by Emma Smith
Nevertheless, in The Tempest Shakespeare does not quite comply with this view of the drama: here, perhaps uniquely (maybe Hamlet or Richard III might be interesting comparisons), his interest seems only really engaged by the main character, not spread more widely. There are a gallery of two-dimensional functional figures flanking him, but Prospero is the focus throughout: Ferdinand and Miranda have little of the energy and youthful verve we see in earlier romantic couples; Antonio is not a well-developed antagonist; Alonso is recessed and inaccessible. Perhaps we are to understand the play – like that prototype Dr Faustus – as another version of psychomachia, the medieval stage technique of showing the interior of the character through exteriorizing elements into different actors. Certainly, it has been a fruitful theory to see Caliban and Ariel as parts of Prospero that he attempts to keep in check: Caliban, appetitive, earthy and physical; Ariel, fey, spiritual and obedient, a kind of virtuous Tinker Bell. These psychic functions map so clearly onto Freudian and post-Freudian ideas about the id, ego and superego – as the locations of instinct, reality principle and conscience respectively – that it’s tempting to think Shakespeare must have read Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (of course the reality is the other way around). Together this composite character Prospero-Ariel-Caliban speaks almost half the play’s lines.
And, further, there are certainly analogies between Prospero and the dramatist, if not with Shakespeare himself. Prospero’s role in writing the script of his revenge against the enemies picks up a long association in the revenge tragedy genre between the avenger and the artist, which has its clearest iteration right at the beginning of the genre, in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, where Hieronimo enacts his revenge under the guise of a play he has written. The revenger as playwright is a structural and thematic topos of revenge tragedy, the genre which The Tempest works to rewrite by turning to ‘virtue’ rather than ‘vengeance’, under Ariel’s tutelage. Identifying Prospero’s role in the play as akin to that of a dramatist does not, therefore, mean he is a Shakespearean self-portrait, but it does allow us to link him with other directorial figures elsewhere in the plays. It’s striking that these figures tend to be negative ones: 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; Helen, who writes her own romantic comedy script with some decidedly unconvinced actors in All’s Well That Ends Well – all of these controlling figures are at least ambivalent within their own plays. Relatedly, none of them has been identified as a biographical portrait of their playwright. We might also want to assess 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 theatre and the blurred lines between illusion and reality. Outside of Shakespeare’s plays – perhaps it is in these kinds of comparison with other writers that we can best break the hold of implicitly biographical readings – we might compare the theatricality of Prospero’s magic with that of the tricksters in Jonson’s contemporaneous The Alchemist. To associate the magic in The Tempest with theatre, we need not inevitably place Prospero and Shakespeare together.
As we have seen from Edward Dowden, readings that associate Prospero and Shakespeare also produce very positive readings of Prospero’s character. Dowden cites Prospero’s ‘grave harmony’, ‘self-mastery’, ‘calm validity of will’, ‘sensitiveness to wrong’, ‘unfaltering justice’, which perhaps tells us something about late nineteenth-century ideas of the admirable patriarch. More modern critics and theatre directors have seen a somewhat different Prospero: irascible, tyrannical, subjecting Caliban to slavery and Ferdinand to unnecessary physical hardship as part of his deeply felt ambivalence towards Miranda’s marriage. Prospero is preoccupied with Miranda’s chastity, largely because her main function for the plot is to be a virginal token. She will secure his own successful return to Milan, by buying off her new father-in-law, Antonio’s erstwhile supporter. Prospero’s antagonism towards Ferdinand is in part a ruse to bring the couple together (he is trying to play the traditional role of comedy’s blocking paternal figure, like Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Shylock in The Merchant of Venice), but his attitude is in excess of that generic point. ‘If thou dost break her virgin-knot before / All sanctimonious ceremonies may / With full and holy rite be ministered, / No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall / To make this contract grow; but barren hate, / Sour-eyed disdain, and discord, shall bestrew / The union of your bed’ (4.1.15–21). And the marriage of daughters is a source of sorrow and loss more widely in the play: the ill-fated sea voyage which brought the noblemen dangerously close to Prospero’s island was undertaken for the marriage of Alonso’s daughter Claribel: ‘you may thank yourself for this great loss,’ Sebastian berates the king, ‘That would not bless our Europe with your daughter, / But rather loose her to an African’ (2.1.129–31). The absent Claribel, like her unseen counterpart Sycorax of Algiers, articulates the play’s anxious, suppressed interest in international, and particularly colonial, politics.
One way, then, of seeing Prospero is as a distinctly unlikeable, manipulative control freak. The play’s second scene, in which he is introduced, gives us a good example of this behaviour. Here Prospero has to give extensive background for the play to make sense, and as we’ve seen, he does this through a series of lengthy narrations, punctuated by Miranda’s apparent disregard and eventually her falling asleep (albeit by magical intervention). These nervous tics in the narrative – ‘Dost thou attend me?’, ‘Thou attend’st not!’, ‘Dost thou hear?’ (1.2.78, 87, 106) – seem to betray a larger fear that this scene, heavy with narrative, might actually be quite boring. Part of the effect is to establish Prospero as a tyrant, physically, psychologically and dramaturgically. The stories of the past erode the distinction between Prospero’s own supposedly benign and scholarly magic and the malign, feminized magic of Caliban’s mother, the witch Sycorax. Prospero charges Ariel with remembering her cruelties to him:
she did confine thee
By help of her more potent ministers,
And in her most unmitigable rage,
Into a cloven pine; within which rift
Imprisoned thou didst painfully remain
A dozen years
(1.2.275–80)
Prospero released him, but keeps him in servitude under threat of similar imprisonment:
If thou more murmur’st, I will rend an oak,
And peg thee in his knotty entrails till
Thou hast howled away twelve winters.
(1.2.295–7)
The ostensible purpose of this exchange, to establish a moral difference between Prospero and Sycorax, collapses – as their similarities become much more evident than their differences. The Tempest offers an early example of something that becomes a cliché in later magical literature: that good and bad magic (Gandalf / Saruman, Harry Potter / Voldemort) are troublingly similar. Our introduction to Prospero is thus more compromised than Dowden’s positive construction: or, to put it another way, if this Prospero is Shakespeare, we wouldn’t much like Shakespeare. More important is that the association of Prospero with Shakespeare has tended to obscure the ways Prospero is characterized in the play. And it’s in this aspect that the autobiographical readings of earlier scholars have been eclipsed by geopolitical ones. The claim of The Tempest on modern attention rests less on Prospero as playwright, specific or not, and more on him as colonial overlord: this is Prospero less as Shakespeare, and more as slave-master.
The Tempest has long been connected with stories of exploration and, more distantly, with the early colonization of the Americas. Two sources for local aspects of the play both connect it with a discourse of exploration. One, a letter about a shipwreck in the Bermudas, provides some detail for the opening scenes. The French thinker Montaigne’s essay ‘Of Cannibals’ provides Gonzalo with his vision of an ideal commonwealth at the beginning of Act 2, and the
name Caliban may have been intended as an anagram of cannibal, then a generic term for aboriginal peoples. This reading of the play, as a parable of colonial expansion, has gained ground particularly because of significant post-colonial rewritings – among them the Martinique poet Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969) – of its contested fable of language, domination and occupation. 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 1999, writing in the third edition of the Arden series: ‘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’.
A similar shift in interpretative priorities has taken place in the theatre, where recent colonial Prosperos have tended to be so unpleasant that any association with Shakespeare would reflect very badly on the playwright himself. Like The Taming of the Shrew with which we began, The Tempest, then, offers an acute emblem of the themes of this book. We get the Shakespeare we need at different times. Shakespeare’s plays generate questions rather than answers. It is for us, as readers, critics, theatregoers and theatre-makers, to take up their challenge, leverage their restless interrogation and re-imagine them for our own world.
Epilogue
The epilogue is a distinctly Shakespearean genre: a concluding moment when the play is both brought together and dissolved, a paradox of completion and dispersal. The typical epilogue is delivered in a voice that shifts between character and actor: it’s a transitional threshold in the play’s architecture, in which the engaging fiction we’ve been enjoying does a last shimmy with the consciousness that we’ve actually been watching a play. This has all been a ‘dream’, says Robin Goodfellow at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and if you’re satisfied with what you’ve seen, he asks, ‘Give me your hands’ (Epilogue 6, 15). ‘My way is to conjure you’, Rosalind archly explains at the end of As You Like It, ‘to like as much of this play as please you’ (Epilogue 10–13). The final speech of All’s Well That Ends Well suggests that the title’s proverbial premise will only be fulfilled by audience agreement: ‘That you express content’ (Epilogue 3). Prospero asks the audience to release him: ‘Gentle breath of yours my sails / Must fill, or else my project fails, / Which was to please’ (Epilogue 11–13). The call for approval and applause is characteristic: the epilogue is the place in Shakespeare’s plays where the vitally constitutive role of the audience is explicitly acknowledged. Without them – without us – the play is incomplete.
This book has presented a Shakespeare whose plays are constitutionally incomplete. I’ve tried to show how their gappiness and their ambiguities produce creative readings. These radical uncertainties function as dramatic and intellectual cues to readers, playgoers and theatre-makers. Just as these epilogues direct audiences to make up their own minds, so Shakespeare’s characters, plots and unanswered questions provide space for us to think, interrogate and experience different potential outcomes. Shakespeare’s plays aren’t monuments to revere, or puzzles to resolve. They are partial, shifting, unstable survivals from a very different world which have the extraordinary ability to ventriloquize and stimulate our current concerns. Sometimes these may be personal and emotional. I had never really noticed the lines in King Lear when, briefly reunited with Cordelia, Lear predicts their future happiness in prison together: ‘we’ll live, / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / At gilded butterflies’ (5.3.11–13), until my ship-loving grandfather, momentarily lucid in the hospital bed in which he would shortly die, talked to us about the cruise which we would all go on together when he was better. Sometimes they are structural: working recently with actors preparing a new production of Measure for Measure, I spent time again with a scene familiar to me, that awful moment when Angelo, the deputy of Vienna, presents to Isabella an awful bargain: that she might ‘give up [her] body to such sweet uncleanness’ (2.4.54) and thereby save her brother Claudio. We looked at why Isabella does not seem to acknowledge Angelo’s repeated insinuations, seeming even wilfully to misunderstand his language of sin and peril. One woman in the company described how she felt that, facing an encounter that has become unreciprocally sexualized, it was quite recognizable for Isabella to continue to attempt to bring the conversation back to safer ground. We saw that it isn’t necessarily that Isabella is too naïve to understand Angelo’s meaning, more that at first she cannot quite believe that she has indeed understood it correctly, and then that to acknowledge it would be to submit to the danger of her situation. And sometimes they are more clearly political or ethical. In a copy of Shakespeare’s works smuggled into Robben Island, Nelson Mandela wrote his name next to the lines in Julius Caesar:
Cowards die many times before their deaths:
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
(2.2.32–7)
All these examples show how Shakespeare can resonate in particular circumstances, and how we bring to the plays our own emotional, political, ideological and creative energies.
I write this at the end of a long, dry summer in the UK, marked by the re-emergence in the landscape of long forgotten outlines of past buildings and settlements and field systems, visible against the parched ground. It strikes me that there are other outlines just visible in this book too. One might have been a literary biography, structured around Shakespeare the writer: his ongoing engagement with his early rivals, Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, and with collaborators, including Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher, his reading and his influences, his writing changing genre and tone through topical histories and escapist comedies into more existential and then satiric plays in the early years of the seventeenth century, and then into those fairy-tale romances of his final years. Another might have been a more theatrical study, drawing first on the personnel of the Chamberlain’s and King’s Men and the influence of this specific resource on Shakespeare’s writing, and then on later adaptations from John Dryden in Restoration London to Aimé Césaire in post-colonial Martinique, and using more recent performance history to illustrate the changing meanings of Shakespeare’s plays. A third might have been more historical: I’m fascinated by what these plays might have meant to their first audiences and readers, and my interpretations often refer to contemporary cultural issues, about Elizabethan succession politics, religion, social organization and city life. All of these alternative books are just present in the archaeology of this one, but the Shakespeare I have ultimately tried to bring forward is more varied, and more available to different approaches and different reading priorities.
So, this is Shakespeare.
Permissive, modern, challenging, gappy, frustrating, moving, attenuated, beautiful, ambiguous, resourceful, provoking, necessary.
Yours.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
References and Further Reading
Except for the chapter on King Lear, my references to Shakespeare’s works cite the second edition of The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery (Oxford University Press, 2005), though, because editors have to leave things out and make things consistent, I sometimes quote – particularly stage directions – from the early printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays. You can look at individual plays published before 1623 via the British Library:
CHAPTER 1: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
The John Fletcher play The Woman’s Prize, or, The Tamer Tam’d, is available in printed editions, including my Women on the Early Modern Stage (Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, 2014), and online from the Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama:
CHAPTER 2: RICHARD III
John Manningham’s anecdote is quoted from Lois Potter’s The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), which I like among all the many biographies of Shakespeare because it is so rooted in the theatre industry. E. M. W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays was first published in 1944. Trevor Nunn’s nice phrase about the histories as a box set comes from his article in The Guardian of 12 September 2015.