by Emma Smith
Given this established habit, there is no reason for us to doubt the truth of Paulina’s terrible announcement in Act 3 scene 2: ‘The Queen, the Queen, / The sweet’st, dear’st creature’s dead’ (3.2.199–200). Leontes exits the scene saying, ‘Prithee bring me / to the dead bodies of my queen and son’ (233–4). There is no suggestion that he cannot see these bodies (because Hermione is not really dead). Of course, Paulina could wink to the audience, or she could overplay her already histrionic lines in the scene to give us a clue that this is all a performance to punish Leontes’ fatal jealousy – but this isn’t scripted. Antigonus even sees the ghost of Hermione in a dream, an apparent corroboration of what has happened (people in Shakespeare’s plays see ghosts of dead, not living, people, even in dreams). So dramatic irony is suspended. The play tells us Hermione is dead, so Hermione is dead.
It is only after Perdita’s reappearance at court that we hear anything to prepare us for Hermione’s ‘revival’. One of the gentlemen discussing the reunion of father and daughter mentions that Paulina is about to reveal a statue of Hermione, and his interlocutor concurs: ‘I thought she had some great matter there in hand, for she hath privately twice or thrice a day, ever since the death of Hermione, visited that removed house’ (5.2.103–6). It’s a rather late indication of what is to come – with what, ten minutes’ notice? – patched into a narrative which has little need of Hermione, given that its terminal energies are now focused towards the next generation’s recovery of what their elders have lost. Saying that the new generation will make up for the mess of the older is a bit compromised when those older ones are still so present. Two different endings seem to be jostling for narrative precedence here: one that proposes marriage between Florizel and Perdita as the future resolution to the problems of the past; the other, that the past is recuperated in the return of Hermione.
Maybe the strangeness, the unexpectedness, of Hermione’s return, unlike her still-dead counterpart Bellaria in Greene’s Pandosto, should be seen as part of Shakespeare’s wrestling with his source, and with its incestuous element which he is trying to banish from his own comic ending. The hasty way in which Hermione’s survival is reintroduced as a possibility might indeed give us, as sources seem to, a glimpse of Shakespeare at work – but working rather effortfully to shape his material. Perhaps he had not always intended that Hermione would return, but he needs to quash Greene’s incest story, and he does it by providing an alternative mate for Leontes – his ‘dead’ wife, Hermione. ‘It is required / You do awake your faith’ (5.3.94–5), the viewers of ‘that rare Italian master’ Giulio Romano’s statue, are urged (5.2.96). It’s a daring attempt to divert family trauma into the realm of religion, magic and the aesthetic.
CHAPTER 20
The Tempest
Shakespeare wasn’t always ‘Shakespeare’. That’s to say, the plays (and poems) of Shakespeare were not always freighted with the cultural burden of genius we now attribute to their author. They were not always bundled up with English national identity, they were not always set as school texts, they did not always appear in editions bristling with learned footnotes and scholarly exegesis. They did not always elicit that guilty sense that Shakespeare is marvellous in theory, but in truth either too difficult or too boring, or both. These practices and assumptions have their own histories that are not identical with the life of the works themselves. Nothing much happened to Shakespeare’s writings in the year 1741, but it is a watershed for the cultural icon ‘Shakespeare’. On a cold January day, a statue to Shakespeare by the sculptor Peter Scheemakers was placed in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, more than a century after his death in 1616: ‘After an hundred and thirty years’ nap’, rhymed the poet and Shakespeare editor Alexander Pope, one of the project’s enthusiastic champions, ‘Enter Shakespear, with a loud clap.’
The fact of the statue is a landmark in Shakespeare’s growing reputation, and it has since become the most familiar three-dimensional depiction of the poet. More influential still is its particular form. The statue depicts the dramatist, a compact 5′ 6″ in height, leaning his elbow on a pile of books, and pointing to a scroll on which are written a variant of lines from The Tempest:
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.
In context in the play, these lines are delivered by the magician Prospero as he contemplates the dispersal of the magical masque he has prepared for his daughter’s betrothal. As befits their redeployment in the sacred space of the Abbey, the quotation has been rearranged to downplay the words’ instinctive existentialism (Shakespeare is not big on Christian visions of the afterlife), suppressing the line ‘like this insubstantial pageant faded’ (4.1.155) and ending the citation before its famous evocation of worldly evanescence, ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep’ (156–8).
That Prospero’s lines in The Tempest could serve as Shakespeare’s own epitaph gives marble form to a myth eliding the author and his character that began in the Restoration period and continues today. When the writers John Dryden and William Davenant began to ransack Shakespeare’s plays for productions to please the newly opened playhouses, they rewrote The Tempest as The Enchanted Island (1667). There they also connected ‘Shakespeare’s magic’ with that of Prospero. It’s clear that there are suggestive parallels between the art of the playwright and the magic exercised by Prospero in his island dominion. Prospero describes his powers as ‘my art’, and uses magic to make things happen, just as an author uses writing. Prospero moves the shipwrecked Italians around his island stage in order to create pleasing dialogues and meaningful encounters, just as an author handles his or her characters, or a director his or her actors. Prospero controls both the present and the other characters’ pasts: in a long narrative scene in the play’s first act, he gives the background to the story – in the compelling account of his brother Antonio’s usurpation of the dukedom, his own subsequent exile with his daughter Miranda, and of the spirit Ariel imprisoned in a tree by the witch Sycorax, mother of Caliban (discussed as diegesis, rather than mimesis, in the chapter on The Winter’s Tale). Many of these recounted events have no independent corroboration. It is almost as if Prospero is inventing all these characters, fleshing out a backstory for them, to develop the force of his creation. In Peter Greenaway’s inventively baroque film adaptation, Prospero’s Books (1991), this idea is interpreted by having Prospero voice all the lines. He (played by John Gielgud) begins the film by writing, in exquisitely precise early modern handwriting with a sharp quill, the play’s opening speeches: ‘Boatswain!/Here master. What cheer’? (1.1.1–2). The play continues this meta-theatrical tone. The speech after the wedding masque is steeped in the language of theatre: ‘revels’, ‘actors’, ‘pageant’, and, above all, the name of Shakespeare’s own company playhouse, ‘the great globe itself’ (4.1.148, 155, 153). For readers eager for biographical interpretations, the idea that Prospero articulates Shakespeare’s own farewell to his art has been irresistible.
Key to this association is the insistent idea that The Tempest is Shakespeare’s last play. The evidence here, as elsewhere in Shakespeare’s career, is patchy. Although it definitely dates from towards the end of Shakespeare’s active theatrical work in London, there is no definitive external evidence to confirm that The Tempest, written and performed in 1610–11, is Shakespeare’s final play. We can’t completely guarantee its place amid the other late plays The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, either of which could be later. It is because we want the play’s closing movement to read as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage that we place The Tempest at the end of Shakespeare’s career, and then we use that position to affirm that the play must dramatize Shakespeare’s own feelings at the
end of his career. We know that Shakespeare worked with John Fletcher on The Two Noble Kinsmen and All is True and the lost ‘Cardenio’, based on Don Quixote, afterwards, so The Tempest was certainly not his last writing for the stage.
Nevertheless, we have wanted to invest in Prospero’s epilogue, which articulates his own freedom in terms of being liberated from his theatre-prison, as a version of what Greek theatre called ‘parabasis’, a digression in which the author addressed the audience directly. In fact, the epilogue does a more conventional job in scripting the bridge between role and actor, acknowledging the audience and soliciting applause:
Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint. Now ’tis true
I must be here confined by you
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got,
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from your bands
With the help of your good hands,
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
(Epilogue)
The vocabulary here – of release, despair, prayer, faults, indulgence – connects farewell with liberation, but also with death. On the one hand, this epilogue completes a comedy, but on the other, its momentum is death-driven. Prospero has already admitted that on his return to Milan, ‘Every third thought shall be my grave’ (5.1.315). It’s a melancholic reading beautifully amplified in W. H. Auden’s poetic meditation on The Tempest, ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ (1944). Part of Auden’s poem, ‘Prospero to Ariel’, sees the magus at the end of the play addressing the newly freed spirit and admitting
I am glad I have freed you,
So at last I can really believe I shall die.
For under your influence death is inconceivable.
In these readings, and others like them, Prospero’s farewell is not only Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage, but his dying breath, signalled by his liberation of the life-spirit Ariel.
There’s a small inconvenience in this interpretation, given that Shakespeare does not die for at least another five years, but let that pass. It may seem too pedantic to observe that the last of Shakespeare’s words performed on the stage were almost certainly not this valedictory epilogue from Prospero, but the rather unsonorous lines of Duke Theseus at the end of The Two Noble Kinsmen: ‘Let’s go off / And bear us like the time’ (5.6.136–7: this play also has an epilogue, but most scholars attribute that to Fletcher as co-author). Further, ideas of Shakespeare’s decisive retirement from the stage may have been exaggerated. In 1613 Shakespeare bought property in Blackfriars, near to the theatre. This is the first time he appears to have purchased property 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 supposedly returning from retirement to resume active life as Duke of Milan).
We can see here, then, that chronology and interpretation become mutually enforcing and mutually constitutive. The Tempest must be Shakespeare’s last play, because it depicts his own renunciation of the art of theatre in the guise of Prospero; because Prospero is Shakespeare, The Tempest must be Shakespeare’s last play. We can extend this to notice that all authorial chronologies, including the one traced by the order of the chapters in this book, are in a sense biographical ones. The Tempest is not the only play to have its meaning determined by its assumed place in Shakespeare’s writing career: early plays are read through the lens of youth, inexperience and experimentation, whereas later ones carry associations of summation, detachedness and philosophizing. For some reason we don’t yet understand, The Tempest was the first play in the collected volume of the First Folio of 1623: this led earlier commentators, not unreasonably, to assume that it was Shakespeare’s first, rather than his last, play, and to judge it accordingly. This critical moment offers a revealing insight into critics finding what they expect to find. When seen as an early play, The Tempest’s brevity became the sign of immaturity, rather than a sign of advanced refinement and compression. The fact that it deals fleetingly with issues dealt with elsewhere in his work was suggestive of a first attempt, and so too its flat characterization was seen as more akin to that of early comedies.
Readings of The Tempest as Shakespeare’s last play, by contrast, recast these same observations within a framework of the culturally charged associations of lateness. For many critics, it has seemed a summation or retrospective on his career. Unusually for Shakespeare there is no major source for this play – but perhaps we should see the play as cannibalistic (calibanistic?) in reusing themes and motifs from his own oeuvre. It’s a retelling of Hamlet in the context of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: a revenge quest between brothers in which forgiveness ultimately trumps violence through an encounter with the magical. Its young lovers recall Shakespeare’s comedies; its magus figure recalls the patriarchs Lear and Pericles; its structure – conforming to the unities of time, place and action – recalls The Comedy of Errors.
These Shakespearean echoes suggest that, as in other plays of this final period, Shakespeare is revisiting the themes and influences of his early career in the 1590s – and not just his own plays. In some ways, The Tempest’s closest kin is the devilish Dr Faustus, by his brilliant contemporary Marlowe. Like Prospero, Faustus is a man of great learning who turns to magic, promising desperately to burn his books just as Prospero anticipates drowning his. Shakespeare’s imitation of and rivalry with Marlowe plots the course of his early career, as he writes Richard III in the shadow of The Jew of Malta, Richard II to Marlowe’s Edward II, and Venus and Adonis to Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. Marlowe’s violent death in 1593 gives Shakespeare the artistic space to develop his own style, but it also makes it impossible for him to supersede the now legendary young playwright who will never grow old.
One way of reading these echoes of the 1590s is to suggest that Shakespeare has run out of steam. While lateness can imply a career zenith, it also has the more negative connotations of a decline from earlier achievement or prowess. Think of Wordsworth, or Hardy, or Morrissey, or Hitchcock, or Elvis, as artists who become less rather than more, and think of those artists, like Keats or Schubert or Plath or Kurt Cobain, whose work has taken on a particular doomed brilliance because they died before they had time to get dull. The Bloomsbury writer Lytton Strachey proposed that in The Tempest Shakespeare was ‘getting bored’ with his own art, and that he couldn’t really be bothered here about the characters or situation: only the poetry itself, says Strachey, now interests him. It’s a view of dramatic decline echoed by Gary Taylor in a newspaper article headlined ‘Shakespeare’s midlife crisis’. Taylor argues 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.’ Collaborations with John Fletcher become, in this revisionist argument, a desperate attempt by a worn-out writer to piggyback 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).
Taylor’s argument is challenging precisely because it is so unexpected. Far more prevalent as a response to the apparently chronological phenomenon of lateness is the suggestion of summation, a high point, a culmination of wisdom and humanity. In this reading, Prospero’s own wisdom leads hi
m to forgive Antonio rather than punish him, and to renounce his magic rather than continue it. He therefore occupies an ethical high ground that we can then associate with the beneficent Shakespeare himself. Edward Dowden, writing in a hugely influential intellectual biography of Shakespeare at the end of the nineteenth century, exemplifies this association, arguing that it is because ‘the grave harmony of [Prospero’s] 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 Shakspere as discovered to us in all his latest plays’. Again, Dowden’s argument is beautifully circular. Prospero reminds us of Shakespeare because his character constructs our idea of what Shakespeare must have been like. The association of Prospero and Shakespeare is likewise syllogistic: 1. Prospero is a good guy. 2. Shakespeare is a good guy. 3. Therefore Prospero is Shakespeare. Syllogisms work, or rather don’t, because two truthful propositions that are not causally connected are placed into a faux logical sequence to generate a third. But was the proposition even truthful? So far I’ve approached the question of the connection between Shakespeare and Prospero via Shakespeare: what about via Prospero?
The primary impulse behind early modern dramaturgy – indeed, behind early modern writing more generally – is rhetorical rather than autobiographical. The reliance on pre-existing literary sources, as we’ve seen in chapters on Measure for Measure, on Antony and Cleopatra and on Hamlet, makes playwriting an experience of crafting as much as invention (the term ‘playwright’, with its associations with artisanal workers like ‘wheelwright’ or ‘cartwright’, was coined during this period by the dramatist Ben Jonson). Humanist grammar-school education, such as Shakespeare’s at King Edward school in Stratford-upon-Avon, as we’ve seen in previous chapters, stressed the techniques of arguing in utramque partem, on both sides of the question: it didn’t matter what your personal feelings were, your task was to make a particular position or worldview compelling. No literature of this period has the revelation of the artist’s own inner feelings as its legible core, and drama even less so, where the animation of different voices and different people is more important than the single narrative consciousness of, say, the traditional novel or lyric poem.