bullying overlord.”8 Recent Prosperos have tended to be so unpleasant that any association with Shakespeare would reflect very badly on the playwright himself.
30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Page 17