The Tempest: A Critical Reader 9781472593962, 9781472518415

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SERIES INTRODUCTION The drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries has remained at the very heart of English curricula internationally and the pedagogic needs surrounding this body of literature have grown increasingly complex as more sophisticated resources become available to scholars, tutors and students. This series aims to offer a clear picture of the critical and performative contexts of a range of chosen texts. In addition, each volume furnishes readers with invaluable insights into the landscape of current scholarly research as well as including new pieces of research by leading critics. This series is designed to respond to the clearly identified needs of scholars, tutors and students for volumes which will bridge the gap between accounts of previous critical developments and performance history and an acquaintance with new research initiatives related to the chosen plays. Thus, our ambition is to offer innovative and challenging guides that will provide practical, accessible and thought-provoking analyses of early modern drama. Each volume is organized according to a progressive reading strategy involving introductory discussion, critical review and cutting-edge scholarly debate. It has been an enormous pleasure to work with so many dedicated scholars of early modern drama and we are sure that this series will encourage you to read 400-year-old playtexts with fresh eyes. Andrew Hiscock and Lisa Hopkins

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Brinda Charry is Associate Professor of English at Keene State College. Her areas of scholarly interest are early modern globalism and cross-cultural encounter, as well as Indian adaptations of Shakespearean drama. Apart from numerous articles, she is co-editor of the essay collection, Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture – 1550–1700 (Ashgate, 2008), and author of The Tempest – Language and Writing (Arden, 2013). She has also published two novels and a collection of short stories. Andrew Gurr is Professor Emeritus at the University of Reading and former Director of Research at the Shakespeare Globe Centre, London, where for twenty years he chaired the committee that fixed the Globe’s shape and structure. His academic books include The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, now in its fourth edition, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, now in its third, The Shakespearian Playing Companies, The Shakespeare Company 1594–1642, and Shakespeare’s Opposites: The Admiral’s Men 1594–1625. He is now completing the first New Variorum edition of The Tempest since 1892. Scott Maisano is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His most recent publications include ‘Now’, about Einsteinian spacetime in The Winter’s Tale, for Early Modern Theatricality; ‘Rise of the Poet of the Apes’, about intelligent apes and monkeys in plays from the beginning (The Comedy of Errors) to the end (Two Noble

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Kinsmen) of Shakespeare’s career, for Shakespeare Studies; and ‘Seen / Not Seen’, about ‘behind-the-scenes’, ‘offstage’, and ‘bawdy’ matters in a Midsummer Night’s Dream for iPad. He is currently writing a new Shakespearean comedy entitled Enter Nurse, or, Love’s Labours Wonne. Nathaniel Amos Rothschild is Assistant Professor of English at St Thomas Aquinas College in Rockland County, New York. He is particularly interested in early modern educational theory, and has recently published on The Tempest’s engagement with Montaignian concepts of learning and imitation. His current book project – Learned Professions: Representing Erudition in Early Modern England – will examine the social ramifications and rewards of laying claim to learnedness in the Tudor-Stuart period. Jeffrey A. Rufo is a Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He is the author of ‘Marlowe’s Minions: Sodomitical Politics in Edward II and The Massacre at Paris’ and ‘La Tragédie Politique: Antoine de Montchrestien’s La Reine D’Escosse, Reconsidered’. He is currently writing a book on Machiavelli and Early Modern English Drama. Alden T. Vaughan, Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University and Affiliate Professor of History at Clark University, specializes in the racial perceptions and policies of England’s American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His most recent historical book is Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 (Cambridge, 2006). He has also written on The Tempest’s origins and reception in Shakespeare Quarterly and elsewhere, and with Virginia Mason Vaughan co-authored Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 1991) and Shakespeare in America (Oxford, 2012), and co-edited The Tempest in the third Arden series (1999; rev. edn, 2011).

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Virginia Mason Vaughan is Research Professor and Professor Emerita of English at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. She is the author of Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge, 1994), Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 2005), and The Tempest for Manchester University Press’s ‘Shakespeare in Performance’ series (2011). With Alden T. Vaughan she also co-authored Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 1991) and Shakespeare in America (Oxford, 2012) and co-edited The Tempest for the third Arden series (1999; rev. edn, 2011). Eckart Voigts is Professor of English Literature at TU Braunschweig, Germany. He has written, edited and co-edited numerous books and articles, predominantly on drama, intermediality, adaptation and neo-Victorianism, such as Introduction to Media Studies (Klett, 2004), Janespotting and Beyond: British Heritage Retrovisions since the mid–1990s (Narr, 2005), Adaptations – Performing across media and genres (WVT, 2009) and Reflecting on Darwin (Ashgate, 2014). Helen M. Whall is Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. There she teaches Shakespeare, early modern and modern drama. Her publications follow that arc, ranging from Didactic Method in Five Tudor Dramas to essays on Shakespeare, on Brecht, and on Brecht’s use of Shakespeare. She has been theatre reviews editor for Theatre Journal and is currently on the editorial board of Interfaces, the international journal of ‘word and image’, and edited their volume, Envisioning Shakespeare/ Shakespeare Envisioned (25: 2007).

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TIMELINE 19 bce: With Virgil’s death, the text of The Aeneid assumes its lasting form; many subsequent editions appear in Latin and other languages, including English in the 1550s. The Aeneid is a clear source for parts of The Tempest’s plot and for many allusions. 1555: Publication of Richard Eden’s collection of exploration narratives, The decades of the New Worlde or West India, from which Shakespeare probably borrowed the name Setebos and perhaps other New World echoes. An expanded posthumous edition (1577), completed by Richard Willes, contains additional possible sources. 1560: Predominantly Calvinist scholars at Geneva translate the Bible into English. Most of The Tempest’s approximately twenty-five biblical allusions are drawn from this edition. 1567: Publication of Arthur Golding’s translation into English of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, from which Shakespeare most notably adapted Prospero’s rejection of his magical powers. 1580: Margaret Tyler’s translation into English of the first part of The Mirror of Knighthood (additional parts appear subsequently) possibly influence The Tempest’s plot. c. 1583–8: John Dee, the prominent mathematician, astrologer, alchemist and reputed magician, visited Bohemia’s Emperor Rudolph II, who, at the expense of his political responsibilities, pursued many of the same interests.

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c. 1588–92: Christopher Marlowe’s play about Dr Faustus, written at approximately this time but without a known text until 1604, provides a likely and varied influence on The Tempest. 1589: Publication of Richard Hakluyt’s The principall navigations, voyages and discoveries of the English nation and a greatly enlarged edition of 1598–1600 may have influenced The Tempest’s plot, characters and language. 1598: The anonymous play Mucedorous (or a subsequent edition) is a probable source for several specific phrases and perhaps for Prospero’s role as magician. 1603: John Florio’s translation into English of Michel de Montaigne’s Essayes, originally published in French in 1580. ‘Of the Caniballes’ is the certain source for Gonzalo’s utopian speech, while other essays are reflected elsewhere in the play. 1604: John Marston’s The Malcontent has enough plot and character parallels to The Tempest for it to have been a partial source. 1606: Ben Jonson’s Hymenaei is a probable influence on the masque in Shakespeare’s play. 1608–11: King Rudolph II of Bohemia loses control of Austria, Hungary, Moravia and Bohemia to his brother, which may have suggested Prospero’s overthrow in Milan. 1609, 28 July: The Sea Venture, flagship of a fleet en route to the Virginia Colony with recruits and supplies, is dashed by a hurricane onto Bermuda reefs but all hands survive, including Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers and William Strachey. 1610: Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Philaster is published, and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is performed at the Globe. Both may have influenced The Tempest’s plot and characters. Following the September arrival in London

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of Sir Thomas Gates and many other castaways of the Bermuda shipwreck, several London publications recount the Sea Venture’s near-disaster, the survival of all passengers and crew, and subsequent events in Bermuda and – after the arrival at Jamestown of all but a few of the original complement – in Virginia. 1610–11: The publication of the three parts of Anthony Munday’s translation of Primaleon, Prince of Greece is completed, providing Shakespeare with another possible source. 1611, 1 November: The Tempest is performed at London’s Whitehall Palace, the first documented staging. 1613, 14 February: Festivities surrounding the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, the Elector Palatine, include a performance of The Tempest, perhaps with added emphasis on dynastic marriages and the masque. 1616, 23 April: Shakespeare dies. No known version of The Tempest has appeared in print or manuscript. 1618: Posthumous publication of Jacob Ayrers’s Die Schőne Sidea (written before 1605) provides a possible partial source for Shakespeare’s plot. 1623: The Tempest appears as the first play in the First Folio edition of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies. 1625: William Strachey’s 24,000-word description of the Sea Venture’s voyage and the survivors’ aftermath in Bermuda and Virginia appears in Samuel Purchas’s Haklvytvs Posthumus, or Pvrchas His Pilgrimes. Since 1610 it had circulated to a limited readership in at least two manuscript versions. 1632: Publication of the Second Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays.

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1663: Publication of the Third Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays. 1667–70: Composition and publication of John Dryden and William Davenant’s The Tempest, or, The Enchanted Island, which supplants the Folio version on most stages. 1674: Thomas Shadwell’s operatic version of Dryden and Davenant’s adaptation of The Tempest provides a popular musical alternative. 1675: Thomas Duffett’s The Mock Tempest, a parody of the Dryden-Davenant-Shadwell Enchanted Island, launches an English tradition of Shakespeare parodies. 1684–5: Publication of the Fourth Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays. 1709: Nicholas Rowe’s six-volume edition of the plays includes the first known illustration of The Tempest, a fanciful frontispiece depicting the opening scene. 1766: Publication of the first of Samuel Johnson’s several editions of Shakespeare’s plays, including The Tempest. 1789: Henry Fuseli paints Prospero for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery with strong indebtedness to portraits of Leonardo da Vinci. 1808: Publication of Edmond Malone’s An Account of the Incidents, from which the Title and Part of the Story of Shakspeare’s Tempest Were Derived emphasizes the Bermuda episode and its literature, though he overlooks Strachey’s (presumed) key role because of the letter’s late publication date. 1838: William Charles Macready stages a close approximation of the First Folio’s text, ending the Dryden-Davenant version’s theatrical dominance.

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1864: Robert Browning’s poem ‘Caliban upon Setebos’ reflects Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859). 1873: Daniel Wilson’s Caliban: The Missing Link expands the Darwinian model of Caliban as evolutionary symbol. 1878: The French philosopher Ernest Renan’s Caliban: Suite de La Tempête inaugurates a new subgenre of Tempest literature: what happened after the play’s action ended, either on the island or, in this case, in Milan. 1890: Rubén Darío of Nicaragua’s ‘The Triumph of Caliban’ begins sixty years of Latin American and Caribbean literary identification of Caliban with United States imperialism and cultural crudity. 1892: Publication of the Variorum edition of The Tempest, edited by H. H. Furness. 1898: First edition (of many) of Sidney Lee’s Life of William Shakespeare emphasizes The Tempest’s colonial context in which Caliban is Shakespeare’s personification of American Indians. 1900: Publication in Spanish of José Enrique Rodó of Uruguay’s Ariel, identifying The Tempest’s gentle spirit with Latin America’s essential character, in contrast to North America’s with Caliban. Many editions follow in English and other languages. 1901: Publication of the first Arden edition of The Tempest, edited by Morton Luce. 1916: Staging of Percy MacKaye’s ‘Caliban by the Yellow Sands’ in New York City, with a cast of many hundreds, in an extravagant memorial masque to Shakespeare and the prospect of American multiethnic assimilation. 1926: R. R. Cawley’s ‘Shakespeare’s use of the voyagers in The Tempest’ attempts to document every parallel between

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sixteenth and early seventeenth century travel literature and Shakespeare’s play. 1944: W. H. Auden’s poem The Sea and the Mirror reflects wartime pessimism as The Tempest’s characters ponder their experiences on the island. 1945: Canada Lee performs Caliban at New York’s Theatre Guild, the first African American in the role in a major production. 1950: Octave Mannoni’s Psychologie de la Colonisation, translated into English by Pamela Powesland in 1956 as Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, provides a major stimulus to colonialist readings of the play. 1954: Publication of the second Arden edition of The Tempest, edited by Frank Kermode; a revised version appears in 1962. 1956: The science-fiction movie The Forbidden Planet, set on a distant planet in the equally distant future, stars Walter Pidgeon as Professor Morbius in an explicitly psychoanalytic interpretation. 1960: George Lamming of Barbados’s autobiographical novel The Pleasures of Exile identifies the author with Caliban. 1969: Une Tempête: d’après ‘La Tempête’ de Shakespeare by Aimé Césaire of Martinique portrays Caliban as an African field hand, Ariel a mulatto house servant in a play that imagines the colonial ramifications of Shakespeare’s story. 1971: First publication of the Cuban writer Roberto Fernández Retamar’s essay ‘Caliban: Notes Towards a Discussion of Culture in America’ reinforces the Caribbean identification with Caliban. 1978: Giorgio Strehler’s La Tempesta at Milan’s Piccolo Teatro Lirico allows the audience to see the stage hands at

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work, while Prospero is the play’s director as well as principal actor. 1980: Derek Jarman produces a homoerotic film adaptation of The Tempest. 1982: In Paul Mazursky’s film adaptation of The Tempest, set on a small Greek island, Kalibanos’s (Raul Juliá) lust for Miranda provokes her father’s anger and forces him to confront her growing sexuality. 1985: First performances of Bob Carlton’s rock musical Return to the Forbidden Planet. 1991: Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books, featuring John Gielgud as Prospero/Shakespeare in a lavish adaptation of The Tempest, influences many subsequent stagings of the play. 1992: Yukio Ninagawa’s ‘Tempest’: A Rehearsal of a Noh Play on the Island of Sado, staged at London’s Barbican Theatre, draws on Japanese Kabuki and Noh traditions. 1999: Publication of the third Arden edition, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan; a revised version appears in 2011. 2006: The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production is set in the Arctic, with Prospero as a shipwrecked European explorer, Caliban as an Inuit native, and a mammoth seal as the disappearing banquet. 2009: The RSC and Baxter Theatre of Cape Town feature a South African cast, with John Kani as Caliban and Anthony Sher as Prospero. 2010: Julie Taymor’s The Tempest, a film adaptation shot mainly in Hawaii and featuring Helen Mirren as ‘Prospera’, Duchess of Milan, employs a multinational cast and innovative visual effects.

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Introduction Alden T. Vaughan

The Tempest has been widely popular and diversely controversial since the second decade of the seventeenth century. Although critics have often rebuked the Restoration dramatist John Dryden for mangling Shakespeare’s text (with major help from Sir William Davenant), they appreciate his presumably reliable affirmation that the original Tempest, besides a performance at Whitehall in 1611 and another at court in 1613, flourished at the Blackfriars. Dryden’s testimony, along with the play’s pride of place in the Folio of 1623, establish The Tempest as a favourite from the outset, and its ongoing popularity is well documented. Similarly, we know from Ben Jonson’s quips of 1614 about a ‘Servant-monster’ and ‘Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries’ that the play has generated persistent questions about its major characters, its seriocomic plot, even its fundamental genre.1 How human, if at all, was the ‘monster’ Caliban? Was the storm a central feature or an attention-grabber in this multifaceted play? Is The Tempest a comedy, as the Folio proclaims and Jonson implies, or – as it is often labelled today – a romance, a tragicomedy, or something else? Later critics expanded the range of inquiries into The Tempest. Was Prospero a deeply wronged ruler in Milan, as he claimed, or an irresponsible caretaker? On the island, was he a benevolent patriarch or petty tyrant? Is the story’s central theme to be found in Prospero’s transformation from a revengeful to a forgiving magus or in something altogether

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different – in the father-daughter dynastic relationship, for example, or in the magician’s baneful or benign control of people and events? And what were Shakespeare’s sources? Did he draw heavily from William Strachey’s 1610 account of a real tempest and fortuitous shipwreck off the Bermuda coast or was it merely a timely incident to open a play that borrowed eclectically from classical and contemporary sources? Or, perhaps, did Shakespeare have a more essential but thus far unheralded literary/historical model? None of these polarized choices is, of course, necessarily valid. Most responses resist such simplification and insist instead on multiple strands, levels, and combinations of influences and intentions. Seldom is there a lasting consensus. The variety of plausible interpretations of The Tempest has prompted not only a wide range of critical commentary but, perhaps more noticeable, a remarkably disparate range of stagings, beginning, it seems likely, during Shakespeare’s lifetime and certainly from the Restoration onward. Often, as in Dryden and Davenant’s The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island that dominated performances for more than a century, Shakespeare’s text suffered so many alterations that the result was a loose appropriation of the original rather than, as some viewers apparently assumed, a minor variation on it. Although Shakespeare’s version was reintroduced to theatres in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and The Enchanted Island quickly fell from grace, Dryden and Davenant had inaugurated a persistent trend (not unique to The Tempest but especially common to it) of fanciful rewritings of the play in response to social, political, philosophical or aesthetic fashions. Hence the performance and/or publication of Tempest reflections of – to name a few – Darwinism, Freudianism, American imperialism and worldwide anticolonialism. The keys to the drama’s popularity on page and stage are its variety of lively characters, its romantic major plot and potentially lethal minor plots, its geographic and narrative cohesion, its winsome music, and its graceful poetry. Some viewers also appreciate the uncluttered brevity of this next-to-the-shortest

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play in the canon: except for Prospero’s lengthy backstory monologue in 1.2 and a few briefer passages here and there, The Tempest moves briskly forward until its several sub-stories are resolved in the final scene. The few loose ends, such as Caliban’s fate (sailing with the others to Italy or left alone on the island?) and Antonio’s uncertain repentance, are rarely seen as serious problems. More often, these conundrums have encouraged dramatists and fiction writers to invent epilogues to The Tempest in drama, poetry, narrative and film. A major stream of Tempest interpretation that has ebbed and flowed for more than a century through critical literature and performance history, and remains relevant today, is the American hemisphere’s influence on the play’s origin, plot and language. Prior to the late eighteenth century that possibility was ignored: The Tempest was assumed to be an eclectic blend of classical (Ovid, Virgil) and modern (Montaigne, Jonson, Marlowe and others) influences. But in the early nineteenth century, Edmond Malone’s redating of the canon disclosed the simultaneity of the Sea Venture contingent’s ‘Wracke, and Redemption’ on Bermuda and the newly calculated date of The Tempest’s composition.2 The real tempest that nearly sank the flagship of a relief expedition to Virginia from which all hands ‘miraculously’ survived on a uninhabited, enchanted island and the strife-filled interim before nearly everyone safely sailed away has obvious parallels to the play. Yet Shakespeare does not make the Bermuda refuge his anonymous island: to the extent that the Folio reveals a geographic locus for his story, it is indisputably in the Mediterranean.3 Moreover, the dystopian community’s three meagre waves of immigration arrived from: (1) Africa (Sycorax, banished from Algiers, and, in her womb, Caliban): (2) Milan (Prospero and Miranda, banished from Milan) twelve years later; and (3) Naples and Milan (the court party, shipwrecked by Prospero’s magic) after another 12 years. At the end of the play, all leave except – the text implies – Caliban, the island’s earliest surviving settler. It is, in short, a play about people and events isolated from society, much like plays in forests. Shakespeare, it is

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widely agreed, had no specific island in mind and surely not an American island.4 That does not preclude a palpable American influence. News since 1493 of European exploration and colonization in the ‘New World’ had been augmented increasingly with accounts of English ventures along both the northern and southern continents. Anglophone travel literature, anthologized by Richard Eden and subsequently by the younger Richard Hakluyt, was readily available.5 Then in the 1580s and after, accounts circulated of English settlements in America and of frequent visits by natives from those sites to England and especially to London.6 The impact of this incipient imperialism and cultural interaction on Shakespeare is hard to measure, but many clues in The Tempest suggest that it was more significant than the incidental mention of the Patagonian ‘god’ Setebos and Gonzalo’s fairly lengthy paraphrase from Montaigne’s meditation on Brazilian aborigines. Additionally, the public rejoicing at the Sea Venture survivors’ happy fate and the availability of Strachey’s narrative coincide uncannily with The Tempest’s apparent date of composition.7 Among the broader realities of New World colon­ ization reflected in the play is the seizure of authority by Europeans over the indigenous population and the eventual enslavement of many natives, along with an insistence that others serve specific terms of service. Caliban and Ariel are hardly unambiguous representatives of those two types of labourer, but the centrality of the master-servant relationship in their dealings with Prospero and in Caliban’s with Stephano and Trinculo could not have been lost on an audience familiar with coerced labour, as modern appropriators of The Tempest have often emphasized.8 Still, as critics of the idea of an American influence have been quick to point out, neither colonization nor such relationships were unique to the Western Hemisphere, and Caliban – sometimes touted as a representative of American natives – owes as much or more of his pedigree to European prototypes, especially the wild man legend. In any case, the play ends with the Europeans

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preparing to leave en masse: there is no long-range territorial appropriation or any implication that other Europeans will shortly follow, as in the Bermuda paradigm. The island has been an involuntary refuge for everyone and temporary for all save (probably) Caliban, who can hardly be seen as the personification of Western imperialism. A rounded interpretation of The Tempest must acknowledge a strong European influence as well as that ambiguous American presence. The impending marriages of King James’s elder son (aborted by Henry’s sudden death) and especially his daughter Elizabeth, at whose celebrations The Tempest was performed, are almost certainly reflected in the MirandaFerdinand subplot and the backstory wedding of Claribel and the King of Tunis. Prospero’s loss of the dukedom of Milan appears to owe more to the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II’s forced relinquishing of Bohemia to his brother in 1611 than to any American precedent. The list could go on, especially regarding magic, music, and other Tempest themes. As David Scott Kastan proposed more than a decade ago, ‘The shift of focus from Bermuda to Bohemia, from Harriot to Habsburg is not to evade or dull the political edges of the play; indeed arguably it is to sharpen them, but it is also to find them less in the conquest of the New World than in the killing religious conflicts and territorial ambitions of the Old’.9 A consensus on that binary perspective may finally be emerging: that Shakespeare’s island play is a multifaceted blend of influences from the Old World and the New, of domestic and foreign politics, of familiar background and current events, and of episodes based on fact but also, of course, on fable. The Tempest is Shakespeare’s American play to the extent that he has one, but it is much more than that. Its sources are also English, Continental, African and probably Irish; Scottish, too, if James’s writings before 1603 on monarchy and witchcraft are included. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, The Tempest was a richly international drama at the time of its creation and has become increasingly so in its long subsequent life.

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Some of the chapters in this volume illustrate, even reinforce, that conclusion; others examine self-contained topics that are compatible with the bi-hemispheric argument but are only tangential to it. In all cases, the authors have enlarged the discussion of Shakespeare’s play in ways that reflect their own distinct interests and opinions. Virginia Vaughan’s discussion of The Tempest’s ‘Critical Backstory’ fleshes out the play’s career from its inception in the early seventeenth century to the late twentieth century in the hands of editors and especially literary commentators. It was a curious career. Shakespeare’s text flourished on stage for 30 years – at least twice at James’s court, then for an unknown number of performances at Blackfriars and presumably also at London’s outdoor theatres. Then for nearly two centuries after the Restoration, Dryden and Davenant’s French-inspired corruption monopolized performances. Simultaneously, readers of the The Tempest such as Nicholas Rowe, Charles Gildon and, later, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt and others based their critical analyses on the four folios and, after 1708, on new scholarly editions. These men of letters avidly searched Shakespeare’s text for clues to Prospero’s character and often of its possible representation of Shakespeare himself. They also explored Caliban’s unique language for evidence of Shakespeare’s genius. That almost all of the major critics before the middle of the twentieth century were English gentlemen is unsurprising, but at the dawn of the nineteenth century the German August Wilhelm Schlegel made influential contributions to dialogues on The Tempest, and in the twentieth century, of course, American and other national voices as well as women’s voices were increasingly heard. New foci of argument also emerged, such as the role of allegory, alchemy, magic and music. With each generation, the critical literature became richer and more diverse. The Tempest’s stage career has been comparably intense and diffuse. In a chapter on ‘A Theatre of Attraction: Colonialism, Gender, and The Tempest’s Performance History’, Eckart Voigts points to the play’s ‘spatial ambiguity’ as encouraging

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a wide variety of performance settings for Prospero’s magic, including the opening storm, the nymphs and spirits, the masque, and other aspects of the play that are briefly and often vaguely described in the text. The Tempest thereby invites special mechanical effects, inventive costumes and innovative sounds, with parameters imposed only by the director’s imagination and current technology, which now includes internet resources such as YouTube. Although widely disparaged today, the Dryden-Davenant appropriation – especially in the operatic form introduced in 1674 – was unusually popular in its day, as numerous entries in Samuel Pepys’s diary and abundant newspaper notices attest. But the revived Shakespeare version has also been an audience favourite in Britain and America, while in the past half-century the drama has gained an enlarged international following highlighted by three Prospero-centred adaptations: Giorgio Strehler’s La Tempesta, Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books, and Stephan Pucher’s outré pop version. Although in productions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries Prospero is usually played as the island’s dominant male, several directors have recently blurred the gender lines, most notably by assigning the part to Vanessa Redgrave in a cross-dressing role (2000), and more recently with Helen Mirren as Prospera, the wronged Duchess of Milan (2011). Such innovative reimaginings of Prospero have not, for the most part, lessened interest in Caliban as the interpretative centre, especially in colonialist or anticolonialist interpretations. Voigts’s essay shows how these and other theatrical approaches to The Tempest have made it unusually rich and varied in the past several decades, not only in the Anglophone world but also in Japan, China and several African nations. Brinda Charry completes this book’s backstory essays with an insightful survey of ‘Recent Perspectives on The Tempest’ in which she examines trends in literary criticism since the 1970s that have shed useful light on the play. Foremost chronologically among those trends were the British emphasis

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on ideological and historical forces under the label Cultural Materialism and its roughly parallel American counterpart in New Historicism. Although neither of these intellectual movements addressed only or even primarily Shakespeare’s texts, all of his works and notably The Tempest were fair game. In a number of influential essays, Stephen Greenblatt and other American and British scholars argued for that play’s reflection of early Jacobean political culture (especially the exercise of royal power against disruptive individuals and groups) or, in other scholarly hands, the era’s social culture (especially the enforcement of class structure or the use of magic as an instrument of control). It was perhaps inevitable that such perspectives on The Tempest would blend with the ‘postcolonial’ analysis in which the play is seen to reflect England’s – indeed, any European power’s – attempts at domination in the post-Columbian world. This was not a return to the literal readings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which Prospero was the embodiment of colonialism and Caliban the exploited native; rather, postcolonial interpretations were figurative reflections of historical and social realities to which The Tempest might offer powerful insights into political and cultural encroachment in the Americas, Ireland, India and elsewhere. This volume’s four chapters on ‘New Directions’ concern topics that to some extent have been addressed before (it would be hard to think of an entirely new field of inquiry) but from decidedly new points of view. In the opening chapter of this section, ‘Sources and Creativity in The Tempest’, Andrew Gurr reexamines Shakespeare’s unquestionable – but still debatable – uses of Virgil, Ovid, Montaigne, Richard Eden and William Strachey, as well as his less transparent borrowings from the Bible (mostly the Geneva edition), Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, and several of Ben Jonson’s plays, especially for The Tempest’s masque. Gurr reassesses Shakespeare’s sources not only to renew the authority of several traditional texts on which Shakespeare demonstrably drew for specific passages – The Aeneid and ‘On the Caniballes’, for example – but to

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consider the essential place of sources more generally in a writer’s creative process, sometimes as inspiration, sometimes as incidental fill-ins. In either case, Gurr cautions, ‘As with everything else about The Tempest, we should beware of buying the traditional orthodoxies without quizzing them’. One of the sources briefly addressed in the Gurr chapter but warranting further separate development is the Italian comedic tradition that many critics have casually assumed to have inspired the roles of Trinculo and Stephano but has hitherto defied persuasive documentation. Helen Whall’s discussion of ‘Commedia dell’Arte, The Tempest and Transnational Criticism’ argues forcefully for seeing the Italian contribution as part of a persistent trans-European cultural exchange. As Whall asks at the beginning, ‘how could Shakespeare not have been influenced by a theatre style that captivated audiences everywhere, despite language barriers?’ Yet because the improvisational commedia dell’arte tradition found expression almost entirely on stages rather than in critical commentary, its influence on English drama has been persistently undervalued. Whall draws on a wide-ranging body of critical literature to reveal the abundant evidence of the arte’s impact on Shakespeare in general and The Tempest in particular, not only in the comical characters but, perhaps more important, in certain patterns of dialogue (‘theatregrams’), various analogues of plot and frequent uses of ‘rhythms of improvisation’ – all prominent features of the Italian comic genre. Some English playwrights and actors witnessed commedia dell’arte abroad; others observed travelling Italian troupes in England, where its influence on performance was pervasive from the late sixteenth century onward. That twentieth-century directors like Giorgio Strehler and Peter Brook exploited commedia dell’arte techniques in their productions demonstrates the tradition’s enduring legacy. Turning from comedy to political theory, Jeffrey A. Rufo’s ‘“He needs will be Absolute Milan”: The Political Thought of The Tempest’ examines how the play variously reflects late Tudor-early Stuart political culture. In a nation enamoured of

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its long-reigning female ‘prince’, followed by a king who had ruled Scotland before acceding to the English throne and who had written extensively about monarchy, Tempest audiences could not avoid pondering issues of power, authority, retribution and justice. Shakespeare was familiar with many of the classical and modern works on government, perhaps at first hand, perhaps less directly, but one way or another they were part of his broad exposure to the political life and literature of his time. Yet his injection of political issues into his plays was rarely uncomplicated. Rufo proposes that ‘the politics of The Tempest and plays like it are ambiguous, complex, intriguing, and at times mystifying. Performed in front of a royal audience, they walked a fine line between seemingly opposite ways of conceiving royal authority’. Although Prospero is the irresistible authority on the island, he is under constant challenge, most blatantly from Caliban but also, at various times, from Caliban’s inebriated cohorts, from Ferdinand very briefly, and even, more gently, from Ariel and Miranda. But issues of authority and resistance appear elsewhere in the play: in the storm scene where the Boatswain rejects advice from the king and his counsellor, in Prospero’s long historical tale to Miranda where her father is deposed and banished, in the court party’s flirtation with regicide, and, of course, in the final scene’s resumption of Prospero’s dukedom, with Antonio’s apparently grudging acceptance, and the impending dynastic marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda. Throughout these political manoeuvrings there hovers the shadow of Niccolò Machiavelli, whose political views were a staple of the times. The final New Directions chapter, Scott Maisano’s ‘Shakespeare’s Revolution – The Tempest as Scientific Romance’, challenges the traditional notion that Shakespeare predated by a few years the arrival of a ‘scientific revolution’, that he was a holdover from the medieval era’s belief in magic and the Ptolemaic view of the universe rather than, like his oft-praised contemporary John Donne, the herald of a new philosophy. A host of intellectual heavyweights, including

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Catherine Wilson, Thomas Kuhn, Marjorie Hope Nicholson and Stephen Greenblatt, have it wrong. In demonstrating Shakespeare’s acceptance of emerging scientific ideas, Maisano also overturns the interpretation advanced by virtually all editors of The Tempest of Prospero’s ‘the great globe itself’: he did not, Maisano persuasively argues, mean the earth but rather the celestial sphere. That reading, in turn, requires a rethinking of what Prospero meant by ‘all which it inherit’ and ‘such stuff as dreams are made on’. And Maisano goes a giant step further in Tempest revisionism by proposing a new understanding of precisely whom Prospero has raised from the dead when ‘graves at my command / Have waked their sleepers […] and let ’em forth’. The evidence presented in this essay should provoke several new discussions while solidifying the author’s claim that Shakespeare ‘did not write against the fact of the new science […]’ but ‘with the new science’. N. Amos Rothschild’s bibliographic discussion of ‘“volumes that I prize”: Resources for Studying and Teaching The Tempest’ offers thoughtful advice on ways to impart knowledge, understanding and enthusiasm for the play to students and teachers – indeed to anyone taking a close look at The Tempest from either a text-based or performance-based perspective. Rothschild first assesses the relative merits of the three major one-volume Shakespeare collections and nearly a dozen single-volume editions of The Tempest (including two digital versions) to help readers select the most effective basic book or format for their own purposes, followed by an overview of the disparate online resources that are revolutionizing the field. As Rothschild makes abundantly clear, the opportunities for readers to view the earliest editions of the playtext, multiple versions of sources materials, illustrations from the sixteenth century onward, and extracts as well as whole productions of The Tempest are immense and rapidly expanding. In the final pages in his chapter, Rothschild annotates scores of important books and articles on The Tempest, especially from the twenty-first century. An introductory

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paragraph explains his rationale for dividing the list into categories which coincide with ‘several established and emergent critical lenses’ that have dominated recent scholarly approaches to the play: (1) Social Hierarchies and Politics; (2) Travel, Geography and Colonialism; (3) Gender, Sexuality and Marriage; (4) Music and Masque; and (5) Magic and Education, plus two general categories (Essay Collections, Performance History and Adaptation). Altogether Rothschild presents approximately 100 succinct summaries that illustrate the play’s ongoing intellectual vitality. The several chapters in this book on The Tempest approach it from many personal and professional viewpoints. Unsurprisingly, the authors do not always agree with each other, as befits a scholarly endeavour with a four-century backstory. They also overlap from time to time in their uses of Tempest-appropriate materials, for example quotations from early commentators on The Tempest such as Ben Jonson’s quips about Shakespeare’s play, or references to major productions or films like The Forbidden Planet, to elucidate their arguments. Rather than concede to the first user in our sequence of chapters a monopoly on such materials and deny to subsequent authors the same freedom of choice, the volume editors have let each essayist employ whatever literary and historical materials most effectively promote the argument at hand – occasional repetition notwithstanding. The ultimate goal of this collection is to heighten appreciation of Shakespeare’s island play, encourage and enable further study of The Tempest in text and performance, and refresh its vigorous interpretative career.

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1 The Critical Backstory: ‘What’s Past is Prologue’ Virginia Mason Vaughan

Since its first performances in the early seventeenth century, critical responses to The Tempest have run the gamut, from revisionism in the Restoration to unquestioning adulation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to interrogation and deconstruction in the late twentieth. While Restoration and eighteenth-century writers believed Shakespeare’s Tempest rightly belongs to Prospero, a wise man and moral governor, by the late twentieth century his wisdom and morality were questioned and his treatment of his island-subjects widely criticized. In the process, critical discussions of The Tempest began to focus more on Ariel and Caliban, less on their master. This chapter will trace changing responses to The Tempest from its inception to the 1970s, when new critical and theoretical perspectives spawned even more radical reconsiderations of Shakespeare’s last non-collaborative play (see Chapter 3 by Charry, 61–92). The Tempest was likely written in late 1610 or early 1611. Records show that it was performed at Whitehall before King James on 1 November 1611 and that a second royal

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performance took place at court in the winter of 1612–13 as part of the celebration of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to the Elector Palatine.1 The fact of a court performance tells us only that the play was considered safe and appropriate to perform before the king, but John Dryden reported in 1670 that The Tempest had been popular with audiences at London’s Blackfriars Theatre. The only contemporary judgement by Shakespeare’s fellow dramatist Ben Jonson was ambiguous. In the Induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614), Jonson contrasted his play with Shakespeare’s Tempest: ‘If there bee never a Servant-monster i’the Fayre; who can helpe it? He sayes; nor a nest of Antiques? Hee is loth to make Nature afraid in his Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries’.2 Jonson’s early critique of the ‘servant-monster’ Caliban begins what became a favourite eighteenth-century pastime, speculation about what kind of ‘monster’ Caliban was meant to be. With the closing of London’s theatres in 1642, opportunities to see The Tempest on stage temporarily ceased, but the text was available to readers in the First (1623) and Second Folio editions of Shakespeare’s collected plays (1632), where it occupied first place.

Restoration and the eighteenth century When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, London’s theatres, which had been shut during the Civil War and Interregnum (1641–60), reopened. Two rival acting companies under royal patronage, the King’s and the Duke’s Companies, divided Shakespeare’s plays, with The Tempest assigned to the latter. In 1667, on the assumption that a Restoration audience would find Shakespeare’s original old-fashioned, William Davenant and John Dryden adapted it as The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island. In 1674, this version of The Tempest incorporated several operatic elements designed by Thomas

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Shadwell. From the Restoration well into the nineteenth century, theatre audiences saw the Dryden-Davenant-Shadwell operatic Tempest, not Shakespeare’s original. In revising The Tempest, Dryden and Davenant sought ‘to bring clarity to Shakespeare’s play by dividing the characters and their actions along lines of class and decorum’.3 In his Preface to the published play, Dryden explained that Davenant had designed a counterpoint to Miranda, a young girl who had never seen a man, Hippolito, a young man who has been hidden on Prospero’s island and has never seen a woman. The intention, he argued, was that ‘by this means those two Characters of Innocence and Love might the more illustrate and commend each other’.4 Miranda was provided with a sister, Dorinda, while the name Sycorax was given to Caliban’s sister instead of his mother. These symmetrical pairings allowed for the suggestive repartee popular in Restoration comedies. Samuel Pepys found it to be ‘the most innocent play’ that he ever saw, ‘full of so good variety that [he] couldn’t be more pleased almost in a comedy’.5 Still, the Dryden-Davenant Tempest embodied serious concerns. As a monarch who is ‘restored’ to his throne, Prospero held a special appeal to elite Restoration audiences, but precisely what political message underlay this adaptation has been widely debated. Katharine Eisaman Maus contends that Ariel, who ensures a happy outcome to the plot when Prospero cannot, suggested the ‘potential for a creative political order’ that ‘resides not with the benevolent monarch, but with the loyal, resourceful subject’.6 Matthew Wikander disagrees, pointing out that by making the corrupt Alonso a Duke, Dryden and Davenant implied that Dukes do not prevent political disorder – a king is needed.7 In either case, argues Eckhard Auberlen, the play is a celebration of the restored monarchy and an affirmation that monarchy is the natural form of government.8 Off the stage and on the page, Restoration and eighteenth-century editors turned their attention from Prospero to Caliban, whom they generally admired for his originality

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in genesis and language. In praise of Shakespeare’s ability to differentiate characters from one another, Dryden chose the puppy-headed monster as a prime example. In Caliban, he argued, Shakespeare had ‘created a person which was not in nature’. He made Caliban ‘a species of himself, begotten by an incubus on a witch’. In the process, Shakespeare has most judiciously furnished him with a person, a language, and a character, which will suit him, both by father’s and mother’s side: he has all the discontents and malice of a witch, and of a devil besides a convenient proportion of the deadly sins; […] the dejectedness of a slave is also given him, and the ignorance of one bred up in a desert island. His person is monstrous, as he is the product of unnatural lust; and his language is as hobgoblin as his person.9 Nicholas Rowe, the first genuine editor of Shakespeare’s plays, agreed, asserting in 1709 that Caliban ‘shews a wonderful Invention in the Author, who could strike out such a particular wild Image, and is certainly one of the finest and most uncommon Grotesques that was ever seen’. Rowe also reported a conversation held by three distinguished jurists sometime in the first half of the seventeenth century, whose consensus was ‘That Shakespeare had not only found out a new Character in his Caliban, but had also devis’d and adapted a new manner of Language for that Character’.10 The following year Rowe added a seventh volume to his edition that included Charles Gildon’s ‘Remarks on the Plays of Shakespear’. Gildon praised Shakespeare’s text (as opposed to the Dryden-Davenant revision) for its carefully constructed ‘Fable’; in particular, Gildon appreciated Shakespeare’s attention to the unities of time, place and action. He also continued Rowe’s focus on characterization, finding as Dryden did, that each character is ‘perfectly distinct from the other. Caliban as born of a Witch, shews his Original Malice, ill Nature, sordidness, and Villany. Antonio is always Ambitious

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and Treacherous, and even there promoting and persuading Sebastian to the committing the same unnatural Act against his Brother, that he had against Prospero with his Aggravation of adding Fratricide to Usurpation.’ Shakespeare’s presentation of sentiments, manners and diction is ‘generally just and elegant’. The only major fault Gildon found with Shakespeare was his presentation of magic, noting that while a belief in the occult arts may have been common in the last century, in 1710 ‘scarce a venerable Citizen or Country Squire’ believed in such chimeras.11 Alexander Pope reiterated Rowe’s admiration for Caliban’s language in his 1725 edition of Shakespeare’s plays, as did William Warburton in 1747. John Holt expanded the theme in 1749, arguing that Caliban demonstrates the greatness of Shakespeare’s imagination: ‘His Language is finely adapted nay peculiarized to his Character, as his Character is to the Fable, his Sentiments to both, and his Manners to all; his Curiosity, Avidity, Brutality, Cowardice, Vindictiveness, and Cruelty exactly agreeing with his Ignorance and the Origin of his Person’.12 Joseph Warton agreed in an essay published in The Adventurer (1753): ‘our poet has painted the brutal barbarity and unfeeling savageness of this son of Sycorax, by making him enumerate with a kind of horrible delight, the various ways in which it was possible for the drunken sailors to surprize and kill his master’.The only fault he can find with Caliban’s characterization is that he shows repentance at the play’s conclusion, when to be consistent he should have remained ‘fierce and implacable’.13 But others disagreed. Benjamin Heath observed in 1765 that there was nothing in Caliban’s lines to distinguish his language from Prospero’s, nor was there anything particularly savage about it.14 Samuel Johnson contended in his 1765 edition that Prospero and Miranda had taught Caliban to speak; ‘he had no names for the sun and moon before their arrival, and could not have invented a language of his own without more understanding than Shakespeare has thought it proper to bestow upon him. His diction is indeed somewhat clouded by the gloominess of

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his temper and the malignity of his purposes; but let any other being entertain the same thoughts and he will find them easily issue in the same expressions’.15

Prospero as Shakespeare To many critics in the eighteenth century and beyond, while Caliban remained the most puzzling character in the play, Prospero held special interest because of the perceived identification between his character and the dramatist who created him. Gildon suggested this connection in 1710 when he cited what has become an oft-quoted passage from the play – ‘Our revels now are ended’ – to illustrate Shakespeare’s poetic genius: ‘His Reflections and Moralizing on the frail and transitory State of nature is wonderfully fine’.16 Who does ‘His’ refer to, Shakespeare or Prospero? Many readers assumed it was Shakespeare. Over time, The Tempest came to be understood as Shakespeare’s autobiographical reflection on his art. That equation soon became a truism, especially when applied to the ‘cloud-capped towers’ monologue. Thomas Campbell’s Dramatic Works of Shakespeare summed it up: ‘Here Shakespeare himself is Prospero, or rather the superior genius who commands both Prospero and Ariel’.17 The connection between Prospero and Shakespeare became literally engraved in stone with the installation of Peter Scheemaker’s sculpture in ‘Poets’ Corner’ of Westminster Abbey in 1741, where a thoughtful Shakespeare leans on a pile of books; a scroll beneath the books was initially left blank, but later the Dean of Westminster Abbey had the following words engraved: The Cloud capt Tow’rs, The Gorgeous Palaces, The Solemn Temples,

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The Great Globe itself, Yea all which it Inherit, Shall Dissolve; And like the baseles Fabrick of a Vision Leave not a wreck behind. Nothing on the statue indicates that these words, however misquoted, belong to Prospero. Many viewers assume they come from Shakespeare himself.18 By 1769, when actor-impresario David Garrick celebrated the bicentennial of Shakespeare’s birth with a Jubilee, Shakespeare had been apotheosized as England’s national poet and the embodiment of British genius and morality. The Shakespeare-Prospero equation reached its own apotheosis in the work of Edward Dowden. His Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art, first published in 1875 and repeatedly reprinted, traced Shakespeare’s life through the plays, with Dowden concluding that we identify Prospero with Shakespeare 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 Shakspere as discovered to us in his latest plays’. By the time Prospero delivers the famous ‘cloud-capped towers’ speech, he has reached, contends Dowden, ‘an altitude of thought from which he can survey the whole of human life, and see how small and yet how great it is’.19 As Shakespearean bardolatry transmigrated to the worship of Prospero from the mid-eighteenth century well into the nineteenth, the magician was portrayed on stage as a benign grey-bearded maguscum-theatre impresario. The identification of Prospero with Shakespeare would permeate critical readings well into the twentieth century. As a result of this one-dimensional interpretation, nineteenth-century critics had little to say about Prospero as a fictive character and turned their attention to his minions, Ariel and Caliban.

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The nineteenth century The basic premises of August Wilhelm Schlegel’s nine-volume Shakespeare’s Dramatische Werke, published in Berlin between 1797 and 1810, became available to English readers in 1815 when John Black’s translation of Schlegel’s survey of dramatic literature, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, was published. Whether England’s leading intellectuals absorbed his criticism from the original compendious German publication or from this translation of the lectures, Schlegel’s influence on England’s early nineteenth-century Shakespeare criticism is palpable. Schlegel joined the ranks of eighteenthcentury bardolaters, observing that ‘Shakspeare’s knowledge of mankind has become proverbial: in this his superiority is so great, that he has justly been called the master of the human heart’. His characters demonstrate his ability to transport himself ‘so completely into every situation, even the most unusual, that he is enabled, as plenipotentiary of the whole human race […] to act and speak in the name of every individual’.20 Schlegel stresses Shakespeare’s universality, particularly in the way his characters, however improbable, become real through the appeal to the imagination that Coleridge would later call ‘poetic faith’. Such views shaped Schlegel’s analysis of The Tempest. He admires the enchantingly beautiful ‘history of the loves of Ferdinand and Miranda’, the ‘wisdom of the princely hermit Prospero’, and the way the ‘disagreeable impression by the black falsehood of the two usurpers [Antonio and Sebastian] is softened by the honest gossiping of the old and faithful Gonzalo’. But most of Schlegel’s attention is directed to Caliban and Ariel. Caliban, he observes, ‘has become a by-word as the strange creation of a poetical imagination. […] In inclination Caliban is malicious, cowardly, false, and base; and yet he is essentially different from the vulgar knaves of a civilized world. […] He is rude, but not vulgar; he never falls into the prosaic and low familiarity of his drunken associates,

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for he is, in his way, a poetical being’. Just as Caliban ‘signifies the heavy element of earth’, Ariel is the ‘image of air’. He ‘hovers sweetly over the whole [play] as the personified genius of the wonderful fable’.21 On 16 December 1811 Samuel Taylor Coleridge delivered a lecture on Shakespeare, using The Tempest to illustrate ideas ­– ideas that are strikingly similar to Schlegel’s – at London’s Philosophical Society. Shakespeare’s Tempest came alive for Coleridge when apprehended as poetry – in the private study, not on the stage. (This is hardly surprising, given that the only stage performances he could have seen in 1811 were versions of the Dryden-Davenant adaptation.) Coleridge opined that Shakespeare could ‘in a moment transport himself into the very being of each character’. Using Gonzalo’s exchange with the Boatswain in 1.1 as an example, he explained: ‘Here is the true sailor, proud of his contempt of danger, and the high feeling of the old man, who, instead of condescending to reply […], turns off and meditates with himself, and draws some feeling of comfort to his own mind’ by observing that the Boatswain is more likely to hang than to drown. Like Schlegel, Coleridge devoted most of his attention to Caliban and Ariel. Ariel is a creature of air; ‘In air he lives, and from the air he derives his being. In air he acts, and all his colours and properties seem to be derived from the clouds’. Coleridge speculates that if there is anything in nature that inspired Ariel, ‘it is from the child to whom supernatural powers are given: he is neither born of heaven nor of earth, but between both’. Caliban, on the other hand, is a creature of the earth, ‘partaking of the qualities of the brute and distinguished from them in two ways: (1) by having mere understanding with moral reason; (2) by not having the instincts which belong to mere animals. Still Caliban is a noble being: a man in the sense of the imagination, all the images he utters are drawn from nature, and are highly poetical’.22 William Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, first printed in 1817, follows suit, claiming that ‘Shakespear was the most universal genius that ever lived’. He particularly

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admires Shakespeare’s imaginative word pictures: ‘Prospero’s enchanted island seems to have risen up out of the sea; the airy music, the tempest-tost vessel, the turbulent waves, all have the effect of the landscape background of some fine picture’. While Prospero is the ‘stately magician’, Miranda ‘the goddess of the isle’, and Ferdinand ‘princely’, the ‘character of Caliban is generally thought (and justly so) to be one of the author’s masterpieces’. After praising the imaginative power of Caliban’s language, Hazlitt then turns to Ariel, who, he writes, ‘is […] the swiftness of thought personified’, and nothing expresses this quality more clearly than his songs. Hazlitt concludes his essay with Prospero. Noting that the ‘cloud-capped towers’ speech ‘has been so often quoted, that every school-boy knows it by heart’, Hazlitt offers Prospero’s abjuration of his magic at the beginning of 5.1 (‘ye elves of hills’) as the prime example of the striking beauty of the magus’s language. Hazlitt concludes his essay in a novel vein, however, by citing Gonzalo’s 2.1 speech (taken from Montaigne’s ‘Of the canibales’) and Sebastian and Antonio’s cynical response to it, with the rueful comment: ‘Shakespear has anticipated nearly all the arguments on the Utopian schemes of modern philosophy’.23 Unlike Coleridge, Hazlitt was an avid theatregoer. Returning from a performance of The Tempest in 1815, he wrote that he had nearly resolved never to attend a Shakespeare performance again because Dryden and Davenant had loaded the play ‘with the common-place, clap-trap sentiments, artificial contrasts of situation and character, and all the heavy tinsel and affected formality’ of the French school.24 He changed his mind, as did many others, in 1838–9 when theatre manager William Charles Macready abandoned the Dryden-DavenantShadwell operatic Tempest and returned to Shakespeare’s original text (albeit greatly cut) in a production at London’s Covent Garden. Among those inspired by the revival was Patrick MacDonnell, who subsequently delivered a lecture on The Tempest before the Shakspere Club on 6 September 1839. MacDonnell opined that it would be no exaggeration ‘to say,

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that the play of The Tempest, was never, at any former period, brought forward, with more advantage, than when it was last performed upon the boards of Covent Garden Theatre. […] [L]et not our theatres, in future, be polluted, by those scenes, that lately disgraced them’.25 In his published lecture, MacDonnell bemoans the ignorance of Shakespeare’s age, particularly its now-outdated belief in magic and the supernatural. But even though Prospero is a magician, ‘in the possession of a mind, enriched by wisdom and great learning, he is enabled to accomplish those virtuous ends, which his exalted and generous views so nobly contemplated’. That he ‘disdains to seek revenge for the injuries he had suffered’ demonstrates his ‘great magnanimity of mind’. Miranda, too, is exemplary; Shakespeare has drawn her character with ‘all those qualities, mingled with sweet affection, which give to her sex, that benign and potent influence, of subduing and controlling the heart of man, amidst the ruder feelings of his character’.26 Such banalities were characteristic of the nineteenth century’s impressionistic criticism, but MacDonnell’s discussion of Caliban – inspired by the actor George Bennett’s performance in the Macready production – breaks new ground. To be sure, Caliban is a savage, ‘yet maintaining in his mind, a strong resistance to that tyranny, which held him in the thraldom of slavery[,] Caliban creates our pity, more than our detestation’. MacDonnell finds excuses for Caliban’s behaviour: rude as he is, ‘with feelings of strong aversion to slavery’, it is ‘with the view of destroying the bondage under which he labours, that urges him […] to form the plot against the life of Prospero’. While his assault on Miranda cannot be justified, it was partly caused, argues MacDonnell, by Prospero’s imprudence in placing the two together. Indeed, ‘the noble and generous character of Prospero, therefore suffers, by this severe conduct to Caliban’.27 No longer simply a savage brute, Caliban had become a sympathetic character. Poet Robert Browning was also intrigued by Caliban. In 1859, the year Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species

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was published, he began writing the dramatic monologue, ‘Caliban upon Setebos’. Browning uses Shakespeare’s puppyheaded monster to ponder the emergence of religious beliefs in prehistoric man. Caliban’s reflections on and fear of his god Setebos suggest a theology based not on supernatural revelation but on the phenomena he observes in nature.28 In 1873, after Darwin’s ideas were widely circulated and at the height of Britain’s colonial empire, Daniel Wilson, a professor at the University of Toronto who had written on the parallels between native Americans and prehistoric Europeans, published Caliban: The Missing Link. Wilson describes Caliban as a ‘novel anthropoid of a high type’ who can be seen as ‘the pre-Darwinian realisation of the intermediate link between brute and man’. While on the one hand Caliban is human, he is also an animal, ‘at home among the sounds and scenes of living nature’. Like MacDonnell, Wilson sympathizes with Caliban’s plight. We shouldn’t judge him by what Prospero says about him because he is like an entrapped animal. Caliban desires freedom to roam his island and live in harmony with the wind and the tides, digging pig-nuts and trapping nimble marmosets. When we think of him as the ‘half-human link between the brute and man’, somewhat like a baboon who is endowed with speech, we can understand his desire to plot against his master.29 By the end of the century, Wilson’s conception of Caliban spread to stage representations; actor Frank Benson prepared for the role by watching monkeys at the zoo, and in performance he ate bananas and climbed trees. In his 1904 stage production, Herbert Beerbohm Tree also played Caliban as a hairy ape-man fascinated by the magic music of his island.30 Whether Benson or Tree recognized it, The Tempest’s portrayal in the late nineteenth century of a wise, white European burdened with the task of civilizing a native servant-monster who would remain ineluctably inferior embodied the central ideologies of social Darwinism and British imperialism.

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The twentieth century Throughout the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries, critical analysis of Shakespeare’s texts was predominately the province of gentlemen scholars like MacDonnell. Cambridge and Oxford universities only began to consider English an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, beginning with its introduction in the women’s colleges. In the United States English literature was not recognized as a discipline until the 1880s. After the founding of the Modern Language Association in 1883, Shakespeare slowly appeared in college curricula, and by the end of World War I the study of Shakespeare and his contemporaries was a recognized research field. Academic scholars soon pushed to make their analyses more objective and less impressionistic. In England, I. A. Richards developed what he called ‘practical criticism’: the application of well-defined aesthetic principles to individual works through meticulous study of their components – what came to be known as ‘close reading’. In the United States, such ‘close reading’ became the mainstay of ‘New Critics’ who wanted to isolate literature from history and biography and examine the literary work without regard to context. But, as Russ McDonald observes in a recent study of the late plays’ language, New Critics tended to ignore Shakespeare’s romances, ‘perhaps because their discontinuities and sprawling structures made them unlike lyric poems and thus inhospitable to the demonstration of the unity characteristic of the verbal icon’.31 The founder of Germany’s post-war English studies, Wolfgang Clemen, devoted Chapter 19 of his study of Shakespeare’s imagery to The Tempest, arguing that references to sea-storms and tempests were the play’s main stream of imagery. For the first three acts, references to the sea suggest nature as a hostile force, but with the masque of Act 4, they are superseded by images of harmony and fecundity. Imagery that appeals to the senses – sound, smell, taste and touch – also creates the audience’s impression of the island

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as a strange, natural world.32 But unless The Tempest was included in a systematic study of all of Shakespeare’s imagery, literary critics neglected its style, preferring to discuss the play’s structure and identify underlying themes that, to their minds, unified the text’s disparate elements.

Form Ever since Dryden, commentary on The Tempest had observed Shakespeare’s careful attention to the play’s structure, particularly his observance of the unities of time, place and action. As Prospero insists, the action takes four hours, at most. It is circumscribed to one uncharted island, and even though it consists of three plots, each culminating in a masque-like spectacle – Prospero’s plan to regain his dukedom and marry off his daughter; Antonio and Sebastian’s conspiracy to murder Alonso; and Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano’s parodic plot to murder Prospero – events stay under Prospero’s control and are clearly related to each other. Critics were also content to describe the play simply as a comedy, in keeping with the First Folio’s tripartite structure of comedies, histories and tragedies, in which The Tempest was first among the comedies. It took until the late nineteenth century for scholars to sketch out a chronology for the plays, identifying Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest as the last works Shakespeare wrote without a collaborator. Edward Dowden based his study of the development of Shakespeare’s mind and art on this chronology and was the first to note these plays’ common characteristics: each plot involves the characters’ movement through wide expanses of time and space (although that movement is narrated rather than acted in The Tempest); the plots centre on a violent breach within a royal family; and at the end the perpetrators are forgiven and the family restored. In these three plays, Dowden opined that ‘while grievous errors of the heart are shown to us, and wrongs

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of man to man as cruel as those of the great tragedies, at the end there is a resolution of the dissonance, a reconciliation’. He concluded: ‘There is a certain romantic element in each’ that differentiates it from the earlier comedies.33 Subsequent critics followed Dowden’s lead, and through much of the twentieth century the late plays (including Pericles) have been classified as romances, a class apart from Shakespeare’s earlier plays. But the exact definition of ‘romance’ varies, with some critics arguing that the plays are derived from Greek romances like Aethiopica and others looking for antecedents in medieval quest narratives and moral pageants. Hallett Smith observes that many narratives from Greek romance were imported into England by the playwright Robert Greene, whose Pandosto was a direct source for The Winter’s Tale and whose early plays Arbasto (1584) and Menaphon (1589) would have been known to Shakespeare. In The Tempest, he contends, we find the ‘ancient genre deliberately utilized and lifted to new dimensions, turned from a rather inconsequential literature of escape to a new vision of reality’.34 Howard Felperin agrees, arguing that in his final plays Shakespeare shows the older romance model used in early Elizabethan plays, such as George Peele’s The Arraignment of Paris, is inadequate. The Tempest, in particular, suggests ‘that there is a fatal gap between the ideal world of romance and the ideal world of history, and that no act of magic can ever make them one’.35 As both Smith and Felperin admit, the difficulty with calling Shakespeare’s texts ‘romances’ is that they differ in so many ways from earlier texts written in that mode. Indeed, Diana T. Childress contends that even though the romances rely on implausible narratives and provide happy endings, these events are treated with a strong dose of irony, and Shakespeare also interjects devices that alienate the audience from the action. Caliban, for example, introduces elements of the grotesque that are not characteristic of ‘romance’, and his contentious interchanges with Prospero are uncharacteristic of the genre.36 Uncomfortable with a label – ‘romance’ – that relates more to Elizabethan prose fiction than drama, other critics

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describe Shakespeare’s late plays as ‘tragicomedies’. Gerald Eades Bentley argued in 1948 that the plays’ mixed mode resembles the Jacobean tragicomedies written by John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont for the indoor Blackfriars Theatre.37 Fletcher, who collaborated with Shakespeare on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, famously described tragicomedy using a definition derived from the Italian theorist Giambattista Guarini: ‘A tragi-comedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy’.38 But, as Lee Bliss explains, Beaumont and Fletcher’s tragicomedies differ both dramaturgically and thematically from Shakespeare’s late plays. Satire on court manners and corruption are their stockin-trade, while Shakespeare’s dramas ‘move through human cycles toward genuine integration of the individual – with himself, toward a consensus of values’.39 Joan Hartwig, who offers the most expansive treatment of Shakespeare’s final plays as tragi-comedies, also confesses that the Beaumont-Fletcher paradigm does not fit Shakespeare. Whereas the tragi-comedies ultimately support the status quo, Shakespeare’s tragi-comic pattern features dislocation, moving the characters away from settled positions through adversity toward an expanded perception of reality. The Tempest‘s storm symbolizes a dislocated world order, and the characters undergo a form of madness as part of the transition from loss to restoration. In the Epilogue, Prospero releases control to the audience, who become ‘the master[s] of the mage’.40 In his introduction to the second Arden Tempest, the edition most widely used in the mid- to late-twentieth century, Frank Kermode used the terms ‘romance’ and ‘tragi-comedy’ interchangeably, underlining his preoccupation with the text’s representation of nature by adding the descriptor ‘pastoral’: The Tempest is a ‘romance’ (liv), a ‘pastoral drama’ (xxiv), a ‘pastoral tragi-comedy’ (lix), and a ‘pastoral romance’ (lix).41 Such slippery nomenclature suggests that even this astute reader of The Tempest was not exactly sure how to describe

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its generic properties. Barbara A. Mowat concludes in an overview of the generic question that Shakespearean plays like The Tempest do not resemble other types of Jacobean drama or earlier romantic plays. They can be called romances or tragi-comedies only in that they share a family resemblance to romance narratives or tragi-comedies.42 The issue is not to force a play like The Tempest into a generic box but to determine the ways it toys with and often subverts the audience’s generic expectations. Mowat’s earlier study of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy does just that. She shows that The Tempest frequently relies on telling rather than showing, especially in Prospero’s explanation of past events in 1.2. The masque, a presentational staging of mythical figures, is abruptly interrupted by Prospero’s quite human anger and fear of Caliban’s conspiracy. Metatheatrical moments abound, as in Prospero’s reference to ‘the great globe itself’ or his address to the audience in the Epilogue. In sum, in The Tempest Shakespeare perfected a new kind of dramaturgy, ‘open form drama’, that blends narrative and dramatic modes, breaks cause and effect patterns, and transcends generic conventions.43 In her title, The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances, Mowat preserves the most common twentiethcentury way of categorizing these plays, ‘romances’, but her preferred term as of this writing is ‘dramatic romance’. More recently critics have taken to referring to Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest (along with Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen) as the ‘late plays’, but even this seemingly innocuous term creates more problems than it solves. The concept of ‘late style’, as Gordon McMullan demonstrates, is anachronistic when applied to Shakespeare. Developed by mid-nineteenth-century musicologists to describe Beethoven’s final works, the term suggests a burst of creative energy at the end of a long career, often following a hiatus in productivity, resulting in transcendent works that express his/ her ultimate view of the human condition. When one labels The Tempest a ‘late play’, McMullan explains, these widely circulated preconceptions about ‘late style’ impose onto the

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text an interpretation that goes all the way back to Dowden.44 While ‘romance’ continues to serve as a convenient way of referencing The Tempest, twenty-first-century critics usually qualify their use of the label.

Allegorical readings Edward Dowden’s survey of Shakespeare’s plays as biographical allegory remained influential well into the twentieth century, especially in regard to The Tempest. Writing in 1932, John Dover Wilson contended that a change came over Shakespeare around 1609, resulting in a shift from tragedy to romance. He relates the last plays to Shakespeare’s retirement, suggesting that Prospero is an extension of Lear, a wronged old man, but in The Tempest he has found his happiness and his Cordelia in Miranda, much as Shakespeare may have found it in times spent with daughter Judith in Stratford. At the same time Prospero is the spirit of dramatic poetry itself, and Ariel represents the poetic imagination. The Tempest as a whole, Wilson posits, is profoundly religious, exuding ‘a Christ-like spirit in its infinite tenderness, its all embracing sense of pity, its conclusion of joyful atonement and forgiveness’.45 J. Middleton Murry continues this theme in a 1936 essay, ‘Shakespeare’s Dream’, claiming that The Tempest is the most symbolic of Shakespeare’s plays. Prospero, he contends, ‘is to some extent an imaginative paradigm of Shakespeare himself in his function as poet’, and he embodies ‘Shakespeare’s selfawareness at the conclusion of his poetic career’.46 Other commentators stretched their analysis of The Tempest beyond biography to argue that the play conveys universal metaphysical truths. Colin Still’s The Timeless Theme (1921) makes the most extravagant claims. After comparing the play’s plots and characters to ancient myths and archetypal themes, he concludes that ‘The Tempest is an imaginative mystery which is true to the spiritual experience of all mankind’,

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incorporating both Christian and non-Christian beliefs in a ‘dramatic representation of the mystery of redemption’. While the court party makes its passage through a kind of purgatory, Ferdinand undergoes an initiation into a celestial paradise. Miranda is wisdom, Caliban a demon figure, and Prospero the initiating priest.47 G. Wilson Knight, writing in 1947, praised Still’s metaphysical overview, adding that Prospero is a kind of Shakespearean superman, in the position of Shakespeare himself. He highlights echoes and reiterations of themes and characters from earlier plays to showcase The Tempest as the culmination of Shakespeare’s entire career. Indeed, he sees The Tempest as a kind of autobiography, replete with universal meaning. And while Prospero has some resemblance to Christ, Wilson concludes that The Tempest can also be seen as a reflection of British destiny as a colonizing power that will ‘raise savage peoples from superstition and blood-sacrifice, taboos and witchcraft and the attendant fears and slaveries, to a more enlightened existence’.48 Twenty years later D. G. James emphasized the vein of allegory that runs through The Tempest. The play reveals Shakespeare’s imbrication in Renaissance neo-Platonic thought; Prospero can be seen allegorically as a kind of Christian providence and also as a priestly magician who has embarked on a dangerous search for godlike perfection. His decision to relinquish his magic signals his desire to remain human. The Tempest creates the impression that ‘Prospero in truth never left Milan and that the island and all we see happen on it was a dream of Prospero’s only’. But in a larger context, it also suggests the ‘mind of European civilization casting off the shackles, and the false hopes, and the terrors of magical daemonology’.49 Also in 1967 A. D. Nuttall used The Tempest to speculate on different types of metaphysical literature. He concludes that while the play is not an explicit allegory – the figure and its significance remain obscured – the audience has the impression that the island belongs to the world of dreams and the play has metaphysical elements. ‘The simplified characters […] are not ipso facto allegorical, but it

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is no great sin to take them as types’. Caliban and Ariel come closest ‘to being allegories of the psychic processes, but they are much more besides’.50 Noel Cobb expanded on the theme of psychological allegory in Prospero’s Island: The Secret Alchemy at the Heart of ‘The Tempest’ (1984) by providing a scene-by-scene reading that draws on the theories of psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Cobb argues that Caliban and Ariel are part of Prospero’s own nature: Ariel is an embodiment of the magician’s desire for reconciliation among the disparate parts of his psyche, whereas Caliban represents all that Prospero has to come to terms with – irrationality and passion. The play’s centrepiece, the union of Ferdinand and Miranda, symbolizes the synthesis of opposites that Prospero attains only at the play’s conclusion, when he enters into a new relationship with the feminine, emotional part of his personality. Like the product of an alchemical experiment, Prospero’s psyche is transformed into a new concoction.51

Thematic readings While Still, James and Cobb’s systematic readings probe the heart of The Tempest’s mystery, other twentieth-century critics were less ambitious and less inclined toward metaphysical readings. They sought instead to identify the play’s major themes, the animating ideas that unify the drama into an organic whole. Like Cobb, some framed the entire play as an alchemical experiment. Harry Levin argued that The Tempest was Shakespeare’s response to Ben Jonson’s satire on confidence men’s alchemical practices, The Alchemist, performed by the King’s Company in 1610. Unlike Jonson’s swindling Subtle, Shakespeare’s magician is legitimate in his aims and demonstrates his moral purpose when he renounces his art.52 Frances A. Yates, a scholar who worked throughout her career on early modern explorations of the occult, maintained that

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Prospero was akin to Henry Cornelius Agrippa, whose De occulta Philosophia circulated throughout Renaissance Europe and was known to Elizabethans such as John Dee, Walter Ralegh and Christopher Marlowe. Like John Dee, Prospero embodies the magus as scientist and moral reformer.53 The most systematic treatment of alchemical elements in The Tempest came in 1997–8 from Peggy Muñoz Simonds, who perceived it as a theatrical exercise in transmutation, structured to demonstrate nine stages of the alchemical process. Prospero, she claimed, was an alchemist as well as a magician; his goal was not to turn base metal into gold but to restore the Golden Age. Ariel was his daemon, playing the role of Mercurius, the alchemist’s assistant.54 A large cohort of scholars saw magic as The Tempest’s pervading theme, but they often disagreed as to the character of that magic. In 1937 Walter Clyde Curry described Prospero as a theurgist whose magical practices, based on the Neo-Platonic teachings of Marsilius Ficino, were meant to raise fallen human nature to a higher, spiritual plane. Sycorax’s witchcraft, in contrast, is goety – black magic that disorders nature and is used for wicked purposes. While Prospero is a theurgist of high rank and his purposes are moral, his human passions prevent him from attaining his spiritual goals.55 Decades later D’Orsay Pearson agreed that Prospero is a theurgist but disagreed with Curry’s claim that his practices are benevolent. Shakespeare, Pearson contends, demonstrates that theurgy is a damnable and unlawful art that Prospero exploits to gain vengeance against his enemies. Ariel, on the other hand, is an agent of divine providence who works toward moral ends, and it is only through his admonition in 5.1.17–19 that Prospero ‘foregoes his pretensions to godhead and assumes his proper role as man’.56 Karol Berger agrees that Italy’s neo-Platonists were the most important paradigm for Prospero’s art, but he relates magic to the imagination. Ficinian magic, he argued, uses spirit as the medium of its operations, and its methods are primarily artistic. In particular, such magic relies on music, as does Prospero, to

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draw and transmit influences. The Tempest is based on the opposition between the imaginary (the island) and the real (Milan); although Prospero’s magic works wonderfully well on the island, it will fail in Milan, and for this reason he must abjure it before resuming his dukedom.57 Two monographs devoted to early modern magic appeared in the 1980s, each with a chapter on The Tempest. Barbara Traister’s Heavenly Necromancers sees Prospero as the ultimate stage magician, except that unlike his predecessors he totally dominates his play. Shakespeare includes Prospero’s account in 1.2 of Sycorax’s witchcraft in order to show Prospero as a good magician. Like other stage magicians, Prospero is a producer of spectacles. In contrast to Pearson, Traister argues that from the very beginning Prospero intends to relinquish his magic when his goals are accomplished; in so doing, he chooses to remain human.58 Like Heavenly Necromancers, John S. Mebane’s Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age takes a positive view of Prospero’s magic. Through Prospero’s art Shakespeare affirms ‘the belief of Ficino and his successors that humans obtain genuine power by aligning themselves with the order of Providence’. Prospero’s abjuration of his magic is not a rejection of magic per se, but a qualification of its ideals.59 Barbara A. Mowat takes a common-sense approach to the vexed issue of Prospero’s magic in ‘Prospero, Agrippa, and Hocus Pocus’. Is he the quintessential philosopher-magician of the Neo-Platonic tradition or is he, like Dr Faustus, a damned sorcerer? Or, perhaps, she proposes, we take Prospero’s magic more seriously than we should. In Shakespeare’s usual eclectic way, The Tempest combines several, sometimes contradictory, constructions of magical practice. In Prospero’s 1.2 narrative we can see a theurgic man committed to intellectual study, but in his 5.1.33–57 monologue, Prospero moves into goety, the world of witchcraft and black magic. In his abjuration of magic Prospero is more like the wizard of medieval legend and stage tradition who gives up his pagan ways and returns to the Christian community. And yet Prospero is also akin to the

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street ‘jugler’ who uses a servant/apprentice (Ariel) to effect his legerdemain. His art is for the most part the art of stage spectacle. When all is said and done, Prospero is ‘the magus who has learned to think of his mortality, the Faustus who successfully destroyed his book, the illusionist who stands before us revealing the tricks of his trade’ – all of these, and more.60 Prospero’s magic spells repeatedly take the form of musical enchantment, so it is not surprising that critics have found music itself as a theme. Commentators frequently note that The Tempest is Shakespeare’s most musical play because, in addition to its many lyrics, it includes song and dance in the masque of 4.1, and Caliban’s comments and the stage directions frequently call for musical sound effects. Through much of the twentieth century, critics related The Tempest’s musical score to the Neo-Platonists’ belief that musical harmonies could lead the soul to an apprehension of heavenly harmony, the music of the spheres. John H. Long shows how music contributes to the play’s dramatic unity. In 5.1, for example, while the court party remains spell-stopped, Prospero calls for heavenly music that ‘underscores the dramatic climax of the play, provides audible magic, cures the irrational quality of the noblemen’s minds […] and symbolizes the restored harmony of human relationships’.61 John P. Cutts outlines music’s contribution to our sense of the island, ‘where no ill is ultimately allowed, where strife and friction are allayed and everything is wrapped in a serene air of celestial harmony’.62 Prospero exploits music to resolve problems; by the final scene, discords cease and musical harmony restores the court party’s senses, allowing them to hear the music of the spheres. Other critics compare Prospero to Orpheus, the Greek god who used the power of music to charm wind and weather, as well as his listeners. Peggy Muñoz Simonds asserts that ‘As Orpheus brings art to nature, so in The Tempest the magus Prospero brings the arts of civilization to an island once ruled by nature alone and attempts to endow it with the divine harmony dramatized in the wedding masque’.63

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But sounds are not always harmonious on Prospero’s island, and as David Lindley explains, while the play’s music has often been accepted as representing celestial concord, even Shakespeare’s lyrics can produce disquiet. The song Ariel sings to bring Ferdinand to Prospero and Miranda in 1.2 is a good example. At first glance, the lyric ‘Come unto these yellow sands’ and Ferdinand’s response to it – ‘This music crept by me on the waters / Allaying both their fury and my passion’ – seems to support the Neo-Platonists’ view of music’s powers. But the song’s refrain, ‘Cockadoodle doo’, also ‘hints at the capricious, even malevolent side of Prospero’s magic and its instruments’.64 Prospero’s music can provoke madness and mayhem, as we see when Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban follow the celestial music into a swamp. To Lindley, music and masque are instruments of Prospero’s power, good or bad depending on his purpose. Most discussions of music in The Tempest see it as a civilizing influence; in particular, as Simonds observes, Prospero uses the island’s harmonies to civilize Caliban, the wild man who loves its sweet sounds that hurt not. The opposition between Art, represented by Prospero, the European endowed with a Renaissance education, and Nature, embodied in Caliban, a ‘salvage’ creature rooted in the island, struck editor Frank Kermode as the play’s overriding theme. In this view, Caliban represents nature without the benefit of nurture, and his function is to illustrate by contrast Prospero’s world of art and civility. Prospero’s Art requires discipline, and Kermode frames it in terms of control: ‘As a mage he controls nature; as a prince he conquers the passions which had excluded him from his kingdom and overthrown law; as a scholar he repairs his loss of Eden; as a man he learns to temper his passions’.65 Magic, music, the masque, and moral education, all are reflections of Shakespeare’s focus on the power of Art to shape and control Nature. But as Northrop Frye noted in his overview of Shakespeare’s comedies and romances, nature here is not simply the flora and fauna of the island. It is a power ‘at once supernatural and connatural’.66 Nature

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in The Tempest is in this reading benevolent, but not to the Polish critic Jan Kott, who contends that from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth commentators had romanticized The Tempest into an operatic fairytale, not recognizing it as a ‘great Renaissance tragedy of lost illusions’.67 Prospero can be seen as a disillusioned parallel to Leonardo da Vinci, his fine aspirations doomed to disappointment because of human corruption. The opening scene encapsulates the play’s violent conflict between nature and a corrupt social order when the Boatswain cries, ‘What care these roarers for the name of king?’ (1.1.16–17). Except for Ferdinand and Miranda, who exist outside of real time, the play’s multiple plots are all based on violent struggles for power, and nature as it exists on the island is more brutal than benign. Opposing views of the natural landscape – descriptions of a mythic golden world, undercut by vivid accounts of brutal weather and starvation – were characteristic of the New World narratives that shaped The Tempest. Robert Ralston Cawley was the first to produce a detailed analysis of the parallels between early modern English narratives of exploration and Shakespeare’s text (see Gurr, 107–8),68 but it took Kermode’s 1954 edition to bring them to prominence. In the United States The Tempest came to be known as an ‘American’ text. Leo Marx went beyond the parallels Cawley had noticed to argue that The Tempest was prophetic of what America would become: ‘Prospero’s island community prefigures Jefferson’s vision of an ideal Virginia, an imaginary land free both of European oppression and frontier savagery. The topography of The Tempest anticipates the moral geography of the American imagination’.69 Leslie Fiedler followed suit, claiming that America was on Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote The Tempest. Fiedler’s conception of Caliban and his troubled relationship to the European Prospero raised issues of colonialism and race that would dominate Tempest criticism for decades to come (see Charry).70 From the 1980s to the present, the centuries-old interpretation of The Tempest as a story of forgiveness, reconciliation

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and redemption has been rejected by many academic scholars who introduced new methodologies and theories into their discussions. Nevertheless, the view outlined here of Prospero as an essentially benevolent surrogate for Shakespeare the dramatist never disappeared entirely, especially in popular and theatrical representations of The Tempest. To this day, actors and performance programmes still treat Prospero’s description of ‘the great globe itself’ as Shakespeare’s allusion to his theatre and to his art (see chapter by Maisano, 165–94) and acknowledge his epilogue as Shakespeare’s retirement address.

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2 A Theatre of Attraction: Colonialism, Gender, and The Tempest’s Performance History Eckart Voigts

The Tempest is arguably the most global play of a truly transnational playwright. As Peter Hulme and William Sherman have shown in a classic reception study,1 the play ‘travels’ internationally and has done so for more than 400 years. It follows that a number of important reception and performance histories have already investigated its voyages. Propelled by issues of generational and colonial conflict, gender, its dreamlike and magical poetics and metatheatrical resonances, as well as by its thematic, and possibly also formal negotiation of the sea, the text has invited a plethora of performances and readings from all over the world. These readings frequently focus on Prospero, who has the most lines in the play and is most present on stage as father, magician, author, or colonizer; around Prospero, the play summons two antithetical colonized

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subjects (Ariel and Caliban) and, as a prize to be given away to the shipwrecked Ferdinand, his daughter Miranda. As the play intervenes in the contested cultural areas of gender and ethnicity, it is hardly surprising that it has generated a plethora of outré revisions with added characters, gender-swap casting choices, radically dissimilar settings and actors of diverse ethnicity. As Virginia Mason Vaughan has noted with reference to the Japanese reception of The Tempest, and as the traditions of German Regietheater (‘director’s theatre’) and post-dramatic theatre alluded to in this chapter also frequently make clear, The Tempest has thus become increasingly hybrid. Despite reservations articulated by Vaughan who, with good reason, warns against The Tempest as a ‘grab bag’ and requires adaptations to follow a holistic concept,2 it is only through hybrid actualizations, adaptations and appropriations that Shakespeare will survive. He is, after all, according to cultural materialist wisdom, primarily ‘a collage of familiar quotations’. The more wildly hybrid, the richer the meme pool, and the higher the chance of the survival of a play that has had a rich cultural presence for 400 years. Germany is a particularly fascinating case study, as over ‘the past 200 years German Shakespeare has succeeded in domesticating the “foreign”, denying the fundamental Englishness of Shakespeare’.3 The Tempest’s colonial scenario can be meaningful in any spatial framework, all the more so as the play is ‘singular in its insistent spatial ambiguity’ among Shakespeare’s plays.4 The island, not precisely located in the text (‘The Scene, an un-inhabited Island’, says the final page of the First Folio edition), has prompted all sorts of specifications, and any performance must find solutions for the specifics of spatial isolation, for the mise-en-scène of the sea and, in particular, the spectacular initial shipwreck. In fact, Christine Dymkowski has pointed out the essential paradox of the play’s effects and the visual poverty for which it was initially written: ‘Although throughout its performance history The Tempest has proved to be perhaps the most visually spectacular of Shakespeare’s

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plays, it was written to be performed on a virtually bare stage’.5 As one of Shakespeare’s most theatrical texts, The Tempest invites effects of both sound and imagery. It calls for the performance of magic trappings: a ship is sunk; a banquet disappears; nymphs and spirits appear; as do the goddesses Iris, Ceres and Juno – and the result is frequently the richness and strangeness alluded to in the text. Its intimate relationship with the court masque has led to fascinating aesthetic links, from frequent operatic adaptations to post-digital cinema. To adapt the title of Tom Gunning’s seminal essay, The Tempest provides theatre as well as cinema of spectacular attractions. As Andrew Gurr notes, the play is singular in the Shakespeare canon as a vehicle for special effects, and Dymkowski records that the ‘emphasis on visual spectacle’6 dominated the performance history of the play at least until the twentieth century. This chapter reflects these overarching concerns in a tripartite structure – focusing on the poetics and metapoetics first, and then discussing the areas of gender and ethnicity.

‘Theatre of attractions’: Poetics, metatheatre, father-god The first surviving record of a performance (in the Revels Accounts) dates the first night on 1 November 1611, when the King’s Company presented ‘att Whithall before [th]e Kinges Majestie a play Called the Tempest’. There are records of a further royal performance in 1613 and the play seems to have been an instant success that lingered in theatregoers’ minds.7 In 1614, Ben Jonson had to justify that he did not include a ‘Servant-monster’ or ‘Tempests’ in his Bartholomew Fair, and Dryden and Davenant knew in 1667 that their adaptation transformed a play that ‘had formerly been acted with success in the Black-fryers’. Unlike most of Shakespeare’s plays, The Tempest seems to have been conceived for an indoor

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playhouse, the ‘private theatre’ Blackfriars. From its inception the play thus afforded the opportunity to add theatrical special effects that would not have been possible on the outdoor stage of the Globe. The Tempest as ‘theatre of attractions’ that required a certain amount of relatively elaborate stage machinery was firmly established even on the Jacobean stage. There are no extant visual or verbal representations as to exactly how the ‘magic’ was evoked on the Renaissance stage. But the Blackfriars could certainly have provided acoustic effects, 8 and Vaughan suggests that in the predominantly aural allure of the Renaissance stage most of the effects were ‘sonic’: drum rolls, dogs barking, organ music, the sound of a ‘sea machine’ – that is, pebbles revolving in a drum – to suggest the sea and the initial shipwreck. Much ink has been spilt on the centrality of music and sound in The Tempest; intricately linked to the magic devised by Prospero and devised by his plethora of servants and creatures, singing and music become the aural signs of the mysterious magic located in the performers’ bodies. It is not at all surprising that the play has frequently inspired musical compositions and operas.9 In addition, spectacular costumes, such as a Prospero in a magic robe, a Caliban in animal skins, an Ariel dressed first as a sprite and subsequently as a harpy, spectacularly dressed masque nymphs, and then reapers and goddesses such as a Juno lowered from the ‘heavens’ in a chariot, or maybe even a pack of dogs, the Renaissance fireworks (‘squibs’) would have contributed to the visual attraction. Miraculous appearances and disappearances via trap doors would have enhanced the banquet scene and the betrothal masque, or would have suggested Caliban’s cave. Did Ariel fly as he often does in modern acrobatic performances? Virginia and Alden Vaughan argue that the text does not demand this when Prospero suggests he become ‘like a nymph o’th’ sea’. Almost certainly both Ariel and Miranda, and possibly many of the additional creatures created by Prospero’s island magic would have been played by boys and, as is usual in the Renaissance court masque, the stately procession of the betrothal masque would

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have been accompanied by an antimasque (here, the island creatures). With William Macready’s 1838 production, Ariel, now decidedly female (performed by Priscilla Horton), ‘flies’ in fairy costume on a wire, singing enchantingly. In various ways subsequent performances of The Tempest, from the Restoration adaptation by William Davenant and John Dryden to the film versions by Peter Greenaway and Julie Taymor, explore the theatricality of the court masque as a staging of heightened spectacularity and special effects. Probably inspired by the mise-en-scène of an enchanted island on the occasion of the completion of Versailles Palace in 1664, in 1667 Davenant and Dryden renamed the play The Tempest, or, The Enchanted Island. Unlike other Shakespeare plays, the aural and visual extravaganza and ‘classical’ unity of the Tempest plot spoke directly to Restoration tastes, but Davenant and Dryden introduced a set of additional characters, above all to add topical political satire and to enhance the potential for erotic innuendo via intensified exploitation of the trope of sexual innocence: Sycorax becomes Caliban’s sister and is introduced as part of the (now amorous) Stephano/Trincalo [sic] subplot; the innocent Miranda is mirrored by an equally innocent new character, Hippolito, who can fall in love with another new character, Miranda’s sister Dorinda – resulting in a mirror narrative to the key romantic union; Ariel appears accompanied by a female sprite, Milcha – whether this implies a male Ariel is open to debate. Davenant and Dryden could rely on earlier re-workings of The Tempest, and their success at the Duke’s Theatre, corroborated for example in Samuel Pepys’s diary entries, prompted a fully operatic adaptation at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Dorset Garden Theatre in 1674, which went even further in turning The Tempest into a special effects vehicle with elaborate scenery. Its musical interludes, flying spirits, demons, turbulent skies, and thunder and lightning (contrasted with a dimmed audience space) proved irresistible as cues to put the theatre machine in action – and soon generated the parody of The Mock Tempest set in the London prison of Bridewell

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that makes fun of the aural and visual outrageousness. Hogarth’s sketch of Davenant/Dryden prepared around 1735, one of the earliest visual representations of a Shakespeare play, does little to convey its theatricality and spectacular visuality.10 Interestingly, Jeremy Sams revived the concept of The Enchanted Island in his 2011 production for the New York Metropolitan Opera, described by the New York Times as a ‘gleeful baroque mashup’ and ‘a Franken-opera’: ‘Essentially “The Enchanted Island” is Shakespearean fan fiction’.11 As this Baroque extravaganza informed above all by assorted music from Handel suggests, irreverent, impure appropriations of The Tempest, here including a part for Neptune written for Met star tenor Plácido Domingo and objets trouvés from YouTube, are back in fashion. The Davenant/Dryden adaptation ruled the London stages almost until the onset of Romanticism in the eighteenth century, when its frippery and licentiousness fell out of favour and the search for origins and for Shakespeare as a national poet suggested a rediscovery of the original Tempest. William Macready’s restored version, which promised both Shakespeare’s genuine language and a plot disentangled from the amorous Restoration complications, was a phenomenal success on the Covent Garden stage. One decisive aspect that Macready did not redress, however, was The Tempest as a vehicle for an ever more elaborate theatre machinery – with the lifelike shipwreck inspired by the preceding pantomime Sinbad the Sailor and columns miraculously emerging from underground for the banquet. For Macready, the restored, authentic Shakespeare represented the national theatre tradition, and, shortly afterwards, Charles Kean, in particular, sought to claim Shakespeare as the key representative of a national poetry. This did not prevent Kean from expressing the Romantic penchant for faux medievalism by dressing the characters in thirteenth-century Italian gowns in his 1857 production. Nor did Kean refrain from mining the play for spectacular lighting effects, which were produced with the help of the new gaslight technologies.

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Increasingly, panoramas and painted canvases enhanced the stagecraft of a thoroughly industrialized Britain. Frequently, the play has come to be seen as a metaphor of the theatre, with Prospero a stage manager who dominates the proceedings. This is evident in two of the most influential recent performances, the stage production by Giorgio Strehler (La Tempesta, Piccolo Teatro di Milano, 1978, a performance filmed for Italian TV RAI and currently available on DVD and on YouTube in full length) and Peter Greenaway’s movie Prospero’s Books. In Strehler’s production, which toured globally in the 1980s and thus became a reference point for subsequent stagings, the curtain opens as stagehands preparing blue sheets to represent the sea, sound and light effects are exposed as precisely ‘effects’ of the stage machinery. The influence of Bertolt Brecht is palpable, but the magic impact of a floundering ship or the aerial Ariel (Giulia Lazzerini, a Pierrot visibly suspended from the flies by a wire) is enhanced rather than diminished by the laying bare of the apparatus, particularly in the filmed version, which includes various glimpses into backstage technology. While the stage is bare and gradually assembles to spectacular effects produced by clever lighting and hypnotic sounds, the comic scenes involving Trinculo and Stephano clearly evoke commedia dell’arte traditions. The contortions of the crab-like Caliban (Massimo Fosch) respond to the cues by the powerful Prospero (Tino Carrara), the theatre magician who has the stagehand Ariel at his side. Eventually, the visible clipping of the wire frees Ariel from his role as stagehand for Prospero.12 Whereas Strehler focuses on theatre magic, Greenaway takes The Tempest as his starting point to illustrate how powerfully creatures, buildings and the like can be evoked from world-building words and books. In one of the first of many narrative passages in the text, Prospero relates to Miranda how Gonzalo eased his banishment decreed by Antonio: ‘Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me / From my own library with volumes that / I prized above my dukedom’. The 120 minutes of digital (the then-revolutionary

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Quantel Paintbox) and high-definition video display follow this logic. Various devices highlight Prospero as originator of the narrative: John Gielgud’s commanding sixth and final performance as a Prospero who speaks all the lines in the play; the foregrounding of his calligraphic writing, his 24 books on science and magic that are paraded (and, as we eventually learn, of which the Folio itself is the last); his characterization as a Renaissance magus in tableaux suggest the St Augustine paintings by da Messina. Greenaway, who had a history in structural filmmaking, divides the film into 91 sections (it was released in 1991) and three parts: the Past (invoking his expulsion by Antonio from Milan), the Present (his performance of magic on the island) and the Future (his abrogation of power and return).13 Greenaway’s multi-artistry (writing, speaking, theatre, architecture, painting, filmmaking) merges metatheatre (stage machinery of the Jacobean court masque) with the metafilmic visual power of a digital theatre of attractions. Painterly static shots and painfully slow travelling shots (supported by the insistent loops of Michael Nyman’s music) exhibit an exuberant procession of creatures and spaces. As I have argued elsewhere, the proliferating Prospero becomes filmmaker and writer, as well as actor and character, while Gielgud and Shakespeare are just big enough to fit Greenaway’s aspirations. As his purpose was to explore metaphor and symbol, Greenaway ‘tried to find as many characters as [he] could that had an allegorical reference to water’.14 The result of this über-allegory, which comes in multiple frames, digitally overlaid to suggest theatrical framing, is an excess of meaning that renders The Tempest an allegory of the rich vacuity of human creativity. As Paula Willoquet-Maricondi notes, Prospero, the master of writing, represents Western modernity, and he fails: Prospero is the modern visionary subject, holder of the assertoric gaze, creator and master-manipulator of a fictionbecome-reality; he is the Cartesian cogito who negates the visible – the organic, dynamic and unpredictable reality of

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the island and its inhabitants – only to construct the visible according to a ‘model-in-thought’.15 When Stefan Pucher picked up the metatheatrical dimension for a celebrated pop version of Shakespeare’s play (Münchener Kammerspiele, 2007), he took the ironies further, and Prospero’s sinking, his increasing unsuitability to represent the (suspect) Cartesian cogito, was clearly in evidence. Just as in Greenaway, the performance highlighted the literariness of the magic: the stage became an open book whose pages were (significantly) filled with eclectic videos cut from old films by video artist Chris Kondek, who had previously worked with the Wooster Group, Laurie Anderson, Michael Nyman and Robert Wilson. The video screens were a receptacle of the many stories in The Tempest, and its water. The pages were turned by a dark-clad Prospero (Hildegard Schmahl) and an Ariel who seemed a tired, slightly younger version of his mistress. This time, however, Prospero does not conjure up Western culture (Greenaway: Renaissance humanism) but, seated in a silly tiger-headed armchair, represents the excesses of pop culture: Ferdinand and Miranda sport long-haired wigs and satin shirts and their romance is deliberately cheesy, the goddesses appear as disco bunnies, and Caliban is an unruly teenager-turned-punk singer. The post-dramatic team presented a pop-cultural trash-Tempest in which Caliban accosted Prospero as a ‘humanist asshole’ (‘Humanisten­ arsch’): we have come a long way from the learned Gielgud Prospero, who is a deeply suspicious character to Pucher. While this pop Prospero seems almost sinister, Gonzalo is a pop dreamer, singing John Lennon’s ‘Watching the Wheels’. It is doubtful if even his vision of Utopianism has to be thought of outside of pop culture.16

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Figure 2.1 Stefan Pucher’s Der Sturm at the Münchner Kammerspiele, 8 November 2007. Left to right: Wolfgang Pregler (Ariel), Hildegard Schmahl (Prospero). Photograph: Arno Declair



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Gender: Prospero in crisis, enter Prospera For all their differences, Strehler, Greenaway and Pucher focus on strong Prosperos as theatrical, filmmaking and pop culture magicians. In fact, Amy Lawrence’s gender critique of Prospero’s Books points out that the film, which came into being at actor John Gielgud’s bidding, reinforces the patriarchal, phallocentric and logocentric authority of wordmaker Prospero/Gielgud/Shakespeare.17 These readings recall The Tempest as a play on poiesis and the rich theatricals of a long tradition and, in particular, the Jacobean era. In the nineteenth century, while productions rich in theatre technology continued to wield their magic on the spectators, Prospero’s status as the source of miracles dwindled. The frequently bearded traditional sage, his costumes variously derived from Greek Antiquity, the Old Testament or Celtic tradition, was deconstructed at the onset of psychoanalysis: with Descartes’s cogito, the overpowering magician was also subjected to a rigorous analysis that seemed to destroy Prospero’s untouchable status as a demi-god who metes out justice in his microcosmic world. Instead, Prospero became the Oedipal player in a Freudian family scenario, who jealously guards Miranda against a Caliban who comes to represent Prospero’s repressed carnal desires. This interpretation reaches an extreme variant in Paul Mazursky’s 1982 film adaptation, which transforms Prospero into Phillip Dimitrious, an architect disenchanted with his wife, who escapes with his daughter and mistress to a Greek island to face Kalibanos, a local goatherd. This 1980s Prospero gives his incestuous turmoil free vent so that it is easy to see that the storm scene is predominantly a metaphor for his tormented state of mind. Contemporary performances tend to deconstruct Prospero and cast grave doubts on his authority, either by demonizing or by belittling him. We have already noted that Hildegard Schmahl turned him into a zero-grade

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pop version of Gielgud’s Renaissance sage. The tormented, powerful Prospero of the twentieth century is represented well in John Gielgud’s angry, hurt and impassioned version of an outcast in Peter Brook’s 1957 production – and Dymkowski praises John Wood for his nuanced portrayal of a torn identity in 1988. At 53, this was already the third time Gielgud had performed the role. More radically, in Derek Jarman’s film Tempest in 1979, Prospero, played with brooding energy by the relatively young Heathcote Williams, seemed to perversely enjoy his enslavement of Ariel, but here Prospero is too introspective and melancholic (inspired by the Renaissance master of the occult, John Dee) to be a domineering father. In 1982, Derek Jacobi portrayed a less radically melancholic Prospero who, nevertheless, also casts doubt on his role as master of ceremonies. Several recent German productions18 (Pucher, Munich, also David Bösch, Bochum 2007; Corinna von Rad, Weimar 2008; Christoph Frick, Berne 2004; Stefan Bachmann, Basel 2000) have portrayed a dictatorial Prospero. In 2012, at Theater Oberhausen, he was even turned into an Arab-world terrorist bent on reclaiming Naples from an imperialist power: there is a machine-gun toting Ariel, and Stephano and Trinculo are executed at the end. In Bochum, he draconically enchained the entourage, and Ariel lost his capacity to fly. In Weimar he failed to release Ariel. Ariel, in turn, has become increasingly aware of his ‘slave’ status and reacts aggressively towards Prospero, infamously spitting in his face in Sam Mendes’s 1993 Stratford production.19 To turn Prospero into a restaurant owner, as Irina Brook’s production did in 2012, is to take away or ridicule the authority derived from his books and his Renaissance magician’s art. As I am writing this, Daniela Löffner’s production at the local Braunschweiger Staatstheater (March 2013) shows a balding, bespectacled, clumsy clerk (echoing John Wood’s performance in Nicholas Hytner’s 1988 RSC production) rather than a powerful magician. At the RSC in 2009, Antony Sher seemed disorientated on the plausibly African island, which included a tree and a

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snake – a Zulu image for nature. Rather than shooting his enemies (an option, as Sher aimed his gun at the entourage), the production ended on the colonizer’s plea for forgiveness, resonating, of course, with the South African post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Most radically, the SF film adaptation Forbidden Planet (1956) has the Prospero character Dr Morbius sacrifice himself. There are other solutions for the conundrum of the deconstructed father-magician-colonizer who has fallen prey to the gender revisions of the twentieth century. One way out is to make Miranda – the sole female character who appears on stage – stronger and more assertive than she usually is in traditional performances.20 In Marina Warner’s novel Indigo (1992), she is a Creole herself, rivalling with her white and blonde young aunt Xanthe. Jarman (1979) counters the John Dee-inspired occultist with Toyah Willcox, who is supposed to embody the Punk iconography of the late 1970s and early 1980s. With the credentials of her punk persona, her unkempt hair and her rebelliousness, Willcox subverted Prospero’s authority. Jarman’s most daring innovation, however, was Elisabeth Welch’s rendering of ‘Stormy Weather’ to a chorus of sailor boys. Unlike Stefan Pucher, Jarman took the power of pop culture to undermine Shakespearean authority seriously. In a perceptive comparison of Jarman and Greenaway, Douglas Lanier has argued that, as avant-garde ‘resolutely auteurist’ Tempests, both ‘productions share, as a reflex of their anti-realist cinematic aesthetics, an interest in the imagery of Renaissance hermeticism and a fascination with masque-like styles’. However, Lanier concludes, ‘Jarman interrogates content, Greenaway form’.21 In Jarman’s Tempest, neo-Baroque gay campiness replaces the spectacularity of the court masque, and, by implication, nationalist and bourgeois Shakespeares, with an artificial performance that at the same time subverts essentialist gender norms as the heterosexual union of Ferdinand and Miranda is undercut with gay iconographies. In fact, Dymkowski notes increasingly tomboyish Mirandas, for instance, in the productions by Sam Mendes,

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RSC 1993, and Wolfe. The powerful female ‘Prospera’ performed by Helen Mirren in Julie Taymor’s 2011 movie was a culmination of earlier attempts at laying the powerful wand in female hands, notably the stage performances by Vanessa Redgrave in the New Globe (2000), Demetra Pittman (2001) or Hildegard Schmahl (2007). Schmahl, however, seemed sinister and androgynous and Redgrave, equally androgynous, portrayed a ‘soft-spoken country squire’ that resembled a transvestite rather than a female Prospera.22 In 2001, Demetra Pittman highlighted her role of mother (rather than father) to Miranda in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production. Taymor returned to The Tempest after her first small-scale stage production in 1986 (Theatre for a New Audience, New York), which starts from the idea of Prospero as master puppeteer. Uniquely, Mirren does not ‘androgenize’ Prospero but makes her deliberately female, with a text adapted accordingly (via, for instance, an interpolated Naples backstory by Glen Berger, 1.2). Whether or not one thinks the merging maternal relationship with Miranda as convincing, clearly Caliban’s rebellion and designs on Miranda intensify the reading of an unruly masculinity provoking female rule. In fact, Mirren’s Prospera is remarkable for her physical strength and authority displayed in spectacular computer-generated Ariel-harpy, its fiery black mastiffs, and the authority of a classic Shakespearean actress and strong female figures of authority in prior roles (The Queen, Elizabeth I, Prime Suspect). In this reading, Taymor’s The Tempest continues a right-wing feminist position, which links the masculine sexualization of the female body with moral corruption – a charge that both Burt (2000) and Walker (2009) bring against her.23 In Jarg Pataki’s Freiburg production, Uta Krause’s genderswapping, however, is not limited to Prospero/Prospera or the hybrid genders of Ariel. In an interesting alternative twist in the 1988 Cheek by Jowl production of the play, director Declan Donnellan turned the King of Naples into a Queen of Naples, with clearly identifiable references to the then British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.

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Space and ethnicity The fact that the location of the island is left unspecified has been attributed to the contexts of emerging capitalism in early seventeenth-century London as a metropolis of European colonialist expansion and globalization.24 Productions are thus free to invent a space, and put it in the Mediterranean (increasingly elaborate and illusionist, Macready, 1838), on a contemporary Greek island (Mazursky, 1982), in the Balkans (Lenke Udovicki, Globe, 2000), in the American civil war (Jack Bender, TV, 1998), in a circus ring (Glen Walford, 1984), in a theatre (Donnellan, 1988; Lepage, 1992), in Africa (RSC, 2009), in Cardiff (Michael Bogdanov, BBC2 Wales, 1997), at Stoneleigh Abbey, Warwickshire (Jarman, 1979), in the Italian restaurant Da Prospero (Irina Brook, Paris, 2012), on the planet Altair–4 (Forbidden Planet, 1956), or on Hawaii (location filming, Taymor’s movie, 2011). Famously, in 1987 Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa set the play on the island of Sado, whereto the Noh theatre doyen, Zeami, was exiled in 1432. Lemi Ponifasio’s Tempest: Without a Body (Vienna, 2007) uses Shakespeare to address Samoa’s colonial history, adapting the Maori dance fa’ataupati. Lee Beagley’s 2011 adaptation for the Bremer Shakespeare Company mixes it with contemporary genetics into a site-specific varietyshow spectacle on the eponymous Shakespeare’s Pleasure Island, located on a disused water tower. In a 1997 Cologne production, Karin Beier suggested a multilingual Europe, having her 12 actors speak nine different languages. In 2011, the site-specific Jericho House production at St Giles Church, East London, travelled to the Israeli West Bank, performing in a Bethlehem refugee camp and thus inviting comparison to a very different conflict of territories. The thrust of twentiethcentury productions, however, takes the play to resonate with the Americas rather than with Europe, so that Vaughan and Vaughan speak about the ‘Americanization’ of The Tempest.25 The ‘Americanized’ Tempest inevitably highlights its ethnic

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and imperialist dimensions. Arguably, ethnicity has been the most contested and defining category in the play’s reception from the first production onwards. Even if the Bermudas are only mentioned in the play as the ‘still-vexed’ place whence Ariel is to fetch ‘midnight dew’ for a magical potion (1.2.233), the New World is lurking in its lines, for instance in Caliban’s reference to the Patagonian god Setebos.26 The play is in all likelihood influenced by the narratives by William Strachey of the shipwreck of the Sea Venture off the Bermudas in 1609 and, as more recent research suggests, Sir Thomas Gates’s oral account that surfaced in 1614, and in Captain John Smith’s report (1624) of two Powhatan men named Namuntack and Matchumps returning from England on Gates’s ship. With two Powhatan men among several Indians present in England in 1609, two years before The Tempest emerged, one may conjecture a direct link between Shakespeare’s play and subsequent Pocahontas narratives – a line of reception that informs contemporary performances and rewritings, from Charlotte Barnes’s ‘Americanized’ The Forest Princess (UK 1844/USA 1848, which remixes The Tempest and Pocahontas) to Philip Osment’s 1987 play This Island’s Mine.27 Since the 1970s, Caliban has appeared quite regularly in African literature, including poetry by Taban Lo Liyong (Uganda), Lemuel Johnson’s poetry collection Highlife for Caliban (Sierra Leone), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Homecoming (Kenya), and David Wallace’s play Do You Love Me, Master? (Zambia).28 Dev Virahsawmy has supplied an appropriation of The Tempest (Toufann, 1991) in Mauritian Creole, but Thomas Cartelli has criticized these writings-back as ‘questionable’.29 In the postcolonial response to The Tempest, he distinguishes a first phase, in which the Prospero-Caliban relationship is subverted and criticized in an attempt at postcolonial national articulation, from a second phase marked by a Shakespearean shorthand for postcolonial repositioning. To radicalize Cartelli’s point, it might indeed seem as if appropriations of Caliban (defiant aggression), Miranda (not-yet-liberated cultural dependency) and Ariel (idealized postcolonial subject)

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have served to stereotype, to some degree, the attitudes of ‘writing back’ to the centre. Indeed, Virginia Mason Vaughan suggests that postcolonial readings of The Tempest may deteriorate towards a pro forma, ‘obligatory gesture to political correctness’.30 Attempts to ‘equalize’ the central text of The Tempest, to rewrite or perform a Caliban as good as Prospero, tend to reinforce its cultural status and thus the colonizer’s perspective. Cartelli, interestingly, has also noted a diminishing importance of Shakespeare as a reference point, as the colonizer’s cultural icons have become at least partially superseded by a cultural iconicity ‘of one’s own’. Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicist interventions in Shakespearean studies have rested most prominently on Caliban and a postcolonial reading of The Tempest. Authors such as Greenblatt and Bill Ashcroft have taken Caliban’s ‘you taught me language and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse’ (1.2.364, p. 198) to be emblematic of the postcolonial situation.31 As early as in the 1950s, Geoffrey Bullough was provoked to dismiss a line of reception that compared Pocahontas to Miranda as a ‘tempting fancy that must be sternly repressed’, but the fact that Shakespeare’s play was first performed in November of 1611, 13 years before Smith’s Generall Historie made the account of Pocahontas widely available to the public, works against this reading.32 Even if one dismisses any unmitigated ‘New World’ link between the Smith/Pocahontas narrative and Shakespeare’s plays, source studies have shown that The Tempest is clearly aware of the discourses which emerged from the Early Modern European encounter with the new world, such as Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essay ‘Of the Caniballes’ or Antonio Pigafetta’s accounts of Patagonia. Inevitably, theatrical interpretations vary and readings that see the play as a narrative of decolonization focus on the dualism of Prospero the colonizer and Caliban his subject. The most influential early articulation of this idea appeared in Octave Mannoni’s Prospero et Caliban in 1950. The French psychologist analyzed how a sex-starved colonizer such as

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Prospero might come to exert a hard-handed rule by displacing his guilt onto Caliban. Mannoni’s argument spawned criticism from Frantz Fanon, as well as Aimé Césaire’s adaptation Une Tempête, in which Caliban is black and Ariel a mulatto slave. These debates intensified in the early 1970s and, since Roberto Fernández Retamar’s 1971 Cuban essay ‘Calibán’ in particular, an entire research field (‘Calibanology’) has emerged.33 The Ubu Repertory Theatre’s New York production of Césaire’s 1969 adaptation in 1992 reversed traditional European stagings with an all-black cast that performed European characters in white masks and an ending that has a withering Prospero remain on the island. In Jonathan Miller’s 1970 production, another influential postcolonial Tempest, not only Caliban (Rudolph Walker), but also Ariel (Norman Beaton) were played by black actors, and Ariel appeared as a nearly assimilated hybrid of colonizer and colonized culture, a precarious position highlighted again by Cyril Nri’s performance in Jonathan Miller’s 1988 reprise of his earlier production. At the 2007 Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Libby Appel cast African-American Derrick Lee Weeden as Prospero. Weeden had rejected the role of Caliban five times before playing Prospero. In 2009, John Kani’s black Caliban seemed justifiably enraged in Janice Honeyman’s co-production by the RSC and Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre. Thus the interpretation of Caliban crucially determines the position of the performance in the postcolonialist debates about The Tempest. This is true even in the case of the very first representation of Caliban. When (in plausible conjecture) the scrivener Ralph Crane inserted his cast list after the Epilogue in the First Folio in 1623, he called Caliban ‘a salvage and deformed slave’, inviting more polysemy, as he suggests references to a Renaissance type of man beyond social control, as well as to an Irish type or a New World ‘cannibal’.34 Caliban first became a crucial character in this discussion when the Romantics inaugurated his reading as a ‘noble savage’. The emerging respect

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for ‘indigenous’ culture and the increasing distrust of civilization epitomized by Rousseau paved the way for Coleridge to grant Caliban ‘a noble being’ and full humanity; consequently William Macready’s 1838 restoration of the Shakespearean Ur-Tempest had a simian, anthropoid object of sympathy. Since the publication of Daniel Wilson’s Darwin-inflected Caliban: The Missing Link in 1873, and the general craze for evolutionary anthropology, Caliban turned from fish-monster into athletic hairy ape, and the fact that both Herbert Beerbohm Tree and F. R. Benson played Caliban, rather than Prospero, testifies to the character’s centrality in the evolutionary paradigm. Both performances, but particularly the simian, hairy Caliban in Beerbohm Tree’s production enhanced by visual tableaux, exhibit a strong aesthetic sensibility (transfixed by beauty and music), increasing psychological depth (visualized suffering after the departure of the Europeans) as well as a strong attachment to the sea (suggested by eating fish and oysters). The problems of ‘ennobling’ Caliban can be witnessed in David Suchet’s 1978 interpretation of the role in the production by Clifford Williams for the RSC: by ennobling Caliban as a proud native ethnically undetermined by pewter-coloured body spray, he rendered Prospero’s wrath futile. Caliban cannot evade the almost crystallized, clichéd dimension of representing a colonized native, even if the postcolonial Tempest is not highlighted, as in the case of Yukio Ninagawa’s late 1980s Japanese production (where he turns into a dragon) or Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books.35 Intended as monstrous and deformed, Michael Clark’s naked, freckled body suggests a sleek, mobile aquatic creature that resonates neither with deformed monstrosity nor with subaltern colonized suppression.36 Jasper Britton’s Caliban eats fish at the London Globe in 2010, while he is attractive enough for Miranda (Anya Khalilulina) to come back and give him (Alexander Feklistov) a farewell kiss before leaving in the Russian-language Cheek by Jowl production at the Barbican

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in 2011. In complete reversal to The Tempest’s structure, Caliban (Thomas Mehlhorn) is a scruffy, degenerate banker in Jarg Pataki’s 2009 production. In the character of Sycorax, who appears only in narrated form in Shakespeare’s play but is frequently performed in contemporary productions, both the re-gendered and de-colonized versions of The Tempest can take hold. Traditionally, when Sycorax does appear, as in Peter Brook’s 1968 production or, in flashback, in Derek Jarman’s 1979 and Peter Greenaway’s 1991 films, she tends to darken Prospero’s role with a harrowing backstory of a struggle against evil or id. In Otra Tempestad, a Cuban adaptation devised by Raquel Carrió and Flora Lauten, Sycorax becomes a significant character. In a prequel to Prospero’s rule, she is a goddess who rules the island and is the mother of additional characters, called ‘orishas’, taken from Afro-Cuban ritual. In Otra Tempestad, the orishas (gods who accompanied African slaves transported to the new world and syncretically merged with Catholic saints) are the daughters of Sycorax’s daughters who are able to take on old-world, Shakespearean characters’ identities. In Marina Warner’s novel Indigo (1992), a feminist and postcolonial revision of The Tempest, Sycorax is a wise woman reigning over an idyllic island with her foster-daughter Ariel, only to be ‘colonized’ by the Englishman Everard. Clearly, stage performances have been influenced by this kind of postcolonial ‘writing back’. The tradition of East-Asian Tempests began with a rich reception in Japan, where Shakespeare was first introduced in the mid-nineteenth century during the Meiji Era (1868–1912), which opened Japan to Western cultural influences. Links to Kabuki and Noh theatre have emerged, notably in the hybrid Tempest productions of Yukio Ninagawa. In fact, the influential Shakespearean films of Akira Kurosawa point to the successful hybrid reception of Shakespeare in Japan. Rather than performing Shakespeare in Western style and Japanese translation, as in the so-called Shinpa (New Wave) Theatre, Ninagawa and other theatremakers such as Ninoru

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Fujita map Shakespeare onto Japanese history and Japanese dramatic traditions – in Fujita’s case on Bunraku theatre, a puppet theatre narrated by a chanter. More recently, the play has been picked up in China, with a spoken drama production in Beijing (1982), a Taiwanese song-music adaptation (2004), and a Chinese/ Danish co-production, a circus theatre version, highlighting Ariel’s acrobatics (Giacomo Ravicchio, 2010). Productions of The Tempest by Sam Mendes (Singapore, 2010), Declan Donnellan (China, 2012) and Northern Broadsides/Barrie Rutter (China, 2013) have toured in Asian countries and there now is a Chinese Universities Shakespeare Festival. The Korean version, adapted and directed by Tae-Suk for Seoul’s Mokwha Repertory Company, also followed the pattern of East-West hybridity, reminding critic Michael Billington of the director Peter Brook, Korean dance and fifthcentury history.37 Meanwhile, in the US, the play was banned from Tucson, Arizona, classrooms in 2011, on the evidence that ‘the likelihood of avoiding discussions of colonization, enslavement, and racism were remote’, according to teacher Curtis Acosta.38 In England, we may see trends towards a re-conventionalization of The Tempest, although one may doubt the prefix ‘re’: the two adventurous movie versions of The Tempest, by Jarman and Greenaway, have proved more influential in Europe than in Britain.39 Trevor Nunn’s West End production (Theatre Royal, Haymarket, 2011) seemed to shun any explicit references or obvious ‘readings’ and seemed above all a star vehicle for Ralph Fiennes as Prospero. Equally conventional, if clever at its special effects, seemed Des McAnuff’s version for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 2011, which is also available on DVD. Jeremy Herrin’s London Globe production in 2013, on the other hand, employed Jacobean dresses and relied less on theatrical effects and more on the simplicity of a father-daughter relationship between Prospero (Roger Allam) and Miranda (Jessie Buckley). Jonathan Holmes claims that he restored the music of Robert Johnson to its rightful

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co-authorial status in his 2012 production of The Tempest as a musical at St Giles, Cripplegate – although there seems to be no record of Shakespeare’s music beyond the two surviving songs. Maybe the future will be an eclectic merger of text and performance via an enhanced version of The Tempest for iPad (Elliott Visconsi and Katherine Rowe, Luminary Digital Media 2012): while reading the play and mining annotations for meaning, one could sample a selection of significant audio and video performances. The experience would be fragmentary rather than holistic, but intriguing nevertheless.

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3 Recent Perspectives on The Tempest Brinda Charry

Like the play’s magic island, The Tempest offers a myriad of interpretative possibilities. Building on the scholarship outlined in the opening chapter, contemporary critics have continued to read and re-read the play in new ways and have used it to substantiate waves of literary and cultural ‘theory’. Even a brief survey of the recent critical history will give us a fairly complete sense of the shifts and trends in critical theory and its application to Shakespearean drama. Criticism, like literature, has a history that responds to changing socioeconomic and institutional factors. While this has doubtless always been the case, the shifts have been quite dramatic and radical in the last 30 years or so, with scholars challenging traditional understandings of the place and role of literature, as well as conventional ways of reading literary texts. In the 1980s, the increasing appeal of these new approaches prompted discussion of a perceived ‘crisis’ in English studies. Crisis or not, the fact remains that the revisions in cultural and literary theory have inspired exciting new readings of The Tempest. This chapter does not attempt an exhaustive survey

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of recent trends in literary criticism; instead it organizes the best-known of scholarship on the play in terms of the critical school they belong to, with the understanding that these critical traditions spawned each other, overlap, and are in dialogue. Together they have helped enrich our understanding and appreciation of The Tempest.

Cultural materialism and new historicist readings The major changes in the nature of English studies in the 1980s were largely prompted by Cultural Materialism, a movement that came out of British universities in the 1970s and 1980s. It was at least partially prompted by the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and thereafter, the renewed interest in Marxist ideology that emphasized the economic forces impacting cultural production, as well as by explosions in European theory. Cultural Materialism posited that literature should not be privileged as superior to or even somehow different from other social artefacts (as Raymond Williams wrote, we cannot ‘separate literature and art from other kinds of social practice’),1 nor was literature seen as transcending time and place. Poems, stories and plays were best understood in their historical context, and above all they were ideological – i.e. influenced by, and, in their turn, influencing thoughts and belief-systems, albeit unintentionally. That called for a convergence of literary study and the study of history and society. While cultural materialists pushed for the study of hitherto marginalized texts, the first substantial piece of criticism that came out of this movement was Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (1985) – the cultural materialists were actually taking on the Bard!2 This is significant because Shakespeare, perhaps more than any other writer, has been seen as a repository of eternal and universal wisdom and above the limitations of time and place. This

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traditional approach to Shakespeare was termed ‘idealist’ by the cultural materialists who, along with the other critical schools they inspired, came to be described as ‘revisionists’. The volume Political Shakespeare, along with Alternative Shakespeares (1985), which also privileged historical and political readings of Shakespeare, contained landmark essays on The Tempest (discussed in more detail under ‘postcolonial’ readings of the play).3 For now, it will suffice to state that these essays are good examples of the ‘revisionist’ trend in criticism in that they were based on the premise that The Tempest is best understood within its historical contexts, with sensitivity to its era’s politics. In fact, the most enduring legacy of Cultural Materialism is that it has inspired a number of politically informed approaches to literature, including postcolonialism, Marxism and feminism (among others), all of which have produced sophisticated and contentious, and therefore very stimulating, readings of The Tempest. New Historicism emerged in the United States almost in parallel with Cultural Materialism, even as it was influenced by the British movement’s emphasis on the inevitably political and historical nature of literary texts. Very simply, the new historicists, too, insisted that literary texts were historical utterances and what was needed, in the words of Stephen Greenblatt, ‘founder’ of New Historicism, was ‘a shift away from criticism centered on “verbal icons” toward a criticism centered on cultural artifacts’.4 History was not simply a backdrop to the literary text which is somehow unique or superior to its context. The literary text is in dynamic conversation with history, participates in it, is marked by and influences it. Historical documents that are studied alongside the literary text are not considered ‘sources’ in any sense. On the other hand, all texts belong to the same ‘discursive field’, i.e. they come out of the same historical conditions and do similar political work. To the New Historicist it is irrelevant if Shakespeare had access to or knew of these other historical texts. In his essay ‘Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne’, Greenblatt places The Tempest alongside other documents that

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demonstrate how the Renaissance church and state aroused anxiety and fear (of hunger, punishment, death, the hereafter) in order to control the public. Threat and punishment, as well as pardon, were strategies of control, designed to reinforce the idea of the monarch as an all-powerful figure who could dispense both justice and mercy at will. Similar strategies were deployed by the Virginia Company’s officers when they were shipwrecked in the Bermudas to keep the rebelling underclass in their place. Once the survivors reached Virginia, the governor passed what Greenblatt calls the ‘first martial code in America’, which led to the affirmation of absolute control.5 Greenblatt then offers a reading of The Tempest emphasizing the means used by Prospero to exercise and maintain power. Like the Renaissance documents that Greenblatt considers, Prospero arouses and manipulates his opponents’ fears and anxieties. The play begins with Miranda’s anxiety, which is an important prelude to the revelation of her life story and even to shaping her identity. Prospero uses similar (though harsher) strategies with Alonso and the other aristocrats, and although he finally forgives them, the pardon itself is an expression of power, just as in the case of the royal pardons of the period. Anxiety is thus aroused and then transformed by Prospero into love, gratitude and, most importantly, obedience. Greenblatt also concedes that the play raises troubling questions about authority, partly by making magic (which was viewed with some suspicion by Renaissance readers and viewers) the main instrument of power and by having Prospero experience some self-doubt, a doubt that perhaps prompts the undertone of guilt in the line ‘this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine’ (5.1.275–6). New Historicism (with some variations) soon became the dominant mode of Shakespeare criticism. The examination of political power and its discursive strategies were central to the New Historicists’ method. Gary Schmidgall argues that The Tempest was written in accord with the ‘courtly aesthetic’ of the time – a mode that was spectacularly grand and centred on court rituals. The play is thus structured around

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the eminence of royal power and social hierarchy, which are both challenged by Caliban, who symbolizes rebellion and disorder. Schmidgall places Caliban amid Tudor sermons on the evils of rebellion and argues that the play reinforces the lesson that obedience to authority is natural and god-willed.6 Curt Breight’s essay examines texts dealing with treason that circulated widely in the Renaissance. Furthermore, treason was not just condemned but ‘produced’ in these texts, i.e. even innocent activities were framed as treason and punished when it suited the authorities to do so. Breight places The Tempest alongside these documents. Prospero evokes the language of treason against Caliban, the upper- and lower-class conspirators and even Ferdinand, in order to legitimize his own power. Oppositional discourses which counter Prospero’s do exist – Caliban, for example, has his own story of treason and usurpation of the island – but these are delegitimized and suppressed by Prospero, although the audience can see Prospero’s control for what it is and is not duped by him. Prospero displays a strategic mixture of power and vulnerability by letting Caliban have his way for a while in order to reinforce his position. Breight argues that at the end of the play Prospero does not concede power but rather switches magic for a more straightforward version of political control.7 While the workings of power and the role that theatre played in its maintenance are central to the New Historicist approach, other critics have adopted the method without necessarily resorting to the ‘absolute power’ paradigm. Significant examples of such work include Mark Thornton Burnett’s essay, which locates Caliban in the midst of numerous tales of monstrosity and prodigious birth in England and reads Prospero as a kind of showman who exhibits ‘strange’ objects.8 Similarly, Trinculo’s desire to exhibit Caliban in England prompts Steven Mullaney’s examination of Renaissance ‘wonder cabinets’ or collections of foreign objects that were viewed as exotic, spectacular, or simply curious, but usually stripped of their human or cultural context.9 In ‘Prospero’s Books’, Barbara A. Mowat tries to understand the volumes

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that Gonzalo sent with Prospero into exile, which are often evoked but never presented. She studies Renaissance books of magic and argues that it is not possible to construct his magic simply in terms of either ‘black’ or ‘white’ magic. She also finds links to the English voyages to America in the similarities between the language used in the ‘magical’ books to summon spirits and the language of explorers of foreign lands.10

Postcolonial readings Postcolonialism developed after the dissolution of Europe’s colonial empires as a literary approach based on the premise that every branch of knowledge and cultural production is part and parcel of the European conquest and colonization of much of the world. It has thus clearly been influenced by Cultural Materialism’s insistence on literary texts as participating in ideological systems. One cannot overlook the ‘worldiness’ of texts, as pioneer postcolonial critic Edward Said wrote.11 Renaissance criticism has benefited from the healthy marriage of New Historicism and postcolonialism, and The Tempest is among the first of the plays that was studied using this dual approach. Postcolonial critics argue that Shakespeare’s work especially needs to be subject to postcolonial study as, in the context of the British Empire, he was the author most associated with English culture and his work was actually used to establish colonial authority and cultural superiority to colonized cultures. Early postcolonial criticism focused on The Tempest’s American connection. As discussed in the previous chapter, the American theme has been persistent in the play’s criticism since the nineteenth century. Critics have continued to ponder the connection. Alden Vaughan’s essay ‘Trinculo’s Indians – American Natives in Shakespeare’s England’, for example, offers instances of Native Americans who were transported to Shakespeare’s London, whether by force or voluntarily, in order to provide

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a context for Trinculo’s statement that Englishmen would ‘lay out ten [coins] to see a dead Indian’ (2.2.32). Vaughan clarifies that the intent is not to prove that Caliban is an American Indian, but to reflect on the topicality of American Indians in Shakespeare’s England.12 While the ‘American connection’ has clearly prompted postcolonial readings of the play, postcolonial criticism does not insist on the American setting as such. Instead it argues that what really matters is that the Prospero-Caliban relationship is marked by the inequalities and struggles that informed the colonizer-colonized relationship in many parts of the globe. Caliban is constructed as monster, brute and savage, all reminiscent of the ways in which many Europeans represented natives across the world. Moreover, postcolonial scholars would argue, The Tempest does not simply reflect early European attempts to colonize the world; the play itself functions as a colonial text, i.e. in its plot and language the play reenacts colonial discourse, and because of its canonical position it has helped perpetuate colonial ideology. In 1950 the psychologist Octave Mannoni saw The Tempest as offering a model that would serve to explain the psychological causes and effects of colonization. For Mannoni, behind colonialism is Prospero’s inferiority complex, which makes him feel the need to overcompensate and establish himself as aggressor, while the colonized are the Calibans of the world – victims of a ‘dependence complex’ who almost welcome dominance.13 Shakespeare’s play offered Mannoni the means to articulate his ideas, and although they were widely criticized by subsequent postcolonial intellectuals, his book spurred others to turn to The Tempest to explore their own experiences of colonization. In 1960 the Caribbean writer George Lamming attempted a postcol­ onial reading of The Tempest decades before postcolonialism became institutionalized as a field of study. His Pleasures of Exile is also significant in that it was written when little criticism was produced outside Anglo-American circles and few critics drew attention to their own sociocultural position. Lamming wrote that as a native of Barbados he could not

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read the play without recalling the travel narratives of the Renaissance: […] when I remember the voyages and that particular period in African history, I see The Tempest against the background of England’s experiments in colonization […] The Tempest was also prophetic of a political future which is our present. Moreover, the circumstances of my life, both as a colonial and exiled descendant of Caliban, is an example of that prophecy.14 Lamming sees Caliban as a native whose humanity has been reduced by imperialism and who has simply become an occasion to be exploited for Prospero’s own development. While he identifies with Caliban, Lamming also realizes that he is unalterably marked by the colonial experience and colonial education. The most significant parallel between the Caribbean experience and Shakespeare’s play is the education of Caliban and the teaching and learning of the colonial tongue. Lamming’s book, which is a personal essay, a colonial history, as well as a critical reading of The Tempest, doubtless foreshadows future readings of the play. Terence Hawkes’s essay ‘Swisser Swatter: Making a Man of English Letters’ is not a specifically postcolonial reading but gestures towards one. Hawkes writes that Trinculo’s question upon stumbling upon Caliban, ‘What have us here, a man or a fish?” (2.2.24–5) raises the interesting question of what defines the human. A category that is taken for granted is thus subject to slippage and fluctuation, especially in colonial contexts where the other’s humanity is persistently questioned.15 In Shakespeare’s Talking Animals, Hawkes suggests that a colonist is like a dramatist in that he ‘imposes the “shape” of his own culture, embodied in his speech, on the new world, and makes that world recognizable, habitable, “natural[ly]” able to speak his language’. Conversely, the dramatist is metaphorically a colonist, for he too explores new areas of human experience and ‘makes the territory

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over in his own image. He […] opens up new worlds for the imagination’.16 The connection between writing and colonizing has been taken up by other critics. Greenblatt’s ‘Learning to Curse – Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century’ focuses on language in The Tempest to understand power relations between the colonizer and the colonized. Language, says Greenblatt, has been perceived as the perfect instrument and partner of empire. He studies Spanish and English documents on the New World and concludes that the settlers had two attitudes toward native language: either the natives had no language but, like Caliban, gabbled ‘like / A thing most brutish’ (1.2.357–8), or there were no linguistic barriers between conquerors and natives, and the natives were forced to adopt the conquerors’ language. Both attitudes, writes Greenblatt, reveal the conquerors’ inability to ‘sustain the simultaneous perception of likeness and difference’. Prospero refuses to recognize Caliban’s language as legitimate and hence denies his humanity, but Prospero also feels the need to teach Caliban his language and refashion him. It is this ‘startling encounter between a lettered and unlettered culture’ that the play illustrates in its conflict between the erudite magician and the ‘barbarian’ who wishes to ‘Burn but his books’ (3.2.95). Caliban might have lost his native language, but he has a moment of victory when he learns how to curse, albeit in his master’s language. Greenblatt’s landmark essay inaugurated a number of postcolonial readings of The Tempest. ‘Learning to Curse’ anticipates and refutes charges of ‘presentism’ (the idea that present-day concerns – such as colonialism – are being imposed on a Renaissance text) by insisting that the play invites political readings and that these readings are historical – they simply discover something that has been obscured or ignored for years.17 Postcolonial readings also typically place Caliban at the centre of the play; he has come to signify the colonized native, the complex villain-victim, political rebel, poet and dreamer. Paul Brown’s essay argues that the play is not just a reflection

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or representation of colonialist practices and discourses but is in itself an example of colonial discourse. Because it is also a literary text, it operates in interesting ways. Written in the romance genre that is characterized by the movement towards harmony and order, the aesthetics and pleasing structure of the play serve to obscure or at best ’mystify’ the harshness and brutality of the politics of colonization. Although the play attempts to celebrate Prospero’s power and obscure or contain dissonance and the ethical and political problems that are part of the colonial enterprise, it ultimately fails to do so. The contradictions in the text (Prospero as usurped and usurper, Caliban as rapist and victim) serve to produce a rebellious and unhappy native who serves to justify Prospero’s rule but also challenges it. In a sense colonialism’s structures of domination actually (and paradoxically) produce opposition. The Tempest, then, ‘declares no all-embracing triumph for colonialism. Rather it serves as a limit text in which the characteristic operations of colonialist discourse may be discerned – as an instrument of exploitation, a register of beleagurement and a site of radical ambivalence’.18 Peter Hulme has also published a considerable body of work based on the premise that English colonialism made significant advances in the first half of the seventeenth century, with an increasing need to establish an ideological discourse to justify and further the enterprise. He argues that an emerging discourse of the ‘Caribbees’ constitutes an important context for The Tempest, as England became increasingly interested in the Caribbean islands. His essay ‘Hurricanes in the Caribbees: The Constitution of the Discourse of English Colonialism’ traces the evolution of this discourse of the ‘Caribbees’. It was first influenced by biblical and classical influences, indicating that Europeans used the language of the familiar and known to deal with the novelty of the Americas. So, for example, the Mediterranean word ‘tempest’ was preferred to the New World ‘hurricane’ at first, implying that Europeans sought to justify the enterprise as willed by God and providence. The emergence of the word ‘hurricane’ indicates an increasing

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awareness of the threats posed by the New World and came to stand for native savagery and treachery. Similarly, Caliban is a ‘compromise formation’ constituted by and also trapped between Old and New World discourses. Oddly enough this dual perception served to justify European control over the natives. The natives also began to be described as ‘cannibals’ (in preference to the classical ‘anthropophagites’), a word which carried connotations of savagery. In Hulme’s reading, Prospero’s magic is equated with the colonizers’ technology (it occupies ‘the space really inhabited in colonial history by gunpowder’),19 Caliban talks back to Prospero but is also trapped in a double bind as both ‘slave’ and ‘conspirator’ and is left with no choice but to ‘seek for grace’ at the end. Hulme also locates the ‘internal contradictions’ of colonial discourse – the fact that Caliban was hospitable but later treated badly by Prospero, that the European working-class characters allied themselves with the native figure. However, these contradictions are suppressed and rebellion is contained at the end. Another of Peter Hulme’s essays, co-authored with Francis Barker, is a major intervention in Tempest studies. Barker and Hulme use the word ‘con-texts’ to draw attention to the world of texts the play needs to be placed amid in order to be best understood. The hyphen, they explain, signifies a ‘break from the inequality of the usual text/context relationship. Con-texts are themselves texts and must be read with: they do not simply make up a background’. Hulme and Barker further argue that ‘the ensemble of fictional and lived practices, which for convenience we will simply refer to here as “English colonialism”, provides The Tempest’s dominant discursive contexts’. The native Caliban’s view of things is declared untrue and therefore Prospero’s claim over the land and his account of his settlement of the island is rendered valid. Because Prospero engineers all events, the play is essentially his plot, with Caliban reduced to the status of subplot. However, for Barker and Hulme the mysterious and abrupt interruption of the masque that Prospero stages for his daughter’s betrothal indicates Prospero’s anxiety regarding the

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legitimacy of his own power and the contradiction between his roles as usurped (he lost his Dukedom to his brother) and usurper (he took away Caliban’s island). This is the climax of the play, the moment when the carefully set up relationship between main and subplot is reversed and Caliban takes on an important – and potentially threatening – position. It is true that Prospero prevails at the end, but the comic closure of the play is symptomatic of the play’s anxiety about the threat posed to its ‘decorum’ (the beauty and harmony of romance) by the colonial texts that surround it to tell a story of conquest and control that is certainly not harmonious or beautiful.20 Dozens of other essays also focus on the ways in which the play functions as colonial discourse. John Gillies’s work argues that colonial writings on Virginia as well as court masques or royal entertainments that staged the figure of Virginia gave the savage and alien landscape a moral meaning. It came to be associated with ‘fruitfulness’ – abundance, fertility and the plentiful riches of the new land – as well as ‘temperance’ – modesty, self-control and moderation, which was a much-needed narrative since the Virginia settlers were often lazy, quarrelsome and rebellious. The play represents both discourses in Miranda, whose lush beauty and youth is a figure of the fruitfulness of the New World, even as her modesty and chastity signify ‘temperance’. On the other hand, Caliban’s monstrosity, ignorance, lust and violence constantly pose a threat to the discourse of temperance and indicate how fragile it is.21 Other critics have approached the theme of servitude in the play as a commentary on slavery, which is, after all, an extension of the colonial project. Caliban has been interpreted by Derek Cohen as the rebellious slave, whose very anger and resentment serve to justify his enslavement, while Ariel has been read as a slave whose consciousness of self has paradoxically been blunted by the promise of freedom.22 Andrew Gurr reads Ariel as an indentured servant whose term of service is limited.23 Other critics have focused on the issue of race and racial difference, both integral to the colonial

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enterprise. Kim Hall points out that commercial exchange often fostered sexual contact between the races, which in turn led to the fear of miscegenation – hence the tension between the need to engage with other races for trade and commerce and still somehow establish boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Miranda’s role in the play is informed by this tension. Prospero’s anxiety about her chastity and the need to maintain the racial purity of his bloodline is in contest with Caliban’s need to revenge himself on Prospero through her.24 Joyce MacDonald further points to Claribel’s marriage to the African king as an example of how political alliances with Africa can rupture much-desired racial purity.25 Both critics also remind us of the African presence in the play in the figure of Sycorax, the Algerian witch. Ania Loomba’s book chapter is an example of criticism that combines colonial, racial and gender issues. Her reading of Caliban links him to Renaissance and later discourses of black male rapacity. Caliban’s character is then limited, even trapped, by colonialist and racist discourse. Loomba also points out that postcolonial criticism is often gender-blind, even as gender is a significant aspect of racial discrimination. Sycorax is constructed in the play as the licentious witch-whore figure, in contrast to Miranda’s purity. Prospero consolidates his power by delegitimizing her, and validates his magic as good ‘white’ magic by constructing hers as evil and ‘black’. The position of Miranda, the most solitary of Shakespeare’s heroines, demonstrates that ‘in the colonial situation, patriarchalism makes specific and often contradictory demands on its own women’. Prospero’s concern for Miranda serves to justify his treatment of Caliban, and his teachings call upon her to participate in his colonial venture. She conforms to ‘the dual requirements of femininity within the master-culture’ and takes on the colonial project, but in doing so ‘only confirmed her own subordination’. Loomba’s essay also looks at the contexts within which Shakespeare’s plays, including The Tempest, are read the world over, specifically in India, where Shakespeare is central to the colonial-influenced English

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curriculum. Because ‘in reality Prospero rarely simply sails away’, Indian culture and education has been irretrievably changed, and it is important to recognize how this postcolonial reality has impacted on Indian readers’ understanding of the play.26 She also points out that colonized people from different parts of the world are likely to respond differently to the play. Thomas Cartelli’s discussion also examines the colonial contexts in which the play has been received. In Africa it has served as a reference point and even a model for colonial rulers, and contradictorily, has inspired anti-colonial intellectuals. It thus has served ‘the competing ideologies’ of both sides.27 A reluctance to homogenize the postcolonial world has led critics to focus on the English colonization of parts of the world other than America as constituting relevant contexts for The Tempest. Paul Brown’s essay (discussed earlier) suggested the importance of English colonization of Ireland to understanding the play, a suggestion taken up by several subsequent critics. Dympna Callaghan has demonstrated that Ireland is indeed ‘the sublimated context’ for the play in spite of the fact that the play never directly mentions it.28 She links the English perceptions of the Irish bards’ music as politically threatening to Ariel’s and Caliban’s music; reads Ariel as the more Anglicized, upper-class Irish as opposed to Caliban, who stands for the rebellious classes; sees the dismissal of Caliban’s earlier speech as gabbling in English attitudes to Gaelic; and likens Sycorax to the supposedly disorderly Irish women. Callaghan especially dwells on Prospero’s constant recollection of Sycorax (though she is dead) as a manifestation of ‘colonial desire’. Early colonizers did have sexual relations with Irish women, but later generations emphasized the need to maintain English racial purity. In the colonial context, sexual desire is thus simultaneously prohibited and provoked. One can see this in Prospero’s obsessive recollections of Sycorax, where repressed desire for her lies just beneath the hostility he professes towards her. Barbara Fuchs argues that the island encompasses and encapsulates different parts of the world. While she agrees

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‘that placing New World colonialism at the center of the play has made it a fundamentally more interesting, and at least for twentieth-century readers, a more relevant text’, highlighting other contexts and locations help to grasp the fact that colonial ideology was multilayered and condensed. It is certainly important to consider Ireland because there the devastation of native people, culture and land was more deliberate and vicious than in Virginia and the colonization of Ireland was, in fact, a laboratory for plantations in America. English attitudes to the Islamic world also need to be taken into account. The Ottoman Empire with its centre in Turkey was larger and more powerful than any European empire. Europeans went to war but also engaged in trade and diplomatic relations with the Ottomans. The Muslim world makes its way into The Tempest – Sycorax is from Algiers and Claribel marries the King of Tunis. These two figures, distant yet threatening, recall English fears of the mighty Ottomans. The play tries to contain these fears by dispensing with Sycorax and constructing Tunis as immeasurably distant from Europe, but Europe’s experience of being the object of Turkey’s imperial ambitions ‘was closely bound up … with its burgeoning experience of empire-building’.29 Of late several other critics have emphasized the play’s Mediterranean setting. While these critics do not focus on colonialism as such (indeed they cannot, because the Islamic East was not a colony of any European power in the early modern period), they still raise issues of racial and religious difference and draw attention to the complexity of international politics and commercial exchange, all of which are relevant to understanding the subsequent colonization of the East. Jerry Brotton writes that ‘The Tempest is much more of a politically and geographically bifurcated play in the negotiation between its Mediterranean and Atlantic contexts than critics have recently been prepared to concede’.30 He recovers the complex and contradictory story of Europe’s engagement with the Islamic world and points out the numerous Mediterranean/ Muslim references in the play: Tunis, Algiers, and the fact that

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the classical Carthage has become Muslim-controlled Tunis, as suggested by Gonzalo’s line ‘this Tunis, sir, was Carthage’ (2.1.84). Fuchs argues that the play’s distancing of Tunis and the disapproval of Claribel’s marriage (in contrast to the inter-European alliance of Ferdinand and Miranda) indicates that Europe needed to distance itself from the Muslim world, while Brotton makes the argument that England, which under Elizabeth I had especially close trade relations with the Turks, was unsure of and even embarrassed by its dealings with the ‘infidel’ Muslims, even as it was insecure about its place in Mediterranean politics. The play deals with this by eventually referring to the classical Mediterranean rather than the contemporary Muslim-controlled one. Richard Wilson links the themes of bondage and slavery in the play to the North Africans’ enslavement of white Europeans: ‘… to sail to the Ottoman regencies of Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis, was to traffic in an entire economy driven by the […] slave market and regulate […] for the lucrative turnout of capture and ransom. Prospero’s exacting negotiations to free Ariel, Caliban, Ferdinand, and his aristocratic hostages, belongs precisely to this trade in redemption’.31 Postcolonial readings of The Tempest came to dominate the play’s critical landscape for several decades. They have been refuted and contested but have overall enriched our understanding of the play. In spite of accusations to the contrary, the best postcolonial readings have been rooted in the text, i.e. they are based on the play’s language and structure, and take into account the complexity and ambiguity of the play. Equally important, not all postcolonial readings are identical. They emphasize different contexts and locations and vary in their perceptions of power. Some of them demonstrate that Prospero’s colonial power is simple, brutal and all-encompassing, while others argue that it is marked by self-doubt, ambivalence and even guilt. Or, as Loomba points out, the colonizer-colonized configuration is stark and brutal, but this does not mean that the characters of Prospero and Caliban are simplistic and uncomplicated. Conversely, the characters are

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admittedly complex and ambivalent, but that doesn’t necessarily make the Prospero-Caliban relationship any less brutal or unjust.

Refuting postcolonial readings It is only to be expected that any approach that came to dominate the critical scene would be opposed and contested. This is certainly true of postcolonial readings of The Tempest. Numerous critics have found it to be unhistorical (there is no evidence that Shakespeare’s audience ever saw the play as ‘about’ the New World; in fact, one cannot even accurately describe England as a colonial power in the early seventeenth century), short-sighted, or quite simply incorrect (postcolonial readings are accused of ignoring the fact that Caliban is not a cannibal, and that Sycorax herself was a settler on the island). These critics put forward their own readings which lay out contexts and histories that are, so the writers claim, more accurate and relevant to understanding the play. Deborah Willis finds postcolonial readings reductive because they ignore the complexities of the text, and if they do point them out, explain them away simply by stating that complexity and contradiction are features of all colonial materials. She argues that unlike typical colonial discourse (if there is anything like that, which is unlikely in the time period) the play does not endorse Prospero but actually provokes us to critique him. Caliban is also ‘by turns sympathetic and ridiculous’ and more ‘grotesquely comic than devilish’.32 Willis contends that European politics are more important to the play than colonial politics. Prospero’s exile is prompted by a political crisis in Italy. He has to seek refuge on the island, but once he contains his Italian enemies he is quite ready to give it back. In fact, Antonio rather than Caliban is the main villain of the play, and he is the one who remains impenitent till the end. David Kastan adds that it is worth reminding

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ourselves that the play’s references to the Americas are few and far between (a single reference to the Caribbean deity Setebos and another to the Bermudas) and while there is no need to reject post­colonial readings outright, it is probably the fact that we live in a world which is experiencing the often ravaging consequences of colonization that has made us project our concerns (and in some cases guilt) onto the play. The Europeans in the play, he writes, have no interest in colonizing it (Prospero leaves the island at the end). If we desire a truly historicist reading we must recognize that the play is more obviously about European dynastic concerns. It was acted at the marriage of King James’s daughter Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine. This was a political marriage meant to further James’s wish to establish closer ties with the Protestant princes of Europe and to further his political dream of European unity. Similarly, the play’s action is more about rescuing Milan from vassalage to Naples and yet allowing the interests of both powers to merge, a vision that is made real through the marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand.33

Feminist readings Although interest in Shakespeare’s female characters certainly predates the twentieth century, criticism that adopts an overtly feminist approach is relatively recent. A feminist approach argues that misogyny is inherent in language and that women have traditionally been marginalized in literature both as authors and as characters. Jyotsna Singh comments on how even radical postcolonial readings and rewritings of the play which privilege Caliban often do so at the cost of Miranda. These readings are ‘oddly oblivious to the dissonances between race and gender struggles’, and it seems that the postcolonial subject can become free only through the erasure of the woman’s identity and freedom.34 Singh combines postcolonial and feminist approaches, drawing our attention

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to how patriarchal and imperial oppression work alongside and feed into each other. She turns to anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ideas regarding the exchange of women between groups to solidify male-male socio-political bonds to comment on how Miranda is superior to Caliban in the island hierarchy but still plays an inferior role in the play’s ‘kinship system’ in which three males ( Prospero, Caliban and Ferdinand) are strangely bonded through competing claims on her. Other feminist critics have commented on the relative absence of women in the play (Sycorax is dead, Miranda’s mother is only mentioned, and Claribel’s distance is repeatedly emphasized) and ask what a feminist reading can do with the text in the light of such an absence. Lori Leininger reminds us of the occasion of the first performance of the play – the marriage of Princess Elizabeth. Just as the princess fell dutifully in love with a groom chosen by her father for political reasons, so Miranda and Ferdinand’s marriage is orchestrated by Prospero for his own political ends. Miranda is represented as submissive and condemned to perpetual obedience to men and her role is primarily to produce legitimate heirs. While her fertility is of great importance in the play, it is also important that she remain chaste until the marriage to Ferdinand. Indeed, her chastity acquires major symbolic significance in the play, as protecting it is both Prospero’s duty and a sign of his power over her.35 Ann Thompson posits that reading as a feminist makes it more possible to refuse to identify with Prospero as protagonist, but also adds that a white feminist critic must also realize that white women too played a role in and benefited from colonialism. She asks two interesting questions: is it possible for a staging of the play to convey a feminist reading (without rewriting the play)? And what kind of pleasure can a feminist take from the play apart from ‘the rather grim one’ of mapping its patterns of the exploitation and control of women? In other words: ‘Must a feminist reading necessarily be a negative one?’36 Later critics whose readings have at least partially been informed by feminism respond that this need not be the case. Barbara Sebek argues

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that Miranda does not submit to the circuits of exchange where women simply become commodities; instead she is the active desiring subject who violates paternal orders and gives herself away on her own to Ferdinand without really gaining Prospero’s consent.37 Similarly, Melissa Sanchez too argues for Miranda’s agency. Her outburst against Caliban in Act I is not a result of being brainwashed by her father, but is a sign of her asserting her right not to be sexually subjugated. Her dealings with Ferdinand not only suggest her independence, but in contrast to the relationships in the play, the young couple adopts a romantic language of mutual love and bondage that defies mastery and subjection. Ferdinand gladly works to win her hand and she proposes marriage to him. This model of marriage based on consent is radical and modern, and although Sanchez concedes that Prospero is directing the affair from the start, ‘the extent to which Miranda directs her betrothal to Ferdinand is nonetheless quite prominent’.38 Denise Albanese’s chapter on The Tempest in her book New Science, New World makes interesting connections between gender, sexuality, race and science. The boundaries of scientific discourse were still blurred in the Renaissance, but one can argue for the emergence of a kind of ‘protoscience’ or early science. Albanese makes the connection between the ‘New Science’ and the ‘New World’. Science and colonialism not only emerged at the same time but were mutually constitutive and similarly interested in discovering the unknown. Both also managed, marked and controlled the bodies of women and non-white peoples. For Albanese, the ‘utopian island precipitates a fantasy, not of the library, but of the laboratory’.39 It demonstrates that colonial space became important for the making of modern epistemologies, especially science. While nature is what is studied by the protoscientist, Miranda’s ambiguous role in the nature-culture divide makes her an interesting figure. Albanese argues that Miranda ultimately becomes ‘naturalized’, i.e. like nature (and the New World). She is to be wondered at and admired but ultimately used and exploited.

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Other feminist critics have drawn attention to Sycorax. Evoked repeatedly by both Prospero and Caliban, she is a powerful but absent figure. As Marina Warner writes, ‘Her story is evoked in a few scant lines that do not flesh out a full character or even tell a coherent tale; in fragments, like the sifting of an archaeological dig, her past is glimpsed, only to fade again’. Sycorax’s supposed lasciviousness (she came to the island pregnant and there gave birth to a child that was possibly half-devil) serves to highlight Miranda’s chastity. Many critics have argued that the contrast between Sycorax and Prospero highlights the polarities between white and black magic, but Warner argues that the contrast between Sycorax and Prospero is between metamorphosis and stasis, ‘unruly mutation and steady-state identity’.40 She links Sycorax with classical figures such as Circe and Medea, who are both associated with mutation, and discusses Christians’ attitudes to change as the work of the Devil perverting God’s handiwork. Leah Marcus also reminds us that almost everything we know about Sycorax is through Prospero, who is clearly not an unbiased narrator. Marcus focuses on Sycorax’s mysterious blue eyes which do not fit commonly held ideas regarding the appearance and colouring of North Africans and suggests that the blue-eyed witch thus has the potential to disturb the rigid self/other binary. Departing from readings that connect Sycorax (and her blue eyes) to unruly sexuality and the pregnancy that followed, she associates her mysterious eye colour ‘with the uncanny power and attributes of a goddess’, thus suggesting that it is possible to have an entirely different perspective on her.41

Reading class relations Cultural Materialism and New Historicism are themselves clearly Marxist-influenced modes. Following Marx’s dictum that human history is best understood as the history of class

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struggle, a number of critics have focused on class relations in The Tempest. Given the presence of working-class characters (the boatswain, the master, Stephano, Trinculo, Caliban, and perhaps Ariel) amid the aristocrats, questions regarding class tensions and relationships are bound to arise. Mark Netzloff considers The Tempest in his book-length discussion of the connections between colonialism abroad and changing economic conditions within England. The two histories are mutually constitutive and further each other. Using the New Historicist method, he reads The Tempest alongside other historical documents on the ‘venting’ or the more-or-less forced ejection of the labouring poor abroad due to overpopulation in England, but more significantly because of changing class relations and conditions of production. The idea was to transform idle workers into productive forces overseas. Netzloff’s reading of the play argues for the tension between the fact that the working classes were indispensable to the success of the colonial project and the ever-present threat of working-class rebellion (the cockiness of the Boatswain in the opening scene indicates that the rebelliousness of labourers intensifies in the colony because they were aware that they were indispensable there). Caliban embodies this tension. The play also dismisses idle nobility such as Antonio and chooses to celebrate Ferdinand’s aristocratic but honest labour. Ultimately, similar to the historical Virginia, regulations on the working classes are tightened, and social equilibrium and traditional class relations are restored at the end of the play.42 Annabel Patterson and David Norbrook disagree with Netzloff’s concluding argument. Patterson’s essay resists the idea of the play as complicit with oppressive class ideologies. On the other hand, it does not let us demonize the servant Caliban and reads much like discourses of popular rebellion in the period.43 This point is echoed by David Norbrook, who rejects the ‘absolute power’ readings put forward by New Historicists. ‘There is no need’, he writes, ‘for twentieth century readings to be more royalist than the King’s Men’.44 Instead, the discourse of social rebellion

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and libertarianism pervades the play, a discourse Norbrook broadly terms ‘utopic’. The roaring of the sea of the play’s opening connotes defiance and rebellion and the scene plays up the opposition between the boundless voice of the sea and the name of the king, which denotes absolute and inherited power. Similar tensions are enacted in the play between Ariel’s and Caliban’s desire for freedom and their subordination. The disruption of the stately masque ‘to a strange hollow and confused noise’ (4.1) echoes the opening and indicates that social revolution is always a possibility. This does not mean, however, that the play is naively utopian; utopian discourses (including Gonzalo’s ‘commonwealth’ speech) are held up to scrutiny. Ultimately however, the play itself does not reject all possibility of revolutionary change. Norbrook further locates such utopic impulses in Renaissance humanism as well as in theatre: drama was increasingly, though subtly, critical of royal power because players were no longer just royal servants, relying more on ticket sales than patronage, with its added autonomy. Walter Cohen also contends that the romance tradition (which was fundamentally optimistic), along with the discovery of the New World, accounts for the play’s ‘inherent utopian tendency’. The opening scene celebrates working-class labour and the last scene in which the boatswain and ship’s master join the group projects a vision of class unity (though this unity is, of course, at the expense of Caliban revealing ‘the racist and imperialist basis of English nationalism’). The freeing of Ariel and Gonzalo’s vision of a society with no hierarchy hints at the ‘the antithesis of capitalism and the abolition of class society’.45 While Breight’s essay (discussed earlier) reads The Tempest in the context of political treason, Frances Dolan sees the Prospero-Caliban relation as primarily domestic, in which the threat posed by Caliban the servant was an act of ‘petty treason’ against the master. She traces the discourse of masterservant relations in the play in which servants were perceived as part-child and part-subhuman. Caliban’s insider position in Prospero’s household also reminds us that servants in the

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Renaissance were clearly subordinate to their masters but also oddly familiar with them and consequently aware of their vulnerabilities. However Caliban, argues Dolan, does not look for real freedom – only for a more just master. The limited scope of his ambitions makes us take him less seriously, and the play’s conclusion has much in common with dramatic conventions of the period in which working-class rebellions were rendered comic.46 Class-focused readings such as those outlined above complement the postcolonial and race readings of the play. They also draw attention to how power struggles are central to understanding the play’s dramatic conflicts, and remind us that colonial and race relations are perhaps fundamentally struggles for economic power and resources.

Psychoanalytic readings Early in the play Prospero wants to tell his daughter the story of her arrival at the island, and the play ends with him promising to narrate the events of the past 12 years to the court party. Narratives are the obvious link between psycho­ analysis and literature. Psychoanalytic methods involve the production and analysis of stories in the form of dreams, folk tales, case histories and patient narratives. It is no surprise then that critics who engage with psychoanalytic theory are drawn to The Tempest. These readings testify to the play’s ambivalences and complexity. Stephen Orgel’s ‘Prospero’s Wife’ dismisses the idea of plays as case histories of either the author or the audience but treats them instead as ‘collaborative fantasies’.47 Given the absence of women in the play, Prospero conceives himself as a mother figure and so works through the trauma of having his younger brother usurp the role of parent/authority figure. Orgel also links family structures and sexual relations in the play to the political structures of Jacobean England and doubts and anxieties regarding both. This approach, combining Freudian

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and historical methods, is evident in Janet Adelman’s work. She discusses how the mother’s influence was seen as debilitating to the male child. She extends this history to contemporary psychoanalysis which locates differentiation from the mother as the site of anxiety for the boy who grows into manhood against her overwhelming femaleness. Renaissance cultural practice only furthered this notion. This is enacted in the play by banishing the maternal body in the figure of Sycorax as it is ‘dangerous and needs the father’s benign management’. Prospero then takes on the role of the ‘idealized father’ who can shape the world as he wants to, now that the maternal has been subsumed. The psychological cost of banishing the maternal is however felt most by Prospero, who is isolated and who also has to distance himself from all emotion in order to maintain his position of power. Unlike other psychoanalytic readings which focus on Prospero, Adelman also uses her model to discuss the complexities of Caliban. Violently separated from the memory of his mother by Prospero, Caliban is left alone on her island which now bears the names given to it by the father’s language. He is however estranged from it and from the patriarchal world at large. Adelman writes that ‘Caliban – in his violent love, his sexuality, and his unassuagable longing – is the final register of Shakespeare’s ambivalence toward what it means […] to be a mother’s son’.48 Coppélia Kahn deftly connects the romance motif of a storm-struck journey to the traumas of an individual growing into adulthood. In coming from Milan to the island Prospero moved from ‘childlike, self-absorbed dependency to paternal omnipotence, skipping the steps of maturation in-between’. In Milan it was Antonio who, in spite of being the younger brother, became the dominant father figure. In the empty space of the island Prospero has the chance to become this ‘father’s’ equal. Unlike other Shakespearean heroes caught in fraternal rivalry, Prospero does not fight his brother to death but instead plays out the rivalries of the court on the island. He takes revenge on his wrongdoers (since not doing so would be a sign of passivity) but falls short of taking real revenge on

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them, since that would mean getting mired in the traumas of the past. Like the other critics discussed in this section, Kahn, too, comments on Prospero’s isolation which is the price he pays for coming into his own on the island. Although his new identity is based largely on his role and power as father, he has no romantic/sexual relationships and the family unit is ‘never united or complete’.49 David Sundelson’s reading is similar to Kahn’s in its focus on Prospero as father. Sundelson however argues that the play is fraught with anxieties that derive from Prospero’s incestuous desire for his daughter, anxieties that are only partially resolved by projecting himself as a father par excellence. Prospero then stands for ‘paternal narcissism’, and Miranda’s reverence and the slaves’ subordination all make him feel ‘there is no worthiness like a father’s, no accomplishment or power’.50 Sundelson also discusses Prospero’s complex relationship with Ferdinand, whose desire for Miranda the older man contests and identifies with. Meredith Skura’s essay emerges from her disagreement with postcolonial readings of the play which, she says, privilege political structures at the cost of understanding personal psychology. Instead, it is important to recognize that psychological motives intersect with political ones. She reads the play as a narrative of inner psychological conflict. Caliban is Prospero’s ego, childlike and narcissistic, lustful and ruled by the desire for power and revenge. Prospero’s hatred and fear of Caliban derives from his fear that his darker, more primal self will overwhelm his being, a fear that comes to the surface when he abruptly recalls the ‘beast Caliban’ (4.1.140) at the end of the masque.51

Intertextuality Because the New Historicist method is based on the premise that texts do not derive their meaning in singularity but in their relationship to other texts, much of the criticism that

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has already been considered in this chapter is ‘intertextual’. The work surveyed in this section only differs in that it does not focus as much on the play’s power dynamics. Though The Tempest has no single source, it is, in Barbara Mowat’s words (in ‘“Knowing I Loved My Books”: Reading The Tempest Intertextually’), an ‘intertextual mélange’ that echoes and bears traces of other texts which obtrude on the informed reader’s consciousness.52 Mowat points out that the Virgilian and biblical references in the play, along with its connections to the Virginia chronicles, trigger multiple cultural references that give us a sense of the narratives and histories of expansion and conquest that Europeans drew upon as models for their colonization of the Americas. This is a point also made by Donna Hamilton’s book, which focuses entirely on the Virgilian presence in the play. One simply cannot fully understand the play’s connections to colonial discourse if one does not acknowledge the influence of the Roman author Virgil’s epic poem Aeneid that describes the founding of Rome and which is ‘the archetypal colonizing text of all time’.53 The Aeneid gave Europeans the narrative of imperialism as a glorious epic enterprise and as part of their natural destiny, and what’s more, Hamilton points out, Virgil’s epic was alluded to in correspondence from English colonists in Ireland and Virginia. While Hamilton’s book goes on to examine the play’s Virgilian connection in order to understand The Tempest’s engagement with the theme of absolute political power, David Wilson-Okamura focuses on Aeneas’s settlement of Carthage (which is mentioned in the play). The Aeneid describes how this settlement was accompanied by sloth and internal dissent on the part of the conquerors, not unlike the seventeenthcentury English experience in Virginia.54 Jonathan Bate goes so far as to say that the play is a ‘kind of collaboration with Ovid’.55 The Tempest is a romance reworking of epic material and the precedent for this manner of reworking was Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Bate also sees Caliban as an Ovidian character in that the Metamorphosis is a veritable depository of monstrosities and deformities. The

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theme of change, so central to Ovid, is also important to The Tempest: Prospero’s magic becomes an agent of change that is conceived and executed by a human rather than the gods. Of course, Prospero, echoing the Ovidian witch Medea in the ‘Ye elves […]’ speech (5.1.33–50), casts doubt on the virtue of Prospero’s knowledge. Shakespeare’s Caliban by Alden and Virginia Mason Vaughan can be described as intertextual scholarship that recognizes that culture and history are intertwined. Both the book and the authors’ introduction to the third Arden edition of the play emphasize the importance of recovering the historical and literary contexts that might have influenced the creation and reception of Caliban who, of all the play’s characters, is ‘the most enigmatic and the most susceptible to drastic fluctuations in interpretation’.56 The Vaughans posit that Caliban could be an anagram for ‘carib’, though this might simply imply that Caliban is native of the Caribbean rather than a man-eater as such, and suggest other possible sources for his name, ranging from Arabic to gypsy words, and also point out the possibility of linking Caliban to sites ranging from the Americas to Africa and Ireland. Shakespeare may have drawn him from a wealth of contemporaneous sources on natives which ran the gamut from near-beast to noble savage with more complex portrayals in between. The Vaughans also describe the literary contexts for Caliban, including Virgil, Ovid, the ‘wildman’ figure of medieval literature and folklore who was revived in Renaissance civic pageants, Spenserian monsters, travellers’ tales of the deformed beings who inhabited foreign lands, figures of Jacobean antimasques and a stock commedia dell’arte figure, the harlequin. They also point out how texts that came after The Tempest, including literary criticism (especially the nineteenth-century readings of Caliban as American native that were influenced by the newly established cordial relations between England the United States), and postcolonial appropriations and stage interpretations of Shakespeare’s ‘monster’ have impacted on modern readers’ and audiences’ understanding of him.

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Theatre history, masques and The Tempest as a metaliterary text It could be argued that all literature is essentially about itself. In other words, a literary text’s fundamental themes are authorship, the process of composition, and the purpose and intent of literature itself. This self-reflexive nature of The Tempest has long been picked up by critics who have written about the play as Shakespeare’s meditation on his art and career as playwright. Many recent commentators have continued the trend. In Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship, Patrick Cheney writes of how Shakespeare in his works projects himself as a man of the theatre engaged in the paradoxical art of print-poetry. This was unusual in an age when a theatrical career was quite distinct from the penning of ‘literature’. Cheney argues that all the plays can be studied to illuminate the kind of author that Shakespeare was (as opposed to a personality-centred criticism that tries to understand ‘Shakespeare the man’) as well as ‘the form of authorship that he penned in response to the pressures of his cultural system’.57 For Cheney, The Tempest (along with other plays) indicates that Shakespeare fashioned himself in opposition to the poet-laureate mode of authorship favoured by Edmund Spenser in which writing was aligned with the national project. The play as a whole emerges from a deliberate shift from Spenserian epic romance to stage romance, and the speech in which Prospero abjures magic is seen as countering the poet-laureate mode of writing by deliberately signalling a turn away from politics and grand projects as Prospero most contentedly gives up his power. Theatre criticism continues to have a place in modern scholarship on The Tempest, with scholars such as Andrew Gurr demonstrating that the play was written for an indoor upmarket theatre, most likely the Blackfriars, rather than the Globe.58 Stephen Orgel posits that while the play is not a masque, the Jacobean court masque still influenced its

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structure and theme. Like the masque, the play is educative and celebratory of the monarch and enacts the movement from conflict to harmony. However, it is unclear if Prospero is the ideal ruler required by the harmonious vision of the masque. The play thus becomes a reflection on the meaning and purposes of masques.59 This point is also made by James Knowles who, however, links the play to non-royal masques which were less erudite and more accessible and incorporated criticism of absolute royal power.60 Studies such as these allow for a more political reading of masques both in the play and within masquing culture in general. Douglas Bruster, however, writes that the play is about the theatre – more specifically about authority and work in certain early modern playhouses. He argues that the character Caliban is Shakespeare’s reflection on the star actor William Kempe, who continually challenged the authority of the playscript and violated theatrical decorum. He also sees the conflict between the actors and the attention-seeking aristocratic section of the audience playing itself out in the play, while Ariel is the obedient and eager boy actor. The playhouse is thus Shakespeare’s most immediate and compelling context and The Tempest is thus ‘among the deepest of his [Shakespeare’s] meditations on laboring in the theater’.61

Coda This critical survey is by no means exhaustive. Other approaches have been applied to the play. Martin Orkin’s work has prompted a new way of reading Shakespeare that he describes as ‘local’, in which local knowledge and attitudes that audiences and readers bring is privileged, rather than the archival and historical knowledge that only critics in the Western world still have access to. He points out that for a South African readership, the island of the play would suggest Robben Island, on which anti-apartheid activists were jailed,

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and also that South African attitudes to sexuality and gender do inform the understanding of the play in that country.62 James Kearney extends history of the book studies and constructs his essay around the idea that literacy and mater­ iality are important to study self/other contacts. Fetishized objects (like Prospero’s book) were seen as marks of the barbarous, but the characters in the play, including Prospero, reenact this fetishization.63 Of late, ‘new formalists’ have called for restoring the study of form to historical readings as well as for political readings of formal values. While the best ‘revisionist’ criticism outlined above has always recognized that a reading of politics and ideology does not simply derive from one’s own ideological preferences but is located in the play’s formal structures, more work that recognizes the historical conditions that influence the play’s formal elements could well be forthcoming. In any case, The Tempest will doubtless continue to inspire new readings. It is a complex play and the best essays on it are equally sophisticated. Although they emerge from a particular critical position, they are not reducible to that position alone; they continue to inspire and provoke debate and discussion as new generations of readers explore the subtleties of that unnamed magic island.

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4 New Directions: Sources and Creativity in The Tempest Andrew Gurr

At what point does the idea of a play coalesce in its author’s mind? When does a source become the inspiration, and when is it merely a follow-up consulted to augment the original inspiration? When does the borrowing process include not inspiration but a convenient and perhaps hasty in-fill? The Tempest is rare in the Shakespeare canon in having no obvious single main source of the kind that Holinshed provided for the English history plays and Macbeth, and Plutarch for the Roman plays. It is easy to identify the inspiration that led to the writing of plays such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Measure for Measure and even King John from their chief source books or plays. But the question about which came first, the original concept or the inspiring sources, is less easy to answer for The Tempest than for almost any play, even the other ‘late’ plays or romances such as The Winter’s Tale. It is unique, both in the originality of its plot and in the way it exploits its main classical sources, Virgil and Ovid.1

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A short play by comparison with all those that used major source-books, The Tempest’s plot is more tightly integrated, the parodic elements more neatly interlocked with their models, in ways that make it much less obviously dependent on any one source than the other plays. To what extent its sources were no more than items remembered and utilized only as they became appropriate to the self-generated plot is a key issue in making sense of it. The other main question is how far the remembered elements from the recognizable sources might have augmented or modified the original core of the plot. Even in its dynastic elements The Tempest’s plot is original. The marriage of the two heirs of Milan and Naples sets up a firmer and simpler union than that in Richard III, when Henry of Richmond, heir to the Lancastrian line, announces that he will marry Elizabeth, the heir of the York line, so that ‘the true succeeders of each royal house’ will create a new lineage that will be single and uncontested. Union of Naples with Milan, with its heirs possessing both realms, is uncontestable. The Tempest’s subplots burlesque this happy prospect with their own dynastic and other games, including the parodic version of Prospero’s book whose power draws Caliban to Stephano’s alternative ‘book’ of liquor.2

Widely accepted sources Ovid and Virgil both make their contributions to The Tempest’s story, but very largely just for individual features, not the whole account or even many of its particular features. Shakespeare obviously copied Ovid (in Golding’s English version) for Prospero’s renunciation of his magic.3 Equally, Jonathan Bate has claimed that Claribel arriving in Tunis was like Dido in Carthage and that Shakespeare was ‘vigorously waving a flag marked Aeneid’ in Gonzalo’s explicit comment,4 just as Francisco’s account of Ferdinand swimming vigorously to shore

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echoes Aeneid 2.203–8.5 Ariel’s spectacular arrival to halt the feast in Act 3 dressed in a harpy’s costume is an equally overt echo of Virgil, whose Aeneid III has a trio of harpies remove the food from the tables where the crew is starting to eat. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton has a chapter on the interaction of Shakespeare with Virgil in The Tempest that, in a remarkably detailed analysis, tries to measure the distinctively different positions of the two authors.6 Over the responses by Ferdinand and Miranda to Prospero’s injunction to steer clear of premature sex, for instance, she notes that Ferdinand’s allusion to ‘the murkiest den’ (4.1.25) has a link with Virgil’s ‘speluncam’, his word for the shelter in which Dido and Aeneas consummate their desires. This, she argues, is an intertextual allusion by contraries.7 More challengingly, Tudeau-Clayton and others have linked Virgil with Ceres’s reference to ‘dusky Dis’, the god of the underworld who stole Ceres’s daughter. Tudeau-Clayton even links the allusion with all the references in the play to the prefix ‘dis-’, as in disproportioned Caliban and ‘dis-tempered’ Prospero, and the many other dis-orders of the natural state that the play shows. In a rather similarly localized way, we can see Shakespeare picking out an essay by Montaigne from Florio’s translation of 1603 as his model for Gonzalo’s speech about his ideal plantation. Beyond such hints of fairly private authorial games being played in the play’s composition, we should also give some consideration to the far less quotable sources for the idle and industrious apprentices, Caliban and Ariel. At the end of the play Ariel is freed, like an apprentice graduating after his full term of service, whereas Caliban reverts to his former role as house-servant to Prospero, the common fate of failed (because idle) apprentices. In the finale, after reminding everyone that the three servants still wear the ‘badges’ of their official allegiance, Prospero sends Caliban off into his cell with the King’s house-servants Stephano and Trinculo. The third rebellious servant accompanies the others. He returns to his former role as bringer of wood and water, with no chance, such as Ariel is given, of freedom from his servitude.8

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The link of this London element in the Tempest story with Eastward Ho’s pair of apprentices, one idle and one industrious, suggests that we should pursue that source with a side-glance at the functions and the characters of Prospero’s two servants. But was Shakespeare deeply and deliberately alluding to the recent and notorious Blackfriars play? Was the Blackfriars play a source? The concept of the fates that awaited the young in their opposed activities had become a moralistic feature of London life a long while before Hogarth came to create his engravings of it. Eastward Ho can hardly be counted a substantial source for the play, any more than can its details relating specific incidents to Ovid or Virgil. The invention of Caliban can be found in Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals, but it can equally be found in London’s daily life and other more distant associations. Douglas Bruster even argues that Caliban was inspired by the clown Will Kempe, despite the gap in the play’s composition of ten years after Kempe left the company, and six since he died.9 Such minimal and quite far-fetched links may have truth in them. They seem typical of a play composed in the author’s mind when longforgotten incidents appear to fit, however fortuitously, into the new creation. The use of Montaigne in Gonzalo’s plantation speech is a case of borrowing where we can see that the author knew exactly what he was doing, but has still left us uncertain about just what his design was. Gonzalo gives voice to an ideal society, in what he evidently thinks is a wild state of nature that may possess some of the legendary values of the golden world. Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essayes, or Morall, Politike and Militarie Discourses came out in 1603, and was familiar to Shakespeare before that, since he parodied phrases from it for Polonius’s much-quoted advice to his son in Hamlet. Two copies in the British Library of Florio’s translation have their first owner’s signature. One is Ben Jonson’s, the other (much more unlikely) the signature of Shakespeare himself. In the essay ‘Of the Caniballes’ Florio translated this version of Montaigne’s account of the society usually called

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(by the ancient Greeks) barbaric, or savage: ‘It is a nation […] 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 poverty; no contracts, no successions, no dividences, no occupation but idle; no respect of kinred, but common, no apparell but naturall, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corne, or mettle’.10 Giving Gonzalo such an exact echo of Montaigne raises the same questions as the use of Ovid for Prospero’s speech renouncing magic, or Virgil for Dido and Aeneas’s den. Was it meant as a joke to be picked up by the cognoscenti, was it a plain parody, or does it resonate as a parallel with pregnant implications for hearers and readers? Or indeed, were these echoes just the lazy effort of a writer so used to picking gems out of his longstanding collection of riches that he calmly lifted whatever seemed to fit the occasion? Other sources seem to have been employed more casually, such as the perhaps fortuitous origin of the name Setebos. It came from Richard Eden, The Decades of the New World, 1555.11 In his account of ‘The vyage rounde about the worlde’ by Magellan, Eden’s marginal note specifies ‘The devyll Setebos’. His main account describes two giants who were said to dance about the bodies of their dead. The bigger giant was called Setebos, the smaller Cheleule. This perhaps random choice seems to give the name the sole value of being exotic. A much stronger case is the likelihood that the idea of writing the play came from the famous Strachey letter, or earlier sources about shipwrecks, and not merely for information about the Bermudas and the storm that wrecked the Gates voyage. This possible precedent is equally unclear as evidence for anything very specific, either as a borrowing or as a stimulus in writing the play. Like the other cases of borrowing, it seems to apply mainly to the storm of the opening scene and the subsequent reminders of it in 1.2 and elsewhere. Whether the Strachey echoes help to date the play’s composition is a related but quite separate question.

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The author’s gamesome use of Strachey, along with his uses of Virgil and Ovid, does resemble very closely his tricks in The Winter’s Tale, the play which Ben Jonson linked with The Tempest in his derisory comment on ‘Tales, Tempests and such like Drolleries’. This last allusive word must be Jonson’s reminder of Sebastian’s comment on the apparition that Prospero shows the courtiers at 3.3.21: ‘A living Drolerie’. These two plays of Shakespeare are remarkably alike, or rather strikingly opposed in Jonsonian terms. The one stretches itself over 16 years and from Sicily to the non-existent sea-coast of Bohemia, while the other meets the requirements of the three unities with, for Shakespeare, a unique degree of precision. Its events last only three hours, the time needed to stage a play, on the one small island. In The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare used Robert Greene’s Pandosto with, for whatever reason, deliberate perversity, reversing the place in the story of Greene’s two states of Sicily and Bohemia, so that Bohemia acquired a sea-coast for Perdita to be left on, much to the literal-minded scorn of Jonson, who registered his contempt for such geographical inaccuracies to Drummond of Hawthornden in 1619, and took care in Bartholomew Fair (1614) to uphold incidental realism with his question: ‘If there be never a Servant-Monster i’ the Fayre; who can help it? He (the Author) sayes; nor a nest of Antiques? Hee is loth to make Nature afraid in his Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests and such like Drolleries’. I suspect that it was largely to tease the vulnerable Jonson in The Winter’s Tale that Shakespeare slipped in not just the sea-coast of Bohemia but the attribution of Hermione’s painted statue, and her ‘natural posture’ when she is first unveiled, with its claim to be work by the artist Giulio Romano. Giulio was the first source of that most notorious of sixteenth-century erotic books that came to be known as Aretino’s Postures, of which Jonson flaunted his own familiarity, most likely alluding to what Shakespeare, for one, knew was his personal copy. References to it appear in both Volpone and The Alchemist, two of the plays he wrote for Shakespeare’s company.12

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Shakespeare wrote Hermione’s story, its 16 years and its Bohemian sea-coast as a pair with or a parody of The Tempest’s perfect unities of time and place, while Jonson was writing The Alchemist with its immaculate observance of the unities. This makes the two plays another necessarily remote factor in the dating game for The Tempest. It would make them another tease in the endless task of working out just where Shakespeare’s tongue lay in his cheek, especially when he was writing alongside Jonson.13 To conclude this overview of the play’s sources, whether we are talking about the old tradition of source-hunting or invoking the newer intertextuality, the value of identifying such origins has at some point to become judgemental, and we all have our doubts about value judgement as a critical principle. Worse than that, we need to be very cautious about deciding just when a source is an overt borrowing. Sometimes the use of sources merely suggests that the writer lacks invention and is evidently weary of the tale. That seems hardly to be the case with The Tempest.

Contested influences The issue of what might have been in Shakespeare’s mind when he composed his text leaves many other issues open, if only because so many of the likely influences have disappeared, let alone those where his access to a particular text is questionable. In 1995 Arthur F. Kinney issued a challenge to current critics who were seeking to establish the play’s possible links with the major concerns of Shakespeare’s own time, such as ‘absolutist rule, white magic, discovery of the New World, colonialism, imperialism, racism’.14 In particular he chose to focus on the two possible sources that describe the shipwreck of the Sea Venture on the shore of Bermuda in 1609, written in 1609–10 by Silvester Jourdain and William Strachey.15 Starting from Bullough’s and Muir’s divergent views on their

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value as a means either to identify sources or to date the play, Kinney picked out first the arrival in 1605 in England of five native Americans brought from northern Virginia by George Waymouth, and then the account of what the title page called a ‘prosperous voyage’ by James Rosier, published in the same year. He emphasized a reference to anchoring in ‘five fathoms’, as in Ariel’s song, and the crew’s dealings with a troop of ‘savages’, of which Strachey’s own account, Kinney declared, says nothing. Adding other stories of storms at sea, such as Jonah’s biblical struggle, he concluded, like many other commentators, that the cultural moment when the text was conceived is both crucial to our understanding and almost inaccessible. Kinney clearly does value the play’s sources for the evidence they provide of its author’s mind. His article, however, contains too many errors to give us much comfort over the sources he evokes. It misrepresents what Strachey and Rosier wrote, along with several other details. Rosier, for instance, did not specify five fathoms, nor such a dangerous storm. Strachey did write extensively about the ‘Indians’ in Virginia, but there were more Indians in the London of Shakespeare’s time than Kinney admits, and the examples he identifies mostly stayed in Plymouth, not London. From other sources, it is known that two Indians from Virginia, one of whom murdered the other on Bermuda, were on the Sea Venture when it was wrecked.16 It does matter that we identify both the likely use of the sources, and their cogency for the composition of the play. Perhaps the clearest instances where the deliberate use of sources is quite accessible yet becomes debatable occur from particular verbal echoes. In his monumentally thorough Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, Naseeb Shaheen registers 25 possible echoes in the play, from either the Geneva Bible or from other Tudor translations.17 The likelihood that these echoes were deliberate varies quite substantially. Doublet phrases such as 2.1.44’s ‘tender and delicate’, which is Adrian’s description of the ‘temperance’ of the island, may echo both the Geneva Bible’s account of Babylon in Isaiah

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47.1 and the Bishops’ Bible version of Deuteronomy 28.56, which has a ‘woman that is so tender and delicate’. But Shaheen takes care to note that ‘the expression may have been common’, citing Hamlet 4.4.48, ‘a delicate and tender prince’. Most of the other biblical phrases he cites, such as 1.1.10’s ‘Play the men’, or 1.2.14’s ‘Woe the day’, were sufficiently commonplace at the time to make any deliberate allusion unlikely. Other instances are even more debatable. Gonzalo’s listing of what his ideal commonwealth will omit, ‘metal, corn, or wine or oil’ (2.1.154), does echo the Geneva Bible, which has ten references to corn, wine and oil in that order. On the other hand, the sequence in Florio’s Montaigne, which Shakespeare was quite overtly imitating in this famous passage, is ‘wine, corne, or mettle’. Here Shaheen questions whether this change from Montaigne to the Bible was deliberate. We cannot really be sure which was being echoed, nor if there was any specific reason for it. Again, where Caliban says that Prospero taught him how to name the two lights of the sky (1.2.336), Shaheen notes that in Genesis all versions of the Bible make the first identifying adjective ‘greater’ rather than Caliban’s ‘bigger’. This is possibly a deliberate alteration to make Caliban sound more clumsy. Another explicit echo is Trinculo’s terrified exclamation ‘O, forgive me my sins!’ (3.2.130), which echoes the Lord’s Prayer, but there seems little likelihood here that the phrase was designed to be read allusively. A more likely deliberate allusion is Sebastian’s ‘legions’ whom he says he will fight in 3.3. That was the word for the unclean spirit of Mark 5.9 who says ‘My name is Legion: for we are many’. Modern readers might find rather more significance in words such as Prospero’s ‘dissolve’, his term for what the great Globe itself will eventually do. Besides its possible link with Tudeau-Clayton’s ‘Dis’, this word echoes 2 Peter 3.10–12, where the end of the world is predicted, ‘by which the heavens being on fire, shalbe dissolved’. As Shaheen noted, William Alexander used a similar image in his play Darius (1603), though he did not

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employ the precise biblical term. Almost any of Shaheen’s 25 cases might be read as standing somewhere inside the wide range from automatic familiar usage to calculated allusion. A more remote and yet much more obviously pervasive influence behind The Tempest is Dr Faustus. The name of the notorious necromancer could be translated as Prospero. One quite obvious verbal echo of Marlowe’s play in The Tempest is 5.1.57, when Prospero at the end of his speech renouncing his magic declares that he will not burn but drown his book. That is a precise echo, meant for audiences to recognize. It emphasizes not only the precedent but the new version’s difference. The essential idea of Faustus selling his soul for the power that magic gives him is often thought to underlie the vital concept of Prospero’s magic, whether it is either good or bad, black or white, blessed or doomed. That was argued by, for instance, Robert A. Logan.18 He identified not only the familiar contrast between black and white magic, and such parallelisms between the two stories as the incident of the disappearing food at the banquet, but more substantially (and perhaps more debatably) a shared linkage between magic and the human imagination, so that Prospero’s magic equates with Shakespeare’s theatrical art. Logan’s argument concludes with the familiar reading of the play’s protagonist being the playwright himself. He finds the chief contrast in this between the two different endings; unlike Faustus, Prospero returns to the realism of governing Milan, where, between every third thought of his grave, his imagination would at the last be confined. In this Logan paid his respects to the appallingly durable biographical approach that finds Prospero a theatrical magician, the image of his author and speaker of his own epilogue. Such speculations ignore the theology of Faustus’s damnation. As with everything else about The Tempest, we should beware of buying the traditional orthodoxies without quizzing them. One of the many issues that has bedevilled study of the sources and the date of composition for The Tempest is marginal to every other likely source for the play: the Strachey

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letter. In its detail, of course, the letter can only relate to the opening storm scene. Critics have noted that many of the ‘romances’ that generated the new fashion found in several of the ‘late’ plays, starting with Pericles, begin with a shipwreck. Which came first, the idea of a romance started by a shipwreck, or the Strachey letter? The vexed questions of what might be the most possible sources and what is the most likely date for Shakespeare composing The Tempest run together over the Strachey letter. Here a little contextual evidence might be of use. It is known that Strachey was resident in the Blackfriars in 1606 and after, when Jonson was also living in the same parish, and that Strachey was a colleague of John Marston, who was a shareholder in the boy companies while he still wrote for them. In 1605 or so Strachey became likewise a shareholder in the boy companies at Blackfriars along with Marston, and in a later deposition testified that he used to attend plays at the Blackfriars ‘sometymes once, twyce, and thrice in a weeke’. Subsequently he wrote a commendatory sonnet to accompany the publication of Jonson’s Sejanus. In that company, it seems highly likely that Shakespeare came into contact with Strachey personally, in the years immediately before he wrote The Tempest. The much-debated Strachey letter, addressed to a ‘noble lady’, perhaps Dame Sara Smith, wife of Sir Thomas Smith, Treasurer of the Virginia Company, prompted Richard Martin, its secretary, to ask Strachey on 14 December 1610 for a full ‘Historie’ of the new colony. This was completed, in three scribal copies, by 1612. Its comments clearly did not please the company, which is probably why it was not published. Strachey’s dedication to the laws of the colony, seven pages published early in 1612, said he was then ‘lodging in the blacke Friers’. Both Jonson’s The Alchemist, set and staged in a house in the Blackfriars, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest were composed in 1610 for the King’s Men’s playhouse in that same precinct. Strachey’s title for his Historie suggests he knew both Richard Eden’s book of 1555 and Richard

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Willes’s 1577 expansion of it. It is at least conceivable that Shakespeare got to know Strachey via Jonson, who was also living in Blackfriars at that time, and that he borrowed copies of Eden and Willes from Strachey, while he also read his letter to the lady about the Bermuda wreck.19

Shakespeare’s use of the sources By some way the single most discussed idea about the sources, a question first raised by William Hazlitt in the early nineteenth century, is who we should take to be the play’s hero, Prospero or Caliban. Strachey’s essay about the Sea Venture is at the heart of the division that still exists among the play’s readers, between the defenders of Prospero’s authoritarianism and of Caliban’s victimization through colonization. An issue widely utilized in recent years, chiefly to exhibit the political bias of particular commentators, this suffuses and in all too many ways distracts from the question of what Shakespeare thought he could do with the sources that were fermenting in his mind when writing this late ‘romance’. The danger of such subjective readings should bring us back to the question that I posed at the outset: just what was in Shakespeare’s mind when he assembled the source materials for this play? The classic assembler of the most likely source materials is Geoffrey Bullough, who gathered and quoted them in extenso in his epic-scale Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. He wrote that ‘No specific source has been found, so we must content ourselves with analogues to the setting, plot and personages of the play’.20 His main claim is that ‘approval of the Virginian Company’s aims, and recognition of its difficulties seem to be implied in [Shakespeare’s] depiction of Prospero, Caliban, and the intruders into the island. Prospero is the good, authoritarian Governor; more, he is like the Providence which in the Bermudan shipwreck brought the ship near to the shore that its people might

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escape, and gave them the means to live and to escape from their predicament. Hence was derived the conception of Prospero as an all-wise controller of events, plaguing sinners for their own good, and both testing and advising Ferdinand’. Later he writes of Prospero as ‘always the Good Governor (a sublimated Sir Thomas Gates)’.21 Bullough very sensibly concluded that ‘behind The Tempest there was a large international body of folk-lore and romantic tradition’.22 Having outlined all the more obvious instances of such sources, he went on to consider possible precedents for some of the names that turn up in the play. These include a Prosper and Stephano in the original version of Every Man in his Humour, in which Shakespeare performed. Similar instances of earlier usage appeared in surviving German and Italian texts. In 1920 H. D. Gray argued that the idea of stealing the magician’s books must have come from an Italian commedia dell’arte play, one of Li Tre Satiri.23 The manuscript containing these plays, however, is dated 1622, and shows no sign of priority over The Tempest. It stands with other analogous stories such as Die Schöne Sidea as one element out of the multitude of folklore stories that Bullough registered as possible background sources.24 What becomes most obvious and most challenging from Bullough’s lengthy assemblage is that the play was selfevidently Shakespeare’s own composition. His use of sources was too diverse, and too exceptionally complex, to fit easily into the concept of sources that led Bullough to compose his great study. Against this, Donna B. Hamilton, writing about the use of the two major classical poets in the design and detailing of the play, disavowed the simpler forms of sourcehunting and argued for a complex process of ‘rhetorical imitation’. She claimed that ‘imitatio is more descriptive of Shakespeare’s craftsmanship than saying that the Aeneid is his “source”, and it explains some of the various systems by which the play imitates the Aeneid’.25 Those systems, roughly outlined above, included similar use of Ovid and Montaigne,

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but give little sense of what initiated the idea of the play in the writer’s mind. For that, the best source probably is Strachey. Edmond Malone at the very beginning of the nineteenth century was the first to draw attention to Strachey’s account of the shipwreck of Thomas Gates and his ship off Bermuda in 1609. He did so in an essay seeking to place the plays in their chronological order of composition. Published in 1808, it was called An account of the incidents from which the title and part of the story of Shakspeare’s ‘Tempest’ were derived and its true date determined. Morton Luce, editing the first Arden edition of 1901, was the most notable of the many who confirmed this as the basis for the dating. He argued that the wreck of the Sea Venture must have ‘suggested the leading incidents of The Tempest’.26 Luce also developed the idea of Shakespeare’s likely association with the Virginia Company, one of whose directors was the Earl of Southampton, the lord for whom Shakespeare wrote his first published poems. This idea of the play’s chief origin continues to be debated, although the main objectors to the Strachey letter as a source are those who want to date the play much earlier in Shakespeare’s writing career. From Strachey’s account of the shipwreck, if Shakespeare read it, he took only certain limited elements. What he selected from Strachey’s lengthy non-fictional narrative about the four-day hurricane the ship struggled through before it could be beached on an island in the Bermudas is thoroughly economical. Unlike the play’s version, in Strachey’s account the crew and the passengers all together helped to bail out the ship and to cast away the surplus baggage and other items that weighed the ship down while she lay awash with her ‘mighty leake’. By contrast, Shakespeare uses the Boatswain to keep the crew from the passengers, though he had the courtiers going below and coming up on deck again, as Admiral George Somers did. Shakespeare’s account has the topmast brought down, while Strachey says they tried to cut down the main mast, and he makes everyone cry ‘all lost!’ and think the ship was splitting. He has luggage thrown overboard, butts

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of beer staved open along with butts of wine such as the one Stephano swam to shore with. Shakespeare uses Ariel to simulate the light of St Elmo’s fire that Somers observed. Ariel ‘flam’d amazement’ with it (1.2.198), where Strachey says it might have ‘strucken amazement’. Shakespeare may also have picked up the term ‘hoodwinked’ from Strachey, for re-use by Caliban at 4.1.206 (although he also used the same word in earlier plays, All’s Well and Macbeth). The chief resemblances between Strachey and the play are fairly clear. In 1926 Robert Ralston Cawley set down three primary examples of its verbal resemblances to the letter, where it was finally reproduced in Purchas’s Purchas his Pilgrims as ‘A True Reportory’.27 They are: (a) Stephano’s ‘But of Sacke, which the Saylors heaved o’reboord’, and his ‘hogshead of wine’, which echo Strachey’s ‘threw over-boord much luggage. […] and staved many a Butt of Beere, Hogsheads of Oyle, Syder, Wine and Vinegar, and heaved away all our Ordnance’; (b) Prospero’s story about how Ariel could ‘run upon the sharp wind of the north’ (1.2.254), matching Strachey’s ‘the sharpe windes blowing Northerly’; (c) Gonzalo’s ‘’Tis best we stand upon our guard, / Or that we quit this place. Let’s draw our weapons’ (2.1.322–3), and Strachey’s ‘Every man from thenceforth commanded to weare his weapon […] and […] stand upon his guard’. Cawley found other echoes under seven categories: (1) contest between sea and sky; (2) desperation of crew and passengers; (3) condition of ship; (4) relations between classes on board; (5) Ariel and St Elmo’s fire; (6) Prospero and the safe landing; (7) the harbour. He also found a few miscellaneous links, including Strachey’s words ‘trim’ for the ship, and ‘glut’, a term Shakespeare only ever uses the once, at 1.1.59. To these he added several references to Virginia as an earthly paradise, matching Gonzalo’s use of Montaigne’s essay, which he called ‘only […] a convenient and succinct phrasing of that idea’.28 In addition he noted the references to thunder and lightning, and Caliban’s account of the ‘fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile’, along with his curse invoking ‘toads, beetles,

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bats’ (1.2.339–41), which Cawley found four pages apart in Strachey. Eden, he notes, also cites ‘Marmasettes’. Equally, Cawley was careful to record the play’s names that do not appear in Strachey, Eden or other ‘voyager’ sources, such as jays (other than Eden’s ‘Popingjayes’) and of course especially the much-disputed ‘scamels’ (2.2.169). He found Strachey’s account a good source for Ferdinand’s log-bearing, citing his statement that ‘The Governour dispensed with no travaile of his body, nor forbare […] to fell, carry, and sawe Cedar’. Of the two sets of conspiracies in the play, Cawley asserts that ‘for ten pages, Strachey is electric with conspiracy and confederates’. Other parallels are identified in a range of verbal and other similarities, including the references to dead Indians and monsters, although very few of these parallels come from the ‘Voyager’ narratives.

The masque Strachey is far from being the only contentious source for the play. The abbreviated masque in Act 4 has generated the most intense and sometimes the most aberrant theories. These include everything from the absence of masques elsewhere in Shakespeare to his assumed interchanges with Ben Jonson, the dominant writer of masques in King James’s early years. What dictated the precise shape of the play’s masque has been less studied, though Jonson’s own distinctive innovation in the forms of masque, the antimasque, has made scholars identify a wide range of possible features in the nearby sections of the play as versions of antimasque. Some critics find it in the dance of the reapers and nymphs that Prospero brings to a halt, others in Ariel’s appearance as the Harpy, and yet others in the dogs that chase away the three comic conspirators after the masque. I think it safe to assume that Shakespeare knew several of Jonson’s masques, probably at first hand if he served as one

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of the King’s players who took the speaking parts in them. He must have known the notion of the antimasque, an acknow­ ledgement of the disorder that the masque itself replaces with royal order. As Stephen Orgel puts it, ‘This ordering of misrule was to become the central action of the masque in Ben Jonson’s hands’.29 The pattern of Jonson’s masques, following quite closely a pattern familiar in Shakespeare’s earlier comedies, shows disorder being resolved by the harmony of weddings or their equivalent. In Chapter 5 of Shakespeare & Jonson / Jonson & Shakespeare, Russ McDonald demonstrated how both writers shared this pattern, Jonson in his masques and Shakespeare in his late romances.30 Although Jonson’s Masques of Blackness and Beauty and the Haddington Masque went into print in 1608, and the Masque of Queens in 1609, his Hymenaei, published in 1606, seems to have been the most accessible to Shakespeare when he wrote The Tempest. Most pointedly, Jonson’s introductory notes to his 1606 masque must have stimulated Shakespeare’s thinking about such shows. Whatever his reason for creating the abrupt truncation to The Tempest’s masque, the evidence seems to indicate that Shakespeare had his own peculiar view of the new art, altogether more modest, or at least more modulated, than Jonson’s. Hymenaei has several features that must have registered in Shakespeare’s mind. Not the least of the apparent echoes of Jonson’s masque in The Tempest is the great orb of silver and gilt, the giant ‘microcosme, or Globe, (figuring Man)’ that Inigo Jones designed for Jonson’s show. It concealed the eight dancers of the antimasque, four dressed as the Humours and four as the Affections, who emerged from it to disrupt Hymen’s harmonious opening song and speech. Whether or not Prospero alludes to it directly when he specifies ‘the great globe itself’ while declaring that ‘Our revels now are ended’ (4.1.148), he might have expected a few of the people in the audience at the Blackfriars, not least Jonson himself, to recognize the connection. If Shakespeare’s play truly was written for performance at the Blackfriars rather than the

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Globe, as I have contended before, this allusion would have done double service. Moreover, that Jonson’s Hymenaei should make Reason, who was the one to restore order, sit on top of Hymenaei’s globe and descend from it to quell the disruptive Humours and Affections, seems to be nicely echoed in Prospero’s own subsequent dismissal of his disordered masquers. Another feature of Hymenaei that may have sat in Shakespeare’s mind includes its printed direction about Juno enthroned with Iris. Both goddesses, of course, reappear in Shakespeare’s masque. In the printed book of Hymenaei a statue of Jupiter is said to be present above the pair, positioned ‘standing in the toppe (figuring the heaven) brandishing his thunder’. Cymbeline’s Jupiter, suspended from the Globe’s heavens with his thunderbolts smelling of sulphur, might have been a deliberate echo of this visual image. Prospero is said in the play’s stage direction to be similarly positioned to watch the banquet, in a superior position specified by the stage direction only as ‘on the top’, a distinctive location not cited in any other play.31 Catherine M. Shaw, who identified the play’s antimasque as being Ariel’s previous maddening of Alonso, Sebastian and Antonio at the end of Act 3 while Prospero is standing to view it ‘on the top’ (3.3.18), argues that Alonso and Antonio have both rebelled against Reason by ‘violating the unity of family and state’, making them draw their swords just as the masquers do in Hymenaei.32 This would make a neat parallel. Perhaps even more reflective of Jonson’s masque is the first speech that Reason delivers, printed in the masque. Reason declares: She that makes soules, with bodies, mixe in love, Contracts the world in one, and therein JOVE; Is spring, and end of all things: yet, most strange! Her selfe nor suffers spring, nor end, nor change.33 The Tempest seems to be recalling this speech when it cites the season-free spring that comes at the end of harvest. This

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paradoxical idea may well have prompted other echoes that appear in Shakespeare’s masque, in the speeches of Proserpine and Ceres, involuntary creators of the seasons. Critics have tried in a variety of ways to account for why Prospero sets out his show for Ferdinand and Miranda. The most obvious thread has been the persistent idea that it must have been inserted into the play late, either because it was designed as a contribution to help celebrate the Princess Elizabeth’s wedding of 1613, or perhaps more obviously for its staging at the court celebrations that saw the play appear before the royal court at Whitehall on 1 November 1611. On a plane rather obliquely inclined towards that theory, Ian Wiles emphasizes the negative or inverted aspects of the masque, which he sees as appropriate for the wedding of 1611.34 He outlines its unconventional features, ‘caught in a limbo between betrothal and marriage, […] a wedding masque performed at the wrong time and the wrong place’. Noting that, unlike the royal masques, the play staged at Blackfriars performs its version in the afternoon, not at night, and out of doors on the island rather than at home in Milan, he calls it ‘an inverted or perverted wedding masque’. Venus is excluded, as is Hymen, and Ceres even alters the seasons when she tells the lovers ‘Spring come to you at the farthest, / In the very end of harvest’ (4.1.114–15). Wiles argues that the denial of night, winter and Venus makes it a deliberately unorthodox masque, removing sexuality and procreation from the marriage. This is a view that seems equally able to support the idea that it was written to celebrate the royal wedding, or the contrary. More to the point, perhaps, is the observation which many other critics have made, that Caliban is a characteristic Jonsonian antimasque figure of disorder, and that what halts Prospero’s presentation is his remembering Caliban’s conspiracy.35 This, of course, would make it an inversion of the usual sequence, where the antimasquers are brought to order by the figures of the masque proper. Wherever we might find the antimasque in the play, there can be no doubt that Shakespeare took great care in designing

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the main masque. John Orrell, after identifying and elaborating the emphasis on symmetry that Jonson applied to Hymenaei, supplies a succinct comment on the comparable symmetry evinced in Shakespeare’s rhyming version.36 In an aside, a footnote to his analysis of Hymenaei, he points out how carefully Shakespeare copied Jonson’s design. The betrothal masque in The Tempest is constructed to the ratio of the diapason, 1:2. Iris introduces it with a speech of sixteen lines, to which Ceres responds with eight lines, so that the two speeches are in the ratio 2:1. There follows a dialogue between the goddesses concluded by Juno’s arrival: twenty-two lines in all, the last one short. After the intervention of the song and Ferdinand’s interruption, Iris calls the Naiads and Reapers to the dance in a speech of eleven lines, the last one short, which stands in relation to the earlier dialogue in the ratio 1:2. The song itself is in two parts marked by the pseudo-refrains ‘Juno sings her blessings on you’ and ‘Ceres’ blessing so is on you’: the two parts are of four and eight lines respectively. Thus the entire masque, up to the point where Prospero breaks it off, is organized like Hymenaei in numerical proportion, though it is shorter and simpler than Jonson’s work. Ferdinand correctly characterizes it as ‘Harmonious charmingly’.37 Such precision in Shakespeare’s design argues that he closely studied the text of Jonson’s earlier masque and exploited at least some of the principles lying behind his practice. It is with some such design in mind that Alison Thorne declares: ‘The masque itself represents the purest expression of Prospero’s utopian ideals, the high-water mark of his faith in the power of a sublime illusion to redeem humanity and institute a beneficent new moral and social order. As befits the occasion, its “majestic vision” projects a multi-levelled concord like that celebrated in Jonson’s marriage masque, Hymenaei’.38 While the means of its abrupt curtailing might call that into question,

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it might equally be seen as locating the ideal in its context of the current reality. One witness to the performance of Hymenaei, John Pory, wrote a letter to Sir Robert Cotton on 7 January 1606 describing what he saw on the two nights of its performance at court. Taking note of it both on Sunday 5 January and the night following, he reported that, for instance, in the main section, Ben Jonson turned the globe of the earth standing behind the altar, and within the Concave sate the 8. men-maskers representing the 4. humours and the fower affections who leapt forth to disturb the sacrifice to union: but amidst their fiery reason that sate above them all, crowned with burning tapers, came down and silenced them […] Above the globe of earth hovered a middle region of cloudes in the centre whereof stood a grand consert of musicians, and upon the Cantons or hornes sate the ladies, 4. at one corner, and 4 at another, who descended upon the stage, not after the stale downright perpendicular fashion, like a bucket into a well, but came gently sloping down.39 This describes a far more grandiose scene than anything that could have been performed by the King’s Men at Blackfriars. Pory’s comments on the dresses and decorations of the ladies and others led him to suggest that the city must have been sacked in order to supply the brightest pearls and other jewels attiring the ladies and gallants. As so often in our hopeful readings of the play’s sources and staging, whether Shakespeare expected his Juno would have to descend like a bucket into a well over the thirty lines of text he wrote for it in his own play’s masque we just cannot know.

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5 New Directions: Commedia dell’Arte, The Tempest, and Transnational Criticism Helen M. Whall

Taking a transnational approach to the modern and contemporary novel has revitalized narrative studies; taking the same approach to early modern drama may yet reinvent the field. Commedia dell’arte in particular, by virtue of its emphasis on performance more than text, provides the perfect site for demonstrating how a transnational approach can better locate dramatic method as itself a ‘kind’ of textual source. Robert Henke and Richard Andrews most notably bring to fruition the work of scholars who across the arc of the twentieth century made reasonable, often compelling cases for Shakespeare’s knowledge of Italian comedy.1 In adding up and adding to their predecessors’ discoveries, Andrews and Henke implicitly make two foundational claims: the improvisational wing of sixteenth-century Italian theatre crossed national boundaries, including the ocean surrounding England. As a corollary to that assumption, they make clear that travellers from many countries, including England, having crossed into

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Italy, attended arte performances and brought reports home. In other words, Shakespeare and his contemporaries had many opportunities to learn from and about commedia dell’arte.2 Pamphlets, diaries, royal court records and comments by other playwrights justify such claims. The logical question is: how could Shakespeare not have known about commedia dell’arte? Given his ‘magpie’ virtues, moreover, how could Shakespeare not have been influenced by a theatre style that captivated audiences everywhere, despite language barriers? Yet, proving the case for commedia dell’arte as a source for The Tempest or any part of any Shakespearean play has proved difficult. The very fact that commedia dell’arte, known for its actors’ improvisational skills, emphasized the performative rather than the textual nature of drama assured that its success would be paradoxical: long-lasting yet transient. The influence of commedia dell’arte on theatre practitioners, both inside and outside of Italy, could not have been greater or survived longer on stage. Even today, commedia dell’arte technique forms the base for much actor training. For the same reason, the accessibility of arte plays to future literary scholars could not have been more limited. Scholars look for that which arte seemed to lack: a textual presence. Fortunately, a new school of critics has begun to reassess the very nature of dramatic literary evidence. Transnational criticism rebuts the critic’s exclusive reliance on empirical, printed evidence as the only way to prove that one play has influenced another. Critics like Henke and Andrews systematize and then locate the non-verbal presence of Italian commedia dell’arte in foreign plays. They invite us to consider the trace evidence, to assess the spirit of performance that haunts every dramatic text. The transnational critic also makes one more critical adjustment to what the critic should assume when evaluating Shakespeare’s artistry: we must foreground the fact that Shakespeare was primarily a playwright. That concession has not always been granted. Enthralled by Shakespeare’s language, often unconsciously hostile to theatre, academics have often emphasized Shakespeare’s language as the sole

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source of his greatness. Shakespeare’s words, moreover, implied a particular kind of performance, a language of performative style used on stages other than his own. Understanding an audience’s theatrical experience allows the playwright to anticipate response to a gesture, an action, a line. Such knowledge is encoded into his dramatic texts. In some sense, every good playtext is self-aware of playing. As a result, the metatheatrical nature of The Tempest makes that tragicomic, pastoral romance an ideal workshop for illustrating Shakespeare’s debt to commedia dell’arte. The elusive genealogy of that play also makes it a perfect experimental space for testing the merits of transnational criticism.

Sources and influences The plethora of texts advanced as sources for The Tempest is perhaps matched only by the paucity of scholarly agreement about the validity of those texts as sources. Virgil and Ovid, Strachey and Montaigne, Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe have all been invoked as sources. Is an ‘influence’ the same as a source? What about an ‘inspiration’? Are verbatim texts the only true sources? Historically, the verbatim text, the ‘word for word’ parallel text, has dominated discussions of Shakespearean sources. Holinshed’s Chronicles are clear sources for the history plays; English translations of Plutarch and Ovid and Italian novellas stream into the tragedies and comedies with reassuring force. The Tempest, however, refuses to follow words back to words in any way that would comfort the traditional scholar. Andrew Gurr effectively reminds us in this volume that we can find verbatim parallels to certain ‘features’ of The Tempest but not to Shakespeare’s actual words. Gurr notes that even Gonzalo’s meditation on an ideal society (2.1.148–68), though clearly related to Montaigne’s ‘Of the Caniballes’, does not

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enter The Tempest ‘word for word’ but rather as transmuted first by John Florio’s translation, then by Shakespeare’s own parody. But it is precisely the hunt for what Gurr calls a ‘quotable’ source that may point by indirection to commedia dell’arte as the single greatest source for Shakespeare’s short text. Given the very nature of drama as more than textual – as performed ideas as well as words performed – verbatim texts can account for only some of the play’s origins. The connections that transnationalists have made between The Tempest and commedia dell’arte make a strong case for reassessing the tyranny of the quotable source. Commedia dell’arte, the theatre of improvisation, is more about manner than matter, more about creating than composing. In many ways, the same can be said of The Tempest. It is a written text that dramatizes both the power and the limits of language, whether spoken in spells or set to music or enacted for an onstage audience who see, hear, and experience various kinds of theatre within one play. The manner of The Tempest also veers away from the logical progression of time found elsewhere in the canon, even in those plays that contain inner plays. Instead, Shakespeare asserts a totally formalistic control over time: he invokes the classical unities he applied only once before, in The Comedy of Errors. But The Comedy of Errors, his first play about a shipwreck, owes an unimpeachable debt to The Menaechmi; like its source, The Comedy of Errors makes dramatic action fill out the hours toward rescue sequentially. In The Tempest, though, we are frequently reminded of the time of the day, time and action are synchronized. The ship is sinking as Miranda and Prospero watch; Ferdinand serves his time with Prospero as the other shipwrecked royals pass their time in talk; Caliban and Stephano and Trinculo begin their plot against Prospero as Prospero hears about it and ends his revels. It is this masterful sense of simultaneity that makes The Tempest so difficult to summarize. And it is this representation of simultaneity that commedia dell’arte relied on when constructing scenarios, the building blocks of action that a

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company of players could arrange and rearrange, depending upon the circumstances of performance, without losing the sense of a coherent story being told each time. Characterization in The Tempest also resembles more the transposable ‘Masks’ of arte rather than the fully developed characters we find in most of Shakespeare’s plays, even the comedies. Prospero, in particular, talks oddly. He constantly halts his long lecture to Miranda (1.2.22–168) to make her attend to him, although Miranda repeatedly makes clear that his talk would ‘cure deafness’ (1.2.107).3 A. Lynne Magnusson, commenting on the way in which Prospero’s long speech, as well as Gonzalo’s ‘plantation’ speech and other extended monologues, are often internally disrupted, associates this pattern with the improvisational techniques central to commedia dell’arte.4 Hers is a smart insight, one that implicitly argues that a non-textual performative technique is a source for The Tempest. If so, then it is equally important to note that Shakespeare generates a text that simulates the rhythms of improvisation. In doing so, he breaks up an otherwise tedious speech that would also be familiar in kind to arte players who often won disruptive laughter when old men delivered long lectures to the young. Performances, like texts by other playwrights, inspire and influence playwrights; clearly performances of the living texts put on by commedia dell’arte players should be evaluated as a source even for words that might otherwise seem totally – or perhaps we should say only – original in The Tempest. Can that evidence be accessed? Recent scholarship says ‘yes’, if pre-suppositions are suspended. Generations of scholars, international playwrights and even the theatre-going public have acquired a casual famil­ iarity with commedia dell’arte that has, to some extent, kept the tradition alive and influential straight into the twenty-first century. But that knowledge comes at a cost. We emphasize some hallmarks of commedia dell’arte while forgetting – or perhaps never having known – the totality of the commedia dell’arte that influenced the very rise of

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early modern drama across Europe and in England. We are familiar with the characters known as Masks and expect the actors to improvise. We recognize their distinctive costumes. Arlecchino wears a patched suit and is given to slapstick; his mask is dark. Pantalone is a greedy or possessive old man in a long cloak: his mask has a long nose. And so on down the list of arte characters, even English names. The mean-spirited Pulcinella’s immortality as the abusive Punch amply displays how audiences still respond with delight to the repetitive, recognizable aspects of entertainment, sometimes to the point of losing the depth conveyed by such emphatic signifiers.

The arte of commedia The vibrantly gestural nature of commedia dell’arte performance style and the improvisational licence granted to the zannis (the clownish servants) distinguished the arte players from the amateurs of ‘commedia erudita’, the ‘serious’ theatre of the Italian universities. It is also true that the comici, the professional actors of commedia dell’arte, aligned themselves with the craftsmen and working people of their audiences rather than the elitists of the universities. Doing so assured that the commedia dell’arte troupes enjoyed commercial success for more than a hundred years without a permanent playhouse.5 The plays of commedia erudita, on the other hand, were scripted by writers like Ariosto and Tasso. There is some irony rather than necessity to the fact that the greatness of Italian drama would eventually be linked to the greatness of named playwrights rather than to the great performance of plays. Playwrights, not players, provided the concrete evidence post-enlightenment historians would value. We assume no familiarity with the work of early modern playwrights. We study them. With the exception of Shakespeare, however, we seldom perform their plays. In her comprehensive Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, Louise George Clubb traces how Italian theatre fell

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into such a false division even as she reunites commedia erudita and commedia dell’arte. Her work makes clear that commedia dell’arte was both more substantive and more scripted than academic memories would come to recollect.6 Scholars now acknowledge, for example, that a number of arte actors performed roles written for the amateurs. That is a concession with consequences. The comici had such professionally trained memories that what we used to call the ‘memorial reconstruction’ of a pirated play would have been a practised performance skill. The matter of those serious plays, Clubb and others argue, found its way into seemingly improvised street theatre. The comici carried scripts in their heads, just as surely as the amateurs of commedia erudita borrowed acting techniques from the public professionals.7 Clubb condemns the binary thinking and academic stuffiness that divided Italian theatre into ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘elite’ and ‘popular’, to the detriment of both. She traces out instead the ‘interchange and transformation of units, figures, relationships, topoi and framing patterns’ between the better preserved academic theatre and that of arte performance.8 As Clubb has shown, these are the crucial building blocks used by commedia dell’arte and commedia erudita alike, though in different proportions. She calls such movable structures ‘theatregrams’.9 That term has proved to be so apt that transnationalist critics, even while testing out terms like ‘modules’ and ‘narremes’, shift to British spelling and identify the ‘theatregrams’ of commedia dell’arte as evidence of how arte plays functioned as art.10 Invented long after commedia dell’arte had waned and now replaced by email, the telegram is a perfect analogue to the way the comici, by the very nature of their craft, sent word across Europe, showing rather than telling others how to make a play. Though transmitted through the air, their ideas could also be caught on paper. Clubb and her successors locate theatregrams in the long-neglected and often lengthy accounts of commedia dell’arte performances written by professional actors like Francesco Andreini, Flaminio Scala and Basilio

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Locatelli. The scholarship of retrieval begun by Ferdinando Neri and continued by others may seem to reopen the gap between kinds of Italian Renaissance drama, but that is not so. While a renewed understanding of commedia dell’arte plays in relation to their performance once again segregates commedia dell’arte, it does so for reasons of focused analysis, not dismissal. Transnational criticism actually unifies that which has been too long divided by literary scholarship: the evidence of text and the evidence of performance. The aim of transnationalism is largely unification. Robert Henke, for example, restores the relationship of orality and literacy in commedia dell’arte. In order to do so, Henke turns to the culture of early modern theatre and to printed texts provided by men like Andreini (1548–1624) and Scala (1552– 1624). Like other actors of commedia dell’arte productions, Andreini and Scala ‘used print to memorialize their ephemeral art and to present a vision of complementarity between performance and literature, between improvised stage composition and written composition’.11 Henke and Richard Andrews persistently illustrate the difference between an emphasis and an exclusion. Commedia dell’arte, they agree, emphasized the physical, the gestural and the improvisational, but it did not do so to the exclusion of the verbal. Clubb made the same point about academic comedy when she observed that the commedia grave (a phrase she prefers to commedia erudita) also ‘made use of the “masks and mannerisms” we think of as the property of commedia dell’arte’.12 Henke, however, explains that the live performances of commedia dell’arte, accessible to the non-lettered through the use of masks and mannerisms, reached larger audiences than printed plays. They also travelled more quickly, regularly crossing national borders and ‘geo-linguistic barriers’.13 Documenting the importance of arte companies across the borders of France and Spain is quite straightforward. Paintings and other visual depictions of the travelling Italian entertainers abound, especially in France. Italian stock characters were outright assimilated into French and Spanish variants of

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their names. Most reassuringly, historical records show that in 1574 an accomplished arte company named Zan Gassa played in Spain to such success that they made Madrid a base from which they could travel. Royal court records also document the travels of Italian companies in France. Henri III summoned the famous Gelosi troupe to Blois in 1577; under Louis XIV, the French ‘Comédie-Italienne’ opened a theatre. Though the record is thinner, there is also – and most importantly for our purposes – historically sound evidence that commedia troupes travelled to England. Turning to E. K. Chambers and Kathleen Lea, as well as to the works of early modern English writers for support, Henke provides the best overview of commedia dell’arte actors in early modern England. He notes especially that an Italian company was asked to perform a pastoral play for Queen Elizabeth in 1574 and that the internationally known arte actor Drusiano Marinelli performed ‘in the Citie and Liberties of London’ in 1578. Just as Shakespeare was beginning his career, Thomas Kyd praised Italian actors in The Spanish Tragedy. Then in 1590 Thomas Nashe spoke with an Italian Arlechino. Henke finds ‘most striking’ the discovery of stage plats in Edward Alleyn’s papers. Because they were remarkably similar to known Italian scenarios both in form and content, Henke argues the plats (or ‘plots’) would have been used by actors in 1590–2. Some of these same actors would join the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1594.14 Henke is more cautious than many in accepting Louis B. Wright’s argument that Will Kempe, Shakespeare’s first great clown, spent time in Italy and actually performed with an arte company.15 Given Kempe’s penchant for travel, his documented trip over the Alps, and the ubiquitous presence of commedia dell’arte throughout Europe, he may well have encountered commedia dell’arte. But perhaps with tongue in cheek, Henke does not accept mere literary evidence as proof of performance. In 1590, Nashe, the assumed author of the pamphlet ‘An Almond for a Parrat’, writes that during his travels he met some commedia dell’arte players, one of whom ‘inquired of me if I knew any such Parabolano here as Signor

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Chiarlatano Kempio. Very well (quoth I) […] He hearing me say so, began to embrace me anew’. Though the actor claims not to know Kempe personally, he has heard of his skill and so ‘for the report he had of his Pleasance, he colde not bee in love with his perfections being absent’.16 Wright, a strong advocate for evidence that Kempe personally experienced commedia dell’arte, draws attention to a 1607 play, The Travailes of the Three English Brothers, attributed to John Day. In that play a character named Kempe performs an inner play in arte style, entering into an exchange with a character called Harlequin. The Kempe character, according to Wright, knows arte style as well as Harlequin does.17 Day’s script survives for us to assess.

Clowns and fools Henke and other transnationalists find more compelling, if more elusive, evidence for English knowledge of arte performances in the many analogues within, rather than around, Shakespeare’s plays. Once again, this time with regard to Shakespeare’s use of clowns and fools, emphasis may have been taken as exclusion, blurring the record. Theatre historians have long sensed some arte influence in the roles Shakespeare assigned his clowns.18 The earliest of them speak set speeches and perform routines similar to comic lazzi – the patter routines, humorous monologues and orchestrated pratfalls that constitute many arte theatregrams – and are cast, like the zanni, as servants. External parallels are also easy to draw. The title ‘clown’ in English theatre, like that of zanni in Italian arte, was a professional one, an offstage as well as onstage designation.19 Too much attention to that seemingly shared genealogy, however, has led commentators to see the clowns as the best (and therefore insufficient) evidence of arte influence on Shakespeare’s plays. In England, the only actors always identified by their offstage role were the professional clowns like Richard Tarlton, Will Kempe and

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Robert Armin. They, like all professional clowns, were listed as such in dramatis personae even if the role played within a play seemed from a historical perspective to be more that of a ‘witty fool’ than a foolish clown. For example, a ‘clown’ is listed as acting both the role of Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice and Feste in Twelfth Night. It is possible that the modern critic senses too great a distinction between the comic clown and the satiric fool. The dramatis personae to King Lear lists no clown actor, only a ‘Fool, to Lear’. Here, the distinction seems linked more to genre than to performer, giving the playwright leeway to make an internal distinction between the kinds of characters he might label ‘fool’. The distinctions of clown from fool within Shakespeare’s dramas seem variously dictated by convention, by guild practice and by genre. Commedia dell’arte, on the other hand, distributes both foolish and clownish characteristics across the spectrum of Masks. Placing too great an emphasis on English clowns as ‘like zannis’ and the reverse neglects the politics of theatre and the subtleties of Shakespeare’s comic characterization while reducing arte influence to one character. Yet the record shows that all Italian stock characters, not just the zannis, were capable of ‘clownish’ behaviour. Criticism has tended to oversimplify the importance of the professional clowns associated with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a tendency that limits our understanding of Shakespeare’s response to native as well as foreign influence. We need to pay more attention to the nuanced distinctions he would draw between medieval clowns and early modern fools, as well as his interest in crossing genres, relocating professional fools ‘allowed’ their satire into tragedy, as well as granting less privileged characters the fool’s wit. The published tales of jigs and jests circulated by Kempe and Armin in particular have provided modern critics too much reassuring print evidence. In effect, having managed to locate important non-textual contact between Shakespeare’s plays and commedia dell’arte, between clowns and zanni, critics have too often ignored internal evidence pointing toward thematic distinctions rather

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than professional credentials. Because of his notorious jigs, Kempe is assigned responsibility for Shakespeare’s interest in the less verbal and assumedly more acrobatic clowns of his early comedies; because of Armin’s proficiency as a singer, he is seen as the source of Shakespeare’s sweetvoiced fools who are nonetheless assumed to derive from the same zany source.20 It makes sense that a playwright who did not audition actors might, when writing a new play, emphasize the known talents of his company. But to assume Shakespeare completely limited his development of fools and clowns to Kempe and Armin’s talents is to risk overemphasis on performance evidence external to the plays! Inside Shakespeare’s scripts, clowns are all called fools. Some clowns and some fools are called ‘jesters’. Most seem to derive at least partially from native tradition, whether the Vice of medieval theatre or the fool of actual courts or the folly figure made famous by Erasmus and the humanists. If we weigh all aspects of Shakespeare’s plays as plays, it seems apparent that clowns and fools are present early and late in the canon with differing emphases. Something, in other words, beyond Kempe’s acrobatic skills and Armin’s voice may have influenced Shakespeare’s movement away from a Launcelot Gobbo toward a Feste, then back to a Trinculo. Arte actors not called zanni have their own set comic routines and display a wide range of what the stage would consider comic activity. Arlechinno and Pantalone and the Dottore, in other words, may well have inspired Shakespeare’s development of variant clowns as well as his growing interest in how the comic and the comedic skew apart when crossing genre lines. Launcelot Gobbo resembles many a zanni, the much-abused servant of commedia dell’arte. He is funny more than witty and, like the zanni, tends to play his part solo or in two-person scenes; the drunken Porter in post-Kempe Macbeth (identified in the list of actors only as ‘Porter’) is more like Gobbo than Feste, who is more like Lear’s Fool than Gobbo. The Porter chills an audience when his displaced comic antics accentuate rather than relieve the horror of

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tragedy.21 Such genre-crossing is itself more typical of Italian commedia dell’arte than English theatre, though English speakers tend to hear only the ‘comedy’ within ‘commedia’. Accounts of performance make clear, however, that commedia dell’arte took on serious matters while retaining its professional clowns. Peter in Romeo and Juliet and the gravediggers of Hamlet, like the Porter in Macbeth, illustrate the concept of ‘theatregrams’ doubly at work across national boundaries and within Shakespeare’s career. English stage clowns and Italian zanni do share at least one common influence; both owe a debt to Roman comedy and that theatre’s regulated stock types. Commedia dell’arte, however, brought those Roman characters into the European sixteenth century; arte playwrights assigned the contemporary words and actions. The living theatre of commedia dell’arte made it easier for Shakespeare to move beyond the classical world of the Dromios and into the life of Windsor and its merry wives. Commedia dell’arte kept other stock characters up to date as well. Falstaff is far more recognizable in the Capitano than in the Plautine Braggart. The greedy old Pantalone, a Venetian figure, offers a new framework for comprehending Shylock as well as for seeing Shylock’s kinship with that other possessive old Venetian, the Christian Brabantio of Othello. The modernized Masks of commedia dell’arte are not firmly fixed roles but rather ways of playing those roles. They signal how their probable Roman ancestors might have been acted had they continued to evolve. The most intriguing of all theatregrams are in fact those that Andrews and Henke trace to the performance art of arte theatre. As an illustration of a performance theatregram, Andrews discusses how Shakespeare uses an arte formula to open Act 5 of The Merchant of Venice. He notes that the comici would have had in their repertoire speeches that dramatize two lovers attempting to top each other’s trope or best each other’s reference to classical gods.22 This is exactly the manner in which Jessica and Lorenzo mark the time ‘on such a night’ in Belmont as they await Portia’s return. The

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exchange in 5.1 recollects abandoned lovers and sets an elegiac tone that complicates Portia’s ensuing confrontation of Bassanio. Shakespeare here turns to an arte construction, then does what he wants with it. Similarly, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, after the union of Helen and Lysander is forbidden by Egeus, the lovers attempt to top each other in examples of woe, luring the audience into comic pathos. Egeus may be more a senex figure than a developed Pantalone, but the exchange between Hermia and Lysander marks them as the ‘inamorati’. The nature of their exchange comes straight from commedia dell’arte: Lys: Ay me! For aught that I could ever read, Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth; But either it was different in blood – Her: O cross too high to be enthrall’d to [low]. Lys: Or else misgrafted in respect of years – Her: O spite! Too old to be engag’d to young. Lys: Or else it stood upon the choice of friends – Her: O hell to choose love by another’s eyes. (1.1.132–40)23 Exchanges between Katherina and Petrucchio (The Taming of the Shrew) and Beatrice and Benedict (Much Ado About Nothing) make use of the same kind of theatregram, though again to different ends. These exchanges assume that an audience takes pleasure in wordplay, and when it is performed well, the language underscores something deeply matched in these mixed couples. ‘Technique’ rather than script provides the most textually generative contact between Shakespeare and the Italian stage. Theatregrams become modular units into which Shakespeare could ‘improvise’ his own words – like the theatregram in which a father lectures his son at length, as does King Henry IV his son Hal or Polonius his son Laertes.24 Few, if any, are tempted to compare Henry IV and Polonius. But such father/ son speeches are common in commedia dell’arte, and each

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speech type, not each character, can be found there. Sometimes Shakespeare even uses the arte technique of modularity itself. In an Italian fashion, for example, he transfers Shylock’s most famous monologue on Jews to Emilia’s reflection of wives in Othello. Shylock asks: ‘Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections passions …?’ (3.1.59–73). Emilia says: ‘Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them; they see and smell / And have their palates both for sweet and sour, / As husbands have […] and have not we affections, / Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?’ (4.3.93–101). Shakespeare is not self-plagiarizing. He is borrowing a technique from his Italian colleagues, copying the art of copying even while altering his own theatregram from prose to verse. Playwrights learn from each other that certain stage actions call for words and certain words call for stage action. Advancing plots call for both. Dramatic formulae like the speech talking down or the lovers locked in a rhetorical competition or the monologue of complaint ‘belong specifically to no individual play, but generically to many […] [T]hey are theatregrams frequently and regularly repeated in Italy, both in scripts and in scenarios’.25 Despite the evidence of performance, we literary critics remain more comfortable finding literary influence in printed words. The aesthetic arrangement of those words matters greatly to our assessment, as well it should. But with the genre of drama, a number of crucial aesthetic decisions can also be conveyed by purely functional language. Scholarly investment in the ‘scenari’ has steadily risen. Written by some of commedia dell’arte’s most successful actors, the scenari are not what an English ear hears as ‘scenes’; they are the polished records of actual performances. Though the scenarios are also not ‘scripts’ in our usual understanding of that playtext, they are also more than ‘plot summaries’. Scenari describe performative methods and performed plot moments. Within or between both kinds of activity reside numerous analogues to Shakespearean plays with contact points as different as are such complete scripts as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and

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Othello. Approached with an understanding of non-textual theatregrams, some scenario collections even bring to bear what transnationalists argue is the weight of a source. This is especially true of various scenarios brought together in the twentieth century by Ferdinando Neri. Neri chose five scenarios from five different early modern manuscripts. These he published in 1913. His selection principle for what he called Scenari delle Maschere in Arcadia appears, from his introductory notes, to have been his knowledge of The Tempest. A few of the scenarios were originally published by their author, Basilio Locatelli, in 1618 and 1622. Those dates might seem to undermine Neri’s suggestion that the Locatelli scenarios provide a source for The Tempest – a play seldom dated later than 1611 – but not if we understand the genre ‘scenari’. Scenari are the recollections prepared by actors of parts they have played and the productions they have come from. As both Andrews and Henke have pointed out, as a reconstruction of undated and ongoing performances the scenari, by genre, convey ideas long in circulation. The great scenario collections like those of Scala or Locatelli record what had been said and done by commedia dell’arte troupes over and over again.26 Word of such performances, moreover, could travel faster than printed materials; the impact of those plays or reports of those plays on an Englishman who began writing only twenty years after the opening of a professional English theatre would be profound.

Commedia and The Tempest Based on a fairly nuanced understanding of the Neri scenarios, in 1926 Henry David Gray advanced the argument for commedia dell’arte as a primary source for The Tempest. Gray was sympathetic to earlier claims that the Scala scenarios contained analogues to Shakespeare’s work. He writes of his surprise, however, when he discovered that German scholar

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Max J. Wolff, the man who had written what seemed to be a definitive list of analogues between Shakespeare and commedia dell’arte in 1910, had not listed The Tempest. Realizing that Wolff could not have seen the 1913 Neri collection, Gray set about completing Wolff’s list. Especially struck by the plot overlaps, he focused on The Tempest: in one Arcadia scenario ‘the magician says at the end that he will not exercise his art any longer, and throws away his staff and book’. In another, the magician who rules the island conjures up a storm. A storm opens three of the five scenarios. He quotes from another: ‘Gratiano talks about Zanni; he says he does not know whether he is a man or beast. He says he has a head and legs, but that the ass has just the same’. This description eerily matches up with the odd and always humorous business between Stephano, Trinculo, Caliban and a cloak in The Tempest, 2.2. But Shakespeare uses 116 lines of comic verse to dramatize that very funny stage figure. He continues the scene once Trinculo is pulled from the monster, an action that corresponds to another scenario’s description of a man delivered from a whale. Gray pleads with his readers to excuse the ‘crudity and unliterary character’ of the scenarios and reminds us that ‘one must constantly visualize the action’. Here we see a critic striving to achieve gravitas. It also takes time, practice and a critical community to see the importance of what Gray himself dismisses as ‘minor analogies’. He observes how a magician (the Arcadian scenarios all have magicians) changes one character into a tree while another cuts the tree to free her. In the same scenario, Zanni ‘comes from a rock and says he was transformed into it because he would not do what the old magician wanted him to do’.27 Shakespeare’s version of the same action is set in potent verse. Asked to do more service by Prospero, Ariel complains that he has been promised freedom. The lengthy exchange that follows calls for both actors to move quickly up and down emotional registers, arte style. Prospero recalls Ariel’s punishment by a bad magician, the witch Sycorax:

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       Thou my slave, As thou report’st thyself, was then her servant, And – for thou were a spirit too delicate To act her earthy and abhorred commands, Refusing her grand hests – 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 […]     It was mine art, When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape The pine and let thee out. (1.2.270–93) Gray dryly assures his reader that he does not ‘doubt Shakespeare’s having heard both of Jonah and of Daphne’.28 In referring to the Bible and Ovid, however, Gray anticipates later discussions of commedia dell’arte and Shakespeare. Both are omnivorous when it comes to sources. Like his Italian colleagues, Shakespeare also loves not only to mix but also to create genres. Louise George Clubb, as part of her sustained efforts to reintegrate erudite and popular drama of the Italian Renaissance, traces out most effectively the origins of pastoral drama in Italy. She discusses the emergence of the form and its relation to literary experiments as well as theoretical tracts written by Italian dramatists debating Aristotle. These experiments eventually led to scripted masterpieces like Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido, the clear, indisputable literary sources for John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess. Clubb also remarks that Fletcher’s work is not itself a likely source for The Tempest because it displays so little of Shakespeare’s ‘theatrically vital and savvy representations of love and providence in action’. According to Clubb, Shakespeare’s late romances seem more in keeping with Italian theatre’s rush toward ‘the invention of a third genre and the critical justification of a range of tragi-comic mixtures’.29

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On the academic stage, Battistia Leoni’s Roselmina models the third genre, the hybrid mode. That play’s Prologue describes Roselmina as a ‘composite of joking and seriousness, of the grave and the gamesome; a mixture of princes with folk of low and middle rank, happy, despairing, mad and wise; an intertwining of high affairs and most jocund jests; and of lovers; so arranged that in their discordant coming together they make a noble and harmonious unity’.30 Leoni’s play was printed first in 1595, then reprinted many times. There is no evidence it was translated into English, nor do we have any indication that the Italian text reached England. But as Clubb points out, arte troupes were quick to adapt the new tragicomedies to their less verbal, more portable theatre. In her mind, the Neri scenarios make clear the continuity between academic experiments in hybridity and popular theatre already quite used to mixing matters. She also supports arguments like Gray’s that the Arcadian scenarios show striking correspondences with The Tempest.31 Robert Henke asks us to attend carefully to how commedia dell’arte ‘transported’ elements of Italian theatre like pastoral drama to England. In his Performance and Literature in the Commedia Dell’Arte, Henke makes his own careful argument for the proximity of orality and literacy in the work of commedia dell’arte. In the book he co-edited with Eric Nicholson, Theatre Crossing Borders: Transnational and Transcultural Exchanges in Early Modern Theatre, he and his contributors map out the territory of transnational criticism. Against that backdrop, Henke’s essay, ‘Transporting Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and the Magical Pastoral’ makes the most compelling argument that commedia dell’arte should be accepted as a source for The Tempest. Implicitly, he shows how that play serves as a paradigm for the ways commedia dell’arte influenced Shakespeare throughout his career. Henke’s explication of the Neri scenarios is more detailed than that provided by others and it is smartly selective. Rather than look for all analogous ‘theatregrams’ in one scenario, he notes how certain modules repeat and expand across the

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collection, leaving the reader with a shipwreck, a magician who is fixated on control, island visitors obsessed by hunger and thirst, rebellious clowns and a set of young lovers. Henke separates the accrued evidence into three categories: ‘Dramatic content, both on a macro and a micro scale […] Dramaturgy […] [and] Genre’.32 The specifics that align with these criteria are many: plot affinities and comic lazzi; characters who readily match up with the Dottore, Pantalone and Zanni; aristocratic young lovers who contrast with ridiculous characters from a lower class; attention to the dramatic unities; use of the supernatural; frequent magical transformations of people into objects and objects into other objects; regular alteration of emotional registers between high and low, utopian fantasies and the pastoral mode. Like all who have read the Arcadian scenarios, Henke cannot help but zero in on the Caliban plot. It is hard to shake off lines so strikingly parallel to Shakespeare’s plot as those of Gratiano when he exclaims that he does not know whether the zany he discovers is a man or a beast because, though he has a head and legs, ‘the ass has just the same’. There are a myriad possible sources for Caliban, including ‘poetry, drama, civil pageantry and folklore’ as well as Spenser, Homer, Virgil, Babylonia, Greece and Rome, the Wild Man tradition and travel reports.33 But there is only one known analogue to the clowns with the cloak and the four-legged monster. All that stands in the way of seeing the arte source for the Caliban lazzi is Shakespeare’s habit of displacement and replacement. In commedia dell’arte, Masks usually come in twos. That includes a first and second zanni, as in the Stephano-Trinculo scene. Trinculo is identified in the List of Roles as a jester; Stephano, in second zanni tradition, is listed only as a servant, a ‘drunken butler’. Caliban is neither a zanni nor a clown by either English or Italian convention; he is ‘a savage and deformed slave’. Even if Shakespeare did not author the Folio list of actors, these are the parts the three men play within the script. It is simply in keeping with Shakespeare’s Italian mode of construction that he alters as he

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adapts. He keeps the hysterically funny stage business of the cloak while making it serve larger thematic ends; he blends into this theatregram another from the Arcadian scenarios in which the clowns plot to steal the magician’s book. Caliban more resembles Brighella, the most violent of the arte characters, than he does Buratino, the figure who joins Pantalone and Gratiano (the Dottore) in the parallel cloak scenarios; the Italian actor’s grotesque mask might even have suggested Caliban’s appearance. Caliban, whatever his source or sources, is clearly Shakespeare’s most powerful creation through amalgamation. Like the play, he has multiple progenitors but is an original. Caliban, however, ends the theatregram of the cloak and the monster with four legs by emerging as more a fool than a clown, though a bit of each. Dancing, he sings out ‘Ban’ ban’ Ca-caliban, / Has a new master, get a new man’ (2.2.179–80). If tragi-comedy were reduced to two lines, these might be the ones. Although no analogue from the commedia dell’arte traditions, techniques and scenari sums up all that is The Tempest, the nature and number of the analogues make commedia dell’arte both walk and quack like that which we should call it: a source. As Richard Andrews writes and Robert Henke quotes: ‘an accumulation of “analogies” can arguably take on the character of a “source”, particularly in a theatrical culture where performance ideas were constantly being transmitted orally and by direct experience from one practitioner to another’.34 How, then, might accepting commedia dell’arte (rather than any one commedia scenario) as a source for The Tempest inform our understanding of it? First and foremost by sensitizing readers of that playtext to the very fact that it is a text about playing, as well as a text meant to be played; The Tempest often implies rather than states elements of plot, not just ‘accompanying gestures’. Transnational critics, moreover, are not asking that commedia dell’arte be seen as the only source for The Tempest. There is a liberating generosity to that method which mirrors the spirit we sense in the closing moments of the play itself. Transnational insights leave

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room for Homer and Virgil and Montaigne, for Mucedorus and tales of shipwrecks and the outlandish tales of travellers. Most importantly, if transnational arguments can lead to a general critical acceptance of commedia dell’arte as an important source for The Tempest, literary critics will have begun to contend with Shakespeare as a man of the living theatre. Such an understanding of commedia dell’arte also brings into sharper focus a Shakespeare who invents worlds, then peoples them with creatures and plots he finds in books, in his experience, in his memory, in his imagination and on the stages of other playwrights. He then turns to actors to translate his vision, the way those Italians did. But into words. English words.

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6 New Directions: ‘He needs will be Absolute Milan’: The Political Thought of The Tempest Jeffrey A. Rufo

This chapter highlights Shakespeare’s contributions to an early modern conversation about authority and its limits by examining what The Tempest says about power, legitimacy, resistance, freedom, and ultimately, justice. In doing so, I hope to elucidate the play’s political thought – how it poses openended questions and suggests complex problems about human behaviour that lack simple answers and solutions. Although Shakespeare alludes to multiple ideas and discourses about power and governance in The Tempest, the text is ultimately more interested in prompting provocative political thought experiments in the mind of its audience than in resolving them. Is sovereignty always benign and beneficent? When, if ever, do subjects have the right to be sceptical of, or even challenge, sovereignty? Must resistance inevitably lead to

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chaos? And if so, can it ever be good? The play’s unwillingness to answer such questions does not signal Shakespeare’s lack of political commitment. Rather, the freedom that the play grants an audience to make up its own mind about whether or not justice is done performs what it considers a philosophical truth: liberty is a universal human demand, and although literature commonly depicts it as a divine or natural gift accorded to every human being, in reality it is not. Rather, like power and authority, freedom is a commodity that is best earned through the consent of other human beings but which therefore can be taken away.

The humanist background of Jacobean political thought: Absolutism and republicanism The Tempest is a distinctly Jacobean play. Written in or just before 1611, it was a product of the King’s Men and was performed at court at least once early in its life, probably in front of the King himself.1 The succession of James Stuart to the throne of England in 1603 transformed the political conversation between government officials, citizens, academics, jurists and writers of all kinds. Controversies created by an unmarried and childless female monarch disappeared, and although James’s private romantic life and sexual activities often served as grist for the gossip mill, the myth of royal virginity was displaced. Speculation and national hand-wringing over the Queen’s potential husbands and, later, successors, ended – James was married and had two male heirs by 1603. In the years following the long and successful reign of Elizabeth, the Jacobean era breathed new life into a continuing conversation about political constitutions, royal prerogative and resistance. Some of the most prominent debates concerned monarchical authority and its limits.2 It

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was generally agreed that the monarch ruled as sovereign through his or her authority as king or queen in consultation with Parliament, but different emphases could be given to this constitutional position: did a prince have to rule in accordance with conclusions reached in Parliament and popular opinion? Or, as early modern European monarchs, including Elizabeth and James, tended to argue, was a prince merely obliged to listen to his people rather than heed their wishes and demands? Philosophers and poets of the early modern era turned to the Ancient Greeks and Romans in order to understand their own politics. The foundation of Renaissance political thought consisted not only of canonical works of philosophy such as Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics and Cicero’s On Obligations, but also the works of historians who wrote about the political life of antiquity. Polybius, Thucydides, Livy, Lucan, Sallust and Tacitus (among others) had an incalculable impact on Renaissance humanist thought.3 The humanists (derived from the Italian and Latin humanitas), a broad category of people that included Shakespeare, were above all students of human nature. At the core of Renaissance humanism was the belief that the studia humanitatis, loosely translated as the ‘liberal arts’, could inspire what Henry Peacham called a ‘love of humanity and politic government’.4 The French philosopher Pierre Charron summed up an axiomatic principle of humanist thought when he wrote: ‘The first lesson and instruction unto wisdom is the knowledge of our selves and our human condition’.5 Humanists believed that before one can consider what constitutes a just society, one must establish the facts of human nature, which is why Renaissance political treatises often begin with a preamble on the subject. From fourteenth-century Italy to early seventeenth-century England, Renaissance humanists debated the merits and weaknesses of the three forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and meditated upon two schools of thought concerning the distribution of power in successful states – absolutism (with its emphasis on royal prerogative and divine right) and republicanism.6

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Jacobean royal prerogative was the body of customary authority, privilege and immunity recognized by law as belonging only to a monarch.7 It served as the legitimized means by which the executive powers of monarchical government were carried out. As King of Scotland and then England, James took a position on prerogative that had become normative by the dawn of the seventeenth century in England. He believed, as did many citizens, that monarchy was a divinely ordained institution and that subjects were to obey the King’s laws and decrees without question. James was a political philosopher in his own right, having authored two lengthy political treatises as King of Scotland, The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598) and Basilikon Doron (1599). His speech to Parliament regarding monarchy (1610) illustrates the key tenets of Jacobean absolutism at nearly the exact moment that Shakespeare was writing The Tempest: There be three principal similitudes that illustrate the state of monarchy: one taken out of the word of God; and the two other out of the grounds of policy and philosophy. In the Scriptures kings are called the gods, and so their power after a certain relation compared to the divine power. Kings are also compared to fathers of families; for a king is truly parens patriae, the politic father of his people. And lastly, kings are compared to the head of this microcosm of the body of man. Kings are justly called gods, for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth […] God hath power to create or destroy, make war or unmake at his pleasure, to give life or send death, to judge all and to be judged nor accountable to none […] And the like power have kings: they make and unmake their subjects, they have power of raising and casting down, of life and of death, judges over all their subjects and in all causes and yet accountable to none but God only.8 In works of literature, poetic conceits were used to ground this theological argument in the language of so-called natural law.

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In publicizing the merits of monarchy, royalists (apologists for the Crown) frequently appealed to a commonplace analogy: just as one god ruled the universe, so it followed that one man should rule the state; and, as reason should control humanity’s lower faculties, so the inferior members of society should be governed by a single authority. Natural law held that a set of identical laws operated throughout the universe: bodies, families, states, and the cosmos itself were all subject to the same universal ontological laws. In his speech, James invoked two metaphorical discourses to naturalize his own absolute authority, those of patriam potestatem (patriarchal power) and the ‘body politic’: Now a father may dispose of his inheritance to his children at his pleasure: yea, even disinherit the eldest upon just such occasions, and prefer the youngest according to his liking; make them beggars or rich at his pleasure; restrain, or banish out of his presence, as he finds them give cause of offence, or restore them in favour again with the penitent sinner. So may the king deal with his subjects. And lastly, as for the head of the natural body, the head has the power of directing all the members of the body to that use which the judgement in the head thinks most convenient. It may apply sharp cures, or cut off corrupt members, let blood in what proportion it thinks fit, and as the body may spare, but yet is all this power ordained by God.9 The body politic is a biological metaphor for a state, which, when healthy, is a functional monarchy. Multiple Jacobean texts made use of such analogies, demonstrating just how normative this conception of absolute monarchy had become. For example, in A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (1606), Edward Forset compares the commonwealth to a hive or ship, but eventually decides that comparing the state to the human body is more accurate, because the monarch (acting as the body’s head and heart)

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regulates the entire commonwealth. James concludes his speech by representing himself as the patriarch of a singleparent family, insinuating that Parliament exists on a par with the rest of the citizen body, beneath the king in power and authority. Absolutism aside, James was nonetheless sensitive to the value of civic humanist and republican rhetoric as it was revived by Renaissance humanists across Europe but especially the Italians of the quattrocento. These ‘republican authors’ emphasized the virtues of patriotic sentiment and civic involvement through counsel. James acknowledged the need for a monarch to obey the law and to serve as an example to his people. Moreover, he declared that a good king should always listen to recognizably wise counsel and must not surround himself with flatterers. James was prepared – at least in theory – to consider the options of not only lesser magistrates but the citizen body as well. In an attempt to appropriate republican rhetoric towards monarchic ends, James’s outward political persona advertised inclusivity and explicitly stated that there was room for vigorous discussion and negotiation among and within his relationship with his subjects. He recognized the need for public places in which political conversations among citizens could occur, such as the theatre. For this reason, the politics of The Tempest and plays like it are ambiguous, complex, intriguing and, at times, mystifying. Performed in front of a royal audience, they walked a fine line between seemingly opposite ways of conceiving royal authority. While orthodox theorists of the European Renaissance claimed that monarchy was the only natural form of government, proponents of limited monarchy argued in support of a mixed constitution incorporating elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. There existed a traditional line of thought tracing back to the ancients in this regard. Aristotle and Polybius (among others) considered monarchy the most effective, least corruptible form of government, yet they defended the ideal of a mixed constitution. Natural law

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theorists, influenced by English-language texts such as John Fortescue’s A Learned Commendation of the Politique Lawes of England (published English translation 1567) and Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum (1583), argued that the prince’s authority was and should be limited in significant ways. This was not solely an English way of thinking. Independent of nationality, religion or ideology, sixteenth-century French and Italian writers such as Jean Bodin, François Hotman, Michel de Montaigne, Niccolò Machiavelli, Baldassare Castiglione, Pietro Aretino and Francesco Guicciardini articulated the principles of limited monarchy by making distinctions between tyranny and good governance by a legitimate and benevolent monarch. Instead of insisting on the virtues of democracy to oppose the defenders of absolutism (critics and supporters of monarchy agreed that the democratic rule was dangerous), Reformation-era writers on both sides of the religious divide developed their own theories of resistance in the face of hypothetical tyranny. Militant Catholics (for instance, William Allen, Robert Persons and other Jesuits) and Protestants (the monarchomachs Christopher Goodman, John Knox, John Ponet, but also their more radical descendants George Buchanan and Peter Wentworth) defended a subject’s right to overthrow and perhaps even execute a monarch who persecuted English citizens for their religious beliefs and practices.10 Drawing largely from works like Tacitus’s Histories and Annals, Lucan’s Pharsalia and Livy’s History of Rome, these authors recovered and in some cases extended a powerful rhetoric against absolute monarchy, which they equated with tyranny. Classical texts that described the ways improperly balanced constitutions spawned the horrors of civil war informed Renaissance political theorists’ development of a language of natural rights. They argued that citizens were born with a right to autonomy and freedom in cases of illegitimate or otherwise corrupt monarchies. Although resistance theory was a central feature of many early modern political and historical texts, not all writers interested in republicanism were opposed to monarchy. Historian

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Patrick Collinson has argued convincingly that the Elizabethan polity inherited by James was a ‘monarchical republic’.11 It was possible in the early modern period to be a royalist and to identify oneself as a republican ‘commonwealth man’ – and this may have been true nowhere more than in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Even if there were few writers who outwardly advocated overthrowing the monarchy, many aspired to a state liberty under the protection of a benign yet functional government. A literature that looks enviously at Ancient Greece and Rome, but also quattrocento Florence, Milan and Naples, reflects this sense of early modern English republican longing, even if such sentiment was couched in idealization and a misbegotten sense of nostalgia. Before the advent of a political thought centred on the Italian conception of Reason of State (ragion di stato),12 the language of politics in Renaissance Europe was predominantly ethical, with a focus on the principles of governance rather than their pragmatic means of redress. Consistent with this kind of understanding of political philosophy as an investigation into ethics, Shakespeare’s drama largely avoids a black-and-white view of politics.13 He was a political philoso­pher, not a propagandist, meaning he was less interested in being an advocate or critic of governmental policies than he was in analysing complex matters of national concern and observing the human causes of social and political conflict. How closely he read specific works of political philosophy is a matter (mostly) of conjecture. Nonetheless, he was almost certainly familiar with the most widely read works of classical and contemporary political literature, and he probably read a few major texts carefully.14 His tendency to make frequent allusions to classical sources, combined with his reliance on imaginative literature from various historical moments and cultures for his plots, indicate that he had a wealth of material on which to draw for his political themes and language. Virgil, Plutarch, Ovid, Plautus, Terence and Livy were some of his favourite authors; their work underlies many of his plays, including Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, Antony

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and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Timon of Athens, among others. Classics aside, Shakespeare also seems to have read a fair amount of contemporary political, philosophical and historical literature. His interest in British history is known from his close reading of Holinshed’s Chronicles (first edition 1577) and Edward Hall’s Union of the Two Noble and Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York (first edition 1542), the main sources of his English history plays of the 1590s. Shakespeare’s career seems, in a broad sense, to have taken him away from admiration for republican ideas and towards an acceptance of absolutist ones.15 Whereas republican themes receive mostly favourable treatment in earlier plays and poems like Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece, works like Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, King Lear and Coriolanus are more suspicious of republican government and express a growing sense of comfort with the notion of absolute sovereignty. Literary critics have speculated that prior to 1603 Shakespeare was opposed to Stuart claims in the succession debate.16 Once James proved himself a competent king, according to this reading, Shakespeare moved past resistant impulses that would have caused more harm than good. Consistent with this position, the later plays concentrate less on the problem of legitimacy than do his earlier works and more on the ethical behaviour of the ruling authority. A second way of explaining Shakespeare’s tendency to write plays later in his career that discourage pro-republican readings is that it would be surprising to find a successful Elizabethan or early Jacobean playwright, especially a leading member of a company supported by the Crown, explicitly calling for the end of monarchy. Despite this apparent drift towards the absolutist side of the spectrum, Shakespeare’s drama demonstrates his and his audience’s interest in the themes and problems described by republican theorists.17 Specifically, this fascination with constitutional questions is evident in the plays’ exploration of ethical problems related to the issue of resistance and rebellion. His

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later plays persist in posing questions about royal prerogative by experimenting with performances of tyranny (the abuse of monarchical power), its controls and its remedies. The Tempest is exactly this sort of play, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it is fundamentally romantic, especially in its ending. I wish to argue that the play’s all-too-tidy resolution problematizes the traditional reading of the play as an essentially absolutist work of literature, one that advocates for sovereignty without boundaries in the form of a supreme, quasi-divine ruler. A sceptical approach, one attentive to irony, requires that we reconsider Prospero and his relationships with others (his ‘subjects’) through the lens of political thought in general and early modern discourses of utopia in particular.

Artistic productions of power and authority Prospero continues to be a controversial and confounding character; it is difficult to know what to make of him as a Renaissance ‘prince of power’ (1.2.55). A growing ambivalence towards him has emerged from changes in the relationships between audiences and the play’s supporting characters, especially Caliban and Miranda, but also from a shift in focus on the part of theatre companies and literary critics. Prospero is the embodiment of the Platonic political ideal, a ‘philosopher king’;18 he represents human striving toward the divine through theatrical illusion, magic and science;19 finally, he is a colonial dictator who embodies the very worst of early modern British imperialism.20 A common feature of these approaches is the notion that Prospero’s identity is inextricably linked to his self-produced authority. In Aimé Césaire’s postcolonial rewriting of the play, Prospero offers his own testimonial: ‘I am power’.21 The Tempest famously explores issues of authority from the start, with its sensational portrayal of a royal vessel

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foundering at sea. The Italian courtiers accost the Boatswain when he refuses to defer to them. In the face of their claims to superiority, he orders them below deck because they impede his efforts to overcome the storm, claiming that expertise is all that matters in a crisis and authority is useless. Short of divine intervention, it will be the only thing to save them: Where is the master, boatswain? Antonio Boatswain Do you not hear him? You mar our labour. Keep your cabins! You do assist the storm. Gonzalo Nay, good, be patient, Boatswain  When the sea is. Hence. What cares these roarers for the name of king? To cabin! Silence! Trouble us not. Good, yet remember whom thou has aboard. Gonzalo Boatswain  None that I love more than myself. You are a councillor; if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more. Use your authority! (1.1.12–23)22 The Boatswain’s exasperated question, ‘What cares these roarers for the name of the king?’, suggests the dominant political motif of the play: the Italian state, represented jointly by the allied regimes of Naples and Milan, is in crisis, where monarchical authority and social hierarchy have been rendered meaningless. In the Boatswain’s analogy, the waves are like rebellious subjects who will not obey legitimate sovereignty. Disorder – madness and ‘hell’ in Ariel’s report (1.2.209, 15) – is a monarchy transformed into something else. At first glance, the tempest promises that the ensuing drama will explore the possibility of republican (if not anarchic) remedies to monarchic inadequacy. How can Aristotelian man, the political animal, survive in a world without sovereignty?23 King Alonso’s vessel resonates with the metaphorical image of the ‘ship of state’ depicted in Plato’s Republic, in which

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Socrates reveals a fundamental disparity between political authority and agency: Conceive the sailors to be wrangling with one another for control of the helm, each claiming that it is his right to steer though he has never learned the art and cannot point out his teacher or any time when he studied it. […] After binding and stupefying the worthy shipmaster with mandragora or intoxication or otherwise, they take command of the ship [and] […] make such a voyage of it as is to be expected from such, and as if that were not enough, they praise and celebrate as a navigator, a pilot, a master of shipcraft, the man who is most cunning to lend a hand in persuading or constraining the shipmaster to let them rule, while the man who lacks this craft they censure as useless. They have no suspicion that the true pilot must give his attention to the time of year, the seasons, the sky, the winds, the stars, and all that pertains to his art if he is to be a true ruler of a ship. […] With such goings-on aboard ship do you not think that the real pilot would in very deed be called a star-gazer, an idle babbler, a useless fellow?24 In Plato’s account of the pragmatics of a worldly politics it is the sophists and flatterers, not the wise and the skilled, who rule. In criticizing the political pretenders, Socrates’s prudential outlook on political rule supposes that ‘art’ initially functions independently from popular recognition and consent. The ‘true pilot’ of the ship steers a course by means of his own learned expertise, as opposed to a fallible titular authority. In the presence of true expertise, patience emerges as the preeminent virtue. Socrates is saying that the ‘art’ of rule anticipates power, which in turn produces true authority. However, the play’s second scene invites reconsideration of the superficial meaning of the tempest. Upon closer inspection, Shakespeare’s invocation of the familiar ship of state topos only seems on the surface to place monarchical authority in question. In actuality, the tempest is not so much reflective

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of a state of nature as it is a fabrication, a fiction, a work of art. Prospero informs Miranda and the audience that he has created the storm through his ‘strong bidding’ (1.2.192) in order to restore himself as the rightful Duke of Milan. Appearances aside, the storm is not a natural phenomenon or an inexplicable event (an act of God or Fortune), a force without a discernible cause. Rather, it is a human artefact, and therefore something that can be rationally explained, which Prospero takes pains to do. The Boatswain’s radical stance, which resonates with Socrates’s account of expertise, loses force when we realize that the tempest is the product of Ariel’s labour, in service of his master. Prospero’s power over Ariel is at once synonymous with and the product of human art. It has been acquired through his prior indifference to governance, not despite it. This is important because Prospero demonstrates his supremacy in a technical sense: he seizes an opportunity brought about by good fortune and thus capitalizes on the virtue of patience. Authority can be misrecognized, whereas true power is always perfectly cogent. As we learn in Prospero’s lengthy exposition in Act 1 Scene 2, it was not always thus for the displaced Duke. In Milan he was indifferent to the active life of politics (in Ancient Roman parlance, negotium) and preferred a more scholarly, contemplative life (otium).25 His abdication benefitted neither him nor his subjects and left the city vulnerable to a coup: Prospero

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My brother, and thy uncle, called Antonio […] […] he whom next thyself Of all the world I loved, and to him put The manage of my state, as at that time Through all the signories it was the first, And Prospero the prime Duke, being so reputed In dignity, and for the liberal arts Without a parallel; those being all my study, The government I cast upon my brother, And to my state grew stranger, being transported And rapt in secret studies […]

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I thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated To close and the bettering of my mind With that which, but by being so retired, O’er-prized all popular rate, in my false brother Awaked an evil nature. (1.2.66–93)

The play’s central action, with Prospero as its executor, is not simply revenge. The Tempest foregrounds the theme of restoration against a backdrop of political disorder – although ‘disorder’ tends to be defined differently by different people. Prospero’s studies seem to pay off in the sense that in the present moment of the plot they inform his ‘potent art’. This significant contrast between past and present must be explored: why is the contemplative life, as opposed to the active life of politics, useful on the island when before it was not? What precisely has changed? Is it Prospero, the world he inhabits, or perhaps both? In order to address these questions, it is useful to turn to the text’s orientation to the aforementioned discourses about absolute power vis-à-vis the desire for liberty. In the readings that follow, I propose that it is worth considering Prospero as a Machiavellian ‘prince of power’ as opposed to merely an avatar of Plato’s utopian philosopher king.

True Machiavellism: Utopia/dystopia The Florentine writer Niccolò Machiavelli’s major political work was a commentary on Roman historian Titus Livius (Discourses on Livy) – even if The Prince (c. 1513), ostensibly a work of absolutist political philosophy, earned him notoriety.26 Machiavelli embodies the ambiguities attached to sovereignty, in the sense that his work seems to oscillate between the competing values of republicanism and absolutism. Elizabethan and Jacobean readers knew Machiavelli through the French writer Innocent Gentillet, author of Contre

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Machiavel (1576), which circulated widely in French from the late 1570s onward. It is both a translation and a direct refutation of Il Principe, even as it contains key passages from The Discourses. Gentillet’s text, like Machiavelli’s reception in a broad sense, is a hybrid, one that often betrays an uncomfortable sense of self-contradiction and paradox.27 Although The Prince’s general orientation is autocratic, largely because it is a ‘mirror for princes’,28 the Machiavelli of the Discourses is an advocate of oligarchical government that often takes the form of a republic, which he argued was the best and most stable form of political existence, even if it was not necessarily sustainable.29 Whereas Gentillet’s refutation in Contre Machiavel is more traditional in its adherence to Christian humanist norms, Machiavellian realpolitik maintains that the right thing to do is not always right for a prince. His conception of human nature and his account of the kinds of social interactions that characterize the world are sceptical, pessimistic, and perhaps even amoral (according to his critics). Gentillet’s conservative impulse is to return to the familiar terrain mapped out by Cicero in De Officiis (‘On Obligations’), with its core idea that moral virtue is the dominant requirement for a ruler of any kind.30 In this sense, The Prince is Machiavelli’s attempt, through his redefinition of virtue as virtù, to correct the Ciceronian definition of princely virtue.31 Despite Machiavelli’s negative description of human nature, The Prince harbours a sense of political optimism, even if it is often occluded by the text’s more shocking theatrical demonstrations. First, if human nature is corrupt, the prince can still bring order and glory to the nation (and himself) if he is willing to accept some fundamental truths. For instance, a prince ‘ought not to trust in the amitie of men’ because they are ‘full of ingratitude, variable, dissemblers […] and covetous of gain’.32 Any prince who ignores this fact is likely to be victimized. For Machiavelli, a man of true virtù will never be dominated by fortune. Virtù, when possessed by a ruler, can permit a prince to attain the greatest glory regardless of

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circumstances and fortune. Machiavelli’s position is much less providential in nature than the sometimes-fatalistic works of antiquity. Second, the promise of a balanced or mixed polity always remains on the horizon. The Prince is also a republican text because in it Machiavelli conceives the state in instrumental and practical terms amenable to dispassionate or ‘scientific’ analysis. Every state must be able to change and adapt, and all successful states need laws that will outlive their makers. Moreover, key passages of The Prince convey one of the central tenants of The Discourses: civic unrest and political conflict are signs of health in a state. A certain amount of tension between the popular desire for a distribution of power across the states and autocratically imposed order and individual expressions of the human libido dominandi (will to power) is productive and good. Thus, autocratic rule can serve to counterbalance the bureaucratic problems invited by republican approaches to governance. In his own way, Machiavelli’s ideal polity may have been organized around a mixed constitution, one resembling a ‘monarchical republic’ or a ‘republican monarchy’. A dialogue between Machiavelli and The Tempest emerges when reading the play as an allegory about power in an imperfect world. For Machiavelli, as for Plato, the ruler of a polity must not only learn hard lessons about human corruption, he must also put wisdom to use. The English word tempest (derived from the Latin tempestas, the equivalent of the Italian tempesta) means not only a storm marked by great wind and rain but also a time, period or occasion. For Machiavelli, this double meaning, although obscure in English, opens up an array of intriguing hermeneutic and poetic possibilities. Chapter 24 of The Prince, entitled ‘Why the Princes of Italy Have Lost Their Kingdom’, is particularly illustrative. Playing on the dual meanings of tempest by setting up a parallel structure between fortune and tempest (here synonymous with storm), he scolds all Italian rulers who have lost possession of their respective kingdoms in recent times:

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Therefore these princes of ours, who have been many years in their princedoms, and then have lost them, should not blame Fortune, but their own laziness. Never in good weather having imagined there could be a change (it is a common defect in men not to reckon, during a calm, on a storm), when at last bad weather came, they thought only of running away and not of defending themselves. (1:89) Downward turns in fortune are inevitable for every prince. The wise prince will recognize this inevitability and make the necessary preparations for weathering the storm. In ‘Fortune’s Power in Human Affairs and How She Can Be Forestalled’, Machiavelli compares fortune to a raging river that can only be overcome by a man of virtù. Virtù emerges as a term synonymous with prudence or the ability to suit one’s actions according to necessity and to adapt to contingency. A prince of virtù must be morally flexible (adaptive) in order to weather the storm of fickle fortune: If, for one whose policy is caution and patience, times and affairs circle about in such a way that his policy is good, he continues to succeed; if times and affairs change, he falls, because he does not change his way of proceeding. […] Yet if he could change his nature with times and affairs, Fortune would not change. (1:91) Thus, to be a happy, secure Machiavellian prince is to be fortunate, which is not at all an arbitrary condition but rather an amalgamation of skill, will and luck. As the ‘head’ of his own body politic, Prospero asserts himself in Machiavellian ways when he deploys a specific tool of self-legitimization: the art of rhetoric.33 The language Prospero uses to describe the providential origins of his authority – ‘Fortune’ and ‘Destiny’ – indexes his own ability to reinforce and propagate a sense of authority over others. Power is the art used to control the world, but it is Machiavellian rhetoric that enables the performance of divine ordination, a pillar in

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the edifice of absolute authority. The rules of ‘Machiavellian’ realpolitik are at work in the play’s conception of sovereignty in that Prospero makes a dually pragmatic and theological argument in defence of his authority on the island. His expertise at rule is demonstrated primarily through poweras-techne, whereas election (his ostensibly legitimate claim to sovereignty) is manifested by the art of rhetorical description. We need not be persuaded by Prospero’s attempts at absolutist self-fashioning. The play invites us to wonder whether or not Prospero (not Antonio, Alonso, or anyone else) has the right to claim the title adopted by Antonio: ‘Absolute Milan’ (1.2.109). It is plausible to see Prospero as at least an illegitimate ruler of the island, if not a usurper. His rule on the island is legitimate only if one is inclined to believe that political authority is garnered according to merit (i.e. something to be earned) or else that ‘might makes right’. Resistance against Prospero is performed in various ways during the play by Antonio, Ferdinand (initially), but most of all by Caliban, whose act of rebellion is informed by his own claim of legitimacy as the rightful ‘king’ of the island. (Ariel, for his part, betrays inklings of resistance but hesitates because he senses that obedience is the better strategy.) Caliban derives his claim to authority and ownership over the island from his deceased mother, the witch Sycorax – as political inheritance by way of blood alone. The themes of resistance and legitimacy began in a political dispute that started before the action depicted in the play. Caliban This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother, Which thou tak’st from me […] For I am all the subjects that you have, Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me The rest o’th’ island. (1.2.332–3, 342–5) Caliban’s accusations of usurpation and enslavement are potent, despite the fact that few Renaissance theorists

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considered the claims of native populations seriously. Prospero does not undertake to refute Caliban’s charges. He assumes his authority and rules by virtue of his ability to do so. But precisely for that reason the question of authority – on the island or in any state – remains open. The play prompts the audience to consider whose claim to the island is stronger, Prospero’s or Caliban’s. To be sceptical of Prospero is to acknowledge that his authority is complicated by what the play itself depicts as his suspect legitimacy. The play can be read as withholding its full endorsement of Prospero as the rightful ruler of the island through its sympathetic depiction of Caliban. Ironically, it is Caliban’s stated desire to ‘people’ the island with Calibans that offers the best solution to this problem of legitimacy, in the sense that his and Miranda’s offspring would be products of a dynastic union, an amalgamation of the native and the European. This possibility is negated by Caliban’s attempt to rape Miranda, if we believe the account of this moment in history provided in the play’s second scene. The arrival of Ferdinand on the island replaces this possibility of a more legitimate state on the island, and in doing so, represents an altogether different promise for the future. Miranda and Ferdinand together have the potential to produce legitimate heirs that would instead unify Italy – yet another theme yoking the interests of the play to the Machiavellian world of The Prince and the Discourses – and possibly leave Caliban to rule over the island. The problem for Caliban is that even if he remains on the island – which is not a given – he will have no hope for an heir. The play’s silence on the topic of Caliban’s fate, besides his declaration that he will seek wisdom and ‘grace’ (5.1.296), reflects the possibility that the audience might feel conflicted about Prospero’s power and sceptical of his claim to authority. Caliban may well be a ‘villain’ (1.2.310) but his claim to the island through inheritance via his mother Sycorax seems legitimate in a Jacobean context. (James’s claim to the succession was made via not one but two ‘mothers’: Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth.)

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Throughout the play, Prospero’s treatment of Caliban, which includes torturous pinches and cramps, invites comparison with the techniques used to extract confessions from those accused of treason in early modern England. Moreover, it is not out of the question to envision Caliban becoming the kind of object of European fascination described by Trinculo (2.2.24–36). Caliban’s rebellion, which is supported by the drunken fools Trinculo and Stephano, provides a counterbalance to Prospero’s autocratic regime and offers room for speculation that Prospero’s authority remains challengeable, even if that project is portrayed as ridiculous. The rebels not only recall the foolish sailors on Plato’s ship of state, they also mirror Antonio and Sebastian’s attempts at usurpation, albeit on a base level. The play’s setting on an unidentified island of the imagination with competing elements of utopia and dystopia further complicates Prospero’s legitimacy and benevolence. The action unfolds on an island located on the edge of the world as known to English audiences in 1610. Shakespeare probably used William Strachey’s account of a shipwreck in the Bermuda islands for his depiction of the tempest itself. Extending the initial New World conceit, Shakespeare integrates Renaissance thought about the relation of Europeans to newly discovered lands and their native populations. Utopia was supposedly a defining element of New World societies, a standard item in European accounts of native life in the Americas. If Shakespeare were looking for accounts of New World natives, a useful source would have been a book describing not only cannibals (Caliban’s name, anagrammatized), but also primitive utopian politics. Montaigne’s essay ‘Of the Caniballes’ (c. 1578–80) is exactly this kind of literary source. In it, utopia is commensurate with edenic innocence.34 For Montaigne, the New World vision was a glimpse at Europe in embryo. Yet Caliban has little in common with Montaigne’s natives. In Montaigne, the Europeans are predatory and savage, not the natives. Montaigne cites Plato’s Republic when he claims that if

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European philosophers could see savage societies, they would have to abandon their utopian fantasies, because the natives’ society outdoes Plato’s imagined one. In a scene that quotes directly from John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essay (Act 2, Scene 1), Alonso’s advisor Gonzalo speculates on the possibilities of establishing a perfect, unspoiled government. His reflections, which attempt to convey the conditions discoverable in an ideal society, are consistent with early modern rehearsals of utopian motifs. According to Gonzalo, all the imperfections of Renaissance European civilization – from inequalities in wealth and the grind of manual labour to the confusions of the law, land inheritance, the falsehood of women, and most significantly, given his own role, the layers of government – will disappear: Gonzalo I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things: for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard – none. No use of metal, corn, or wine or oil. No occupation, all men idle, all; And women, too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty – Sebastian Yet he would be king on’t. Antonio The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning. Gonzalo All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavour; treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine Would I not have; but nature should bring forth Of it own kind all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people. (2.1.148–65) Sebastian and Antonio point out a contradiction in Gonzalo’s logic: he wants to impose a state of nature, meaning that he

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would ‘govern’ without the authority to do so, and without the coercive force that would permit it. The paradox is that a king would abolish sovereignty and yet still be able to maintain order in his kingdom. Is there such a thing as sovereignty without the practical application of power? Antonio and Sebastian seem not to believe so. In the scene’s binary opposition between cynics and idealist, the villains punctuate (and thus puncture) the daydream with their sarcasm, which is played for comedic effect. But there is deep truth in their cynicism. Antonio correctly points out that power is always quick to fill a vacuum, just as history shows that one should never take the word of a man who declares that he does not want to be king. Antonio and Sebastian provide a necessary counterbalance to Gonzalo’s impractical political philosophy. Their objections, grounded in their experience of the world, point to the regressive nature of Gonzalo’s fantasy, just as they demonstrate the naiveté of anyone who believes that we might return to the Golden Age. Given that Shakespeare places Montaigne’s words (as translated by Florio) in Gonzalo’s mouth in this scene, it resembles a debate between Montaigne and Machiavelli, whose pragmatic cynicism in advice to the Medici in The Prince informs Antonio and Sebastian’s worldview. Prospero’s earlier account of Antonio’s usurpation indicates that he sees, or wants others to see, his brother as a stereotypical Machiavel who uses deception as a weapon in the quest for power. Antonio, whose ‘falsehood in its contrary [was] as great / As [Prospero’s] trust’ (1.2.95–6), is the type of person that Gonzalo must expect to govern alongside as equals in his utopia. The fact that Antonio is about to unleash a plot to murder him is a hint that we should be attending to the irony of this exchange. Thus Gonzalo emerges as something of a satirical figure. The notion of Gonzalo as a utopian philosopher-king is highly amusing to the ‘Machiavellian’ cynics. His aspiration of perfection as a ruler over such a rustic island is a ridiculous pipe dream. Even worse, he is about to make precisely the same sort of mistake that cost Prospero

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his dukedom and nearly his life through crimes committed by these same individuals. But the juxtaposition of political ideologies does not reflect entirely well on Sebastian and Antonio. Whereas Gonzalo is naive and unrealistic, the wicked brothers are ambitious and power-hungry. It is ironic that they fail to realize the problematic aspects of the political philosophy that they themselves represent. Sebastian and Antonio’s ideal state resembles tyranny, a corrupt or illegitimate monarchy in which power is invested in the hands of the unjust, and often to the discontentment of the citizen body. The island is also distinctly Mediterranean, and this builds on the play’s simultaneously dystopian and utopian thematics. Its Italian coordinates in particular signal that the political thought of the play, which is simultaneously idealistic and pragmatic (or romantic and realistic), feeds on antithetical tension. All of the play’s named human characters, besides Caliban, come from Italy; Prospero’s enemies are returning home from a wedding in Tunisia; and the Mediterranean topos resurfaces in multiple references to the ancient African city of Carthage and Virgil’s Aeneid. Shakespeare may have been influenced by works such as William Thomas’s Historie of Italie (1549) and Geoffrey Fenton’s English translation of Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia (The Historie of Guicciardini containing the warres of Italie and Other Partes [1579]). The former includes an account of Prospero Adorno, a Milanese officer who became Duke of Genoa, forged an alliance with King Ferdinand of Naples, and was eventually banished. Thomas describes republican Venice as the ideal commonwealth, whereas Genoa, Florence and Milan oscillate between states of tyranny and liberty, while Naples is the epitome of tyranny, in contrast to the stability and freedom of Venice. Thomas’s account of Naples describes civil wars, sedition and tyranny in the reign of King Alfonso, in which Alfonso’s own bastard son Ferdinand was involved. The themes of political instability, tyranny and usurpation are central to Guicciardini’s version of this history, as well. Although nomenclature provides good evidence that these texts should be

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considered possible sources of the play, more intriguing is the probability that Shakespeare was attentive to Italian historical texts in ways that stretch beyond Machiavellian intrigue and dynastic melodrama. Rather, in reading such books, he would have been able to contemplate, absorb, or formulate rebuttals against a good deal of the political philosophy contained within them. Through Gonzalo, Shakespeare explicitly invokes the idealist theme that is absent from Machiavelli’s political science. Shakespeare is thus able to critique utopian political philosophies for their incommensurability with the modern world, even as he demonstrates the limits of the hyperMachiavellian form of self-interested cynicism represented by Antonio and Sebastian. Like Prospero, whose life he once saved, Gonzalo aspires to live up to the Christian virtues that are dismissed (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, through irony) by Machiavelli in The Prince. Gonzalo embodies loyalty; on multiple occasions he gives voice to the traditional belief in the importance of duty to one’s superiors. Moreover, Prospero’s exposition shows Gonzalo to be a man of compassion and mercy. Of course, compassion is not only an empathy for others who feel pain, but the desire to actively relieve that pain – in other words, to be a servant of justice. By the end of the play Prospero seeks to create a regime as just as possible in an effort to alleviate in some small way the sin and human suffering that is a product of man’s depravity. But in order to establish such a regime, he must first become the Machiavellian prince. And so, Prospero must learn to govern the men on the island, he supposes, in accordance with their natures. Caliban, the slave, is not a figure that Gonzalo or Montaigne would willingly acknowledge is necessary in the ideal society. This is not the case for Prospero when he says of Caliban, ‘But as ‘tis, we cannot miss him’ (1.2.310–11). At first glance it might seem that Prospero’s Ciceronian and Christian princely virtues – his compassion, his mercy, and his desire to create a more just regime – disqualify him as a Machiavellian prince of virtù. But it is important to realize

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that it is precisely in this way that Prospero will earn glory. In the Discourses, Machiavelli writes: ‘And truly, if a prince seeks the glory of the world, he ought to desire to possess a corrupt city – not to spoil it entirely as did Caesar but to reorder it as did Romulus. And truly, the heavens cannot give to men a greater opportunity for glory, nor can men desire any greater’ (1:223). Prospero will acquire glory by establishing a more just regime, by reforming an illegitimate Milanese regime. He orders the government so that a just regime might be possible, placing Miranda and Ferdinand as joint rulers, enlightening the royal party to their own corruption, and causing Stephano and Trinculo to see that they are not to be trusted with rule. And so, even though Prospero promises to forfeit his rule, he will have established himself as a glorious prince of virtù – a great ruler who understood the opportunity brought about by fortune and converted that opportunity not only into the reestablishment of his rule but the establishment of a new and virtuous order. At least, this is what he would have his auditors believe.

‘Our revels now are ended’: Scepticism and the end(s) of romance If the tempest represents the destructive capacity of Prospero’s art, then the Masque of Ceres in Act 4 – the play’s third expansive illustration of his art (the second is the banquet scene in Act 3) – epitomizes the beneficent, though no less coercive, side of that power. Just as royal weddings were Jacobean ‘matters of state’, the masque form is immersed in princely power. With its movement from conflict to harmony, the masque was as much the king’s form as the poet’s: it was a celebration of his authority, an assertion of his private will, and a theatrical realization of his sense of place in the universe. The ceremony enacts and reinforces his ability to direct Miranda, Ferdinand and the audience through

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exquisitely lifelike illusions. The power to bring Miranda and Ferdinand together in a dynastic marriage is also what enables Prospero to subject his enemies to his own personal sense of mercy and justice. Only here in the calm of Act 4, the art that raised the tempest and sent ominous apparitions to its victims – enemies of the state, rebels, invaders, usurpers – adopts a celebratory mode, despite the seriousness of its underlying message. The masque invokes a myth in which the crucial act of destruction is the rape of a daughter; it finds in the preservation of virginity the promise of civilization and fecundity, and it presents as its patroness of marriage not Hymen but Juno, who symbolizes royal power. Miranda thus embodies the extension of Prospero’s authority but only if, by remaining a virgin, she serves as a suitable bride for the husband of his choice. This is a deeply paternalistic vision, one that echoes James’s own self-conception as a father figure. In the masque, eros is exclusive of lust, which is reflected in the masque’s omission of the natural cycle of winter. Ceres makes this one of her gifts to the lovers: ‘Spring come to you at the farthest, / In the very end of harvest’ (4.1.14–15). After autumn, spring will return at once. At this point Prospero interrupts the masque as he suddenly recognizes what is missing from the ‘revels’: violence, lust, death, and the director’s own sense of the importance of the moment – time as a series of potential crises to be negotiated. His imaginative creation makes him forgetful of the realities of the world of action – everything the masque excludes is now impending in the conspiracy of Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo. The threat is less in the conspiracy itself than in Prospero’s forgetfulness of it: this is the first time he loses his awareness (but not control) of what is happening. Just as in Act 2 Scene 1, utopian revelry proves to be something beyond fanciful – it is dangerous. Act 5 brings the political plot initiated by the tempest to an entirely orderly, somewhat anticlimactic, and rather unsettling conclusion. Prospero hopes to rule (for an undetermined amount of time) securely in Milan, insured by a legacy in dynastic heirs, and looks forward to a life of otium. For

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Prospero, the ending optimistically asserts that he can have his cake and eat it too. It is nonetheless curious that he makes no concrete arrangements to relinquish power – this is not a scene of succession or a transition of power in the present moment. There is room for doubt concerning whether Prospero’s sense of restoration is plausible or even possible in the world of the play. For, if Milanese politics are the same as they were when he was deposed, his assumptions and intentions are naively optimistic. If history is any indication, Milan and Italy will remain constant in their inconsistency and susceptibility to political crisis and civil unrest. Prospero seems to have learned very little about human nature. It would be risky to try and live by the virtues he espouses in the play’s final moments. Forgiveness, mercy, and a willingness to relinquish the source of one’s own coercive powers are noble qualities – the kinds of qualities one hopes to find in any benevolent sovereign. But such fine ideals have no place in quattrocento Italian, English Jacobean, or twenty-first-century politics. Montaigne’s contrast between the benign and limited evils of American savages to the horrors of the French wars of religion is a reminder that this is can be a dangerous way of thinking, and not only for those who mean to rule. Prospero’s own ironic, problematic anticipation of a ‘brave new world’ (5.1.183) is itself a warning. For those who desire the freedom to give up their art, there is nothing but fortune (or providence) to protect them and their children (or subjects) from harm. And so, despite its outwardly happy conclusion, the play anxiously acknowledges that Prospero’s hopes may be dashed in the not-too-distant future. Of course, there is another way to interpret the ending while remaining sceptical of the play’s superficial endorsement of Prospero’s romantic heroism: one need not believe that Prospero himself fully subscribes to what he is saying. Shakespeare provides multiple hints that Prospero has achieved expertise in a Machiavellian brand of rhetoric that seeks to cash in on the fact that people always will be prone to believing that a prince is something he is not. Sebastian and Antonio are still present at the end of the play,

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and there is nothing to indicate that they have been reformed. They should not be and are not new to him, like to Miranda. Prospero’s words of forgiveness suggest that his gesture is rhetorical more than it is material. Given his silence, Antonio may well recognize this. The play ends with a sense that the world does indeed contain ‘goodly creatures’ like Alonso, Gonzalo and Ferdinand, indicating that human nature is in some ways ‘beauteous’ (5.1.183). But the same world is also home to the likes of Antonio, Sebastian, Stephano and Trinculo. Utopia can be a thing of beauty, and inventing one can be a useful exercise that invites an author and her audience to imagine a better world. But in the end, as Shakespeare, like Machiavelli, knew, we must be willing to tell the truth about power and politics – human nature is also a ‘thing of darkness’ (5.1.275) that we must acknowledge ours. Prospero’s epilogue demonstrates that even the most powerful people are forced to appeal to a higher authority for freedom. We, the audience, are given the power to send Prospero back to Milan, where he will (he hopes) found a new Italian dynasty, like Aeneas and Machiavelli’s idealized prince. The notion that liberty is unhappily but forever married to power and authority in their various manifestations or constitutions was not necessarily a new idea in the age of Machiavelli and Shakespeare. What was new and shocking to many was the fact that this inconvenient truth might be acknowledged and accepted by poets and political philosophers alike.35 This development in the history of ideas, one that predicted the advent of liberalism with its emphasis upon the supreme virtue of individual freedom in the context of the just state, is inextricably linked to the world portrayed in The Tempest. Power and the authority it produces can function as a means to this end of the just state but will never suffice as the end itself. Without acknowledging that their value is limited, how can we ever hope for the kind of liberty and freedom that necessarily inhabits a just world?

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7 New Directions: Shakespeare’s Revolution – The Tempest as Scientific Romance Scott Maisano

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a scientific romance in which The Complete Works of Shakespeare are simultaneously relegated to a ‘savage reservation’ and kept locked in a vault in the World Controller’s office, took more than just its title from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The seemingly futuristic technique of subliminal sleep-teaching, or hypnopedia, comes directly from Prospero, who makes his daughter fall asleep at the snap of his fingers and pre-programmes her behaviour down to the very moments when Miranda thinks she is rebelling. Likewise the Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning of Huxley’s World State, in which Delta children receive an electric shock and hear a loud alarm as they attempt to touch a display of books and flowers, only updates Shakespeare’s ‘banquet scene’ where the shipwrecked crew are repelled from a sumptuous feast

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by the alarming sound of thunder and the electrical shock of lightning as Ariel appears and the banquet vanishes. Huxley’s book-hoarding dictator and the ‘Savage’ who protests this tyrant’s denials of history derive from Shakespeare’s Prospero and Caliban. The ‘ALL-SUPER-SINGING, SYNTHETICTALKING, COLOURED, STEREOSCOPIC FEELY’ in this supposedly far-future world is merely the analogue version of – and lags light years behind – Prospero’s digital home entertainment system, where flickering images or ‘spirits’, powered purely by mental energy, dance, sing, and interact with the audience before dissolving into thin air when Prospero’s concentration is broken.1 The ultimate irony of Huxley’s novel, then, is that Shakespeare has been excluded from the very future he originally invented and engineered. I claim that Shakespeare’s The Tempest is among the earliest works of scientific romance. ‘Scientific romance’ is what we call works of science fiction produced before the term ‘science fiction’ became standard in the 1920s. Brian Aldiss, Carl Freedman and other historians and theorists of science fiction assert that the genre was born at the start of the ‘industrial revolution’ when Mary Shelley imagined an overreaching scientist – not a magician – fashioning a creature with the capacity for human thought and feeling.2 Freedman has observed that Frankenstein is ‘the first important work of fiction to engage modern science seriously’.3 Freedman’s emphasis on the centrality of ‘modern’ science in the novel echoes the familiar refrain that science, not magic or devilry, resulted in the creation of Frankenstein’s monster. But this oft-rehearsed claim will not bear close scrutiny. What distinguishes Victor Frankenstein from his classmates, and makes him superior even to his teachers, is not his serious engagement with ‘modern science’, but his dangerous obsession with the occult magic of the Renaissance: namely that of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus. Victor even describes himself as a ‘disciple’ to Agrippa and Paracelsus, knowing full well that it ‘may appear strange that such should arise in the eighteenth century’, a century championed, by his least favourite

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professor, as ‘this enlightened and scientific age’.4 Thus, what Freedman calls ‘the first important work of fiction to engage modern science seriously’ takes place not in the nineteenth century, the time of its composition, but in the eighteenth; its hero, moreover, regards Isaac Newton and his successors as mere ‘tyros’ when compared to the pre-Baconian alchemists and occultists who knew nothing about infinitesimal calculus or universal gravitation but a great deal about laboratory procedures, transmutation of matter, and even raising the dead.5 The simultaneous appearance of both magic and science in the Shelley’s novel suggests that it is not the wholesale replacement of the former by the latter but rather the interplay and tension between these two ostensibly incompatible epistemologies that produces the characteristic frisson of the science fiction genre.6 Even so, it might seem impossible to make the case for Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a work of science fiction if the genre requires the simultaneous presence of modern science and some residual magic. After all, the Royal Society and modern science did not exist when Shakespeare penned his play; these things were, at the time, only a gleam in the eye of King James’s future Solicitor General, Francis Bacon. John the Savage in Huxley’s novel assumes that Shakespeare was ignorant of the new science of his day. Indeed for the Savage, Shakespeare is synonymous with magic: The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song […] like old Mitsima saying magic over his feathers and his carved sticks and his bits of bone and stone – kiathla tsilu silokwe silokwe silokwe. Kiai silu silu, tsithl – but better than Mitsima’s magic, because it meant more, because it talked to him.7 When Mustapha Mond, the Controller of the World State, mentions the word ‘science’, he only confuses John the Savage:

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‘Science? The Savage frowned. He knew the word. But what it exactly signified he could not say. Shakespeare and the old men of the pueblo had never mentioned science’.8 Where did Aldous Huxley get the idea that Shakespeare, who was writing at the exact same time as Galileo, Kepler and Francis Bacon, knew nothing about science? The answer is from Shakespeare scholars themselves who, from the time of Samuel Coleridge, have identified Prospero, ‘a mighty wizard, whose potent art could [conjure] […] spirits from the deep’, as ‘a portrait of the bard [that is, Shakespeare] himself’.9 What can a wizard know of science?

The great globe and our little life On or about March 1610, human character, as much as the heavens above it, changed. At least that is how John Donne’s ‘An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary’, published in 1611, presents the situation. According to Donne, this moment marked the extinction of an ancient and orderly cosmos, in which the earth sat motionless at the core of a series of concentric spheres, and the eruption of a mobbishly modern universe, where the earth joined an ever-increasing multitude of planets all jostling in an infinite homogeneous space deprived of its erstwhile umbilical centre: And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world’s spent, When in the planets and the firmament They seek so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies.10 Literary historians, especially Shakespeare scholars, have tended to take Donne at his word in making 1610 an epochal

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year – the site of a ‘scientific revolution’ or ‘epistemic rupture’ – wherein the venerable and ancient Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology was dethroned by its Copernican-Galilean rival. Copernicus himself had been dead for more than half a century before his abstract, mathematical fictions became a reality with the publication of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger) and its announcement that the new technology of the telescope had revealed not only that the surface of the Earth’s moon was rough and irregular, thus overturning the Aristotelian tenet that the heavens consisted of perfect and immutable spheres, but more importantly that Jupiter also had a moon, or four, of its own. The discovery of moving bodies or ‘planets’ in orbit about Jupiter implied that Earth was not the fixed centre of Creation. The ‘new philosophy’ of 1610, which called into question both Aristotelian physics and Judeo-Christian metaphysics, appears to have arrived a bit too late for Shakespeare’s purposes. For better or worse, the story goes, Shakespeare was on the eve of retirement in 1610 – indeed, he was already spending more time on minor property disputes in Stratford than on plays for the London stage – and so, despite being born just two months after Galileo in 1564, none of his works show any awareness of the ‘paradigm shift’ heralded by his scientific contemporary.11 Thus our world, the modern world, is believed to be separated from Shakespeare’s by a scientific revolution. Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s study of seventeenthcentury literature and science, The Breaking of the Circle, drew a hard line between Donne, who became a ‘modern’, and his contemporary Shakespeare, who remained ‘medieval’, in terms of scientific thinking: Whether to Aristotle, to Augustine and Dante, or to Shakespeare, change and decay had always been limited to matter lying beneath the orb of the moon. The heavens, the handiwork of God, were eternal and immutable. As God had placed the stars in their constellations, so they had remained, an abiding proof to man that there was

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something unchangeable and permanent in the universe. […] Man decays; that had long been a tenet of Christian faith. The world decays: that too was orthodox enough. But beyond the orb of the moon, there had been no decay, no change, no alteration.12 In Nicolson’s literary history, Shakespeare’s philosophical contemporaries were Aristotle, Augustine and Dante – all of whom found in the perfectly spherical heavens an image of God and eternity, the perfect circle that would endure forever – but not John Donne, because Donne ‘was the first to realize that’, even as he wrote his momentous poem in 1611, ‘the circle was breaking’.13 Nicolson goes on to note how ‘Shakespeare ceased writing at the very time the “new philosophy” called all in doubt to his contemporary poet’, in 1610–11, before asking: ‘Was that […] mere coincidence, or did Shakespeare […] deliberately retire to a simpler life [away] from a world and universe that were growing unintelligible?’14 Admittedly, at first glance, Prospero – conjuring spirits, attired with his cloak and staff – appears to be a relic, a stage magician out of place amid what Donne hails as ‘new philosophy’. But Prospero’s ‘revels speech’, the most famous passage in the play and the source of so many readings of Prospero as Shakespeare’s alter ego, turns out to say not quite what we had thought and actually something almost identical to John Donne’s 1611 ‘First Anniversary’ poem. In what Stephen Greenblatt describes as ‘the air of a farewell, a valediction to theatrical magic, a retirement’, I hear instead an alchemist-cum-atomist’s theory of everything in which the audience (both onstage and off) discovers that all perceptible entities, from the outermost celestial sphere to our inmost mental images, are composed of subtle, imperceptible, but nonetheless physical ‘stuff’.15 Prospero’s vision of universal decay or dissolution reaches, like Donne’s, far beyond the orb of the moon and presents the heavens as anything but eternal:

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Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air; And – like the baseless fabric of this vision – The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a [w]rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (4.1.148–58) The Arden edition glosses ‘the great globe itself’ as ‘the world, though probably with a simultaneous reference to the Globe playhouse for which Shakespeare wrote plays after 1599’; the editors then explain the phrase ‘all which it inherit’ as ‘all people who will subsequently live on earth and, perhaps also, all who will perform in or attend (and possibly own) the Globe [theatre]’.16 While there is no quarrelling with the secondary or autobiographical significance of ‘the great globe itself’ – that is, the metatheatrical allusion to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre – the editors, I suspect, have mistaken Prospero’s primary referent. In the context of what Thomas Kuhn has described as ‘the two-sphere universe’ – both Ptolemaic and Copernican cosmologies represented the earth as a ‘tiny’ terrestrial sphere around which rotated, or appeared to rotate, the ‘much larger’ celestial sphere of the fixed stars – Prospero’s ‘great globe’ does not refer to the ‘tiny’ earth but to the immense globe of the heavens.17 As a self-proclaimed scholar of ‘the liberal arts’ – including the quadrivial arts of geometry, astronomy, music and arithmetic – Prospero, if he had not read Ptolemy or Copernicus directly, could not have avoided studying Johannes de Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera (c. 1230), the most widely used textbook for astronomy courses at European universities for more than 400 years, published in more than 200 editions in the sixteenth century alone. Sacrobosco’s first chapter

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Figure 7.1 The Copernican cosmos in De revolvtionibvs orbium coelestium, libri VI. Norimbergæ, Apud I. Petreium, 1543. By kind permission of Boston Public Library, USA.

commences with a discussion of the geometrical properties of spheres, describing both the earth and the universe as spherical, and differentiating the lesser earthly sphere from its greater ethereal counterpart. In Sacrobosco’s illustration of the medieval cosmos, the earth appears as the smallest and most irregular globe at the centre of a series of larger globes, or spheres, of water, air, and fire, followed by the spheres of the known planets, and finally the sphere of the fixed stars and the primum mobile, or first cause of motion, the sphere of God. It is impossible, while looking at Sacrobosco’s illustration, to identify the earth as the ‘great globe itself’ when it is the not

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Figure 7.2  The Ptolemaic cosmos in Johannes Sacrobosco’s Spherae tractatvs, Venetia, 1531. By kind permission of Boston Public Library, USA.

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only the smallest sphere but also the farthest from God; the celestial sphere of fixed stars, by contrast, touches the primum mobile at every point on its circumference. Even astronomers who doubted the material reality of a celestial sphere realized its necessity, as an imaginary geometrical projection, for describing the position of visible planets and stars in the night sky; in this capacity, the celestial sphere as well as its materialization in the form of a celestial globe proved essential for timekeeping as well as navigation at sea. The most basic coordinate on an imaginary celestial sphere is the ‘zenith’, the point in the sky directly above the head of an earthbound observer. Prospero’s familiarity with the concept of a celestial sphere, if not the construct of a celestial globe, is evident from the moment he announces in the opening act: ‘by my prescience / I find my zenith doth depend upon / A most auspicious star’ (1.2.180–2).18 That ‘auspicious star’, I think, is the planet (or wandering star) Jupiter, which moves through the circuit of the zodiac and returns to its zenith over the course of twelve years. Nandini Das, in notes to her edition of Robert Greene’s 1585 astrological pamphlet Planetomachia, explains how ‘In [early modern] astrology, Jupiter and the Sun are frequently perceived as having similar effects and signification […] Both celestial bodies are considered to be temperately hot; however, Jupiter is considered the most beneficial of the planets due to its moist nature, while the Sun is hot and dry, therefore liable to have more negative effects’. After keeping a close eye on the clockwork sky for 12 years, Prospero informs Miranda: ‘the hour’s now come / The very minute bids thee ope thine ear’ (1.2.36–7). An observational astronomer like Prospero, who coordinates his political coup with Jupiter’s orbital period, would not confuse or conflate the tiny earth with the ‘great globe’ of heaven. But interpreting Prospero’s ‘great globe itself’ as the earth rather than the firmament is not exclusive to the Arden edition – the Riverside, Norton, Signet Classic, Bedford/ St Martin’s, New Folger Library, and the New Cambridge Shakespeare editions all concur with the Arden – nor is it a

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minor or insignificant detail.19 In the first decade of the seventeenth century, there was no more innovative or controversial approach to astronomy than the application of sublunary physics to objects in the superlunary spheres, a method which violated Aristotle’s age-old distinction between the muddy non-luminous earth, where things die every second of every day, and the heavens themselves, the image of eternity, where the same bright stars return in the same constellations night after night, for eons and eons.20 According to Aristotle, no star had ever appeared or disappeared in the past nor would any do so in the future. The only exception to this timeless rule, according to Aristotle’s medieval interpreters, had been the miraculous Star of Bethlehem.21 But the appearance of two ‘new stars’ (what we now know as supernovae) in the heavens in 1572 and 1604 respectively made it difficult for contemporary astronomers to continue to believe in an ontological distinction separating the four elements of the ever-changing terrestrial sphere from a fifth element, a ‘quintessence’ of ‘aether’, that formed the eternal superlunary celestial spheres. Contrary to the physics of Aristotle and the metaphysics of Augustine and Dante, Prospero avers (after the fashion of Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Galileo) that the outermost sphere of the heavens is made of the same ‘stuff’ and subject to the same physical processes of generation, mutation, corruption and decay as earthly matter. My interpretation of ‘the great globe itself’ as heaven, not earth, requires rethinking the verb ‘inherit’ in the same passage. Again, however, the Arden footnote referring to ‘all people who will subsequently live on earth’ is consistent with other editions of the play. The Riverside edition paraphrases ‘which it inherit’ as ‘who occupy it’.22 In the New Cambridge edition, David Lindley mentions ‘all those who subsequently inhabit the earth’, as well as ‘the frequent reference in the Old Testament to the Jews “inheriting” the land of Israel, and Matthew 5.5. where “the meek shall inherit the earth”’.23 These glosses might make more sense if Prospero had referred to ‘all which shall inherit it’, thus

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indicating the futurity of said inheritance. Yet even if that were the case, why should Prospero solemnly invoke the future of a chosen people when they are destined, along with everyone else, to ‘dissolve’ in the fullness of time? To understand what it would mean for things to ‘inherit’ the celestial globe, instead of people inheriting the terrestrial globe, requires restoring the verb to the context of Prospero’s speech. The Oxford English Dictionary cites this speech as an early instance of the use of ‘stuff’ to mean ‘the substance or “material” (whether corporeal or incorporeal) of which a thing is formed or consists, or out of which a thing may be fashioned’.24 With this sense of ‘stuff’ in mind, the most consistent and plausible way to construe ‘inherit’ is not the familiar interpersonal connotation – to receive property from a parent or predecessor – but the more obscure, contemporary sense of: ‘(a) to take possession, take up an abode, dwell (obs); (b) to derive its being, or some quality, from’.25 Indeed, the phrase ‘inherit heaven’ in the sense of the first definition – ‘to take up an abode, dwell’ – appears in a confirmed Shakespearean source, the anonymous Timon comedy performed at the Inns of Court between 1601 and 1605, when Timon standing alone onstage pleads: ‘O holy justice, / If thou inherit heaven, descend at once’.26 What undoubtedly ‘inherits’ the celestial globe are the fixed stars and constellations: the same things that inhabit the ‘heavens’, the projecting roof, with painted signs of the zodiac on its underside, visible to characters on the platform stage and to spectators in the pit at the Globe Theatre. Prospero’s ‘the great globe itself / Yea, all which it inherits, shall dissolve’ could easily be delivered, if performed at the Globe, with Prospero directing his gaze up to the ‘heavens’, just as Hamlet does when speaking of ‘this brave o’erhanging firmament’.27 A better paraphrase of the speech, in this case, would be ‘the celestial sphere’, the realm of the fixed stars, which Aristotle held to be eternal and immutable, and everything dwelling there will ‘dissolve’ in time – go into a solution, break apart, cease to function as a coherent unit – just as the earth and all

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its edifices will ‘crumble’, in the words of John Donne, to their ‘atomies’. By ‘atomies’ Donne means ‘atoms’ and his lament calls attention to the way in which the ‘new philosophy’ of the seventeenth century threatened to resurrect an ancient, godless theory of atomism whose earliest proponents, Leucippus and Democritus, lived prior to Aristotle. Atomism, the idea that everything on earth and in heaven comes into existence through – and can be explained in terms of – the random motion of tiny, invisible, physical particles of matter called ‘atoms’, was further developed in antiquity first by Epicurus, a Greek philosopher contemporary with Aristotle, and then by Lucretius, a Roman poet whose De Rerum Natura (‘On the Nature of Things’) offered the most cogent and coherent account of the philosophy. Epicurus’s extremely parsimonious ontology reduced the four sublunary elements of Aristotle – and, for good measure, the extraterrestrial quintessence of aether – to differently shaped minimal particles called atoms. These atoms are eternal but not ‘alive’ in any sense of the word: they move through unoccupied space (void or nothingness) without perception; they collide without sensation; and they cohere in elaborate, albeit always temporally limited, configurations without any intention of doing so. Those mortal configurations, unlike the eternal atoms themselves, were often living, perceiving, sensing, willing and dreaming beings of the most complex variety. Lucretius’s poem was rediscovered in the late fifteenth century and then increasingly printed, circulated and cited in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In recent years a number of books, including Catherine Wilson’s Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity and Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, have explored the paradox of how ancient atomism’s revival made possible the ‘new philosophy’ of modernity. According to Wilson, ‘[the] material corpuscle played a starring role in the scientific revolution of the mid-seventeenth century. […] Yet, as the chemist Daniel Sennert wonderingly pointed out in 1618, the doctrine of

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subdivisible particles was not new in his own time, and was indeed older than Aristotle’.28 According to Greenblatt: Like Lucretius, Galileo defended the oneness of the celestial and terrestrial world: there was no essential difference, he claimed, between the nature of the sun and the planets and the nature of the earth and its inhabitants. […] Like Lucretius, he sought […] a rational comprehension of the hidden structures of all things. And like Lucretius, he was convinced that these structures were by nature constituted by what he called ‘minims’ or minimal particles, that is, constituted by a limited repertory of atoms combined in innumerable ways.29 For the speaker of Donne’s poem, ‘new philosophy’ made it possible to remove Providence from the cosmos and to reduce the heavens from an eternal empyrean (‘the element of fire’) to mutable matter. Nothing was sacred and nothing, except atoms, would last forever. In the context of early modern atomism, Prospero’s speech acquires added significance. Like Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, Prospero equates death with sleep; unlike the Prince of Denmark, however, the Duke of Milan never worries about what tortures await us in the afterlife, ‘what dreams may come’ to disturb our peaceful slumber. Why not? The answer, I think, lies partly in Prospero’s pronouncement that ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on’. Again ‘stuff’ is the operative – and odd – word here. Common sense tells us that dreams are exclusively mental phenomena; as such, they are immaterial. But Lucretius, in the fourth book of De Rerum Natura, teaches that dreams, like every other sensation and perception we experience, are in fact the result of aleatory atomic particles. In a metaphysics consisting only of hyperkinetic atoms and nothingness, even the most rarefied entities – mental images troubling our sleep – must arise from and ultimately return to something thinner than air: invisible and imperceptible particles of matter. The fact that all life

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emerges from lifeless and infinitesimal atoms swirling through an infinite void of space becomes the basis for ethical reform in Lucretius’s Epicurean epic. No one should fear the prospect of ‘eternal death’ because the eternity that follows from the end of our life is no different from the eternity that preceded it: in both cases, the transient atomic configurations that make possible the sensitive, perceptive and rational creatures that we are simply do not exist. The endless afterlife is merely a return to endless pre-life; death, likewise, is ‘a return to sleep and repose’.30 Prospero’s characterizations of ‘life’ as ‘little’ and death (or non-existence) as ‘sleep’ are so close to what we find in Lucretius’s epic that his vision of the heavens dissolving does not sound apocalyptic, à la Donne, but merely inevitable. Even his description of the pageant as ‘insubstantial’ resonates with ‘a complaint brought by one Brother Ximenes’, according to Catherine Wilson, against Galileo: Ximenes accused Galileo of teaching his students that ‘there is no such thing as the substance of things, nor is there continuous quantity, but everything is a discrete quantity and contains empty space’.31 Prospero’s revels speech carries the atomistic argument even farther than Francis Bacon, whom Wilson calls the ‘first well-known English philosopher to defend the atomic philosophy […] and to link it to the old alchemical ambition of controlling natural processes’.32 Bacon concludes the third and final edition of his Essays, published in 1625, with a short Lucretian offering entitled ‘Of Vicissitude of Things’.33 In it, Bacon proclaims that ‘matter is in perpetual flux, and never at a stay’, before extending this doctrine of material mutability from the natural world – which, according to Bacon, is remade continually by earthquakes, floods and fires – to the realm of spirit itself: ‘The greatest vicissitude of things amongst men, is the vicissitude of sects and religions’. Just as lakes dry up, and forests burn to ash, so, too, do faiths, metaphysics, and visions of the afterlife eventually grow old and give way to new ideas that thrive on their decay. Bacon, however, holds up the celestial sphere as a singular image of constancy: ‘the fixed stars ever stand at a like distance from one another, and never

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come nearer, together, nor go further asunder’. Elsewhere Bacon acknowledges that the superlunary spheres had begun to show signs of alteration in his lifetime, but knowing that he could not pursue the implications of ‘new stars’ suddenly appearing in the hitherto unchanging heavens in the confines of a brief essay, he notes ‘[the] vicissitude of mutations in the Superior Globe are no fit matter for this present argument’. There is no question that by the ‘Superior Globe’ Bacon means the universe – the heavens or, as the Oxford editor notes, ‘the concentric spheres surrounding the earth’ – and there should be little doubt that by ‘the great globe itself’ Prospero means the same thing.34 Shakespeare’s contemporaries made a clear distinction between the two globes: the lesser terrestrial globe and the greater celestial globe. In 1576, for example, Thomas Digges, the English Copernican, argued for an infinite universe in A Perfit Description of the Celestial Orbs but still retained the concept of a ‘great globe’ by insisting that ‘this orbe of stares fixed infinitely up extendeth itself in altitude spherically’. In fact, Digges uses the very same phrase as Prospero, only 35 years earlier, when he explains: ‘the Earth it self to be one of the Planets, hauing his peculiar and strange courses turning euery 24 houres round vpon his owne Centre: whereby the Sun and great Globe of fixed starres seeme to sway about and turne, albeit indeede they remaine fixed’.35 If Prospero has in mind the infinite expansion of the celestial sphere in Digges’s ‘great Globe of fixed starres’, then his alliterative contrasting of the ‘great globe’ with our ‘little life’ – both of which are ‘rounded’ and thus spherical – becomes almost incomprehensibly sublime as the heavens become immeasurably ‘greater’ and our human dramas ever ‘littler’, tending asymptotically toward atoms, in comparison.

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Experimenting with spirits, or, atomic Ariel ‘It is comforting when winds are whipping up the waters of the vast sea, to watch from land the severe trials of another person’. – Lucretius, De Rerum Natura36 ‘Neither is that pleasure of small efficacy and contentment to the mind of man, which the poet Lucretius describeth elegantly. […] “It is a view of delight” (saith he) “to stand or walk on the shore side, and to see a ship tossed with tempest upon the sea”’. – Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Book One37 It is no accident that The Tempest begins with a dramatization of what both Lucretius and Francis Bacon present as the ideal of comfort and contentment – standing on solid ground and observing others struggling at sea – nor that Prospero uses the occasion to instruct his daughter to ‘Be collected’ and ‘have comfort’ (1.2.13, 25). The goal of atomistic philosophy, according to both Epicurus and Lucretius, is to attain the state of ataraxia or tranquillity of mind. Although Lucretius’s Epicurean epic devotes most of its six books to explanations of natural philosophy – ‘lest’, the poet counsels Memmius, ‘you should suppose that earth and sun and sky, sea, stars, and moon, by virtue of their divine body must endure eternally’38 – the point is not scientific knowledge per se but peace of mind and the restoration of reason as a result of overcoming both the fear of death and the belief that inscrutable gods are responsible for meteorological phenomena, including planetary motions, eclipses, thunderstorms and lightning.39 Prospero seems to have grasped the lesson: his conviction that the ‘great globe’ will ‘melt’, ‘dissolve’ and ‘fade’ (4.1.153–5) in no way diminishes the importance he ascribes to family

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(Miranda and Ferdinand), friendship (Gonzalo), or justice (Caliban, Alonso, et alii).40 But why doesn’t Prospero spiral into an existential dilemma or at the very least lose some sleep over the notion that everything is destined, in the fullness of time, to revert to nothing? The answer to that question requires focusing not on Lucretius’s most famous axiom (made even more famous by Shakespeare’s King Lear) – ‘Nothing comes from nothing’ – but rather on its corollary: no being is ever completely annihilated or reduced to utter nothingness. Yes, everything eventually dissolves to its physical minima, atoms; but these indestructible particles will ultimately recombine with others to create new things and generate new lives. Indeed, after the masque has ended and Prospero has announced that its actors have ‘melted […] into thin air’, Shakespeare permits the offstage spectators to see one of those spirit-actors, Ariel, who tells Prospero (and us) that he ‘presented Ceres’ just moments ago, still going about his business (4.1.167). When actual beings ‘melt into air, into thin air’, they do not simply cease to be; instead, they assume the potential to become. For example, Prospero’s prime spirit, Ariel, has the ability to ‘dive into the fire’, ‘tread the ooze of the salt deep’, ‘run upon the sharp wind’ and undertake ‘business in the veins of the earth’ (1.2.191, 253–5); in other words, Ariel mixes indiscriminately with – and moves effortlessly across – the four elements. The verb ‘to fade’ appears twice in The Tempest, once in Prospero’s ‘revels’ speech and once in the song Ariel sings to Ferdinand about the supposedly drowned Alonso: Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made. [His bones ‘inherit’ coral] Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea change Into something rich and strange. Sea nymphs hourly ring his bell. (1.2.397–403)

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Bit by bit and piece by piece, the newly dead composite being returns to its atomic constituents and, from there, gradually rejoins the visible world in the form of countless new beings.41 These infinitesimal bits and invisible pieces, or corpuscles, are what is real and eternal – like Ariel. In ‘Ariel and all his quality’, Prospero has harnessed the power of the atom. Ariel’s artificial imitation of ‘Jove’s lightning, the precursors / O’th’ dreadful thunderclaps’ (1.2.201–2) drives the King and Prince to prayers, with the latter exclaiming, ‘Hell is empty, / And all the devils are here’ (1.2.214–5). But Prospero’s subsequent explanation – it is his own godlike command of the elements, not divine displeasure, which has caused the storm – enables Miranda, as well as the audience offstage, to recognize the error involved in attributing supernatural significance to atmospheric outbreaks. Ariel’s name is, as the Arden editors point out, strikingly similar to Uriel, ‘the name of an angel in the Jewish cabala [… and] John Dee’s spirit communicant during his ill-fated experiments with magic’.42 But Dee’s ‘spirit communicant’, Uriel, was an archangel, from whom Dee’s ‘scryers’ took dictation and for whom the magus himself exhibited, in Deborah Harkness’s words, a ‘complete willingness to perform any task [Uriel] set before him’.43 Thus, the relationship between Dee and Uriel, a divine messenger sent from God, is a complete reversal of the relationship between Prospero and Ariel. When spoken ‘Ariel’ sounds like ‘aerial’, a word which means ‘Dwelling, flying, or moving in the air’ and ‘Consisting or composed of air […] associated with or having the nature of air’.44 At the outset of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius, anticipating his readers’ scepticism of the claim that all perceptible change is actually the result of invisible matter, makes an analogy to the nature of air: ‘the wild wind [though unseen] […] whips the waves of the sea, capsizes huge ships, and sends the clouds scudding; sometimes it swoops and sweeps across the plains in tearing tornado, strewing them with great trees, and hammers the heights of mountains with forest-splitting blasts’.45 Lucretius’s account of the wind calls to mind not

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only Prospero’s curriculum vitae but his final command to Ariel: ‘Then to the elements / Be free, and fare thou well!’ Atoms, not angels, properly inhabit the ‘elements’. Elementa, the Latin root of ‘elements’, is the key word in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. A Latin word Lucretius uses as a synonym for the Greek ‘atom’, elementa also means ‘a letter of the alphabet’. Lucretius takes great care in his epic poem to explain how atoms are to the physical world as individual letters are to the intellectual world: even though individual letters (for example ‘L’, ‘M’, or ‘N’) are meaningless in isolation, they nonetheless combine with other intrinsically meaningless letters to form the words, sentences, paragraphs, books, names, conversations and ideas that give our lives meaning.46 Likewise, the atoms or physical elementa of the natural world are invisible and imperceptible in isolation and yet they combine to create every visible and perceptible entity in the universe – from the ‘great globe itself’ to the involuntary succession of mental images in a dream. ‘Elements’, Ariel’s final destination at the end of the play, is also a keyword in The Tempest. The Boatswain, for example, invites Gonzalo to ‘command these elements’ – the winds and waters – ‘to silence’ (1.1.21–2). Gonzalo cannot command the elements; Prospero, however, can. Ariel later informs the shipwrecked crew that ‘the elements, / Of whom your swords are tempered […] are now too massy for your strengths’ (3.3.60–7). It is as if Ariel and his ‘fellow ministers’, at Prospero’s command, could manipulate the atomic weights of iron, carbon, copper and zinc which combine to make up the blades of steel and brass. The Lucretian refusal to acknowledge anything but elementa as eternal results in an almost Buddhist detachment from the impermanence of things and the suffering they impart. This same philosophical detachment, I submit, has been mistaken by Stephen Greenblatt and others for ‘the air of a farewell […] a retirement’ in Prospero’s ‘revels speech’. To talk of Prospero’s ‘farewell’ and ‘retirement’ here is premature. Far from retiring in Act 4, Prospero is just gearing up for the most exciting parts of his project, the quelling of Caliban’s insurrection and the

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confrontation with his usurpers. Prospero does propose that Miranda and Ferdinand ‘retire into my cell / And there repose’ (4.1.161–2), but he does not plan to lie down himself. As soon as the two lovebirds are out of earshot Prospero springs into action, commanding: ‘Come with a thought, I thank thee, Ariel. Come!’ (4.1.164). If it is not a farewell, what kind of speech act is this sketch of ‘our little life’ against the immense backdrop of ‘the great globe itself’? What does Prospero hope to accomplish by voicing these words to this couple at this juncture? The Arden ‘Introduction’ explains how ‘Prospero pretends to block Ferdinand’s courtship of Miranda’ but in fact plans their betrothal ‘before they even meet’ (9–10). What if Prospero, a proven master of reverse psychology, similarly pretends to discourage the newly engaged couple from indulging in premarital sex? Excusing himself on the pretext of ‘weakness’ and ‘infirmity’, Prospero invites the young lovers, who have just watched a masque about the birds and the bees, to make use of his bed while he walks once or twice around the island. Prospero is neither infirm nor taking a leisurely stroll to clear his head. He is multitasking like mad. Following the unceremonious ending to the wedding masque, Prospero has improvised an epicurean epithalamium, a Renaissance carpe diem lyric, for his daughter and soon-tobe son-in-law. If Miranda and Ferdinand do have sex when they ‘retire’ and ‘repose’, that would explain why Prospero chooses to reveal the couple playing a game of chess. The object of chess is to ‘mate’ one’s opponent: in the space of a few hours, the Duke of Milan has effectively ‘mated’ the King of Naples and made their two families into one. All very provocative, some might say, but Ariel is not an atom; he is ‘an airy spirit’. Interestingly, in England in 1610 the most vocal proponent of particle physics, Francis Bacon, posited as the basic building blocks for all visible phenomena neither ‘atoms’ nor ‘elements’ but ‘spirits’. Yes, spirits. Graham Rees, who chastises other historians of science for claiming that Bacon professed a belief in atomism, acknowledges that Bacon ‘helped to make atomism palatable to the

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seventeenth-century virtuosi’ but only adopted the rhetoric of atomism to advance his own ‘chemical philosophy’ and ‘pneumatic theory of matter’.47 Rather than atom and void, Bacon divided the universe, as Rees explains, into ‘two types of mutually convertible matter: the tangible and the pneumatic’, the latter of which is ‘thoroughly corporeal [and yet] weightless, invisible, and incorrigibly restless’.48 Sounds like Ariel to me. Bacon’s seemingly idiosyncratic idea of spirits as analogous, if not identical, to Lucretian atoms is actually in keeping with a long line of natural philosophers, magicians and alchemists, including but not limited to Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Battista della Porta, Giordano Bruno, and the aforementioned favourites of Victor Frankenstein, Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus.49

Miranda’s father, Frankenstein’s forefather Prospero is an experimental atomist who not only sees but reaches into and manipulates the most miniscule, invisible ‘elements’ of nature in ways that are ahead of his time. And ours. In his New Organon Bacon wrote: ‘Every natural action depends on things infinitely small or at least too small to strike the sense, [and] no one can hope to govern or change nature until he has duly comprehended and observed them’.50 During the first onstage conversation between Prospero and Caliban in The Tempest, the magus threatens his slave: ‘For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps, / […] thou shalt be pinched / As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging / Than bees that made ’em’ (1.2.326–31). The ‘honeycomb’ had been an image of sweetness as far back as Proverbs and Psalms and a term of endearment for English writers since Chaucer, but Prospero’s usage emphasizes not sweetness but thickness. What does it mean to be ‘pinched / As thick as honeycomb’? The problem of how to squeeze the greatest number of

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spheres, like cannonballs, into a limited space, such as the hold of a ship, had led a couple of Shakespeare’s most mathematically minded contemporaries, Thomas Harriot and Johannes Kepler, to speculate that bees’ honeycomb structures offer the tightest possible configuration; it also led Harriot, though not Kepler, to develop an atomic theory of matter in which every visible being consisted of countless invisible particles. Harriot never published his work on hexagonal close-packing and Kepler only discussed the matter in a light-hearted, albeit Latin, essay on ‘The Six-Cornered Snowflake’ printed in Frankfurt am Main in 1611, the same year Shakespeare’s The Tempest debuted on the English stage. But Prospero recognizes and utilizes this principle of tessellation or discrete geometry nonetheless. His ‘honeycomb’ is a model of mathematical efficiency and physical compactness – its hexagonal lattice allows for the highest density of sphere-packing within a three-dimensional space – and, as such, it threatens Caliban with the prospect of maximal pain: Prospero contrives to torture his slave on a ‘cellular’ level. Although Shakespeare did not live long enough to read Robert Hooke’s Micrografia, published in 1665, in which Hooke announced his discovery of biological cells, the smallest living units of an organism, the playwright knew that the smallest unit of the ‘honeycomb’ is the closely compacted six-sided cell. This not-so-sweet usage of the ‘honeycomb’, coupled with Caliban’s claim that ‘The spirit torments me!’ (2.2.63), gives new and menacing meaning to the diminutive Ariel’s song: ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I’ (5.1.188). Over the past quarter of a century Prospero has undergone an interpretative sea-change. The magus whom a previous generation of critics had identified with the soon-to-be-retired Shakespeare has increasingly drawn comparisons to Francis Bacon. Several examples will illustrate this trend. Stephen Orgel, in his introduction to the 1987 Oxford edition, stressed the presence of the ‘new science’ in the play: ‘Bacon promised, as benefits deriving from the new philosophy, the power to raise storms at will, to control the seasons, to accelerate

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germination and harvest: in this context, both the opening scene and Prospero’s masque constitute a scientific fantasy, marvellous, but not at all inconsistent with reason and virtue’.51 In 1996, Denise Albanese suggested that ‘The Tempest sketches a problematic that comes to fulfillment [more than a decade later] with Bacon’s New Atlantis’.52 In 2006, Gabriel Egan argued that ‘although critics have tended to treat him as a sorcerer, there is little shown to the audience that has to be understood as magic’, adding that ‘Prospero’s apparent magic represents human ingenuity at its peak, not supernature at all’.53 In 2007, Jonathan Sawday suggested that ‘if any play by Shakespeare should have been written by Francis Bacon it is, surely, The Tempest, so Baconian are its concerns’.54 Finally, in 2009, Elizabeth Spiller concluded that through ‘his own shifting attitudes toward the relationship between art and science, nature and man, and power and knowledge, Prospero gives us a history in small of the larger cultural transformation by which Aristotelian philosophy would become Baconian science’.55 The present essay contributes to the trend toward a Prospero engaged with ‘new science’. But what gives me pause about this recent shift toward identifying Prospero’s agenda with that of Bacon is that it too often results in a wholesale disenchantment of the play. Egan, for example, deflates Prospero’s abjuration speech – ‘Impressive as this catalogue of tricks is, there seems little possibility that an audience will take it seriously’ – and mocks his claim of raising the dead by asking rhetorically: ‘Whose graves might Prospero be referring to on this island?’56 Spiller, likewise, manages to write nearly 20 pages about ‘Prospero’s Art’ without a single mention of Ariel. The assumption appears to be that linking the drama to ‘early modern science’ means downplaying its allusions to witchcraft and necromancy. But The Tempest is weird. Just as ‘new world’ and ‘old world’ – Virginia and Virgil – make strange bedfellows on Prospero’s island, so too do experimental atomism and old-fashioned raising of the dead. Just prior to renouncing his magic, Prospero lists all of the accomplishments in which he has been abetted by the magical

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creatures of the island, and he concludes with the provocative announcement that ‘graves at my command / Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth’ (5.1.48–9). Prospero’s claim to have raised the dead usually fails to raise so much as an eyebrow among Shakespearean scholars, who quickly point out that the ‘abjuration’ speech is a set piece borrowed from Ovid’s Medea and should not be read too literally. Besides, The Tempest, unlike Shakespeare’s other ‘Romances’, observes the neo-classical unities of time and space: there is no ‘unaccounted-for’ or ‘missing’ time in this play as there is in The Winter’s Tale, where a gap of 16 years divides Acts 3 and 4, or in Cymbeline, where 1,600 years separates the two locales of Roman Britain and Renaissance Rome. If graves had opened and let their sleepers forth, we would have seen it. Any attempt to integrate Prospero’s boast of black magic into the narrative of the play, therefore, runs into an apparent dead end. Where is the creature whom Prospero brought back from the dead? When Prospero first tells Miranda, his daughter, that he is more than just her father, and ‘master’ of more than just this ‘full poor cell’ where they have lived together for 12 years, her response is simply: ‘More to know / Did never meddle with my thoughts’ (1.2.21–2). Translation: ‘I’ve never given it a second thought because it never occurred to me that there might be more to our story, father’. And yet Miranda’s very next lines in the play – after Prospero has commanded her to ‘Sit down, / For thou must now know further’ (1.2.32–3) – are directly at odds with her previous statement. Now she says: You have often Begun to tell me what I am, but stopped And left me to a bootless inquisition, Concluding, ‘Stay, not yet’. (1.2.33–6) Translation: ‘We’re always having this conversation, dad, and I’m always begging you to tell me more about who we are and where we come from but you always insist that this

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isn’t the right time’. How might we explain or reconcile these two consecutive statements by Miranda which appear to contradict each other? The solution, I believe, lies in one other command Prospero gives to his daughter, just before he orders her to sit down. ‘Lend thy hand’, he says, ‘And pluck my magic garment from me’ (1.2.24). The best way that I can see to make sense of what appears to be a puzzling passage in the text – Miranda claiming, one moment, never to think about their life before coming to the island and then, in the very next moment, claiming she has inquired ‘often’ about precisely this matter – is to take note of an implicit stage direction. When Prospero dons his ‘magic garment’, Miranda, so to speak, loses her mind; when he doffs the robe, she regains cognitive autonomy. Little more than a somnambulist, who returns to sleep at the snap of her father’s fingers, Miranda must struggle to think for herself throughout the play. It is clear to us in the audience that her experience of falling in love at first sight and her most seemingly spontaneous questions are all predictably ‘provoked’ by Prospero, who never appears so content with his daughter as when he is reassuring her, ‘I know thou canst not choose’ (1.2.186). Moreover, Miranda confronts a conspicuous memory lapse. Although she vaguely recalls the scene from her infancy of ‘four or five women’ standing beside her (1.2.47), Miranda has no recollection of the perilous sea-journey she and her father undertook as a result of his exile. Prospero: If thou rememb’rest aught ere thou cam’st here, How thou cam’st here thou mayst. Miranda: But that I do not. (1.2.50–1) Though one could ascribe such amnesia to the traumatic nature of the episode itself, doesn’t Prospero’s relentless interrogation, his incessant testing of Miranda’s memory, hint at something more significant? And why else have Miranda harp on her failure to recall the fateful trip: ‘O my

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heart bleeds / To think o’ th’ teen that I have turned you to, / Which is from my remembrance’ and ‘I not remembering how I cried out then, / Will cry it over again’(1.2.63–5, 133–4). Twice Shakespeare calls our attention to what appears to be unaccounted-for time – first in the form of Miranda’s memory lapse and then in Prospero’s declaration that he has raised the dead – as if first posing the question at the start of the play and supplying an answer at the end. Given the conditions under which they travelled, on a rat-infested ‘rotten carcass of a butt’ (1.2.146), isn’t it just as likely that the infant Miranda died en route to the island and that her bold ‘smile’ (1.2.153), which Prospero says was ‘Infused with a fortitude from heaven’ (1.2.154), was merely the lifeless rictus of a chilly death at sea? Perhaps the reason Prospero has ‘many times begun’ to tell Miranda of her life – and just as many times broken off the story – and the reason that Miranda recalls the part of her life that she does – the part that Prospero has recounted frequently over the course of 12 years, without ever heeding Miranda’s wish, ‘Please you, farther’ (1.2.65) – is that his own daughter is the creature he brought back from the grave. She is the first ‘Frankenstein monster’. The ‘secret arts’ of raising the dead, which Shakespeare shows as part of the mimetic stage action in Pericles, are alluded to by Prospero as part of the diegetic story in The Tempest.57 As the Arden editors explain, ‘The Tempest’s action is elliptical, leaving readers and audiences to speculate about events that happened before the play begins […] [and] attempt to fill in the narrative gaps’.58 Supposing a prologue in which Prospero, like Cerimon before him, reanimates a recently deceased corpse arguably enhances Stephen Orgel’s psychoanalytic claim that ‘Prospero, several times explicitly, presents himself as incorporating [Miranda], acting as both father and mother to [her], and in one extraordinary passage describes the voyage to the island as a birth fantasy’; extends Ann Thompson’s feminist observation that ‘apart from Miranda herself, the only females in the First Folio’s list of “Names of the Actors” are Iris, Ceres, Juno and the Nymphs, all of whom

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are spirits’; and complements John Bender’s new historicist observation that The Tempest ‘was tried out at a public theatre’ on Halloween night, when the line between living and dead is traditionally blurred.59 More valuable than the establishment of any critical consensus, however, are the new opportunities for making sense of erstwhile puzzling passages. Why, for example, does Prospero have Ceres risk spoiling the mood of the wedding masque by lamenting how ‘dusky Dis my daughter got’ (4.1.89)? Ceres’s daughter, Proserpina, is notorious for having been brought back from the dead. Does this explain why the fresh young nymphs are joined in their dancing by ‘certain Reapers, properly habited’ (4.1.138.1)? Is there a whiff of ‘open graves’ about this play-within-the-play? Has Prospero, like Hamlet before him, carefully crafted the material of his dramatic entertainment in order to probe the memories and to witness the reactions of one of its audience members? Does Prospero still wonder what precisely Miranda remembers of their fateful journey to the island? Admittedly, such a conjecture will be less compelling than, say, my more painstakingly evidentiary approach to ‘the great globe itself’. Such a supposition will fail to convince some readers of its substantive and logical plausibility. But not supposing or speculating about Prospero’s magical fait accompli means not taking Prospero at his word. It also risks diminishing the potency of Prospero’s magical prowess and, consequently, the importance we ascribe to its ultimate surrender.

Coda: The scientific revolution comes un-Donne In ‘An Anatomy of the World’ John Donne invented the ‘scientific revolution’ as it was described for most of the twentieth century in the works of Alexander Koyré, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault and others: a momentous ‘paradigm shift’ or ‘epistemic rupture’ in which all the meaningful

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elements of an old worldview (medieval/magical/analogical/ geocentric) are superseded by a totally new worldview (modern/mechanical/analytical/heliocentric) as the result of some singular game-changing discovery. According to this model of historical change in which one totalizing system or mode of thought is replaced by an equally totalizing alternative, the old celestial orbs ‘crumble’ beneath the new Copernican cosmology; the old gods and angels are ‘lost’ in the new infinite universe; the old astrology and belief in planetary influences are ‘called in doubt’ by Kepler and Galileo’s new physical astronomy; and the old alchemists’ fire is ‘quite put out’ by Robert Boyle’s chemistry and Isaac Newton’s new physics. But that is not what happens. Instead, Copernicus keeps the celestial orbs, including the outermost sphere or ‘great globe’ of fixed stars; Copernicans prove to be the most ardent adherents to the belief in stellar ‘influences’; Digges’s infinite universe retains a ‘court of celestial angels, devoid of grief and replenished with perfect endless joy’; Kepler and Galileo both practise astrology as well as astronomy; Boyle and Newton each continue to tend, however secretively, to the old alchemical flame; and romance still resonates in the ‘brave new world’ of science. Steven Shapin wrote in 1996, ‘[t]here was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution’; Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park concluded, in 2006, ‘[t]he cumulative force of the scholarship since the 1980s has been to insert skeptical question marks after every word of this ringing three-word phrase, including the definite article’.60 What can a wizard know of science? Once we accept that there was no wholesale replacement of magic by science in the seventeenth century and that no hard line can be drawn ‘in or about 1610’ to separate medieval thinking from modernity, the answer is an awful lot. Prospero’s ‘our revels now are ended’ speech has traditionally been read as containing ‘a certain tinge of visionary melancholy’, as if Shakespeare was ‘saying farewell to a whole region of the human imagination […] to magic and all its ways’.61 But The Tempest seamlessly

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weaves together modern science with medieval romance. In his last solo play, Shakespeare does not write against the fact of the new science, in the style of Donne’s ‘An Anatomy of the World’, nor even about it, in the style of Ben Jonson’s masques; instead, Shakespeare writes with the new science – fictionalizing its discourses and discoveries by scrubbing them of their original circumstances and situations and inserting them into a magical world of his own making – at once prefiguring and launching the genre of scientific romance.

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8 ‘volumes that / I prize’: Resources for Studying and Teaching The Tempest N. Amos Rothschild

This chapter surveys resources for approaching The Tempest – resources to assist the student or scholar in interpreting the play, and resources to aid the instructor in presenting it. I begin with an account of the various editions of Shakespeare’s text, assessing the contexts in which each would be most useful, before proceeding to an overview of resources available online. Next, this chapter details a number of lenses that might lend focus to classroom discussion or written analysis of The Tempest: social hierarchies and politics; travel, geography, and colonialism; gender, sexuality, and marriage; music and masque; and magic and education. In elaborating each of these lenses, I highlight relevant works of criticism, as well as specific late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century texts that will help students to explore and teachers to present the variety of early modern discourses that shaped The Tempest and were shaped by it. The chapter concludes with

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an annotated bibliography structured to complement the preceding discussion of critical and pedagogical approaches to the play.

A survey of selected editions The three major one-volume editions of Shakespeare’s works require little introduction. The Riverside Shakespeare (edited by G. Blackmore Evans, 1974), The Complete Works of Shakespeare (edited by David Bevington, 1980), and The Norton Shakespeare (edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus, 1996) are all more than adequate for classroom use, particularly in Shakespeare survey courses. Each volume has its particular quirks. Unrevised since 1997, the Riverside often adopts traditional critical approaches to the plays. Hallett Smith’s introduction to The Tempest, for instance, discusses various oppositions that might be seen as ‘major themes’ of the play: the natural and the supernatural, reality and illusion, servitude and freedom, personal power and providence (1657–8). By contrast, The Complete Works and the Norton offer introductions informed by new historicist, postcolonial and feminist approaches: thus, the oppositions Smith identifies as themes, Bevington understands as Shakespeare’s effort to ‘invite consideration of many unsettling questions about exploration, colonialist empire building, and sexual imperialism’ by ‘dramatizing […] conflict[s] without taking sides’ (1572) – a view Greenblatt seconds in his introduction to the play (3060–1). It is matters of formatting and readability, however, that leads me to prefer the Norton to its competitors as a teaching text. While both the Riverside and Bevington’s Complete Works present the plays according to divisions of genre deriving from the First Folio, the Norton follows the Oxford editors in presenting the plays and poems in a reconstructed chronological order, thereby offering a glimpse

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of what Greenblatt calls ‘The Shakespearean Trajectory’ (56–9). Moreover, I have found that students appreciate the user-friendly page layout of the Norton. Each page contains only one column of lines, with textual glosses in the righthand margin and longer notes below. The Riverside and The Complete Works, on the other hand, fit two columns of text on each page, leaving both longer notes and glosses somewhat less accessible at the bottom of the page. Of course, given their price and heft, these one-volume editions of Shakespeare’s works are not always desirable. Among single-play editions of The Tempest, the Arden third series stands apart. Edited by literary scholar Virginia Mason Vaughan and historian Alden T. Vaughan, this volume provides a comprehensive introduction analysing the play’s genesis, genre, structure, music, language and characters, along with accounts of its early performance history, its domestic and colonial contexts, and its ‘afterlife’ across four centuries. In the main text, excellent glossarial notes and commentary point the way to sources, contextual documents and critical arguments relevant to a given line’s interpretative possibilities, while a second set of notes records textual variants from the previous editions (as in all plays in the Arden series). Appendices include selections from source texts (Strachey’s A True Reportory and Montaigne’s ‘Of the Caniballes’) and appropriations (Browning’s ‘Caliban on Setebos’, Rodó’s Ariel, and Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban). In fact, in the revised edition (2011), the Arden editors revisit the issue of The Tempest’s sources and extend their account of the play’s performance history, surveying important recent productions such as Janice Honeyman’s RSC Tempest in Cape Town (2009) and Julie Taymor’s film adaptation (2010), starring Helen Mirren as Prospera. Overall, the Arden Tempest is the clear choice for scholarly work and graduate-level study. Those in search of an alternative scholarly edition might consult either Stephen Orgel’s Tempest from the Oxford Shakespeare series or the New Cambridge Tempest, edited by David Lindley. Orgel’s 1987 edition was reprinted, unrevised,

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in 2008. As such, certain sections of his excellent introduction – most obviously the illustrated stage history (64–87) – are no longer current, though his thorough notes and commentary on the playtext remain hard to beat. Happily, emphasis on performance history (and an insistence on the mutual interpretative value of stage performance and literary criticism) is a strength of Lindley’s Tempest. Indeed, appendices on performing the play’s songs and on casting choices redouble Lindley’s concentration on production. A revised version of his 2002 edition was published in 2013. In keeping with the approach of Cambridge University Press’s Shakespeare in Production series, Christine Dymkowski’s Tempest forgoes textual glosses, instead offering lengthy notes on the multifarious ways in which each line and silence in Shakespeare’s text has been interpreted and reinterpreted on stage over the past four hundred years. This focus makes Dymkowski’s edition unsuited for the undergraduate classroom but potentially invaluable for directors, actors and scholars interested in the play’s performance history. Dymkowski (understandably) limits the scope of her project to productions of The Tempest itself, excluding the many adaptations and appropriations of the play – a subject on which the researcher will likely find the Arden edition more useful. As one might expect, the strength of Peter Hulme and William Sherman’s Norton Critical Tempest is its supporting material. A section dedicated to sources and contexts includes documents on magic and witchcraft (from Ovid, but also from Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Reginald Scott and William Biddulph), politics and religion (Samuel Purchas and Gabriel Naudé), and geography and travel (Montaigne, Strachey, and five excerpts from early modern travel documents). The volume also offers an extensive compilation of reprinted criticism both old (Dryden, Coleridge and Henry James) and relatively new (Orgel, Hulme, Gurr, Marcus and others), as well as an equally impressive selection of excerpts from theatrical, filmic and literary ‘rewritings and appropriations’

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(301–50). While some undergraduates have, in my experience, been overwhelmed by the sheer array of material available in this edition, the contextual cultural materials make it a solid choice for the upper-level student. Bedford/St Martin’s The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan, has much to offer both the classroom instructor and the individual researcher. The playtext and notes are reprinted from Bevington’s complete works. Graff and Phelan’s real contribution is the second part of the volume, which provides not only the usual array of source texts and contextual documents, but also an impressive assortment of important essays arranged as critical camps in argument with one another: traditional old historical and new critical approaches, postcolonial challenges, and feminist reexaminations. These essays – including work by Frank Kermode, Reuben Brower, Leah Marcus, Paul Brown, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, Deborah Willis, David Scott Kastan, Meredith Anne Skura, Ania Loomba and Ann Thompson – serve as an excellent introduction to evolving critical conversations about Shakespeare’s play for students and scholars alike. A number of smaller, teaching editions of The Tempest are also available, many of them exceptionally well suited for beginning students. The Signet Classic edition, edited by Robert Langbaum, offers an introductory overview, including a brief biography, a glance at the authorship controversy, a summary account of early modern theatrical conventions, and some useful notes on Shakespeare’s dramatic language. It also contains more supporting material than similar editions, including excerpts from source texts and a selection of critical writings ranging from Coleridge to E. M. W. Tillyard to Greenblatt. The Pelican edition lacks the Signet’s sections on source material and critical commentary, but Peter Holland provides a clear and concise introduction to both the play and ‘The Theatrical World’ of early modern England (vii–xxii). That said, perhaps my favourite of these introductory-level editions is the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Tempest, edited

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by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Like all volumes in the New Folger Library series, this edition provides an account of Shakespeare’s language (with examples tailored to the text at hand), a biography, a description of early modern theatres, a section on the publication of Shakespeare’s plays, and an explanation of editorial principles observed. Most useful from a teaching perspective, explanatory notes on the playtext appear on left-facing pages, allowing the editors space to supplement their commentary with an impressive array of relevant images from Tudor-Stuart cultural documents. Following the text, Mowat also contributes a particularly accessible ‘Modern Perspective’ on the play (185–99). The volume closes with a short annotated bibliography of classic criticism and a ‘Key to Famous Lines and Phrases’ (217–8). Finally, two recent versions of The Tempest showcase the ways in which digital humanities initiatives are redefining what constitutes an edition in the first place. Brent Whitted and Paul Yachnin’s digital edition of the play, published and hosted by the University of Victoria’s Internet Shakespeare Editions (internetshakespeare.uvic.ca), might just as well have appeared in the next section of this chapter.1 Whitted and Yachnin have composed a scholarly introduction addressing the play’s origins, genre, themes, characters, critical reception and performance history that would not be out of place in an accomplished print edition; however, there most similarities end. First, the editors are able to offer both a modern spelling and an early modern spelling version of the playtext, each fully searchable with pop-up, hyperlinked notes. Furthermore, they provide links to no fewer than five facsimile texts, two different First Folios and one each of the Second, Third and Fourth Folios. A section of the ISE site entitled ‘Shakespeare’s Life and Times’ – subjects include the unities in The Tempest, Prospero and Shakespeare, Caliban and colonization, the young lovers, special effects, music, and masques – complements and expands on material covered in the introduction. The edition’s digital medium also allows the editors and site managers to continually

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update sections entitled ‘Performances’ and ‘Performance Materials’; thus, while the playtexts were edited in 2006, as of mid–2013, the most recent performance listed was also in 2013. Luminary Digital Media’s The Tempest for IPad, created by Elliott Visconsi and Katherine Rowe, pushes the possibilities of the digital edition even further. This app relies on the Folger edition for its playtext, but lines are not just fully searchable, users can also take notes, select and store passages for later analysis, and share their questions and commentary via social media platforms. A linked fulllength audio performance by Actors From the London Stage ensures that any passage may be listened to aloud; indeed, several key selections offer multiple, alternative audio performances. Moreover, a partnership with the Folger Shakespeare Library furnishes an outstanding selection of relevant illustrations, podcasts and video clips. Perhaps most impressive, the app offers extensive commentary from a host of leading Shakespeare scholars on passages throughout the text.

A glance at online resources Some of the best online resources on Shakespeare’s plays and poems are available through the Folger Shakespeare Library’s website. The site’s pedagogical component (accessed via the ‘Teach and Learn’ tab) includes more than a dozen lesson plans for The Tempest designed primarily for middle and high school students, a podcast discussing the relevance of the wreck of the Sea Venture to Shakespeare’s play, digital facsimiles of the play as it appears in two different copies of the First Folio, and much more. An incredible ‘Primary Sources Archive’ provides links to gorgeous, classroom-ready images of relevant source and contextual documents for each of Shakespeare’s plays – fourteen links for The Tempest alone. Each document has its own page complete with a general description and suggestions

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for uses in the classroom. Furthermore, ‘The Tempest Photo Gallery’ in the Folger’s Digital Image Collection (accessible online via LUNA Insight at http://luna.foger.edu) includes 430 high-resolution illustrations, costume designs, photographs, and screenshots from historical editions and productions of the play both old and recent. Another useful resource is Norton Literature Online (www. norton.com/shakespeare), a companion site for The Norton Shakespeare accessible with a registration code printed on that text’s second page. The Tempest is one of six plays for which Norton has designed a ‘Workshop’. This impressive multimedia sub-site includes nine topics – the New World, Caliban, Language, Music, Love, Ariel, Metadrama, Masques, and Magic – to facilitate analysis of the play, each with its own page containing an introductory description with images from early modern contextual documents and significant historical productions, ‘Questions for Discussion, Writing, and Research’, and suggestions for further reading. The workshop also offers pages on source texts, theatrical receptions and critical receptions, as well as a select bibliography. Throughout the workshop site, discussions of scenes in the play are hyperlinked to the relevant lines in a digital version of Norton’s playtext – itself a potentially useful resource for in-class projection. Finally, tabs entitled ‘Shakespeare’s Songbook’ and ‘Audio/Video Resources’ offer a handful of Tempest-related recordings and clips. MIT’s Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive (globalshakespeares.mit.edu) provides an even richer resource for such media. The site offers online access to films and recorded performances involving Shakespeare from all over the world on the conviction that demonstrating ‘the diversity of the world-wide reception and production of Shakespeare’s plays […] will nourish the remarkable array of new forms of cultural exchange that the digital age has made possible’. As such, the archive is continually growing. When I visited the site, it claimed a catalogue of ‘more than 397 productions, 75 video clips, and online videos of over 30 full productions’;2

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I located 25 listed productions related to The Tempest, nine with video footage available in seven different languages – including English, French, Arabic, Mandarin, Korean, Italian and Malayalam. When it comes to online video content, no resource trumps youtube.com. The site offers a veritable cornucopia of clips from recorded theatrical productions and filmic interpretations of The Tempest. While the quality of such clips varies widely, it is possible to find and (with the help of easily acquired software) to download invaluable material for classroom use. Scenes and trailers are readily available from films such as Fred Wilcox’s 1956 science fiction adaptation Forbidden Planet, Derek Jarman’s avant-garde film version of the play (1979), Peter Greenaway’s experimental Prospero’s Books (1991), Julie Taymor’s recent star-studded Tempest (2010), and many others. Lastly, it is worth mentioning some of the online study guides for Shakespeare’s plays that many students will consult despite their professors’ warnings about the shortcomings of such resources. SparkNotes, CliffsNotes, enotes.com, and shmoop.com (to name a few of the better-known examples) each offer summaries, character analysis, thematic breakdowns, quizzes, and prospective essay questions on The Tempest. Beyond study guides, students and teachers alike may benefit from the assortment of links assembled by Terry Gray on his site, ‘Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet’ (shakespeare.palomar.edu). Gray maintains links to useful pages on early modern theatre culture and on Shakespeare’s biography, contemporaries and sources. The site also offers access to a number of critical articles on each of the plays, including seven on The Tempest.

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Critical approaches and lenses for classroom study A growing number of print publications focus on strategies for teaching The Tempest, many detailing in-class exercises and prospective essay topics.3 Rather than duplicate such work, this section outlines several established and emergent critical lenses for approaching the play and suggests strategies for using those lenses to facilitate classroom discussion.

Social hierarchies and politics Early scholarship on The Tempest tended to understand Prospero as an artist figure (even a Shakespeare stand-in) whose creative power allows him to forge order from chaos. According to such interpretations, the magus occupies a happy medium (both elementally and psychologically) between the earthy and libidinous Caliban and the ethereal, non-human Ariel – he is a balanced creator who in turn brings balance to nature and controls potentially subversive elements within his mini-commonwealth (Kermode). However, more recent work has reevaluated Shakespeare’s approach to issues of order, contending that The Tempest does not simply reproduce, but also interrogates visions of natural hierarchy (Norbrook, McAlindon). Instructors might encourage students to explore the play’s treatment of cosmic and social hierarchies by asking them to consider how different characters in the play would regard the striking image of The Great Chain of Being from Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi … Historia (available via the Folger’s ‘Primary Source Archive’ for The Tempest). Internet Shakespeare Editions also offers a variety of complementary images and excerpts on this subject under the heading ‘Putting Nature in Order’ (within the ‘Ideas’ section of the ‘Life and Times’ tab). I found such material particular

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effective when juxtaposed with the Boatswain’s challenges to conventional social structure in The Tempest’s opening scene (1.1.10–39).4

Travel, geography and colonialism Perhaps the largest shift in critical appraisal of The Tempest came with recognition of the play’s engagement with New World contexts – Ariel’s trip to the ‘still-vexed Bermudas’ (1.2.229), Sycorax and Caliban’s South American deity Setebos (1.2.374), and Trinculo’s ‘dead Indian’ (2.2.32) (Frey) – and with the broader discourses of colonialism (Greenblatt, Brown, Barker and Hulme). While subsequent work has warned against overstating the text’s preoccupation with the colonial project (Willis, Skura), postcolonial approaches have had a particularly meaningful impact on interpretations of Caliban, likening him to a native ‘Which first was [his] own king’ (1.2.343), only to be displaced and enslaved by the usurping, European Prospero. The Tempest’s various intertexts offer excellent start points for exploring this topic in the classroom (Mowat). Reading excerpts from Strachey’s ‘True Reportory’ – reprinted in many editions and available in facsimile form via the Folger Shakespeare Library’s ‘Primary Source Archive’ – prompts students to come to their own conclusions about the play’s complicity with, or interrogation of, colonialism. Similarly, encouraging students to reexamine the play’s much-discussed New World allusions and Gonzalo’s description of his ideal commonwealth (2.1.148–57) alongside the latter’s established source text, John Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s ‘Of the Caniballes’, might prompt consideration of the extent to which Shakespeare engages Montaigne’s insights about the relativity of civility and savagery. Beyond source texts, the Folger’s ‘Primary Source Archive’ also offers classroom-ready excerpts from early modern travel narratives and reproductions of maps preselected for their contextual relevance to the play.

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Gender, sexuality and marriage Just as postcolonial approaches to The Tempest unsettled traditional humanistic and old historical interpretations, so feminist criticism illuminated persistent oversights concerning the play’s representations of women, gender and sexuality. Such scholarship has emphasized that while Miranda is the only woman to appear on stage in The Tempest, a number of other women hovering just off-stage play crucial roles nonetheless: Miranda’s unnamed mother, Ferdinand’s sister Claribel, the witch Sycorax, and even the ‘widow Dido’ (2.1.77–102) (Loomba, Thompson, Orgel). Recent work has also sought to rehabilitate Miranda herself as a ‘self-fashioning woman’ capable of ‘defiant actions’ rather than ‘a dehumanized cipher’.5 In the classroom, instructors might remind students that The Tempest was performed at court in 1613 as one of the entertainments celebrating the marriage of King James I’s daughter Elizabeth to Frederick the Elector Palatine. As such, students may find it instructive to consider the similarities in dynastic and gender politics between this historical royal union and the marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand within the play (Leininger). Moreover, I have found the panoply of early modern cultural documents gathered by Peter Stallybrass in his excellent ‘Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed’ invaluable for contextualizing the discourses of chastity that Prospero invokes so vociferously as prologue to the masque (4.1.13–23).6 Lastly, Julie Taymor’s recent film adaptation (multiple clips available via MIT’s Video and Performance Archive) can be used to open a compelling dialogue about the manifold effects of cross-casting roles (Hartley).

Music and masque Interpretations of music and masque in The Tempest are predictably various. Some scholars regard Prospero as an Orpheus/Amphion figure, tuning nature’s confused cacophony

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to a more perfect, harmonious order (Simonds), while others contend that the play’s ‘treatment of concord and discord […] invite[s] a less univocal interpretation than Prospero seeks to impose’ (Neill, Ortiz).7 Similarly, scholarship has begun to complicate the traditional view that Shakespeare’s play simply recreates the conservative Neo-Platonism characteristic of Stuart court masquing culture (Lindley, Bevington). Surviving musical settings for both ‘Full Fathom Five’ and ‘Where the Bee Sucks’ by Shakespeare’s contemporary Robert Johnson (reprinted in both the Arden and the Oxford editions) provide an excellent opportunity for multimedia instruction. A high-quality audio recording of both songs is available online via arsantiguapresents.com, and students may benefit from considering how hearing these works performed affects their understandings of 1.2.397–405 and 5.1.88–94. Instructors might also refer students to Internet Shakespeare Editions’ useful introduction to the early modern masque (under the ‘Stage’ tab), where images of costumes and stage settings by Inigo Jones invite classroom discussion of the social and political significance of different Renaissance dramatic forms.

Magic and education Traditional critical approaches to magic in The Tempest stressed the distinction between Prospero’s theurgy, or ‘white’ magic, and Sycorax’s goety, or ‘black’ magic (Traister, Mebane). More recently, critical work has extended focus on Prospero’s learning beyond his magic. Building on postcolonial criticism’s observations about the role of language instruction in the colonial project, such scholarship has begun to focus on Prospero – a self-identified ‘schoolmaster’ (1.2.172) – as an educator (Carey-Webb, Winson, Shin). Prospero’s famous renunciation speech (5.1.33–57) offers a natural touchstone for classroom conversation about the play’s magic. Reading this speech alongside its source text – an incantation voiced by the witch Medea in Arthur

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Golding’s translation of Ovid – should encourage students to question overly simplistic distinctions between Prospero’s and Sycorax’s art and the gendered implications thereof (Bate, Lyne). Meanwhile, the play’s lengthy second scene serves as an excellent starting point for in-class discussion on the subject of education. Choice excerpts from early modern pedagogical treatises such as Richard Mulcaster’s Positions […] for the training up of children or Montaigne’s ‘Of the Institution and Education of Children’ can do much to complicate the significance of the often-domineering history lessons that Prospero offers Miranda, Ariel and Caliban (Moncrief, Rothschild).

Selected annotated bibliography The following bibliography includes an introductory overview of essay collections on The Tempest from 1969 to the present, subject-specific sections corresponding to the approaches described above, and a concluding section surveying recent work on the play’s performance history and adaptations. In sections after the first, I focus on texts published since 2000, but also include some important earlier scholarship on each topic. For a more exhaustive bibliography of criticism on the play prior to the turn of the century, consult John S. Mebane and Richard L. Nochimson’s excellent annotated bibliography of work on Shakespeare’s late plays from 1864 through 2000.8

Essay collections Bloom, Harold ed., Caliban (New York: Chelsea House, 1992). Compiles essays and excerpts from critical works discussing Caliban by authors ranging from Dryden to twentieth-century scholars, including Frye, Kermode, Berger, Orgel, Greenblatt, Skura, V. Vaughan and others. Bloom’s introduction critiques narrowly focused postcolonial approaches to Tem.

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Bloom, Harold ed., William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (New York: Chelsea House, 1988). Reprints important work on Tem by Paul Brown, Harry Berger, Marjorie Garber, Stephen Greenblatt, Stephen Orgel, Barbara Traister and others. Döring, Tobias, and Virginia Mason Vaughan eds, Critical and Cultural Transformations: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 1611 to the Present (REAL – Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 29 [Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 2013]). Offers fourteen new essays. Six articles in Part 1 focus on the various ‘literary, historical, philosophical, religious and/ or cultural connections through which [The Tempest] is interrelated – and interacts – with discourses and practices in the period of its first production’ (3). In Part 2, eight more essays take up recent ‘critical and cultural transformations’ of the play ‘across a range of media and different culture […] in Cuba, China, Germany or Japan […] in theatrical staging or rewriting, in DIY versions on YouTube or in arthouse films on screen’ (3). Lie, Nadia, and Thea D’haen eds, Constellation Caliban: Figurations of a Character (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997). A collection of seventeen works – four critical essays analysing stage representations of and sources for Shakespeare’s Caliban, twelve more essays discussing later adaptations and appropriations centring on the character, and a closing poem by Cedric Barefoot. Hulme, Peter, and William H. Sherman eds, The Tempest and Its Travels (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Offers eighteen essays on The Tempest and its adaptations arranged into three categories: those addressing ‘Local Knowledge’ and domestic contexts; those involving ‘European and Mediterranean Crossroads’; and those addressing ‘Transatlantic Routes’ related to the New World. Also includes Tempest-related poems, visual art, and excerpts from several twentieth-century appropriations. Murphy, Patrick ed., The Tempest: Critical Essays (New York and London: Routledge, 2001). A four-part anthology, including an introductory account of

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The Tempest’s evolving ‘critical legacy’, 19 reprints of literary criticism (whole and excerpted) ranging from Dryden to Arthur F. Kinney, 11 performance reviews and essays about performance, and eight original essays on The Tempest and Montaigne, The Tempest’s print history, modernist versions of The Tempest, and more. Palmer, D. J. ed., The Tempest: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1969). A perfect introduction to traditional new critical and old historical approaches to The Tempest. Part One offers reprinted excerpts of Dryden and Davenant’s Enchanted Island and Auden’s ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ alongside historical interpretations of The Tempest. Part Two includes work by Reuben Brower, G. Wilson Knight, E. M. W. Tillyard, Frank Kermode and J. Middleton Murry. Smith, Hallett ed., Twentieth-Century Interpretations of The Tempest: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969). This early collection provides another excellent sampling of traditional critical approaches to the play. Essays and excerpts of commentary by G. Wilson Knight, Frank Kermode, A. D. Nuttall, Northrop Frye, A. C. Bradley and others. Vaughan, Virginia Mason, and Alden T. Vaughan eds, Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s The Tempest (London: Prentice Hall, 1998). A collection of essential critical work on The Tempest, including essays and excerpts by Jonathan Bate, Meredith Anne Skura, David Scott Kastan, Barbara Mowat, Russ McDonald, Ann Thompson, Alden T. Vaughan and others. White, R. S. ed., The Tempest: Contemporary Critical Essays (New York: St Martin’s, 1999). A collection of ten essays and excerpts by leading scholars designed to survey a wide variety of literary critical approaches to The Tempest. Wood, Nigel ed., The Tempest, Theory in Practice Series (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1995). A collection of essays selected to showcase different literary

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theoretical approaches to The Tempest, including formalist, materialist, new historicist, and psychoanalytic models.

Social hierarchies and politics Beck, Ervin, ‘Platonism and Politics in The Tempest’, in Politics Otherwise: Shakespeare as Social and Political Critique, eds Leonidas Donskis and J. D. Mininger (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 85–94. Surveys the oppositions between traditional and more recent postcolonial or feminist approaches to The Tempest and analyses their political underpinnings. Brevik, Frank W., The Tempest and New Word-Utopian Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Contests critical assessment of The Tempest as ‘a fiercely political palimpsest grounded in historical events like colonialism’, suggesting instead that ‘the Americanist impulses of the play form part of a larger utopian discourse that has been all but neglected by Tempest criticism’ (3–4). Hamilton, Donna B., Virgil and The Tempest: The Politics of Imitation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990). Analyses The Tempest’s links to Virgil’s Aeneid to suggest that the play subtly critiques the absolutist politics of James I. Kastan, David Scott, ‘“The Duke of Milan / And his brave son”: Dynastic Politics in The Tempest’, in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Prentice Hall, 1998), 91–103. Contends that postcolonial approaches to The Tempest tend to overlook the play’s larger focus on dynastic politics and its investment in early modern social concerns. Kermode, Frank, William Shakespeare: The Final Plays: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, The Two Noble Kinsmen (London: Longmans, 1963). Includes a classic study of The Tempest that presents Prospero as an artist figure bringing civilized order to base nature both within and without.

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Lee, Young Cho, ‘The Theatrical Representation of Politics in The Tempest’, Journal of English Language and Literature (Seoul) 49 (2003), 935–54. Argues that The Tempest both endorses and obliquely critiques the political ideologies of James I. Lupton, Julia Reinhard, ‘Creature Caliban’, Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000), 1–23. Limns an early modern ‘discourse of the creaturely’ and suggests that Caliban ‘takes shape beneath the arc of wonder that moves throughout the play between “creatures” and “mankind”’ (2–3). McAlindon, Thomas, ‘The Discourse of Prayer in The Tempest’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 41 (2001), 335–55. Uses an analysis of prayer in The Tempest to contest postcolonial critiques of the play. Contends that the text endorses not ‘an intrinsically oppressive hierarchical order’ but a ‘leveling, horizontal ethic of interdependence and reciprocity’ (336). Norbrook, David, ‘“What cares these roarers for the name of king?”: Language and Utopia in The Tempest’, in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, eds Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 21–54. Suggests that The Tempest is ‘structured around […] oppositions between courtly discourse and wider linguistic contexts’ (159) such that it reproduces but also questions ‘complacent celebrations of a natural order’ (177). Schlueter, Nathan, ‘Prospero’s Second Sailing: Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and the Politics of The Tempest’, in Shakespeare’s Last Plays: Essays in Literature and Politics, eds Stephen W. Smith and Travis Curtright (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), 179–95. Argues that Prospero learns a ‘politics which incorporates much of the Machiavellian project while retaining critical aspects of the classical alternative’, thus balancing philosophy and political necessity (191). Strier, Richard, ‘“I am power”: Normal and Magical Politics in The Tempest’, in Writing and Political Engagement in

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Seventeenth-Century England, eds Derek Hirst and Richard Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10–30. Suggests that The Tempest continues Shakespeare’s career-long exploration of ‘service’, but contends that it is ‘more conservative than the plays that precede it’, reflecting on ‘the practical or existential rather than the moral limits of authority’ (10).

Travel, geography and colonialism Barker, Francis, and Peter Hulme, ‘Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Contexts of The Tempest’, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis, 2nd edn (London and New York, Routledge, 2002), 194–208. An important essay, first published in 1985, helped define The Tempest as ‘a play imbricated within the discourses of colonialism’, and cautioned against ‘critical practices that have often been complicit, whether consciously or not, with a colonial ideology’ (207). Brotton, Jerry, ‘“This Tunis, sir, was Carthage”: Contesting Colonialism in The Tempest’, in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba (London and New York, 1998), 23–42. Contends that most postcolonial readings of The Tempest offer ‘historically anachronistic and geographically restrictive view[s] of the play’ by overemphasizing its New World contexts. Examines Mediterranean and Old World references to present ‘a politically and geographically bifurcated’ vision of the play (24). Brown, Paul, ‘“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, eds Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, 2nd edn (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1994), 48–71. An important early essay that presents The Tempest as ‘not simply a reflection of colonialist practices but an intervention in an ambivalent and even contradictory discourse’ that ‘foreground[s] precisely those problems which it works to efface or overcome’ (48).

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Cefalu, Paul A., ‘Rethinking the Discourse of Colonialism in Economic Terms: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Captain John Smith’s Virginia Narratives, and the English Response to Vagrancy’, Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000), 85–119. Argues that postcolonial readings of The Tempest have focused on ‘the early modern English-Native American encounter’ while overlooking the play’s focus on ‘describing or allegorizing embattled economic relationships among the European colonists themselves’ (85). Childs, Peter ed., Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). Reprints excerpts from Trevor R. Griffiths’s ‘“This island’s mine”: Caliban and Colonialism’ and Rob Nixon’s ‘Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest’. Evans, Robert C., ‘“Had I Plantation of This Isle, My Lord”: Exploration and Colonization in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, in Exploration and Colonization, Bloom’s Literary Themes, eds Harold Bloom and Blake Hobby (New York, Infobase, 2010), 179–90. Contends that despite The Tempest’s interest in colonization and exploration, ‘few of the characters fit common stereotypes about explorers and colonizers’ (180). Feerick, Jean, ‘“Divided in Soyle”: Plantation and Degeneracy in The Tempest and The Sea Voyage’, Renaissance Drama 35 (2006), 27–54. Analysing The Tempest alongside Fletcher and Massinger’s The Sea Voyage suggests that Shakespeare’s play ‘obliquely engages the question of whether and how foreign lands might reinscribe the physical and social identity of transplanted Europeans’ (29). Frey, Charles, ‘The Tempest and the New World’, Shakespeare Quarterly 30 (1979), 29–41. An important early consideration of The Tempest’s ‘several glances […] toward the New World’ (29). Go, Kenji, ‘Montaigne’s “Cannibals” and The Tempest Revisited’, Studies In Philology 109 (2012), 455–73. Reexamines the link between The Tempest and Montaigne’s ‘Of

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the Caniballes’, suggesting that the connection provided ‘the source of the name “Sycorax” and the mysterious location of Prospero’s island’ (457). Greenblatt, Stephen J., ‘Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century’, in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, eds Fredi Chiappelli, Michael J. B. Allen and Robert L. Benson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 561–80. A classic study of the complex relationship between language learning and colonialism in The Tempest and beyond. Laroque, François, ‘Italy vs. Africa: Shakespeare’s Topographies of Desire in Othello, Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest’, Shakespeare Studies (Tokyo, Japan) 47 (2009), 1–16. Presents Claribel’s off-stage marriage to the King of Tunis as one of several examples in which Shakespeare ‘predicate[s] desire on tropes of otherness by associating it with various geographical sites where Italy – be it Venice, Rome, Milan or Naples – is opposed to as well as paired with Africa’ (Abstract, 1). Mowat, Barbara, ‘“Knowing I loved my books”: Reading The Tempest Intertextually’, in The Tempest and its Travels, eds Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 27–36. Argues that The Tempest’s many intertexts – especially the Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Montaigne’s Essais, and Strachey’s letter – expand the play’s ‘geographical and temporal boundaries far beyond its apparent limits’ (27). Skura, Meredith Anne, ‘Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989), 42–69. An invaluable survey, and useful critique, of criticism concerning The Tempest’s relationship to the colonial discourse of Shakespeare’s day. Stritmatter, Roger, and Lynne Kositsky, ‘Shakespeare and the Voyagers Revisited’, Review of English Studies 58 (2007), 447–72.

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Argues that William Strachey’s True Reportory was completed too late to be a source for The Tempest.

Vaughan, Alden T., ‘William Strachey’s “True Reportory” and Shakespeare: A Closer Look at the Evidence’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008), 245–73. Counters attempts to remove William Strachey’s letter from the list of The Tempest’s sources. Vaughan, Alden T., and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. An impressively comprehensive analysis of Caliban as a ‘durable cultural signifier’ that traces the character from his literary and historical ‘origins’ through nearly four centuries of ‘receptions’ – on the page, the stage, the screen, and beyond – to discover ‘how and, wherever possible, why each age has appropriated and reshaped him to suit its needs and assumptions’ (ix). Willis, Deborah, ‘Shakespeare’s Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 29 (1989), 277–89. Critiques Paul Brown’s ‘“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’ to warn against the tendency of criticism to present The Tempest as ‘wholly engulfed by colonial discourse’ (278). Wilson-Okamura, David Scott, ‘Virgilian Models of Colonization in Shakespeare’s Tempest’, English Literary History 70 (2003), 709–37. Suggests that The Tempest shares in early modern colonial discourse’s use of Virgil’s Aeneid, and especially Carthage, ‘to focus on issues of character (such as temperance and industry)’ (725). Woodward, Hobson, A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest (New York: Viking, 2009). Asserts the primacy of William Strachey’s account of the wreck of the Sea Venture in 1609 as a source for The Tempest. Wylie, John, ‘New and Old Worlds: The Tempest and Early Colonial Discourse’, Social and Cultural Geography 1 (2000), 45–63.

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Contends that the ‘imaginative geographies’ of The Tempest ‘trace a complex narrative of voyaging and encounter’ in which ‘the problematics of colonization are negotiated within a Renaissance imago mundi still beholden to classical mappings of European empirical and imaginative space’ (46).

Gender, sexuality and marriage Brown, Sarah Annes, ‘The Return of Prospero’s Wife: Mother Figures in The Tempest’s Afterlife’, Shakespeare Survey 56 (2003), 146–60. Finds that The Tempest’s two absent mothers – Prospero’s wife and Sycorax – are ‘surprisingly potent presences’ in both very early and more recent creative responses to the play, anticipating critical focus on ‘issues of race, sexuality, and gender’ (146). Goldberg, Jonathan, Shakespeare’s Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). The essay ‘Under the Covers with Caliban’ explores questions of sexuality in The Tempest through focus on the gendered implications raised by several textual cruxes in the history of the play’s ‘editorial and critical production’ (287). Hartley, Andrew James, ‘Prospera’s Brave New World: Cross-Cast Oppression and the Four-Fold Player in the Georgia Shakespeare Festival’s Tempest’, in Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance, ed., James C. Bulman (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), 131–49. Uses a production of The Tempest in which the role of Prospero was ‘cross-cast’ as Prospera to dissect how standard readings stressing the character’s patriarchal aspects are predicated on the extra-textual assumption of a ‘male body in which the character is personated’ (140). Leininger, Lorie J., ‘The Miranda Trap: Sexism and Racism in Shakespeare’s Tempest’, in The Woman’s Part, eds Carolyn Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 285–94.

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Analyses the symbolic importance of Miranda’s chastity and parallels with the historical Princess Elizabeth.

Loomba, Ania, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). In her final chapter, ‘Seizing the Book’ (142–58), Loomba examines the persistent sexism in most postcolonial readings of The Tempest. Orgel, Stephen, ‘Prospero’s Wife’, Representations 8 (1984), 1–13. A classic study of Prospero’s conspicuously missing wife as a key to The Tempest’s powerful consideration of ‘the absent, the unspoken’ (1). Poole, William, ‘False Play: Shakespeare and Chess’, Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004), 50–70. Resituates Miranda and Ferdinand’s chess match in Act 5 within a literary tradition involving ‘not only kings and courts, but cheating, betting, beating, fighting, class conflict, civil unrest, and seduction’ (53). Sanchez, Melissa E., ‘Seduction and Service in The Tempest’, Studies in Philology 105 (2008), 50–82. Argues that ‘the conjunction of erotic, economic, and political vocabularies of servitude’ in The Tempest implies that political authority is not monolithic, but ‘dispersed across an intricate network of seduction and constraint, desire and deference’ (54). Slights, Jessica, ‘Rape and the Romanticization of Shakespeare’s Miranda’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1599 41 (2001), 357–79. Presents Miranda as a ‘bravely independent but always embedded self’ to remind us that The Tempest ‘does offer some alternative to the paternalist order with which [it] opens’ (376). Thompson, Ann, ‘“Miranda, where’s your sister?”: Reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, in Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Sellers (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 45–55. An important essay that asks ‘what feminist criticism can do in the face of a male-authored canonical text which seems to exclude women to this extent’ (46).

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Music and masque Bevington, David, ‘The Tempest and the Jacobean Court Masque’, in Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, eds David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 218–43. Argues that The Tempest ‘capitalizes on public sentiment about the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick [the Elector Palatine]’ by staging a wedding masque accessible to the excluded common folk – a ‘politics of masquing’ that ‘suggests some implicit criticism of James [I]’ (220; 238). Cholij, Irena, ‘“A thousand twangling instruments”: Music and The Tempest on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage’, Shakespeare Survey 51 (1998), 79–94. Traces the production history of The Tempest during the eighteenth century, ‘focusing specifically on the musical requirements and amendments’ and links between music and magic. Demaray, John G., Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness: The Tempest and the Transformation of Renaissance Theatrical Forms (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998). Contends that The Tempest is not a return to the ‘academic’ drama of Shakespeare’s early career, but an innovative blend of European and English dramatic traditions, particularly court masque. Green, Andrew, ‘Sound and Music in The Tempest’, English Review 13 (2002), 2­–5. Contends that the ‘widely varied nature’ of the island’s music and sounds ‘reflects the changeable and often contradictory nature of Prospero’ (2). Kelsey, Lin, ‘“Many Sorts of Music”: Musical Genre in Twelfth Night and The Tempest’, John Donne Journal: Studies In The Age of Donne 25 (2006), 129–81. Links music to dramatic genre and explores Shakespeare’s awareness of early modern musical developments. Lindley, David, The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

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Includes an excellent chapter entitled ‘Music, Masque, and Meaning in The Tempest’ (47–59), which contends that The Tempest ‘explores the tensions’ between music’s capacity to delude or awaken illicit passions and its ability (conventionally invoked in court masques) to create harmony (47).

Lindley, David, ‘The Tempest’s Masque and Opera’, in Shakespeare and the Mediterranean, eds T. Clayton, S. Brock, V. Forès and J. Levenson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 103–16. Considers how various historical productions of The Tempest have struggled with Miranda and Ferdinand’s betrothal masque in Act 4. Concludes that many problems are solved by transforming the masque into a ‘mini-opera’ (103). Minear, Erin, Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton: Language, Memory, and Musical Representation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Includes a chapter called ‘Playing Music: Twelfth Night and The Tempest’. Neill, Michael, ‘“Noises, / Sounds, and Sweet Airs”: The Burden of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008), 36–59. Analyses the language of music and sound in The Tempest – particularly resonance between the text’s physical, emotional and musical ‘burdens’ – to argue that the play’s ‘treatment of concord and discord’ is not so narrow as Prospero’s interpretation (45). Ortiz, Joseph, Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the Politics of Music (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). Includes a chapter entitled ‘Impolitic Noise: Resisting Orpheus from Julius Caesar to The Tempest’. Pask, Kevin, ‘Caliban’s Masque’, English Literary History 70 (2003), 739–56. Contends that the relationship between The Tempest and Ben Jonson’s court masques has much to reveal about ‘Shakespearean theatricality and its relationship to the history of sexuality’ (746). Simonds, Peggy Muñoz, ‘“Sweet power of music”: the political magic of “The Miraculous Harp” in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, Comparative Drama 29 (1995), 61–90.

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Presents Prospero as ‘a type of Orpheus’ who brings ‘harmony to his garden kingdom, control[s] his own passions, and civilize[s] the wild man’ (86).

Magic and education Carey-Webb, Allen, ‘National and Colonial Education in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, Early Modern Literary Studies 5 (1999), 3.1­­–39. Finds links between The Tempest’s representations of schooling and colonialism. Dawkins, Peter, The Wisdom of Shakespeare in The Tempest (Warwickshire: I. C. Media, 2000). Explores The Tempest’s engagement with alchemy, Neo-Platonism, Rosicrucianism and cabala. Friesen, Ryan Curtis, Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama and Culture (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010). A chapter entitled ‘Magic in The Tempest: Shakespeare’s Critique of Rough Art and Harsh Reason’ (190–212) suggests that magic in The Tempest represents the ‘ways in which knowledge and power are gained and governance sought on a middle ground between theory and experience’ (190). Kearney, James, The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Includes a chapter entitled ‘Book, Trinket, Fetish: Letters and Mastery in The Tempest’, which analyses The Tempest’s ‘exploration of the book as an icon of European enlightenment and Christian transcendence’ (179). Knopp, Sherron, ‘Poetry as Conjuring Act: The Franklin’s Tale and The Tempest’, Chaucer Review: A Journal Of Medieval Studies And Literary Criticism 38 (2004), 337–54. Extends earlier arguments that Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale is a source text for The Tempest by positing ‘a shared engagement on the part of [Chaucer and Shakespeare] with the status of poetry as illusion and conjuring act’ (338).

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Lucking, David, ‘Carrying Tempest in His Hand and Voice. The Figure of the Magician in Jonson and Shakespeare’, English Studies: A Journal Of English Language And Literature 85 (2004), 297–310. Contends that The Tempest influenced Jonson’s The Alchemist, not vice versa. Lyne, Raphael, ‘Ovid, Golding, and the “Rough Magic” of The Tempest’, in Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems, ed. A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 150–64. Reexamines the significance of Shakespeare’s borrowing from Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses for Prospero’s abjuration speech (5.1.33–57). McAdam, Ian, Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009). Suggests that Prospero’s ‘appropriation of pre-Oedipal or maternal magic results in an ambivalence between a recuperation of “feminine” nature and a continued masculine narcissistic idealism’ (21). Mebane, John S., Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). Explores The Tempest’s engagement with the philosophical strand of early modern magical theory in particular. Moncrief, Kathryn M., ‘“Obey and Be Attentive”: Gender and Household Instruction in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, in Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood, ed. Naomi J. Miller (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 127–38. Analyses The Tempest alongside early modern pedagogical texts, contending that Prospero’s instruction of Miranda ‘raises important questions about the practice and purpose of education in the household, especially the schooling of daughters’ (128). Mowat, Barbara, ‘Prospero’s Book’, Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001), 1–33. Situates Prospero’s ‘always-offstage book’ of magic in the context of actual early modern manuscript grimoires or conjuring books (1).

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Rothschild, N. Amos, ‘Learning to Doubt: The Tempest, Imitatio, and Montaigne’s “Of the Institution and Education of Children”’, in Critical and Cultural Transformations: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 1611 to the Present, eds Tobias Döring and Virginia Mason Vaughan (Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 2013), 17–36. Suggests that The Tempest playfully engages with Montaigne’s ‘Of the Institution and Education of Children’, an essay that itself explores the power and the dangers of education and imitatio. Contends that this engagement informs the play’s staging of the problems and processes of learning, particularly Prospero’s pedantic aspects. Shin, Hiewon, ‘Single Parenting, Homeschooling: Prospero, Caliban, Miranda’, Studies In English Literature, 1500–1900 48 (2008), 373–93. Reads Prospero as ‘a homeschooling single parent to both Caliban and Miranda’ and explores why his ‘unorthodox educational methods’ fail with one pupil and work with the other (373). Sokol, B. J., A Brave New World of Knowledge: Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Early Modern Epistemology (London: Associated University Press, 2003). Draws on early modern scientific writings regarding natural history, atmospheric science, and time measurement and more to suggest that The Tempest shares with such discourse an emphasis on ‘the aesthetics of truthfulness and order’ rather than on ‘the aesthetics of surprise’ (18). Stanivukovic, Goran, ‘The Tempest and the Discontents of Humanism’, Philological Quarterly 85.1–2 (2006), 91–119. Attempts to ‘displace the postcolonial approach to The Tempest’ by ‘re[en]visioning [the play] as allegorizing humanism’s positive and negative characteristics’ (91). Traister, Barbara Howard, Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984). Links Prospero and other early modern magus figures to two views of the magician, one from a ‘popular and literary’ tradition best expressed in medieval romances, and another from an ‘elitist and philosophical’ tradition of Italian Neo-Platonic magical theory (1–2).

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Winson, Patricia, ‘“A Double Spirit of Teaching”: What Shakespeare’s Teachers Teach Us’, Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 1 (1997), 8.1–31. Includes Prospero in an analysis of Shakespeare’s teacher figures. Contends that in The Tempest and elsewhere, Shakespeare critiques those who ‘use language solely to promote their own erudition or to exert power’ (2).

Performance history and adaptation Bate, Jonathan, ‘Caliban and Ariel Write Back’, Shakespeare Survey 48 (1996), 155–62. Works to redress the elision of non-white non-European responses to The Tempest in criticism on the play by focusing on the work of George Lamming, Aimé Césaire, Roberto Fernández Retamar, and especially Edward Brathwaite. Bosman, Anston, ‘Cape of Storms: The Baxter Theatre Centre–RSC Tempest, 2009’, Shakespeare Quarterly 61 (2010), 108–17. Analyses the successes and failures of Janice Honeyman’s 2009 RSC production of The Tempest in South Africa and queries whether the production ‘signaled the exhaustion of The Tempest as a vehicle for [colonial allegory]’ (109). Dobson, Michael, ‘“Remember / First to possess his books”: The Appropriation of The Tempest, 1700–1800’, in Shakespeare and History, eds Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (New York and London: Garland, 1999), 433–42. Examines eighteenth-century appropriations of The Tempest to ‘sketch a history of the cultural pressures under which this text was enabled to function alternatively as a fiction of gender relations and a fiction of racial mastery’ (433). Goldberg, Jonathan, Tempest in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Applies a feminist and queer studies approach ‘to open a discussion of questions of sexuality that have not been broached in much of the critical literature on the topic of [Caribbean re-] deployments of The Tempest’ (3). Gurr, Andrew, ‘The Bare Island’, in Shakespeare in the Theater,

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eds Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (New York and London: Garland, 1999), 29–43. Uses Prospero’s epilogue to begin an account of the original staging of Shakespeare’s plays.

Henderson, Diana E., ‘Shakespearean Comedy, Tempest-Toss’d: Genre, Social Transformation, and Contemporary Performance’, in Shakespeare and Genre: From Early Modern Inheritances to Postmodern Legacies, ed. Anthony R. Guneratne (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 137–52. Uses Julie Taymor’s film adaptation of The Tempest as a key example of the ‘ways in which Shakespeare and genre can be, or fail to be, mutually refreshing through performance’ (140). Holland, Peter, ‘Modernizing Shakespeare: Nicholas Rowe and The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000), 24–32. Examines the text of The Tempest from Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition of Shakespeare’s works to demonstrate that Rowe ‘established a practice of presentation and modernization of Shakespeare’s text that continues to exert exceptional influence’ (24). Hopkins, Lisa, Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, The Relationship between Text and Film (London: Methuen Drama, 2008). Analyses film adaptations of The Tempest, with special focus on The Forbidden Planet, Derek Jarman’s The Tempest, and Prospero’s Books. Horowitz, Arthur, Prospero’s ‘True Preservers’: Peter Brook, Yukio Ninagawa, and Giorgio Strehler – Twentieth-Century Directors Approach Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004). Analyses six post-WWII productions of The Tempest to show how ‘the dynamics that go into directing a production of The Tempest turn its director into Prospero’s surrogate’ (12). Jefferson, Teddy, ‘Rorschach Tempest or The Tempest of William S. Performed by Flies on the Erection of a Dreaming Hyena’, Shakespeare Quarterly 61 (2010), 78–107. Playwright and fiction writer Teddy Jefferson offers a dreamy argument between a director and his researcher about how and why The Tempest might be performed today.

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Khoury, Joseph, ‘The Tempest Revisited in Martinique: Aimé Césaire’s Shakespeare’, Journal For Early Modern Cultural Studies 6 (2006), 22–37. Applies Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in comparing The Tempest and Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête. Nixon, Rob, ‘Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest’, Critical Inquiry 13 (1987), 557–78. A classic study of postcolonial responses to The Tempest by Octave Mannoni, George Lamming, Aimé Césaire and Roberto Fernández Retamar. Singh, Jyotsna, ‘Caliban versus Miranda: Race and Gender Conflicts in Postcolonial Rewritings of The Tempest’, in Shakespeare’s Romances, ed. Alison Thorne (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 205–25. Contends that postcolonial appropriations of The Tempest tend to reconfigure oppression rather than truly interrogating hierarchical structures, particularly when it comes to relations between men and women. Stalpaert, Christel ed., Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books: Critical Essays, Studies in Performing Arts and Film, 3 (Ghent: Academia Press, 2000). Offers seven essays examining Greenaway’s filmic adaptation of The Tempest. Vaughan, Virginia Mason, ‘Literary Invocations of The Tempest’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Last Plays, ed. Catherine M. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 155–72. Examines adaptations and appropriations of The Tempest with particular focus on works that respond to the play’s ‘unusual emphasis on the role of art in human consciousness as well as its limitations, particularly in relation to the material world’ (155). Vaughan, Virginia Mason, The Tempest: Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Situates productions of The Tempest from Dryden and Davenant to the twenty-first century within their historical contexts to provide an excellent analysis of the ways in which ‘cultural attitudes, political issues, and changing aesthetic principles have

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been intertwined in [The Tempest’s] fascinating performance history’ (2). Welsh, James M., Shakespeare into Film (New York: Checkmark Books, 2002). Includes Mariacristiana Cavecchi’s ‘Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books: A Tempest between Word and Image’, and Diana Harris and MacDonald P. Jackson’s ‘Stormy Weather: Derek Jarman’s The Tempest’. Zabus, Chantal, Tempests after Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Traces the ‘Deprivileging of Prospero’ and the ‘Rise of Caliban’ in postcolonial rewritings of The Tempest (9–102), the appropriation of Miranda and Sycorax in adaptations ‘On the “Eve” of Postpatriarchy’ (103–76) and ‘The Return of Postmodern Prospero’ in more recent reimaginings (177–264).

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NOTES

Introduction 1

John Dryden and William Davenant, The Tempest, or, The Enchanted Island (London: 1670), sig. A2v; Ben Jonson, Works of Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), 6:16.

2

Edmond Malone, An Account of the Incidents, from which the Title and Part of the Story of Shakspeare’s Tempest Were Derived; and Its True Date Ascertained (London: Printed by C. & R. Baldwin, 1808–[1809]). Malone misreported the facts about Indians taken to England between 1605 and 1614 but correctly named the two who sailed on Sea Venture in 1609 (387–8).

3

Many passages hint obliquely at the island’s location, but see especially 1.2.129–50, 171, 178–80, 230–35; 2.1.70–4; 5.1.153–62, 307–17 in The Tempest, 3rd Arden Series, eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (Walton-onThames: Thomas Nelson, 1999; rev. edn, London: Bloomsbury, 2011).

4

Among the advocates of specific islands are George Chalmers, A Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Shakspearepapers (London: Printed for Thomas Egerton, 1799), 438–41; Joseph Hunter, A Disquisition on the Scene, Origin, Date, etc. etc. of Shakespeare’s Tempest (London: Printed by C. Wittingham, 1839), 17–32; Edward Everett Hale, Prospero’s Island (New York: Dramatic Museum of Columbia University, 1919), 33–41; Theodor Elze, ‘Die Insel der Sykorax’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 15 (1880), 251–3; and Richard Paul Roe, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard’s Unknown Travels (New York: Harper, 2011), 265–95, which

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230 Notes

champion, respectively, Bermuda, Lampedusa, Pantalaria, Cuttyhunk and Vulcano. 5

The handiest guide to the literature is John Parker, Books to Build an Empire: A Bibliographical History of English Overseas Interests to 1620 (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1965).

6

Alden T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21–67.

7

See Alden T. Vaughan, ‘William Strachey’s “True Reportory” and Shakespeare : A Closer Look at the Evidence’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008), 245–74; and Tom Reedy, ‘Dating William Strachey’s “A True Reportory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates”: A Comparative Textual Study’, Review of English Studies, 61 (2010), 529–52. Doubters include Peter D. McIntosh, ‘Storms, Shipwrecks and South America: From Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa’s Voyage to Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, Colonial Latin American Review, 20 (2011), 363–79, and (from an Oxfordian stance) Roger A. Stritmatter and Lynne Kositsky, On the Date, Sources and Design of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013).

8

See especially Andrew Gurr’s ‘Industrious Ariel and idle Caliban’, in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, eds Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 193–208.

9

David Scott Kastan, ‘“The Duke of Milan / And His Brave Son”: Dynastic Politics in The Tempest’, in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 91–103.

The Critical Backstory: ‘What’s Past is Prologue’ 1

E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 1:490–1.

2

Ben Jonson, The Works of Ben Jonson, eds C. H. Herford and

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231

Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), 6:16. 3

Maximillian E. Novak and George Robert Guffey, eds The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 10:329.

4

Ibid, 4.

5

Pepys on the Restoration Stage, ed. Helen McAfee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916), 75.

6

Katharine Eisaman Maus, ‘Arcadia Lost: Politics and Revision in the Restoration Tempest’, Restoration Drama 13 (1982), 189–209, quotation from 206.

7

Matthew H. Wikander, ‘“The Duke My Father’s Wrack”: The Innocence of the Restoration Tempest’, Shakespeare Survey 43 (1990), 91–8.

8

Eckhard Auberlen, ‘The Tempest and the Concerns of the Restoration Court: A Study of The Enchanted Island and the Operatic Tempest’, Restoration 14 (1991), 71–88.

9

John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other English Essays, 2 vols, ed. George Watson (London: J. M. Dent, 1962), 1:253.

10 The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, ed. Nicholas Rowe, 6 vols (London: Jacob Tonson, 1709), 1:xxiv. 11 Charles Gildon, ‘Remarks on the Plays of Shakespear’, in The Works of William Shakespear, ed. Nicholas Rowe, vol. 7 (London: Jacob Tonson, 1710), 258–74, quotations from 264, 265. 12 Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers, 6 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 3:344. 13 British Essayists, ed. Lionel Thomas Berguer, 45 vols (London: T. and J. Allman, 1823), 25:29–34, quotation from 31. 14 Critical Heritage, 4:552. 15 Critical Heritage, 5:101. 16 Gildon, ‘Remarks on the Plays of Shakespear’, 273. 17 Thomas Campbell, ed. The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare (London: E. Moxon, 1838), lxiv. 18 For discussion of Scheemaker’s statue, see Gordon McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing (Cambridge:

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Cambridge University Press 2007), 147–8, and Michael L. Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 135–46; quotation from McMullan, 147. 19 Edward Dowden, Shakspere: His Mind and Art, 10th edn (London: Macmillan, 1892), 417–18. 20 Augustus William Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, rev. by A. J. W. Morrison (London: George Bell, 1879), 361–2. 21 Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art, 394–5. 22 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Athlone, 1989), 157–70, quotations from 158, 159, 162, 163. 23 William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817; repr. London: Dent, 1906), 98–107. 24 William Hazlitt, ‘The Tempest at Covent Garden’, in ‘The Tempest’: Critical Essays, ed. Patrick Murphy (New York: Routledge, 2001), 327–9. 25 P[atrick] MacDonnell, An Essay on The Play of ‘The Tempest’ (London: John Fellowes, 1849), 35. 26 MacDonnell, An Essay, 9–12. 27 MacDonnell, An Essay, 16–18. 28 For a thorough discussion of Browning’s poem, see Ortwin de Graef, ‘Browning Born to Wordsworth’, in Constellation Caliban: Figurations of a Character, eds Nadia Lie and Theo D’haen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 113–43. 29 Daniel Wilson, Caliban: The Missing Link (London: Macmillan, 1973), 79, 78, 87 and 90. 30 See Virginia Mason Vaughan, ‘The Tempest’, Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 51–63. 31 Russ McDonald, Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 18. 32 Wolfgang Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1951), Chapter 19. 33 Dowden, Shakespeare: His Mind and Art, 406, 403.

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34 Hallett Smith, Shakespeare Romances (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 1972), 20. 35 Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 281. 36 Diana T. Childress, ‘Are Shakespeare’s Late Plays Really Romances?’ in Shakespeare’s Late Plays, eds Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974), 44–55. 37 G. E. Bentley, ‘Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre’, Shakespeare Survey 1 (1948), 138–50. 38 Quoted from Joan Hartwig, Shakespeare’s Tragicomic Vision (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1972), 14. 39 Lee Bliss, ‘Tragicomic Romance for the King’s Men, 1609–11’, in Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan, eds A. R. Braunmuller and J. C. Bulman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 148–64, quotation from 157. 40 Hartwig, Shakespeare’s Tragicomic Vision, 33, 139, 173. 41 Frank Kermode, ed. The Tempest (London: Methuen, 1954; repr. 1977). 42 Barbara A. Mowat, ‘“What’s in a Name?” Tragicomedy, Romance, or Late Comedy’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. 4, eds Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (London: Blackwells, 2003), 129–49. 43 Barbara A. Mowat, The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976). 44 See McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing, Chs 1 and 2. 45 John Dover Wilson, The Essential Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 144. 46 J. Middleton Murry, ‘Shakespeare’s Dream’, in Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’: A Casebook, ed. D. J. Palmer (London: Macmillan, 1968), 109–29, quotation from 110. 47 Colin Still, The Timeless Theme (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1936), 134, 135. 48 G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (Oxford, 1947; repr. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), Chapter 5, quotation from 255.

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49 D. G. James, The Dream of Prospero (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), quotations from 149 and 174. 50 A. D. Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), 159. 51 Noel Cobb, Prospero’s Island: The Secret Alchemy at the Heart of ‘The Tempest’ (London: Coventure, 1984). 52 Harry Levin, ‘“The Tempest” and “The Alchemist”’, Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969), 47–58. 53 Frances A. Yates, Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), Chapter 4. 54 Peggy Muñoz Simonds, ‘“My charms crack not”: The Alchemical Structure of The Tempest’, Comparative Drama 31 (1997–8), 538–70. 55 Walter Clyde Curry, Shakespeare’s Philosophical Patterns (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1937), Chapter 6. 56 D’Orsay W. Pearson, ‘“Unless I be reliev’d by prayer”: The Tempest in Perspective’, Shakespeare Studies 7 (1974), 253–82, quotation from 273. 57 Karol Berger, ‘Prospero’s Art’, Shakespeare Studies 10 (1977), 211–39. 58 Barbara Howard Traister, Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), Chapter 6. 59 John S. Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 79. 60 Barbara A. Mowat, ‘Prospero, Agrippa, and Hocus Pocus’, English Literary Renaissance 11 (1981), 281–303; repr. in The Tempest, eds Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (New York: Norton, 2004), 168–87, quotation from 187. 61 John H. Long, Shakespeare’s Use of Music: The Final Comedies (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1961), 108. 62 John P. Cutts, ‘Music and the Supernatural in The Tempest’ (1958), repr. in Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’; A Casebook, 196–211, quotation from 196. 63 Peggy Muñoz Simonds, ‘“Sweet Power of Music”: The Political

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Magic of “the Miraculous Harp” in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, Comparative Drama 29 (1995), 61–90, quotation from 73. 64 David Lindley, ‘Music, Masque, and Meaning in The Tempest’, in The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); repr. in The Tempest, eds Hulme and Sherman, 187–200, quotation from 190. 65 Kermode, ed. The Tempest, xlviii. 66 Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 71. 67 Jan Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966), 271. 68 Robert Ralston Cawley, ‘Shakespeare’s Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest’, Publications of the Modern Language Association 61 (1926), 688–726. 69 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), Chapter 2, quotation from 72. 70 Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein & Day, 1972), 230.

A Theatre of Attraction: Colonialism, Gender, and The Tempest’s Performance History 1 ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels, eds Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). For a general introduction to ‘global’ Shakespeare in performance, see the essays collected in Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton, Shakespeare on Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 2

Virginia Mason Vaughan, ‘The Tempest’: Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 167.

3

John Drakakis, ‘Shakespeare in Quotations’, in Studying

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British Cultures, ed. Susan Bassnett, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2003), 156–76, 170: ‘Shakespeare now is primarily a collage of familiar quotations, fragments whose relation to any coherent aesthetic principle is both problematical and irremediably ironical.’ 4

Crystal Bartolovich, ‘“Baseless Fabric”: London as a “World City”’, in ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels, 18.

5

Christine Dymkowski, ‘The Tempest’: Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 71.

6 Dymkowski, ‘The Tempest’, 72; in this passage she disregards the important dimension of aural fascination. 7

This evidence of early performances of The Tempest is preserved in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare a Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), quoted in Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, ‘Introduction’, The Tempest, 3rd Arden Series (Walton-onThames, 1999; rev. edn London: Arden, 2011), 1–160, esp. 6–7. A useful (but far from exhaustive) list of productions until 1999 can be found in Dymkowski, ‘The Tempest’, xix–xxxii.

8

See Keith Sturgess, ‘“A Quaint Device”: The Tempest at the Blackfriars’, in Critical Essays on ‘The Tempest’, eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 107–29; Andrew Gurr, ‘The Tempest’s Tempest at the Blackfriars’, Shakespeare Survey 41 (1988), 91–102.

9

For example, musical compositions (e.g. Purcell, Sibelius, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky), ballets (Michael Nyman, 1991) and operas (Felice Lattuada, 1922; The Knot Garden, Michael Tippett, 1970; Un Re in Ascolto, Luciano Berio, 1984; John C. Eaton, 1985; Heinrich Sutermeister, Die Zauberinsel, Dresden 1942; Frank Martin, Vienna, 1956; Thomas Adès, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 2004). In her song ‘Blue Lagoon’ (1984), performance artist Laurie Anderson remixes The Tempest with Moby Dick and other cultural references to the sea; the eponymous voice asks herself who she might bring to a desert island, then quotes from Ariel’s song (‘Full fathom five thy father lies […]’) and ends with ‘And I alone am left to

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tell the tale / Call me Ishmael’. Marianne Faithfull performed one of the surviving settings of the original music of The Tempest by court lutenist Robert Johnson (1965) and, with David Lynch composer Angelo Badalamenti, set the Epilogue to music in 1995. 10 See Stephen Orgel, ‘Shakespeare Illustrated’, in Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 72–92. 11 Cori Ellison, ‘The Met’s Gleeful Baroque Mash-Up’, New York Times (22 December 2011). 12 Dymkowski, ‘The Tempest’, 80–1, explores the metatheatrical dimensions of these and more Tempest settings. Lepage reprises the metatheatrical interpretation in his subsequent 2012 production for Thomas Adès’s opera at the New York Met. Here, Prospero is a nineteenth-century theatre impresario whose magic island turns into La Scala opera house. 13 See Eckart Voigts-Virchow, ‘Something richer, stranger, more self-indulgent: Peter Greenaway’s Fantastic See-Changes in Prospero’s Books et al.’, Anglistik & Englischunterricht 59: Fantasy in Film und Literatur (Heidelberg, 1996), 86. 14 Quoted in Voigts-Virchow, 1996, 92. 15 Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, ‘Prospero’s Books, Postmodernism and the Reenchantment of the World’, in Peter Greenaway’s Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema, 2nd edn, eds Paula Willoquet-Maricondi and Mary Alemany-Galway (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2008), 177–202, 183. 16 The production was selected as one of the best German theatre productions for the Berliner Theatertreffen. Cf. also the critical slashing that Leander Haussmann’s The Tempest (Berlin, Theater am Schiffbauerdamm) had to endure as the critics saw merely Spasstheater (‘fun theatre’) that failed to address any of the dimensions opened by the play. 17 Amy Lawrence, The Films of Peter Greenaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 149. 18 More often than not, production footage can be found on YouTube. The best source for the vibrant, publicly funded German-language Shakespeare productions is the yearly

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theatre reviews in the time-honoured, 148-year-old German Shakespeare-Jahrbuch. 19 This detail was subsequently removed from the London transfer. For this detail and the press reaction see Dymkowski, ‘The Tempest’, 327. 20 Unsurprisingly, a recent young adult fiction novelization of The Tempest called Tempestuous (Kim Askew, Amy Helmes, Merit Press, 2012) merges Prospero and Miranda, focusing on the plight of Miranda Prospero, a spoilt ‘it girl’ in dire straits. 21 Douglas Lanier, ‘Drowning the Book. Prospero’s Books and the textual Shakespeare’, in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (London: Routledge, 1996), 187–209. 22 Vaughan and Vaughan (2011), ‘Additions and Reconsiderations’, 157. 23 See Elsie Walker, ‘Julie Taymor’s Titus – ten years on’, in Shakespeare on Screen: The Roman Plays, eds Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerin (Mont-Saint-Aignan, 2009), 23–66, 44. Walker also quotes Burt’s argument from his essay ‘Shakespeare meets the Holocaust’, ibid., 24. 24 See Bartolovich, ‘Baseless Fabric’, 19. 25 As Vaughan and Vaughan (2011, 98) suggest, this trend emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, with Nicaraguan journalist Rubén Dario, for whom Caliban was an expression of US crudity – a tradition subsequently picked up by other Latin American writers. Sidney Lee (North American coast) and Rudyard Kipling (Bermudas) located the island in the New World. E. E. Stoll fought in vain against this line of reception, arguing that this was not corroborated in the text. 26 Shakespeare here used Antonia Pifagetta’s 1519 travel narrative; see Vaughan and Vaughan (2011), 41–2. 27 See Mary Loeffelholz, ‘Miranda in the New World: The Tempest and Charlotte Barnes’s The Forest Princess’, in Women’s Revisions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 58–75. Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan offer a detailed overview of the New World material available to Shakespeare in Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge:

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Cambridge University Press, 1991). See also their ‘Introduction’ (39–47) and the ‘Additions and Reconsiderations’ to the 3rd Arden edition introduction (2011), 139–42. The fact that other references (Ireland, Africa) can also be detected invites the plurality of ‘global’ postcolonial readings. 28 See Vaughan and Vaughan (2011), 107. 29 Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare. National Formations. Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999), 106. 30 Vaughan, Performance, 214. 31 See Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Aspects of Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge 1990), 16–39; Bill Ashcroft, Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Postcolonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 2009). 32 See Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957–75), 8:241. 33 Nadia Lie and Theo D’haen eds, Constellation Caliban: Figurations of a Character (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), i. See also Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban. 34 Again, the best discussion of this occurs in Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban and in Vaughan and Vaughan, The Tempest, 59–61. 35 Notably H. R. Coursen has criticized Greenaway’s lack of postcolonial sensibility, in H. R. Coursen, Watching Shakespeare on Television (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), 164–7. Vaughan, Performance, 97, however, sees a postcolonial dimension in the contrast between ridiculously overdressed Europeans and naked islanders. 36 Chantal Zabus and Kevin A. Dwyer, ‘“I’ll be wise hereafter”: Caliban in Contemporary Postmodern Cinema’, in Constellation Caliban, 271–89, esp. 283. 37 Michael Billington, Review, Guardian (15 August 2011). 38 Sam Favate, ‘Shakespeare’s The Tempest Barred from Arizona Public Schools’, Wall Street Journal (17 January 2012). 39 The best source for The Tempest on screen is Lisa Hopkins’s book Screen Adaptations of The Tempest (London: Methuen

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Drama, 2008). Greenaway’s film is dismissed, for instance, in the woefully parochial and evaluative text by Douglas Brode (Shakespeare in the Movies [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000]), and both films get short shrift in Shakespeare and the Moving Image (eds Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994]) and The Shakespeare Companion to Shakespeare on Film (ed. Russell Jackson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007]). A collection of essays on Prospero’s Books was published in Ghent (Christel Stalpaert, 2000). Standard introductions to Greenaway are Amy Lawrence, The Films of Peter Greenaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Douglas Keesey, The Films of Peter Greenaway (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006).

Recent Perspectives on The Tempest 1

Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 44.

2

Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield eds, Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985).

3

John Drakakis and Terence Hawkes eds, Alternative Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 1985).

4

Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3.

5

Stephen J. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 154.

6

Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

7

Curt Breight, ‘“Treason doth never Prosper”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Treason’, Shakespeare Quarterly 41.1 (1990), 1–28.

8

Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘“Strange and Woonderfull Syghts”: The Tempest and the Discourses of Monstrosity’, Shakespeare Survey 50 (1997), 187–99.

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9

241

Steven Mullaney, ‘Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance’, Representations 3 (1983), 40–67.

10 Barbara A. Mowat, ‘Prospero’s Books’, Shakespeare Quarterly 52.1 (2001), 1–33. 11 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 12 Alden T. Vaughan, ‘Trinculo’s Indian: American Natives in Shakespeare’s England’, in The Tempest and Its Travels, eds Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 49–59. 13 Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (New York: Praeger, 1956). 14 George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Michael Joseph, 1960; rev. edn 1984), 13. 15 Terence Hawkes, ‘Swisser Swatter: making a man of English letters’, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Routledge, 1985), 26–46. 16 Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare’s Talking Animals – Language and Drama in Society (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 211. 17 Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 31, 23. 18 Paul Brown, ‘“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism’, in Political Shakespeare, 48–71. 19 Peter Hulme, ‘Hurricanes in the Caribbees: The Constitution of the Discourse of English Colonialism’, in 1642: literature and power in the seventeenth century; proceedings of the Essex Conference on the sociology of Literature, eds Francis Barker, Jay Bernstein, John Coombes, Peter Hulme, Jennifer Stratton and Jon Stone (Colchester, 1981), 55–83, quotation from 74. 20 Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, ‘“Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish” – The Discursive Con-Texts of The Tempest’, in Alternative Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 1985), 191–205, quotations from 206, note 7 and 202. 21 John Gillies, ‘Shakespeare’s Virginian Masque’, English Literary History 53.4 (1986), 673–707.

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22 Derek Cohen, ‘The Culture of Slavery: Caliban and Ariel’, The Dalhousie Review 75.2 (1996), 153–75. 23 Andrew Gurr, ‘Industrious Ariel and Idle Caliban’, in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, eds Jean Pierre Maquerlot and Michéle Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 193–208. 24 Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness; Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 25 Joyce Green MacDonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 26 Ania Loomba, Gender, Race and Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 153, 155, 157. 27 Thomas Cartelli, ‘Prospero in Africa – The Tempest as colonialist text and pretext’, in Shakespeare Reproduced – The text in history and ideology, eds Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 99–115, quotation from 112. 28 Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare without Women (New York: Routledge, 2000), 137. 29 Barbara Fuchs, ‘Conquering Islands: Contextualizing The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48.1 (1997), 45–62, quotations from 45–6 and 62. 30 Jerry Brotton, ‘“This Tunis, sir, was Carthage”: Contesting Colonialism in The Tempest’, in Post-colonial Shakespeares, eds Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 23–42. 31 Richard Wilson, ‘Voyage to Tunis: New History and the old world of The Tempest’, English Literary History 64.2 (1997), 333–57. 32 Deborah Willis, ‘Shakespeare and the Discourse of Colonialism’, Studies in English Literature 29.2 (1989), 277–89, quotation from 286. 33 David Scott Kastan, ‘“The Duke of Milan / And His Brave Son”: Old Histories and New in The Tempest’, in The Tempest – A Case Study in Critical Controversy, eds Gerald Graff and James Phelan (Boston: Bedford, 2000), 268–86.

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34 Jyotsna G. Singh, ‘Caliban vs. Prospero: Race and Gender Conflicts in Postcolonial Rewritings of The Tempest’, in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, eds Lindsay M. Kaplan and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 191–209, quotation from 195. 35 Lori Leininger, ‘The Miranda Trap: Sexism and Racism in The Tempest’, in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds Carolyn Ruth Swift, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 285–94. 36 Ann Thompson,‘ “Miranda, where’s Your Sister?’: Reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, in Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, eds Susan Sellers, Linda Hutcheon and Paul Perron (Hempel Hemstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 45–55, quotation from 54. 37 Barbara Ann Sebek, ‘Peopling, Profiting and Pleasure in The Tempest’, in The Tempest – Critical Essays, ed. R. S. White (New York: St Martins, 2001), 463–81. 38 Melissa E. Sanchez, ‘Seduction and Service in The Tempest’, Studies in Philology 105.1 (2008), 50–82, quotation from 75. 39 Denise Albanese, New Science, New World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 69. 40 Marina Warner, ‘The “Foul Witch” and her “Freckled Whelp”: Circean Mutations in the New World’, in The Tempest and Its Travels, 97–113, quotations from 97 and 98. 41 Leah S. Marcus, ‘Introduction – The blue-eyed witch’, in Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996), 1–37, quotation from 16. 42 Mark Netzloff, England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capitalism and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 43 Annabel Patterson, ‘“Thought is Free”: The Tempest’, in The Tempest – New Casebooks, ed. R. S. White (New York: St Martins, 1999), 123–34. 44 David Norbrook, ‘“What Care these Roarers for the Name of the King?” Language and Utopia in The Tempest’, in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, eds Gordon

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McMullan and Jonathan Hope (London: Routledge, 1992), 21–54, quotation from 24. 45 Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation – Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 404, 401, 402. 46 Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 47 Stephen Orgel, ‘Prospero’s Wife’, Representations 8 (1984), 1–13, quotation from 2. 48 Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), 237, 238. 49 Coppélia Kahn, ‘The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family’, in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, eds Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 217–43, quotation from 240. 50 David Sundelson, ‘“So Rare a Wonder’d Father”: Prospero’s Tempest’, in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, 33–53, quotation from 37. 51 Meredith Anne Skura, ‘Discourse and the Individual: the Case of Colonialism in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40.1 (1989), 42–69. 52 Barbara A. Mowat, ‘“Knowing I Loved my Books”: Reading The Tempest Intertextually’, in The Tempest and Its Travels, 27–36, quotation from 27. 53 Donna B. Hamilton, Virgil and ‘The Tempest’: The Politics of Imitation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990), 65. 54 David Scott Wilson-Okamura, ‘Virgilian Modes of Colonization in The Tempest’, English Literary History 70.3 (2003), 709–37. 55 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 239. 56 Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7.

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57 Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 58 Andrew Gurr, ‘The Tempest’s tempest at the Blackfriars’, Shakespeare Survey 41 (1989), 91–102. 59 Stephen Orgel ed., ‘Introduction’, The Tempest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1–89. 60 James Knowles, ‘Insubstantial Pageants: The Tempest and Masquing Culture’, in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, eds Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 108–25. 61 Douglas Bruster, ‘Local Tempests – Shakespeare and the Work of the Early Modern Playhouse’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 25.1 (1995), 33–53, quotation from 53. 62 Martin Orkin, Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power (London: Routledge, 2005). 63 James Kearney, ‘The Book and the Fetish: The Materiality of Prospero’s Text’, Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 32.3 (2002), 33–68.

New Directions: Sources and Creativity in The Tempest 1

See Robert Wiltenburg, ‘The Aeneid in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Survey 39 (1977), 159–68, esp. 162.

2

For a comment on this version of Prospero’s book, see Gurr, ‘Editing Stefano’s Book’, Shakespeare Survey 59 (2008), 91–107.

3

Metamorphoses (Golding), 7:263–89.

4

Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 343.

5

Donna B. Hamilton, Virgil and ‘The Tempest’: The Politics of Imitation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990), 21–2.

6

Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),

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Ch. 6: ‘Shaking Neptune’s “dread trident”: The Tempest and figures of Virgil’, 194–244. 7 Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil, 215. This link was first made by Bernard Smith, cited in the second Arden Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Methuen, 1954; note to 4.1.25), who tied this phrase to Virgil’s ‘speluncam’, Aeneid 4, line 124. 8

For an analysis of this aspect of the play, see Andrew Gurr, ‘Industrious Ariel and Idle Caliban’, in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, eds Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 193–208.

9

Douglas Bruster, ‘Local Tempest: Shakespeare and the work of the early modern playhouse’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25 (1995), 33–53.

10 John Florio, trans. Essayes on Morall, Politike and Militarie Discourses of Michaell de Montaigne (London, 1603), 102. 11 (London, 1555) BL 929.c.27 / C.13.a.18. 12 I suggested in Essays in Theatre 1 (1982), 52–62, that the allusion to Romano in WT was a reference to Aretino’s famous pornographic book. More recently Bette Talvacchia has endorsed my reading in ‘The Rare Italian Master and the Posture of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale’, Literature Interpretation Theory 3 (1992), 163–74. 13 Erica Sheen in particular, in Shakespeare and the Institution of Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), sets down the contrasts between Jonson’s play and Shakespeare’s in terms of their rival views about the work of theatre. Noting Zachary Lesser’s point that Jonson’s Latin epigram for The Alchemist asserts his preference for a few intelligent readers against the mass of theatre audiences, she claims that The Tempest responds to Jonson’s satire by asserting the value of royal authority against Jonson’s elitism. ‘Point by point, Shakespeare’s apparent aim, and achievement, in The Tempest was not simply to answer The Alchemist; it was to turn the mirror of Shakespearean theatre on the social and political framework by which the play’s contempt for popular theatre

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legitimated itself. If, within 45 lines, Jonson’s spectators knew that what they were looking at and thinking about were the Blackfriars and the King’s Men, by the end of 1.2 Shakespeare’s spectators could have been in no doubt that the object of their gaze was the very image of Jonsonian monarchy. The Alchemist begins with a parodic account of theatrical labour undertaken in absence of the owner of the house. The Tempest responds with a spectacular contrast between sovereignty and collective labour which proceeds to a comprehensive vindication of that labour’ (134–5). 14 ‘Revisiting “The Tempest”’, Modern Philology 93 (1995), 161–77, quotation from 165. 15 For a thorough rebuttal of the main feature of Kinney’s analysis, see Alden T. Vaughan, ‘William Strachey’s “True Reportory” and Shakespeare: A Closer Look at the Evidence’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008), 235–73. 16 See The Tempest, eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (Walton-on Thames, 1999; rev. edn London: Arden, 2011), 139–42. 17 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999). 18 ‘“Glutted with Conceit”: Imprints of Doctor Faustus on The Tempest’, in Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe. Fresh Cultural Contexts, eds Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 193–208. 19 S. G. Culliford, William Strachey, 1572–1621 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1965). 20 Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), quotation from 8:245. 21 Bullough, 8:245 and 273. 22 Bullough, 8:249. 23 ‘The Sources of The Tempest’, Modern Language Notes 35 (1920), 321. 24 On the works that Bullough called ‘analogues’, in MLN 35 (1920), 321–30, Henry David Gray published a reassessment of the claims for works such as Die Schöne Sidea, which he averred has ‘only the merest outline of the story’, along with

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the Spanish Noches de Invierno, and proposed instead that the Caliban subplot was taken from what he called ‘a dramatic framework much closer to The Tempest’s than either of those works’. Specifically, he identified what he called ‘the basic source’ of the play in a set of commedia dell’arte scenarios, found in a manuscript by Locatelli dated 1622. Apparently they were old scripts that Locatelli fiddled with to make them suitable for stage presentation. The originals, Gray suggested, might have been seen in London by Shakespeare. As Gray summarizes them, in Scenari delle Maschere in Arcadia, Ferdinando Neri published five commedia scenarios set on the enchanted island of Arcadia, ruled by a magician who controls spirits. He raises a tempest and causes a ship to be wrecked. The ship’s occupants, nobles and clowns, arrive one by one on the island, each thinking he is alone, and lamenting the loss of the others. Fathers lose their children, and lovers lose each other. In the end all are reunited. Pantaloncino has the magician declaring that he will renounce his magic and throw away his staff and book. Gray went into some detail finding matches between the works, including figures being locked into trees or rocks and in one scenario a gathering of drunken clowns which has some resemblances to Caliban’s first encounter with Trinculo and Stephano. The clowns in one plot wear stolen finery, and in two others the magician hangs garlands on a tree which the clowns put on. A further plot has the clowns stealing the magician’s book. This, Gray argues, fits Shakespeare’s play, with a version that preceded what he considered to be the modified text we have, which he argued elsewhere was altered for the 1613 wedding of Princess Elizabeth. This hypothetical earlier version, Gray thought, made more of the play’s elements from Thomas’s Historye of Italye and Eden’s History of Travaille, which supplied Ferdinand of Naples and the usurping and banished dukes of Milan. Into these Shakespeare inserted Ferdinand’s love story from the commedia scenarios. Other commedia devices have been identified in the clown scene where Ariel speaks in Trinculo’s voice, and gets him a beating from Stephano. Fanciful though much of this is, some of the Italian analogues are persuasive. See Robert Henke, ‘Transporting Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and the Magical Pastoral of the Commedia

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dell’Arte’, in Early Modern Tragicomedy, eds Subha Mukerji and Raphael Lyne (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), 43–58. 25 Hamilton, Virgil and ‘The Tempest’. The Politics of Imitation, xi. 26 Morton Luce ed., The Tempest (London: Methuen, 1901), xii. 27 Robert Cawley, ‘Shakespeare’s Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest’, Publications of the Modern Language Association 41 (1926), 688–716. 28 Cawley, ‘Shakespeare’s Use’, 703. 29 The Jonsonian Masque (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 35. 30 Shakespeare & Jonson / Jonson & Shakespeare (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), Chapter 5. 31 The play’s stage directions are thought to have been possibly composed by the scribe Ralph Crane, not by Shakespeare himself. Assuming it was Shakespeare who read Jonson’s masque, this particular stage direction must be the author’s. 32 ‘The Tempest and Hymenaei’, Cahiers Elisabéthains 26 (1984), 29–39, esp. 31–2. At around this time Jonson was working for Prince Henry rather than more generally for the court. He dedicated The Masque of Queens in 1609 to him, and wrote The Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers for him in 1610, as well as Oberon in 1611. Gary Schmidgall, in Shakespeare and the Poet’s Life (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990), reckoned that the chief inspiration for Shakespeare’s masque, and a possible model for Prospero, might have been not so much King James as Prince Henry. Noting that the prince had danced in Hymenaei, he argued that ‘Considering Henry’s well-known interests in ships, sailing, colonization, and masquing, one is tempted to think that The Tempest might be the one Shakespeare play written more with him than James in mind’ (118–22). 33 Ben Jonson, The Works of Ben Jonson, eds C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925–52), 7:214. 34 Shakespeare’s Almanac. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Marriage and the Elizabethan Calendar (Cambridge:

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Cambridge University Press, 1993), 60–6. Wiles followed E. B. Gilman in identifying a pattern of inversions in it. See Ernest B. Gilman, ‘“All Eyes”: Prospero’s Inverted Masque’, Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980), 214–30. David Lindley, ‘Music, Masque, and Meaning in The Tempest’, in The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 47–59, notes that the play consistently registers harmonies and disharmonies, where the disharmonious such as Antonio and Sebastian cannot hear the harmonies. Such a pattern does not of course appear in the subplot, where Ariel seduces Stephano and Trinculo with his music, although he does use the tabor and pipe of the clown, whereas the offstage ‘solemne musick’ that caught Alonso’s courtiers had the whole Blackfriars ensemble to deliver it. 35 See for instance Hugh Craig, ‘Jonson, the antimasque, and the “rules of flattery”’, in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, eds David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), 176–96, quotation from 184. 36 John Orrell, ‘The Musical Canon of Proportion in Jonson’s Hymeniae’, English Language Notes 15 (1978), 171–8. 37 Orrell, ‘The Musical Canon’, 178. 38 Alison Thorne, Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare. Looking Through Language (New York: St Martins, 2000), 216. 39 William S. Powell, John Pory, 1572–1646. The Life and Letters of a Man of Many Parts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), microfiche, 3.

New Directions: Commedia dell’Arte, The Tempest, and Transnational Criticism 1

These authors advance their arguments about commedia dell’arte in many works, but of particular importance to this essay are: Robert Henke, Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997); Performance and Literature in

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the Commedia Dell’Arte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); ‘Transporting tragicomedy: Shakespeare and the magical pastoral of the Commedia Dell’Arte’, in Early Modern Tragicomedy, eds Subha Mukerji and Raphael Lyneeds (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), 43–58; ‘Border Crossing in the Commedia Dell’Arte’, in Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theatre, eds Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), 19–34; Richard Andrews, ‘Moliere, Commedia Dell’Arte and the Question of Influence in Early Modern Theatre’, in Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe, eds Andrew Hadfield and Paul Hammond (London: Arden, 2004), 123–49; Winifred Smith, The Commedia Dell’Arte: A Study in Italian Popular Theatre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912); K. M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia Dell’Arte, 1560–1620 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934); Marvin T. Herrick, Italian Comedy in the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960). 2

See especially Henke, ‘Border Crossing’.

3

All citations from The Tempest are taken from the Arden edition, Third Series, eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (Walton-on-Thames, 1999; rev. edn London: Arden, 2011).

4

A. Lynne Magnusson, ‘Interruption in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (1986), 52–65.

5

See especially Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 249–57.

6

The reunification of these two streams of Italian Renaissance drama is the sustained project of Clubb’s book, but the first and last chapters effectively ground and summarize her argument.

7

Henke identifies comici skills throughout Performance and Literature; in many ways, Winifred Smith’s ebullient summary of those skills remains accurate. See Smith, The Commedia Dell’Arte, 4–5, 17–19.

8 Clubb, Italian Drama, 6. 9 Clubb, Italian Drama, 1–26.

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10 See Henke, ‘Transporting tragicomedy’, 45, and Andrews, ‘Shakespeare and Italian Comedy’, 123, 131. 11 Henke, Performance and Literature, 175. 12 Clubb, Italian Drama, 53. For an extended example of such ‘cross-contamination’, see 273–6. 13 Henke, ‘Border Crossing in the Commedia dell’Arte’, 1 14 Henke, ‘Transporting tragicomedy’, 44. 15 Louis B. Wright, ‘Will Kempe and Commedia Dell’Arte’, Modern Language Notes 41 (1926), 516–20. 16 Wright, ‘Will Kempe’, 518. 17 Wright, ‘Will Kempe’, 517–18. 18 See Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London: Faber and Faber, 1935). 19 David Wiles traces both the etymology and theatrical use of the term ‘clown’ in Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Unfortunately, Wiles centres his study on the assumption that all fools’ roles were written for Robert Armin. 20 Wiles almost makes true his own claim when he declares prematurely that ‘there is general scholarly agreement that the parts of “fools” in Shakespeare were written for Armin to perform’, 136. 21 This point was made exceptionally well by Lauren Buckley in her paper, ‘The Italian Genealogy of Shakespeare’s Clowns and Fools’, presented at the 8th annual Undergraduate Shakespeare Conference, Fitchburg State University, 2009. 22 Andrews, ‘Shakespeare and Italian Comedy’, 133. 23 With the exception of The Tempest, all Shakespeare citations are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 24 See Henke, Performance and Literature, 12–14, 24–30, for a sound discussion of ‘dialogic structure’ in commedia dell’arte. 25 Andrews, ‘Transporting tragicomedy’, 132. 26 See Andrews, ‘Moliere, Commedia Dell’Arte and the Question of Influence’, 454.

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27 Henry David Gray, ‘The Sources of The Tempest’, Modern Language Notes 35 (1926), 321–30, quotations are taken from 324, 325 and 326. 28 Gray, ‘Sources’, 329. 29 Clubb, Italian Drama, 163, 184. 30 Clubb, Italian Drama, 163. 31 Clubb, Italian Drama, 182–3. 32 Henke, ‘Transporting tragicomedy’, 58. 33 For an unequalled discussion of the many literary texts and historical events that scholars have identified as possible sources for Caliban, see Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 55–85. 34 Andrews, ‘Shakespeare and Italian Comedy’, 132; Henke, ‘Transporting tragicomedy’, 58.

New Directions: ‘He needs will be Absolute Milan’: The Political Thought of The Tempest 1

See Stephen Orgel, ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 1–4.

2

See Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (London: Arden, 2004), 1–35; and Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Elizabethan Essays (London: Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1994), 31–58.

3

See Charles Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975); and Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1955).

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4

Henry Peacham the Elder, The Garden of Eloquence (1593; Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1954), sig. ABiiv.

5

Pierre Charron, ‘Of Wisdome’ (1601), trans. Samson Lennard (London, 1606).

6

Republicanism took many forms in early modern Europe. The Latin term res publica literally meant the ‘public thing’ but was most frequently translated as ‘commonwealth’. See Markuu Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

7

See Brian Levack, ‘Law and Ideology: The Civil Law and Theories of Absolutism in Elizabethan and Jacobean England’, in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, eds Richard Strier and Heather Dubrow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 220–41.

8

James Stuart, ‘Speech to Parliament Regarding Monarch, 21 March 1610’, quoted in The Renaissance: A Sourcebook, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 37.

9 Ibid. 10 Richard Strier, ‘Faithful Servants: Shakespeare’s Praise of Disobedience’, 104–33, and Donald Kelly, ‘Ideas of Resistance before Elizabeth’, 48–78, in Strier and Dubrow, The Historical Renaissance. 11 Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’. 12 Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought. 13 David Bevington, Shakespeare’s Ideas: More Things in Heaven and Earth (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2008) and Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1968); Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare’s Politics: A Contextual Introduction (London: Continuum, 2009); and Shakespeare and Politics, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 14 Blair Worden, ‘Shakespeare and Politics’, in Shakespeare and Politics, ed. Alexander; David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);

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and Paola Pugliatti, Shakespeare the Historian (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). 15 Mark Thornton Burnett, Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). 16 Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977). 17 Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 18 Paul Cantor, ‘Shakespeare’s The Tempest: The Wise Man as Hero’, Shakespeare Quarterly 31 (1980), 64–75, and ‘Prospero’s Republic: The Politics of Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, in Shakespeare as Political Thinker, eds John E. Alvis and Thomas G. West (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981); Howard White, ‘Copp’d Hills Towards Heaven’: Shakespeare and the Classical Polity (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 133–70; and David Lowenthal, Shakespeare and the Good Life: Ethics and Politics in Dramatic Form (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 21–70. 19 Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 871. 20 Paul Brown, ‘“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Political Shakespeares: Essays in Cultural Materialism, eds Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1985), 48–71. 21 Translated from the original French, ‘Je suis la puissance’, in Aimé Césaire, A Tempest: Based on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, Adaptation for a Black Theatre (1969), trans. Richard Miller (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2002), 31. Thanks to Richard Strier for reminding me of this moment. 22 Citations from The Tempest are taken from the Arden Edition Third Series, eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (Walton-on-Thames, 1999; rev. edn London: Arden, 2011).

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23 The Politics of Aristotle, trans. and ed. Ernest Baker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958); Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and David Miller, Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 19–36. 24 Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 2:19–23. 25 Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought; and Jean Marie André, L’otium dans la vie morale et intellectuelle romaine des origins a l’époque augustéenne (Paris, 1966). 26 John Roe, Shakespeare and Machiavelli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from ‘Richard II’ to ‘Hamlet’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 27 Sidney Anglo, Machiavelli: The First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005); Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Poetics of Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Emile Gasquet, Le Courant machiavelien dans la pensée et la littérature anglaises du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1975); and Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964; reissued, 2010). 28 See John F. Tinkler, ‘Praise and Advice: Rhetorical Approaches in More’s Utopia and Machiavelli’s The Prince’, Sixteenth Century Journal 19 (1988), 187–207. 29 Skinner, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Vickie Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Patrick Coby, Machiavelli’s Romans: Liberty and Greatness in the Discourses on Livy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); and Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965).

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30 Cicero, On Obligations, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 31 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); and Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 32 Niccolò Machiavelli, ‘The Prince’ and ‘Discourses on the First Ten Years of Titus Livius’, in The Chief Works, and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert, 2 vols (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 1: all citations correspond to this edition. 33 Michelle Zerba, ‘The Frauds of Humanism: Cicero, Machiavelli, and the Rhetoric of Imposture’, Rhetorica 22.3 (2004), 215–40; Arlene Oseman, ‘The Machiavellian Prince in The Tempest’, Shakespeare in Southern Africa 22 (2010), 7–19; Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 34 Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Cannibals’, in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 150–8. 35 Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Question of Machiavelli’, New York Review of Books (4 November 1971).

New Directions: Shakespeare’s Revolution – The Tempest as Scientific Romance 1

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Heron, 1969), 89.

2

Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (New York: Doubleday, 1973); Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000).

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3 Freedman, Critical Theory, 4. 4

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1985), 88, 94.

5 Shelley, Frankenstein, 88. 6 In The History of Science Fiction, Adam Roberts writes: ‘SF is the genre that mediates the discourses of “science” (or “fact”) and “magic” (or, subsequently, “imagination,” “fiction”); and it comes into generic being at precisely the historical moment when competing cosmic discourses were in the process of separating themselves into rationalist Protestant and ritualistmagical Catholic religious idioms. […] “SF” in its broadest sense can be understood as a textual strategy to mediate this dialectic cleavage. SF texts from the early seventeenth century mark this disjunction most clearly, none more evidently than Kepler’s Somnium (written c. 1600, published 1634), which has a good claim to be the first work of modern SF’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 42. 7 Huxley, Brave New World, 88. 8 Huxley, Brave new World, 153. 9

Quoted in William Shakespeare, The Tempest, eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (Walton-on-Thames, 1999; rev. edn London: Arden, 2011), 88. For the suggestion that Shakespeare writes himself into the play not as Prospero but as Caliban, see Scott Maisano, ‘Rise of the Poet of the Apes’, Shakespeare Studies 41 (2013), 64–76.

10 John Donne, John Donne’s Poetry, ed. Arthur L. Clements (New York: Norton, 1992), 102. 11 I have elsewhere shown how Shakespeare incorporates Galileo’s dramatic discovery into Cymbeline, another ‘scientific romance’ from 1610. See Scott Maisano, ‘Shakespeare’s Last Act: The Starry Messenger and the Galilean Book in Cymbeline’, Configurations 12:3 (2004), 401–34. 12 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the ‘New Science’ Upon Seventeenth-Century Poetry, rev. edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 118–19. 13 Nicolson, Breaking the Circle, 76.

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14 Nicolson, Breaking the Circle, 170. 15 Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004), 373. 16 Vaughan and Vaughan, The Tempest, 254. 17 Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 1–44. 18 This is Shakespeare’s only use of the word ‘zenith’. 19 The Riverside edition does not provide a footnote for ‘great globe itself’ in the text of The Tempest but equates ‘the great globe’ with ‘the solid globe’, the earth, in Troilus and Cressida in its ‘General Introduction’, 7. See The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 20 According to William Donahue, ‘Although there were numerous remarkable developments in astronomy in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a broad theme that was common to many of them was the trend toward treating things in the sky as physical objects no different from terrestrial objects. In this trend, there were two central figures: Galileo and Kepler’. See Donahue, ‘Astronomy’, in The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 3, Early Modern Science, eds Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 563. 21 For Shakespeare’s apparent equation of the Christmas star with the planet Jupiter, see Maisano, ‘Shakespeare’s Last Act’. 22 See The Tempest in The Riverside Shakespeare, 1630. 23 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. David Lindley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 191. Invoking an inter-theatrical allusion, Lindley glosses the ‘great globe’ thus: ‘The world but also perhaps recalling the Globe theatre and the globes on a turning machine that figured in Jones’s designs for Hymenai and The Haddington Masque’. But Lindley makes no distinction between Inigo Jones’s two globes. Like Gerard Mercator, the Flemish cartographer who followed the publication of his terrestrial globe in 1541 with a celestial globe ten years later, Jones transformed what had been a terrestrial globe in Hymenaei, or The Masque of Hymen

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in 1606 into a celestial globe for The Haddington Masque in 1608. John G. Demaray suspects the same globe might have been used as a stage prop in The Tempest. See Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness: The Tempest and the Transformation of Renaissance Theatrical Forms (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 90–2. My argument does not require bringing an actual globe on stage because Prospero could simply direct his gaze up to the ‘heavens’. 24 ‘Stuff, n. trans. and fig.’, The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), OED Online. 25 ‘Inherit, v. fig.’, OED Online (emphasis in original). The earliest instance of this usage, according to the OED, occurs in Cyril Tourneur’s Transformed Metamorphosis (1600), in which the Elizabethan poet and playwright queries: ‘O, wherein can celestial life inherit, / If it remains not in a heav’nly spirit?’ 26 See ‘Appendix I: Sources’, in William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, eds Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton (London: Arden, 2008), 383. 27 2.2.266. The Arden editors’ note reads: ‘For early audiences, Hamlet might be indicating the overhanging roof of the Globe playhouse (referred to as “the heavens”) as well as the sky above it’. See William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden, 2006), 257. 28 Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Clarendon, 2008), 39. 29 Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011), 254. 30 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers, 2001), 92. 31 Wilson, Epicureanism, 23. 32 Wilson, Epicureanism, 22. 33 Francis Bacon, ‘Of Vicissitude of Things’, Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 451–4. 34 Vickers, Francis Bacon, 782.

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35 Leonard Digges, A Prognostication Everlasting… Lately Corrected and Augmented by Thomas Digges his Sonne (London, 1576). Emphasis mine. 36 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Smith, 35. 37 Bacon, ‘The Advancement of Learning, Book One’, Francis Bacon, 167. 38 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Smith, 140. 39 See M. F. Smith ‘Introduction’, in Lucretius, Nature of Things, vii–xxxiv. 40 Nor does it necessarily require Prospero to be an atheist. 41 More than a century ago John Churton Collins noted ‘in Ariel’s song in The Tempest, “Nothing of him that doth fade”, etc., is a most exquisite adaptation of Lucretius’. See John Churton Collins, Studies in Shakespeare (Westminster: A. Constable, 1904), 31. 42 For the etymology of Ariel’s name see Vaughan and Vaughan, The Tempest, 27–8. 43 Deborah Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 46. 44 ‘Aerial, adj.’, OED Online. 45 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Smith, 10. 46 Gerard Passannante, The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 135–6, 144, 178–80. 47 Graham Rees, ‘Atomism and “Subtlety” in Francis Bacon’s Philosophy’, Annals of Science 37 (1980), 549–50. 48 Rees, ‘Atomism’, 552. 49 Except for Bruno, see Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 159–72. For Bruno’s ‘Neoplatonising’ approach to Lucretius, see Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), 224–5, 246–9. 50 Francis Bacon, New Organon Part II aphorism 6, in Works,

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262 Notes

eds J. Spedding, R. Ellis, D. Heath and W. Rawley (Boston, MA, 1860–4), viii, 174; quoted in Wilson, 22. 51 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 20. 52 Denise Albanese, New Science, New World (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 39. 53 Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2006), 169. 54 Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London: Routledge, 2007), 305. 55 Elizabeth Spiller, ‘Shakespeare and the Making of Early Modern Science: Resituating Prospero’s Art’, South Central Review 26 (2009), 24–41, quotation from 36. See also B. J. Sokol, A Brave New World of Knowledge: Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Early Modern Epistemology (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003). 56 Egan, Green Shakespeare, 167. 57 Just a couple of years before The Tempest, Shakespeare had written of another great magician, Cerimon, also living on an island (or an isthmus), and curiously called upon to reanimate the corpse of a woman who had not only died at sea but, subsequently, been thrown overboard. See Act 3, Scene 2 in William Shakespeare, Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gossett (London: Arden, 2004). 58 Vaughan and Vaughan, The Tempest, 75. 59 Stephen Orgel, ‘Prospero’s Wife’, in Modern Critical Interpretations: The Tempest, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1988), 103; Ann Thompson, ‘“Miranda, Where’s Your Sister?”: Reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: G. K. Hall, 1998), 234; and John B. Bender, ‘The Day of The Tempest’, in The Tempest: Critical Essays, ed. Patrick M. Murphy (London: Routledge, 2001), 201. 60 Steven Shapin, Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1; and Daston and Park, ‘Introduction: The Age of the New’, Cambridge History of Science: 3:12–13.

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263

61 Noel Cobb, Prospero’s Island: The Secret Alchemy at the Heart of The Tempest (London: Coventure, 1984), 174; and D. G. James, Prospero’s Dream (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 68.

‘volumes that / I prize’: Resources for Studying and Teaching The Tempest 1

There are, of course, other online editions of The Tempest, but none that I have located are fully edited. Examples include MIT’s Complete Works (Shakespeare.mit.edu) and Northwestern’s Wordhoard (wordhoard.northwestern.edu).

2

Quotations are from Director & Editor-in-Chief Peter S. Donaldson’s description of The Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive, globalshakespeares.mit.edu/about/ (accessed 1 June 2013).

3

See, for example, Maurice Hunt’s Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Other Late Romances (New York: MLA, 1992); Mary L. Dennis, The Tempest by William Shakespeare: Teacher Guide (San Antonio: Novel Units, 1999); Brenda Pinder, Full Fathom Five: A Workshop Approach to The Tempest (Rozelle: St Clair, 1991). David Lindley’s recent contribution to Arden’s Shakespeare at Stratford series, The Tempest (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), is not a teacher’s guide, but it provides an excellent introduction to the play for students and instructors alike.

4

All quotations from The Tempest follow the Arden edition, Third Series, eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (Walton-on-Thames, 1999; rev. edn London, 2011).

5

Jessica Slights, ‘Rape and the Romanticization of Shakespeare’s Miranda’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1599, 41.2 (2001), 357–79, 371.

6

Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed’, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual

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264 Notes

Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123–44. 7

Michael Neill, ‘“Noises, / Sounds, and Sweet Airs”: The Burden of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008), 36–59, 45.

8

John S. Mebane and Richard L. Nochimson, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest: An Annotated Bibliography of Shakespeare Studies, 1864–2000 (Fairview, NC: Pegasus, 2002).

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Albanese, Denise, New Science, New World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). Alvis, John and Thomas G. West eds, Shakespeare as Political Thinker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981). Auden, W. H., The Sea and the Mirror, ed. Arthur Kirsch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Barker, Peter Francis and Peter Hulme, ‘“Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish” – The Discursive Con-Texts of The Tempest’, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Routledge, 1985), 191–205. Bate, Jonathan, ‘Caliban and Ariel write back’, Shakespeare Survey 48 (1995), 155–62. Berger, Jr., Harry, ‘The Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, Shakespeare Studies 5 (1967), 253–83. Bloom, Harold ed. Caliban (New York: Chelsea House, 1992). —William Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ (New York: Chelsea House, 1988). Brevik, Frank W., The Tempest and New World-Utopian Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2012). Brockbank, Philip, ‘The Tempest: Conventions in Art and Empire’, in Later Shakespeare, eds John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London, 1966), 183–201. Brotton, Jerry, ‘“This Tunis, Sir, was Carthage”: Contesting Colonialism in The Tempest’, in Post-colonial Shakespeares, eds Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 23–42. Brown, Paul, ‘“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,’ in Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, eds Jonathan

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Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) 48–71. Bryden, Diana, ‘Re-writing The Tempest’, World Literature Written in English 23 (1984), 75–88. Bullough, Geoffrey, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975). Burnett, Mark Thornton, Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (New York: St Martin’s, 1997). Callaghan, Dympna, ‘Irish memories in The Tempest’, in Shakespeare Without Women (London: Routledge, 2000), 97–138. Campbell, Stephen, ‘Giorgione’s Tempest, Studiolo Culture and the Renaissance Lucretius’, Renaissance Quarterly 56 (2003), 299–332. Carroll, William C., ‘The Virgin Not: Language and Sexuality in Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Survey 46 (1994), 107–19. Césaire, Aimé, A Tempest: Based on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, Adaptation for a Black Theatre (1969), trans. Richard Miller (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2002). Coursen, H. R., The Tempest: A Guide to the Play (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000). Demaray, John G., Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness: ‘The Tempest’ and The Transformation of Renaissance Theatrical Forms (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998). Dobson, Michael, ‘“Remember / First to possess his books”: The Appropriation of The Tempest, 1700–1800’, Shakespeare Survey 43 (1990), 99–107. Döring, Tobias and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Critical and Cultural Transformations – Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ – 1611 to the Present (Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 2013). Douglas, Trevor, ‘Mapping the Celestial in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Writings of John Donne’, in Shakespeare and Donne: Generic Hybrids and the Cultural Imaginary, eds Judith H. Anderson and Jennifer C. Vaught (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 111–29. Dymkowski, Christine, ‘The Tempest’: Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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Felperin, Howard, Shakespeare’s Romances (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). Frey, Charles H., ‘The Tempest and the New World’, Shakespeare Quarterly 30 (1979) 29–41. Fuchs, Barbara, ‘Conquering Islands: Contextualizing The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997), 45–62. Gillies, John, ‘Shakespeare’s Virginian Masque’, English Literary History 53 (1986), 673–707. Goldberg, Jonathan, The Tempest in the Caribbean (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Greenaway, Peter, Prospero’s Books (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991). Greenblatt, Stephen, ‘Learning to curse: Aspects of linguistic colonialism in the sixteenth century’, in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 16–39. Griffiths, Trevor, ‘“This island’s mine”: Caliban and colonialism’, Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983), 159–80. Guffey, George Robert ed. After the Tempest, Augustan Reprint Society, Special Series No. 4 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1969). Gurr, Andrew, ‘Industrious Ariel and Idle Caliban’, in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, eds Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 193–208. —‘The Tempest’s Tempest at the Blackfriars’, Shakespeare Survey 41 (1988), 91–102. Hadfield, Andrew, ‘Shakespeare and Italian Comedy’, in Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe, eds Andrew Hadfield and Paul Hammond (London: Arden 2004), 123–49. —Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (London: Arden, 2004). —Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Hamilton, Donna B., Virgil and ‘The Tempest’: The Politics of Imitation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990). Hartwig, Joan, Shakespeare’s Tragicomic Vision (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1972). Henke, Robert, Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997).

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Hirst, David, ‘The Tempest’: Text and Performance (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1984). Hopkins, Lisa, Screen Adaptations of ‘The Tempest’ (London: Methuen Drama, 2008). Horowitz, Arthur, Prospero’s ‘True Preservers’: Peter Brook, Yukio Ninagawa and Giorgio Strehler (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004). Hulme, Peter, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986). Hulme, Peter and William H. Sherman eds, ‘The Tempest’ and its Travels (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Jowett, John, ‘New created creatures: Ralph Crane and the stage directions in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Survey 36 (1983), 107–20. Lie, Nadia and Theo D’haen eds, Constellation Caliban: Figurations of a Character (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997). Lindley, David, ‘Music, Masque and Meaning in The Tempest’, in The Court Masque, ed. David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 47–59. —‘The Tempest’: Shakespeare at Stratford (London: Arden, 2000). Loomba, Ania, Gender, Race and Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). Lowenthal, David, Shakespeare and the Good Life: Ethics and Politics in Dramatic Form (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997). McAlindon, Tom, ‘The Discourse of Prayer in The Tempest’, Studies in English Literature 41 (2001), 235–55. McDonald, Russ, ‘Reading The Tempest’, Shakespeare Survey 43 (1990), 15–28. —Shakespeare & Jonson / Jonson & Shakespeare (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988). —Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Marchitello, Howard, The Machine in the Text: Science and Literature in the Age of Shakespeare and Galileo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Maus, Katharine Eisaman, ‘“Arcadia lost”: Politics and Revision in the Restoration Tempest’, Renaissance Drama 13 (1982), 189–209. Mebane, John S., Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

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Mowat, Barbara A. The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1976). —‘Prospero, Agrippa, and hocus pocus’, English Literary Renaissance 11 (1981), 281–303. Murphy, Patrick ed. ‘The Tempest’: Critical Essays (New York: Routledge 2001). Neill, Michael, ‘“Noises, / Sounds, and Sweet Airs”: The Burden of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008), 36–59. Nixon, Rob, ‘Caribbean and African appropriations of the Tempest’, Critical Inquiry 13 (1987), 57–78. Orgel, Stephen, ‘New Uses of Adversity: Tragic Experience in The Tempest’, in Essays in Shakespeare Criticism, eds James L. Calderwood and Harold E. Tolliver (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970), 368–87. —‘Prospero’s wife’, in Rewriting the Renaissance, eds Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 50–64. Oseman, Arlene, ‘The Machiavellian Prince in The Tempest’, Shakespeare in Southern Africa 22 (2010), 7–19. Schmidgall, Gary, Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). —Shakespeare and the Poet’s Life (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990). Sheen, Erica, Shakespeare and the Institution of Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). Simonds, Peggy Muñoz, ‘“My charms crack not”: The alchemical structure of The Tempest’, Comparative Drama 32 (1998), 538–70. —‘“Sweet power of music”: “the miraculous harp” in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, Comparative Drama 29 (1995), 61–90. Singh, Jyotsna, ‘Caliban versus Miranda: Race and Gender Conflicts in Postcolonial Rewritings of The Tempest’, in Shakespeare’s Romances, ed. Alison Thorne (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 205–25. Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Skura, Meredith, ‘Discourse and the individual: The case of colonialism in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989) 42–69.

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Smith, Hallett, Shakespeare’s Romances: A Study of the Imagination (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 1972). Sokol, B. J., A Brave New World of Knowledge: Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ and Early Modern Epistomology (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003). Spiller, Elizabeth, ‘Shakespeare and the Making of Early Modern Science: Resituating Prospero’s Art’, South Central Review 26 (2009), 24–41. Thompson, Ann, ‘“Miranda, where’s your sister?”: Reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, in Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, eds Susan Sellers, Linda Hutcheon and Paul Peron (Hempel Hemstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 45–55. Traister, Barbara, Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1984). Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret, Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Vaughan, Alden T. ‘William Strachey’s “True Reportory” and Shakespeare: A Closer Look at the Evidence’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008), 245–73. Vaughan, Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Vaughan, Virginia Mason, ‘Literary Invocations of The Tempest’, in Shakespeare’s Last Plays, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 155–72. —‘The Tempest’: Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Von Rosader, Kurt Tetzeli, ‘The Power of Magic from Endymion to The Tempest’, Shakespeare Survey 43 (1990), 1–14. White, Howard, ‘Copp’d Hills Towards Heaven’: Shakespeare and the Classical Polity (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970). Wood, Nigel ed., The Tempest: Theory and Practice (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995). Yates, Frances A. Shakespeare’s Last Plays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975). Zabus, Chantal, Tempests after Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

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INDEX Adelman, Janet 85 Albanese, Denise 80, 188 alchemy 32–3 Aldiss, Brian 166 allegorical readings 30–2, 46 Anderson, Laurie 236n. 9 Andreini, Francesco 121, 122 Andrews, Richard 115–16, 122, 127, 130, 135 Antonio 3, 158–9, 160 Aretino, Pietro 143 Ariel 21, 22, 30, 95, 182–4 in performance 47, 50 as servant 95 as slave 56 Aristotle 139, 142, 176, 177 Armin, Robert 125, 126 Atomism 177–80, 183–4 Auberlen, Eckhard 15 Auden, W. H. xvii Ayrer, Jacob xiv, 105

Bevington, David 196, 219 Blackfriars 1, 42, 96, 103, 111, 247n. 13 Bliss, Lee 28 Bloom, Harold 209 Bodin, Jean 143 Bosman, Anston 224 Boyle, Robert 193 Breight, Curt 65, 83 Brevik, Frank W. 211 Brook, Peter 9, 50 Brotton, Jerry 75, 213 Brown, Paul 69–70, 74, 213 Brown, Sarah Annes 217 Browning, Robert xvi, 23–4, 197 Bruster, Douglas 90, 96 Buckley, Lauren 252n. 21 Bullough, Geoffrey 55, 99–100, 104–5 Burnett, Mark Thornton 65

Bacon, Francis 167, 179–80, 181, 185–6, 187–8 Barker, Francis 71–2, 213 Bate, Jonathan 87–8, 94, 224 Beaumont, Francis xiii, 28 Beck, Ervin 211 Bender, John 192 Bennett, George 23 Benson, Frank 24, 57 Bentley, Gerald Eades 28 Berger, Karol 33–4

Caliban 1, 3, 4, 24, 47, 54, 56, 88, 111 as colonized subject 55–6, 57, 67–8, 71 language of 15–18, 22, 69 as monster 16, 65, 67 as natural man 36, 57 as rebel 154–7 as savage 20–1, 23 as servant 72–3, 95 as slave 72, 160

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272 Index

Callaghan, Dympna 74 Campbell, Thomas 18 Carey-Webb, Allen 221 Cartelli, Thomas 54–5, 74 Castiglione, Baldassare 143 Cawley, Robert Ralston xvi–xvii, 37, 107–8 Cefalu, Paul 214 Césaire, Aimé xvii, 56, 146 Chambers, E. K. 123 Charron, Pierre 139 Cheney, Patrick 89 Childress, Diana T. 27 Childs, Peter 214 Cholij, Irena 219 Cicero 139, 151 Clemen, Wolfgang 25–6 Clubb, Louise George 120–1, 122, 132, 251n. 6 Cobb, Noel 32 Cohen, Walter 83 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 21, 57, 168 Collinson, Patrick 144 commedia dell’arte 9, 45, 105, 115–36, 248n. 24 Dottore 134, 135 Lazzi 124, 134 Masks 119, 120, 125, 127 Pantalone 127, 134, 135 scenarios 118–19, 129–30, 133–4, 248n. 24 Zannis 120, 124–7, 131, 134 commedia erudita 120–1 Copernicus 169–72, 193 Coursen, H. R. 239n. 35 cultural materialism 8, 40, 62–3 Curry, Walter Clyde 33 Cutts, John P. 35

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Darío, Rubén xvi, 238n. 25 Das, Nandini 174 Daston, Lorraine 193 Davenant, William xv, 1, 2, 6, 7, 14–15, 41, 43 Dawkins, Peter 221 Day, John 124 Dee, John xiii, 33, 50, 183 Demaray, John G. 219, 260n. 23 D’haen, Thea 209 Digges, Thomas 180, 193 Digital Shakespeare 60, 201–3 Dobson, Michael 224 Dolan, Frances 83–4 Donahue, William 259n. 20 Donne, John 10, 168–70, 177, 178, 192 Döring, Tobias 209 Dowden, Edward 19, 26–7, 30 Drakakis, John 235–6n. 3 Dryden, John xv, 1, 2, 6, 7, 14–15, 16, 41, 43 Duffett, Thomas xv, 43–4 Dymkowski, Christine 40–1, 50, 51–2, 198, 237n. 12 Eden, Richard xii, 4, 97, 103, 108 editions of The Tempest xvi, xvii, 28–9, 106, 171, 174–5, 196–201 see also First Folio education 25, 207–8, 221–4 Egan, Gabriel 188 Elizabeth, Princess of England xiv, 5, 111, 206 Evans, Robert C. 214 Faithfull, Marianne 236–7n. 9 Feerick, Jean 214

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Index

Felperin, Howard 27 feminist readings 78–81, 206, 217–18 Fernández Retamar, Roberto xvii, 56 Ficino, Marsilius 33 Fiedler, Leslie 37 First Folio xiv, 14, 26, 40, 56, 134, 191–2, 196, 200 Fletcher, John xiii, 28, 132 Fludd, Robert 204 Folger Shakespeare Library 201–2 Forbidden Planet xvii, 51, 203 Forset, Edward 141–2 Fortescue, John 143 Freedman, Carl 166 Frey, Charles 214 Friesen, Ryan Curtis 221 Frye, Northrop 36 Fuchs, Barbara 74–5, 76 Fuseli, Henry xv Galileo 169, 179, 193 Garrick, David 19 Geneva Bible xii, 100–1 genre 26–30 as late play 29–30 as romance 27 as scientific romance 166–8, 194, 258n. 6 as tragicomedy 28–9, 132 Gentillet, Innocent 150–1 German productions 40, 50, 52 Gielgud, John 46, 49, 50 Gildon, Charles 16–17, 18 Gillies, John 72 Gilman, Ernest B. 240n. 34 Go, Kenji 215 Goldberg, Jonathan 217, 224

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273

Gonzalo 157–9, 160 Graff, Gerald 199 Gray, Henry David 105, 130–2, 247–8n. 24 Gray, Terry 203 Green, Andrew 219 Greenaway, Peter xviii, 45–6, 57, 203 Greenblatt, Stephen 8, 55, 63–4, 69, 170, 177–8, 184, 196–7, 215 Greene, Robert 27, 98, 174 Guarini, Giambattista 28, 132 Guicciardini, Francesco 143 Gurr, Andrew 41, 72, 89, 224–5 Hakluyt, Richard xii, 4 Hall, Edward 145 Hall, Kim 73 Hamilton, Donna B. 87, 105–6, 211 Harkness, Deborah 183 Harriot, Thomas 187 Hartley, Andrew James 217 Hartwig, Joan 28 Hazlitt, William 21–2, 104 Heath, Benjamin 17 Henderson, Diana E. 225 Henke, Robert 115–16, 122, 123, 130, 133–4, 135, 251n. 7 Herrin, Jeremy 59 Holinshed, Raphael 145 Holland, Peter 199, 225 Holmes, Jonathan 59–60 Holt, John 17 Honeyman, Janice 197 Hooke, Robert 187 Hopkins, Lisa 225

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274 Index

Horowitz, Arthur 225 Hotman, François 143 Hulme, Peter 39, 70–2, 198, 209, 213 Huxley, Aldous 165–6, 167–8 Hytner, Nicholas 50

Knight, G. Wilson 31 Knop, Sherron 221 Knowles, James 90 Kositsky, Lynne 215 Kott, Jan 37 Kuhn, Thomas 171

intertextuality 86–8 Islam 75–6

Lamming, George xvii, 67–8 Langbaum, Robert 199 Lanier, Douglas 51 Laroque, François 215 Lea, Kathleen 123 Lee, Sidney xvi, 238n. 25 Lee, Young Cho 212 Leininger, Lori 79, 217–18 Leoni, Battista 133 Levin, Harry 32 Lie, Nadia 209 Lindley, David 36, 175, 197–8, 219, 220, 250n. 34, 259n. 23, 263n. 3 Locatelli, Basilio 121–2, 130, 248n. 24 Logan, Robert A. 102 Long, John W. 35 Loomba, Ania 73–4, 76–7, 218 Luce, Morton xvi, 106 Lucking, David 222 Lucretius 177, 178–9, 181–2, 183–4 Lupton, Julia Reinhard 212 Lyne, Raphael 222

Jacobi, Derek 50 James, D. G. 31 James I, King of England 5, 138–9, 140–2, 145, 155, 162 Japanese productions 58–9 Jarman, Derek xviii, 50, 51, 203 Jefferson, Teddy 225 Johnson, Samuel 17–18 Jones, Inigo 109 Jonson, Ben xiii, 1, 14, 41, 96, 98, 103, 105 Alchemist, The xiii, 32, 99, 103, 246–7n. 13 Hymenaei xiii, 108–11, 112–13, 249n. 32 Kahn, Coppélia 85–6 Kastan, David Scott 5, 77–8, 211 Kean, Charles 44 Kearny, James 91, 221 Kelsey, Lin 219 Kempe, William 90, 96, 123, 124–6 Kepler, Johannes 187, 193 Kermode, Frank xvii, 28–9, 204, 211 Khoury, Joseph 226 Kinney, Arthur F. 99–100

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McAdam, Ian 222 McAlindon, Thomas 204, 212 MacDonald, Joyce Green 73 McDonald, Russ 25 MacDonnell, Patrick 22–3 Machiavelli, Niccoló 10, 143, 150–4, 158, 159–60

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Index

MacKaye, Percy xvi McMullan, Gordon 29 Macready, William Charles xv, 22–3, 43, 44, 57 magic 17, 33–6, 64, 66, 102, 207–8, 221–4 Magnusson, A. Lynne 119 Malone, Edmond xv, 3, 106, 229n. 2 Mannoni, Octave xvii, 55–6, 67, 197 Marcus, Leah 81 Marlowe, Christopher xiii, 33, 102 Marston, John xiii Marx, Leo 37 Marxist readings 81–4 masque 42–3, 89–90, 108–13, 161–2, 206–7, 219–21 Maus, Katharine Eisaman 15 Mazursky, Paul xviii, 49 Mebane, John S. 34, 208, 222 Mendes, Sam 50, 51, 59 metatheatre 29, 47, 89–90 Minear, Erin 220 Miranda 23, 51, 72, 73, 79–80, 162, 189–91, 206 Mirren, Helen xviii, 7, 52, 197 Mirror of Knighthood, The xii Moncrief, Kathryn M. 222 Montaigne, Michel de xiii, 101, 143, 158, 163 ‘Of the caniballes’ 4, 22, 55, 96–7, 117–18, 156–7, 197, 205 ‘Of the institute and education of children’ 208 Mowat, Barbara A. 29, 34–5, 65–6, 87, 200, 215, 222, 223

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275

Mullaney, Steven 65 Murphy, Patrick 209–10 Murry, J. Middleton 30 music 33–4, 35–6, 59–60, 206–7, 219–21, 236–7n. 9, 250n. 34 Nashe, Thomas 123–4 Neill, Michael 220 Neri, Ferdinando 130, 248n. 24 Netzloff, Mark 82 new historicism 8, 55, 63–6 New World readings 4–5, 37, 54, 66–7, 99–100, 103–5, 106–8, 156 Newton, Isaac 193 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope 169–70 Ninagawa, Yukio xviii, 57, 58 Nixon, Rob 226 Nochimson, Richard 208 Norbrook, David 82–3, 204, 212 Nunn, Trevor 59 Nuttall, A. D. 31–2 Orgel, Stephen 84, 89–90, 109, 187–8, 191, 197–8, 218 Orkin, Martin 90–1 Orrell, John 112 Ortiz, Joseph 220 Ovid xii, 87–8, 93, 94–5, 96, 97, 105, 144, 189 Palmer, D. J. 210 Park, Katherine 193 Pask, Kevin 220 Patterson, Annabel 82 Peacham, Henry 139

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276 Index

Pearson, D’Orsay 33 Peele, George 27 Pepys, Samuel 7, 15, 43 performances, earliest xiv, 1, 5, 13–14, 41, 111 Phelan, James 199 Pittman, Demetra 52 Plato 139, 147–8, 156–7 political readings 9–10, 15, 62–3, 82–4, 137–64, 204–5 Polybius 142 Poole, William 218 Pope, Alexander 17 Pory, John 113 post-colonial readings 8, 54–6, 66–77, 205, 213–17 refutation of 77–8 Primaleon, Prince of Greece xiv Prospero 1–2, 36 as colonist 55–6, 64, 71–2, 146 as governor 104–5 as philosopher 46–7, 146–7 as prince 150, 153–6 160–1, 163–4 as scientist 174, 186–7, 188–91 as Shakespeare 18–19 as woman 47–9, 52 Prospero’s island 3–4, 53, 156, 159, 229–30n. 4 psychoanalytic readings 49, 55–6, 67, 84–6 Pucher, Stefan 47–8, 49 Ralegh, Walter 33 Redgrave, Vanessa 7, 52 Rees, Graham 185–6

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Renan, Ernest xvi republicanism 138–46, 254n. 6 Richards, I. A. 25 Roberts, Adam 258n. 6 Rodó, José Enrique xvi Romano, Giulio 98 Rosier, James 100 Rothschild, N. Amos 223 Rowe, Katherine 201 Rowe, Nicholas xv, 16 Rudolph II, King of Bohemia xiii, 5 Said, Edward 66 Sams, Jeremy 44 Sanchez, Melissa 80, 218 Sawday, Jonathan 188 Scala, Flaminio 121, 122, 130 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 6, 20–1 Schlueter, Nathan 212 Schmahl, Hildegard 47, 48, 49, 52 Schmidgall, Gary 64–5, 249n. 32 science, early modern 10–11, 80, 168–94 Sea Venture xiii, xiv, 3, 54, 99–100, 104, 106 Sebastian 158–9, 160 Sebek, Barbara 79–80 Sennert, Daniel 177–8 Shadwell, Thomas 14–15 Shaheen, Naseeb 100–2 Shakespeare, William Antony and Cleopatra 144–5 Comedy of Errors 118, 144 Coriolanus 145 Cymbeline 110, 189

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Index

Hamlet 127, 128, 178 Henry IV, Part One 128 Julius Caesar 145 King Lear 125, 145, 182 Macbeth 126–7 Measure for Measure 145 Merchant of Venice 125, 126, 127–8, 129, 145 Midsummer Night’s Dream 128, 129–30 Much Ado About Nothing 128 Othello 127, 129, 130 Pericles 191, 262n. 57 Rape of Lucrece 145 Richard III 94 Romeo and Juliet 127 Taming of the Shrew 128 Timon of Athens 145, 176 Titus Andronicus 144, 145 Twelfth Night 125, 126 Winter’s Tale 98, 189 Shapin, Steven 193 Shaw, Catherine M. 110 Sheen, Erica 246n. 13 Shelley, Mary 166–7 Sher, Antony 50–1 Sherman, William 39, 198, 209 Shin, Hiewon 223 Simonds, Peggy Muñoz 33, 35, 36, 220–1 Singh, Jyotsna 78–9, 226 Skura, Meredith 86, 215 slavery 72, 76, 160 Slights, Jessica 218 Smith, Hallett 27, 196, 210 Smith, John (Captain) 54 Smith, Thomas 143 Smith, Winifred 251n. 7 Sokol, B. J. 223

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277

sources 8–9, 93–113, 117–18, 135–6, 144–5 Spenser, Edmund 89 Spiller, Elizabeth 188 Stallybrass, Peter 206 Stalpaert, Christel 226 Stanivukovic, Goran 223 Still, Colin 30–1 Strachey, William xiii, xiv, 2, 54, 97, 99–100, 103–4, 106–8, 156, 197, 205 Strehler, Giorgio xvii–xviii, 9, 45 Strier, Richard 212–13 Stritmatter, Roger 215–16 Suchet, David 57 Sundelson, David 86 Sycorax 58, 73, 74, 155 Tarlton, Richard 124 Taymor, Julie xviii, 52, 197, 203, 206 theatregrams 121, 127–9, 135 Thompson, Ann 79, 191–2, 218 Thorne, Alison 112 Traister, Barbara 34, 223 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm 24, 57 Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret 95, 101 Vaughan, Alden T. 42, 66–7, 88, 197, 210, 216, 238–9n. 27, 253n. 33 Vaughan, Virginia Mason 55, 88, 197, 209, 210, 216, 238–9n. 27, 253n. 33 on performance 40, 42, 226–7, 239n. 35

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278 Index

Virgil xii, 87, 94–5, 96, 144, 159 Visconsi, Elliott 201 Warburton, Willliam 17 Warner, Marina 51, 58, 81 Warton, Joseph 17 Welsh, James M. 227 Werstine, Paul 200 White, R. S. 210 Whitted, Brent 200 Wikander, Matthew 15 Wiles, David 252n. 19, 20 Williams, Raymond 62 Willis, Deborah 77, 216 Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula 46–7 Wilson, Catherine 177, 179

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Wilson, Daniel xvi, 24 Wilson, John Dover 30 Wilson, Richard 76 Wilson-Okamura, David 87, 216 Winson, Patricia 224 Wolff, Max J. 131 Wood, John 50 Wood, Nigel 210–11 Woodward, Hobson 216–17 Wright, Louis B. 123 Wylie, John 217 Yachnin, Paul 200 Yates, Frances A. 32–3 Zabus, Chantal 227

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