The Tempest: Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition 9781350087071, 9781350087088, 9781350284159

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The Tempest

Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition The aim of the Critical Tradition series is to increase our knowledge of how Shakespeare’s plays were received and understood by critics, editors and general readers. Each volume traces the course of Shakespeare criticism, play-by-play, from the earliest items of recorded criticism to the beginnings of the modern period. The focus of the documentary material is from the late eighteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. The series makes a major contribution to our understanding of the plays and of the traditions of Shakespearean criticism as they have developed from century to century. The introduction to each volume constitutes an important chapter of literary history, tracing the entire critical career of each play from the beginnings to the present day. Series editors:

Professor Sir Brian Vickers, fellow of the British Academy and Emeritus Professor, ETH Zürich, Switzerland Professor Joseph Candido, University of Arkansas, USA Series titles: Coriolanus Edited by David George 978-1-3501-5783-5 King Henry V Edited by Joseph Candido 978-1-4742-5805-0 King Richard II Edited by Charles F. Forker with a new introduction by Nicholas R. Radel 978-1-3500-8475-9 The Tempest Edited by Brinda Charry 978-1-3500-8707-1

The Tempest Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition Edited by Brinda Charry

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Brinda Charry, 2022 Brinda Charry has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Permissions Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-8707-1 ePDF: 978-1-3502-8415-9 eBook: 978-1-3502-8414-2 Series: Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents General editor’s preface General editors’ preface to the revised series Permissions acknowledgements Acknowledgements

vii x xi xii

Introduction 1 1 Edmond Malone, date of composition, 1790 47 2 William Taylor, as tragicomedy, 1795 49 3 George Chalmers, New World voyages, 1797 50 4 Edmond Malone, Virginia voyages, 1808 53 5 August Wilhelm Schlegel, as poetry, 1809–11 66 6 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, commentary, 1811–12 68 7 William Hazlitt, commentary, 1817 76 8 Edmond Malone, Caliban as savage, 1821 80 9 Charles Lamb, The Tempest staged, 1822 85 10 Anna Brownell Jameson, on Miranda, 1832 87 11 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as romantic drama, 1836 90 12 Thomas Campbell, Shakespeare as Prospero, 1838 95 13 Joseph Hunter, the Mediterranean, 1839 97 14 Washington Irving, The Tempest and America, 1840 100 15 Patrick MacDonnell, on Caliban, 1840 104 16 Charles Knight, commentary, 1843 107 17 Hermann Ulrici, the wonderful and the real, 1846 109 18 W. J. Birch, religion, 1848 114 19 John Ruskin, slavery, 1872 119 20 Daniel Wilson, Caliban as the ‘missing link’, 1873 121 21 Edward Dowden, Shakespeare as Prospero, 1875 130 22 A.C. Swinburne, commentary, 1880 138 23 Frances Anne Kemble, commentary, 1882 139 24 Horace Howard Furness, on Caliban, 1895 144 25 George Bernard Shaw, review, 1897 147 26 Rudyard Kipling, commentary, 1898 150 27 Frank Bristol, The Tempest and America, 1898 153

Contents

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28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Luce Morton, commentary, 1901 Ashley Thorndike, the influence of Beaumont and Fletcher, 1901 Everett Edward Hale, commentary, 1903 W. W. Newell, The Tempest and folk-tale, 1903 Max Beerbohm, theatre review, 1903 A. C. Bradley, the transitory nature of things, 1904 Stopford Brooke, commentary, 1905 Lytton Strachey, Shakespeare’s final period, 1906 Henry James, commentary, 1907 Sidney Lee, The Tempest and America, 1907 Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare’s last phase, 1907 John Churton Collins, Christian symbolism, 1908 F. H. Ristine, tragicomedy, 1910 Sidney Lee, Caliban as a Native American, 1913 Rachel Kelsey, New World influences, 1914 Arthur Quiller-Couch, the first performance, 1917 Charles Gayley, political ideas, 1917 John Rea, Erasmus’ influence on the storm scene, 1919 Ernest Law, the Blackfriars Theatre, 1920 Collin Still, as allegory, 1921 José Enrique Rodó, Ariel and Caliban as symbols, 1922 Richard Noble, songs, 1932 Enid Welsford, the court masque, 1927 E. K. Chambers, sources, 1930–1 Wilson Knight, tempests and music, 1932 E. M. W. Tillyard, commentary on The Tempest, 1936 John Middleton Murry, nurture and change, 1936 F. R. Leavis, reality, 1942 Theodore Spencer, ordering of characters, 1942 Wilson Knight, commentary on The Tempest, 1947 G. E. Bentley, the Blackfriars Theatre, 1948 James Nosworthy, structure and sources, 1948 Derek Traversi, artistic and moral purpose, 1949 Nevill Coghill, Christian myth, 1950 Frank Kermode, commentary, 1954

Notes Select bibliography Index

157 165 168 170 174 178 180 187 193 204 211 215 219 220 224 226 230 235 237 243 255 257 260 269 272 279 283 290 292 297 309 311 314 321 324 335 352 361

General editor’s preface The aim of this series is to increase our knowledge of how Shakespeare’s plays were received and understood by critics, editors, and general readers. His work, with its enormous range of represented situations, characters, styles, and moods, has always been a challenge, both to the capacity of readers and to their critical systems. Two main reactions may be expected: either the system is expanded to match the plays or the plays are reduced to fit the system. If we study his reception in the neo-classic period, as I have done in my six-volume anthology of primary texts, Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 1623–1801 (London and Boston, 1974–81), we see his plays being cropped – literally, cut, drastically adapted – to accommodate the prevailing notions of decorum and propriety. If not hacked about for the stage, they were evaluated by literary-critical criteria which seem to us self-evidently anachronistic and inappropriate, and found wanting. Yet despite this frequent mismatch between system and artefact, the focus of neo-classic critical theory on issues of characterization, structure and style did enable many writers to respond to the experience of reading or seeing his plays in a fresh and personal way. Since most of the eighteenth-century material has been dealt with in the previously mentioned collection, the main emphasis in this series will be on documenting the period 1790 to 1920. While the major Romantic critics (Coleridge, Hazlitt, Keats) have been often studied, and will need less representation here, there are many interesting and important writers of the early nineteenth century who have seldom attracted attention from modern historians. As one moves on chronologically into the Victorian period, our knowledge becomes even more thin and patchy. But there was a continuous, indeed constantly increasing stream of publications in England, America, France and Germany, hardly known today. (See my select bibliography of the ‘History of Shakespeare Criticism’ in the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Third Edition, Volume 2: 1500-1700, ed. Douglas Sedge, Cambridge University Press; forthcoming.) This period saw the founding of the Shakespeare Society by J. P. Collier in 1840, which produced a huge number of publications by 1853, when it unfortunately collapsed, following Collier’s exposure as a forger. In 1873 the New Shakespeare Society was founded by F. J. Furnivall, and over the following twenty years produced some eight series of publications, including its Transactions, which contain many important critical and scholarly essays, a group of reprints of early quartos, allusion books, bibliographies and much else. This was also the period in which the first journals devoted exclusively to Shakespeare appeared, some short-lived, such as Poet Lore (Philadelphia 1889–97) and Shakespeariana (Philadelphia 1883), Noctes Shakspearianae (Winchester College, 1887), or New Shakespeareana (the organ of the Shakespeare Society of New York), but at least one still with us, the Jahrbuch of the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft, which appeared as such from 1865 to 1963, was divided into separate volumes for West and East Germany in 1964–5, but happily reunited in 1991.

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Shakespeare’s plays were constantly edited and reprinted in this period. Of the complete editions, the two great peaks are the ‘third variorum’ edition of James Boswell, Jr. in twenty-one volumes (1821), the apotheosis of the eighteenth-century editions by Johnson, Steevens and Malone, and the Cambridge edition by William G. Clark, John Glover and W. Aldis Wright in nine volumes (1863–6), which in turn provided the text for the enormously long-lived one-volume ‘Globe edition’ (1864). The Cambridge edition, which presented Shakespeare’s text with minimum annotation, broke with the eighteenth-century tradition of reprinting all the important footnotes from every earlier edition, an incremental process which burdened the page but certainly led to a great dissemination of knowledge about Shakespeare’s plays. That service was recommenced on a new and more coherent plan in 1871 by Dr H. H. Furness with his Variorum Edition of separate plays, continued by his son H. H. Furness, Jr. (fifteen titles by 1908), and revived in our time as the New Variorum Shakespeare, currently under the aegis of the Modern Language Association of America. But in addition to these well-known scholarly editions, a vast number of competing sets of the plays were issued for and absorbed by an apparently insatiable public. Their popularity can be judged by the remarkable number of reprints and re-editions enjoyed, for instance, by Charles Knight’s ‘Pictorial edition’ (eight volumes, 1838–43), followed by his ‘Library edition’ (twelve volumes, 1842–4), re-christened in 1850–2 the ‘National edition’, not easily distinguishable from Knight’s own ‘Cabinet edition’ (sixteen volumes, 1847–8), not to mention his ‘Imperial edition’, ‘Blackfriars edition’, all of which being followed by a host of spin-offs of their constituent material; or those by J. P. Collier (eight volumes, 1842–4, six volumes, 1858, eight volumes, 1878, now described as having ‘the Purest Text and the Briefest Notes’), or Alexander Dyce (six volumes, 1857; nine volumes, 1846–7; ten volumes, 1880–1, 1895–1901). Other notable editions came from J. O. Halliwell (sixteen volumes, 1853–65); Howard Staunton (three volumes, 1856–60; eight volumes, 1872; six volumes, 1860, 1873, 1894; fifteen volumes, 1881); John Dicks, whose ‘Shilling edition’ (1861) had reputedly sold a million copies by 1868, but was undercut by the ‘Shakespeare for Sixpence’ edition (Cardiff, 1897); Nicolaus Delius (seven volumes, 1854–61), the text of which was reused by F. J. Furnivall for his one-volume ‘Leopold edition’ (1877, ‘100th Thousand’ by 1910); Edward Dowden (twelve volumes, 1882–3); F. A. Marshall and Henry Irving in the ‘Henry Irving edition’ (eight volumes, 1888–90); C. H. Herford’s ‘Eversley edition’ (ten volumes, 1899); the ‘Stratford town edition’ by A. H. Bullen and others (ten volumes, 1904–7); the ‘University Press’ edition with notes by Sidney Lee and important introductions to the individual plays by over thirty critics (forty volumes, 1906–9); and many, many more, as yet unchronicled by bibliographers. America also launched a vigorous tradition of Shakespeare editing, starting with Gulian C. Verplanck’s edition (three volumes, New York 1844–7), continuing with those by H. N. Hudson (eleven volumes, Boston 1851–6 and twenty volumes, 1880–1); R. G. White (twelve volumes, Boston 1857–66, 1888), and the ‘Riverside edition’ (three volumes, Boston 1883); J. A. Morgan, the ‘Bankside edition’ (twenty-two volumes, New York, 1888–1906), with parallel texts of the plays from the quartos and folio; W. J. Rolfe, a larger edition (forty volumes, New York 1871–96), and a smaller or ‘Friendly edition’ (twenty volumes, New York 1884); and two notable editions by women, Mary Cowden Clarke’s (two volumes, 1860, four volumes, 1864), and the ‘First Folio edition’ by Charlotte

 General Editor’s Preface ix E. Porter and Helen A. Clarke (forty volumes, New York 1903–13). These editions often included biographical material, illustrative notes, accounts of Shakespeare’s sources, excerpts from contemporary ballads and plays, attempts to ascertain the chronology of his writings, and much else. The fortunate – largely middle-class – purchasers of these sets had access to a surprisingly wide range of material, much of it based on a sound historical knowledge. In addition to the complete works, there were countless editions of the individual plays and poems, many of them of a high scholarly standard (the bestknown being the original ‘Arden edition’, ed. W. J. Craig and R. H. Case in thirty-nine volumes, 1899–1924), not to mention numerous facsimiles of the folios and quartos. The more we study the Victorian period, the less likely we shall be to indulge such facile dismissals of it as Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918). Where Strachey could follow the common practice of rejecting the values of the preceding age, we now should have sufficient historical distance to place the scholarly and critical output of that period into a coherent perspective. Nineteenth-century scholars produced a number of studies that held their place as authorities for many years, and can still be used with profit. For Shakespeare’s language there was E. A. Abbott, A Shakespearian Grammar (1869; many editions), Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare-Lexicon (Berlin, 1874–5, 1886), revised and extended by Gregor Sarrazin (two volumes, Berlin, 1902), and Wilhelm Franz, Shakespeare-Grammatik (Halle, 1898–1900, 1909; Heidelberg, 1924). It is only very recently that modern works, such as Marvin Spevack, A Shakespeare Thesaurus (Hildesheim, 1993), have added anything new. On the fundamental issue of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, such as his collaboration with John Fletcher in Henry VIII, the division of labour independently proposed for that play by Samuel Hickson and James Spedding in 1847 and 1850 has been largely confirmed by Jonathan Hope in The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays (Cambridge, 1994). In other areas we now have more reliable tools to work with than the Victorians, but it was they who laid the basis for many of our scholarly approaches to Shakespeare. As for their Shakespeare criticism, while a few authors are still known and read – A. C. Bradley for his Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), Walter Pater for his essay on ‘Shakespeare’s English Kings’ in Appreciations (1889) –- the majority are simply unknown. Among the English critics who clearly deserve to be revalued are Richard Simpson for his essays on Shakespeare’s historical plays, R. G. Moulton for his Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (1885; 3rd ed. 1906), Edward Dowden, and F. S. Boas. As for the many German critics whose work was eagerly translated into English – A. W. Schlegel, Hermann Ulrici, G. G. Gervinus, Karl Elze, Wilhelm Creizenach – who today can give any account of their writings? Joseph Candido’s full and detailed survey of King John, the first volume in this collection, has not only clarified the various critical traditions that emerged for this play in exemplary manner but has also recovered three critics who seem to me outstanding: J. Lytelton Etty, Charlotte Porter and John Munro. The fascination of this series will be not just the recovery of many forgotten writers but the unpredictable ways in which their work will redefine the history of Shakespeare’s reception, and – paradoxical though it may seem – throw new light on the plays themselves. Brian Vickers 1996

General editors’ preface to the revised series This volume is the latest in the revived series Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition (1996– 2005), which originally consisted of editions of King John, Richard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, and Coriolanus, all of which will be reprinted and expanded to bring them more nearly in line with the newer volumes. Among future additions to the series are editions of The Tempest, Richard III, King Lear, and a two-volume set on Hamlet. Additional plans call for a more extensive range of titles drawn from the tragedies, comedies, and histories. Introductions to the volumes will contextualize the reprinted excerpts by presenting a full history of the critical reception of the play from the earliest times to the present. The reprinted and expanded editions of the earlier volumes are intended to give a clearer picture of how the play has been received by scholars and critics in the last twenty or so years. Each reprinted volume consists of two distinct parts: (1) the complete text of the original book, and (2) a new Supplementary Introduction covering all significant scholarship on the play from the date of the initial publication of the book down to the present day. The Supplementary Introduction will document significant continuities as well as noteworthy – sometimes abrupt – changes in the critical tradition. Each editor has been given free rein on the structure and level of analysis in the introductions to both the newer and reprinted volumes. The various segments of each chapter are designed to highlight important strains of scholarly inquiry so that the reader can locate specific areas of interest or interpretative emphasis. The new editions, as well as the enhanced reprinted editions, will thus serve as convenient critical guides to all students of Shakespeare undertaking serious scholarship on these plays. Brian Vickers and Joseph Candido 2021

Permissions acknowledgements © G. E. Bentley, excerpt from ‘Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre’, Shakespeare Survey 33 (1948), 40–9, Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission. © Neville Coghill, excerpt from ‘The Basis of Shakespearean Comedy,’ Essays and Studies N. S. III (London, 1950) 1–28. John Murray Publishers an imprint of Hodder and Stoughton, Publisher. © Wilson Knight, excerpt from The Shakespearean Tempest, London: Methuen and Co Ltd, 1960 with thanks to Methuen and Co Ltd, 1932. © James M. Nosworthy, ‘The Narrative Sources of The Tempest.’ Review of English Studies 249 1948), 281–94, reproduced with permission from Oxford University Press. © Frank Kermode, excerpt from ‘Introduction.’ The Tempest. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Methuen and Co., 1954, xi–xciii. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing. © E. M. W Tillyard, excerpt from Shakespeare’s Last Plays, London, 2014. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the staff at Mason Library, Keene State College for their help and support. I also am grateful to Venkat Sadasivan for his patience and generosity and to Devika Johnson and Jennifer Stemp for their assistance.

Introduction

Beginnings to 1800 ‘By the King’s players Hollowmas night was presented at Whitehall before the King’s Majestie a play called The Tempest’ – so reads an entry in the ‘Book of Revels’, a record of court entertainments between 31 October 1611 and 1 November 1612.1 This historical record offers no commentary on the play or that particular performance, although one can infer that the playing company or the playwright were sufficiently prestigious to merit a royal audience. With this single brief reference begins the tradition of writing on The Tempest. Perhaps more than any play by Shakespeare, The Tempest is a ‘writer’s play’. It has inspired adaptations and appropriations through the centuries and across cultures, and these rewrites have served as a unique form of critical engagement. Consequently, it is not entirely surprising that the earliest pieces of commentary, all penned within half a century of Shakespeare’s death, appear as allusions and adaptations by other poets and playwrights. Ben Jonson’s allusion to the play in his preface to Bartholomew Fair (1614) emerged from professional rivalry. Shakespeare’s use of the fantastical is contrasted with Jonson’s own realism. Shakespeare goes unnamed: he is simply one of those writers who ‘make nature afraid’ with their exaggerated and unreal characters and plots, one of ‘those that beget tales, tempests, and such-like drolleries’; Jonson’s own play will never feature a ‘Servant-monster’.2 Jonson’s comments, uncomplimentary though they might be, anticipate a long line of readers and critics who comment on the element of the fantastic in the play. They also gesture towards the debate between Nature and Art, a debate that Frank Kermode, the last critic featured in this collection, identifies as central to The Tempest’s dramatic conflict. John Dryden, often considered the greatest poet and playwright of the generation following Shakespeare, also comments on The Tempest in the context of his own creative adaptation of the play. Dryden’s 1670 adaptation (which was preceded by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s 1622 adaptation, The Sea Voyage) was co-authored with William Davenant and was titled The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island (1667). The project was undertaken because, so Dryden writes in his ‘Preface’ to the play, Davenant ‘found that somewhat might be added to the Design of Shakespeare, of which neither Fletcher not Suckling had ever thought’.3 Standing as he does at the beginning of the neoclassical period with its emphasis on the unities, form, decorum and reason, Dryden is all too aware of Shakespeare’s imperfections. As he (Dryden)

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put it elsewhere, Shakespeare often fell short of the ‘dignity of subject . . . Never did any author precipitate himself from such great height of thought to so low experience as he often does’.4 It was believed that these violations of decorum could be erased or rewritten in adaptation. In fact, Dryden himself adapted two other Shakespeare plays, apart from The Tempest. As Brian Vickers points out, ‘there is no comparable instance of the work of a major artist being altered in such a sweeping fashion in order to conform to the aesthetic demands or expectations of his age.’5 Genuine critical dissatisfaction with the works of Shakespeare aside, the appetite of the theatrical audience for both heroic and risqué fare also promoted these rewritings. Dryden’s ‘Introduction’, however, does not dwell on Shakespeare’s so-called flaws: it simply acknowledges The Tempest as a source of inspiration to writers, the master root from which ‘new branches shoot’.6 But, by implication, the source must be displaced and must make way for later, more polished writers, including, of course, Dryden and Davenant. Apart from and perhaps quite distinct from his adaptations, Dryden left a substantial body of writing on Shakespeare. There is little consistency in this work and Dryden moves between criticism and admiration, but always writes as one close enough to Shakespeare in time to see him as an immediate predecessor, yet far enough removed to view him with a degree of detachment. Dryden’s approach is that of a poet, playwright and reader who has an instinctive love for literature and good writing even as he is often hampered by the neoclassical dogma that dominated the age. For the neoclassical critics, Shakespeare disregarded the unities and his language was often coarse and lacked refinement and ‘wit’ – the ability to use words in a manner befitting the dignity of the subject. As Brian Vickers explains the neoclassical view of Shakespeare: The canons of criticism were tested against him, and he was found wanting. It may seem clear to us that in fact their critical categories were wanting, but we must think ourselves back into the freshness of this phase of English criticism if we are to understand the fascination of testing out a critical system against the acknowledged ‘greatest writer of this or any other age’.7

However, Dryden, like some other critics, still admired Shakespeare in spite of his so-called flaws and the fact that the current of opinion was generally against him. He argued that Shakespeare’s unfortunate failings can be attributed to the fact that he lived in an age that was less polished than the one the neoclassicals occupied, more lacking cultural and artistic refinement, but he was still among the greatest of English writers. A reference to Caliban in the preface to Dryden’s 1679 adaptation of the other Shakespeare play, Troilus and Cressida, is the first piece of writing on Shakespeare’s famous character. Dryden had elsewhere expressed his admiration of Shakespeare’s ability to draw from ‘Nature’ in all its multiplicity and richness: ‘All the images of Nature were still present to him and he drew them, not laboriously but luckily . . . he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked inwards and found her there.’8 The interesting thing about Caliban, however, (Dryden writes in his preface to his Troilus and Cressida) is that he is not natural – he is ‘a species of himself . . . .

 Introduction 3 Distinguished from other mortals’.9 Shakespeare’s success lies in the fact that he creates a character who is still credible in his monstrosity. If Dryden wrote both as a fellow-poet and as a critic, most of the criticism of The Tempest that followed came from scholar-critics providing introductions, glosses, and supplementary notes to editions of Shakespeare, or penning periodical or literary essays. In the early eighteenth century, neoclassical rules continued to be applied with few reservations. If Shakespeare followed the rules, he pleased; if he failed to, he did not. The unities of time, place, and action continued to be the easiest aspect of the plays within which to identify a lack in Shakespeare. The unities were important not only because they were prescribed by antiquity but also because they were apparently dictated by the requirements of plot structure. Unlike most of the other plays, The Tempest (along with The Merry Wives of Windsor) was easy to commend because it observed the unities of time, place and action. Additionally, it served as proof that Shakespeare could indeed follow the unities if he so wished, and he was at his best when he did so. For instance, Charles Gildon (1709) was firmly of the neoclassical opinion that ‘Shakespeare is great in nothing but what is according to the rules of Art; and where his ignorance of them is not supply’d by his Genius Men of Judgment and good Sense see such monstrous Absurdities in almost every Part of his Works that nothing but his uncommon Excellencies in the other coul’d ever prevail with us to suffer; and what he woul’d never have been guilty of had his Judgment been but well inform’d by Art’.10 Gildon appeals to the higher authority of Aristotle and praises The Tempest as a perfect instance of the Aristotelean ‘imitation of an action’. All elements of plot as described by Aristotle can be identified in The Tempest, as Gildon clarifies in his painstaking structural analysis of the play’s ‘conduct’ or structure. Besides, the characters are constant and true to themselves: so, Caliban is always malicious and villainous, Antonio always treacherous and so forth. There appears to be little place in Gildon’s analysis for contradictory impulses within the same character. Yet, in spite of his faith in classical order, Gildon is willing to concede that ‘Likeness’ (faithfulness to reality) when it comes to ‘Manners’ (the representation of human behaviour), is not to be expected in the play because it is a fiction. And although Gildon is of the opinion that the magical element in the play is ‘questionable’, he adds that Shakespeare was simply being true to his age, a time when the general populace believed in spirits and conjurers.11 In fact, it could be said that the fantastical aspect of The Tempest gave even the most rigorously conservative of critics licence to make concessions when it came to Shakespeare’s disregard of the classical conventions. To those other critics who anyway had less regard for the conventions, Shakespeare is great in spite of, or even because of, his disregard for the rules, simply because artistic genius and rules rarely went together. Nicholas Rowe (1709), who was one such defender of Shakespeare’s unconventional genius, writes that while the unities are observed in the play, the truth is that Shakespeare ‘valu’d himself least upon’ that aspect of the play. The play’s real ‘Excellencies were all of another Kind’ – it is the ‘Solemn’ and ‘Poetical’ magic and the ‘wonderful Invention’ that characterize the play as a whole that deserve to be commended. Caliban’s character is particularly chosen for praise – he is an extravagant creation who is also consistently drawn (‘well-sustained’) and forms a composite and unified whole in

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The Tempest

that his personality is invested with a unique language that is all its own.12 Rowe’s and Gildon’s commentaries, when read alongside each other, do not draw as much attention to disagreements regarding the play as they demonstrate how two critics who agree on its excellence approach it from quite different directions and describe in quite distinct terms the nature of Shakespeare’s achievement in it. Like Rowe, Joseph Addison (1712) reserves his greatest commendation for Caliban: Caliban emerged from a kind of imaginative genius unsupported by reality. Hotspur or Julius Caesar were created out of ‘History’ or ‘Observation’ (presumably the study of real-life people), but Caliban was ‘supplied out of his own Imagination’. By implication, the creation of such a character is a sign of greater poetic talent. This theme of the imagination seems misplaced in the neoclassical age, but for admirers of The Tempest, the play’s fantastical storyline and characters (Caliban in particular) needed to be judged on its own distinct terms, terms often far removed from prevalent strictures and expectations. Addison attributes the appeal of the magical element of the plot to the ‘strength of his [Shakespeare’s] genius’ in appealing to the ‘weak superstitious Part of his Reader’s Imagination’.13 While Addison does not explicitly make this argument, his assessment of magic in the play appears to be based on the assumption that Shakespeare’s ability to depict magic was often far superior to that of other more urbane writers (notably Beaumont and Fletcher) because he grew up in the countryside and was less ‘learned’. In any case, for both Addison and Gildon before him, Shakespeare’s use of magic in The Tempest was noted as speaking directly to the audience’s beliefs and superstitions. Generally speaking, there was an investment in accuracy and the idea of the ‘true original’ in eighteenth-century editorial labours. So, writing in 1733, Lewis Theobald emended the text in accordance with critical (and social) notions of ‘propriety’ and ‘manners’. Theobald’s project was to restore Shakespeare’s ‘genuine text’ which had unfortunately been corrupted and contaminated, often by actors, and which was rife with ‘Errors propagated and multiplied by Time’.14 Following this, he moves the ‘Abhorr’d slave . . .’ lines in Act 1, Scene 1 from Miranda to Prospero. His reasoning is along the lines that characters should speak and conduct themselves in a manner befitting their station and person; consequently, Miranda was not only too young to have taught Caliban language, she was too delicate to have interrupted her father when he was berating Caliban and to have lashed out herself at the ‘monster’. Theobald explains that attributing the lines to Miranda was a change made by actors who believed that she had stayed too silent for too long although present on stage. Theobald’s emendation is interesting on two counts: as an editorial correction it reflects the impetus to create a play that is supposedly correct and permanent, as free of the corruption introduced by actors as Miranda herself is ‘pure’; Theobald’s comment also makes apparent that consideration of character was becoming as important as an interest in the plays as whole aesthetic objects (although character was still read in relation to the unity of the entire text). Following this, the neoclassical concept of the ‘consistency’ of character was taken very seriously. Characters should be ‘preserved’ through the text; every aspect of a fictional persona should work elegantly and seamlessly with the other aspects delineated in the play. Theobald’s editorial revision yields the earliest extant comment on Miranda. Richard Sill’s 1797 revision where he will not allow that Miranda puns upon the word ‘maid’

 Introduction 5 at her first meeting with Ferdinand because she was ‘no shrewd female flirt’ is another one.15 These comments are based on readings of Miranda as she appeared through the whole text and also, obviously, on ideas of what constitutes seeming behaviour in young women. These approaches to Miranda are echoed by other commentaries that emphasize the play’s single female character’s ‘maidenly dignity’ and ‘purity’. William Richardson’s essay (1789) on Shakespeare’s ‘Imitation of Female Characters’ directs the late eighteenth-century discussion of Miranda in the direction of sociological criticism –all characters should be true to life and to their social standing, writes Richardson, and since, realistically speaking, women’s social circumstances were somewhat limited in Shakespeare’s time, it is not surprising that his female characters lack the depth and variety of his men. While Richardson echoes the standard descriptions of Miranda as being innocent and naïve, he also considers her as ‘confident’ rather than ‘shy’. This confidence, he argues, is also born of circumstance – innocent in the ways of the world (and not subject to the socialization most women were), Miranda does not know shyness or dissimulation, as seen in her frank confession of her love to Ferdinand. For the first time, Richardson studies a character in relation to social context.16 The notion of ‘consistency’ of character and ‘propriety’ of ‘manners’ comes up over and over again in Tempest criticism of this period. William Warburton (1747) evokes ‘unity of character’ once again in a discussion of Miranda and admires Shakespeare’s ‘art in preserving the unity of her character’,17 as does Peter Whalley (1748) who applies neoclassical principles of ‘exactness’ and ‘likeness’ and ‘propriety’ in the depiction of the play’s characters.18 While Joseph Warton (1754) too turns to consistency and decorum in his discussion of the depiction of Ariel and Caliban, he draws attention, possibly for the first time, to the complexities of these characters. So, Ariel is delightful and other-worldly but also brings a moral element into the play with his line on forgiveness – a move that Warton approves of, just as he does the brutish Caliban’s generosity to newcomers on the island. Warton’s commentary gives depth to the discussion of fictional character. Consistency and ‘propriety’ are important in the depiction of character, but these can coexist – to an extent – with contradiction and with something like multi-facetedness; indeed, the complexity of character contributes to propriety in construction.19 Those who pushed against neoclassical rules did not come up with a clear alternative theory of criticism or even a unified set of statements on The Tempest. But we find certain points of interest that emerge: both Samuel Johnson (1765) and Benjamin Heath (1765) note the adherence to the unities but dismiss that feature of the plot as unintended by the author and, in fact, as not the most remarkable aspect of it; Johnson’s co-editor George Steevens (1778), on the other hand, says that the unity of time is rigidly observed because Shakespeare wanted to show that he could write according to the classical precepts.20 In any case, for Johnson and Steevens (1773), what is important is the variety of character, passion and thought that Shakespeare is able to encompass within a single plot.21 On the other hand Heath argues that there is no single plot, and hence no unity of action. Ignoring or overlooking the ways in which the Trinculo–Sebastian subplot parallels the main story, he says that sections could be struck out of the play with no great loss. Further, many commentators return to the point of Shakespeare being a poet of ‘Nature’. William Guthrie (1747) writes that

6

The Tempest

Shakespeare was not simply inspired by nature, but he created objects and persons ‘rendered natural’ by his skill and ‘improved, embellished and ennobled’ reality. Like Dryden, Addison and other critics who came before them, these mid/late-eighteenthcentury commentators reconceptualize the idea of ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ as that which is credible or probable in the context of the work. Finally, any insistence that the play follows classical precepts is framed as a form of false refinement, an unnecessary reliance on what Guthrie describes as the ‘tinsel ornaments of the French academy’.22 Shakespeare’s language was another topic of criticism. While it had often been accused of being coarse and barbaric by neoclassical critics, for Shakespeare’s apologists the language did have some embarrassing excesses but only because ‘public taste [in Shakespeare’s time] was in its infancy and was delighted (as it always does during that State) in the high and turgid’.23 But Shakespeare’s language was gradually admired by critics who regarded his style as worthy of greater attention than his disregard for classical conventions. The explosion of new editions in the second half of the eighteenth century resulted in close attention paid to language in the glosses and notes of editors such as Johnson and Steevens. Still other commentators simply engage in a systematic and detailed analysis of his style – John Holt (1749), for instance, defends Shakespeare’s diction in The Tempest against the revisions made by Warburton in his 1747 edition.24 Edward Capell (1783) maintains that the puns in the Antonio– Sebastian scenes have a place in that they show us the shallowness and unseemly levity of these two men.25 Daniel Webb (1762) comments on the connection between diction and effect; Joseph Priestley (1777) on metonymy; Henry Kames (1789) looks at hyperbole in the play.26 Apart from these comments on figures of speech, increased attention was paid to characters’, notably Caliban’s, style of speech. Dryden had first drawn attention to Caliban’s language when he famously wrote that Caliban’s speech was ‘as hobgoblin as his person’.27 Following this, Warburton wrote that Shakespeare gave Caliban’s language ‘a certain grotesque air of the Savage and Antique’.28 The rules of decorum required that a character’s speech be consistent with his personality, and Johnson too writes that Caliban’s language is appropriate to his disposition (which is gloomy and malignant, according to Johnson). The Tempest commentary also engaged with the prevalent debate on the extent of Shakespeare’s learning. Scholars had long debated whether Shakespeare knew the ‘ancients’, and if he did, whether he had read them in their original renditions in Greek or Latin, or in translation. To some, his learning enhanced his natural genius, to others the lack of learning diminished it, while to still others, learning actually hindered natural genius and only inferior wits needed study. So, John Holt, who writes that Shakespeare was the better poet for being unshackled by rules, still maintains that the author of The Tempest is a careful and well-informed writer who adheres to the unities, is appropriate in his use of poetic diction and delivers moral and religious lessons in the play (though what those lessons are, Holt does not quite specify). Peter Whalley argues that Shakespeare was no scholar in the classics, but he was certainly not altogether unacquainted with the dead languages, as made evident in classical allusions that Whalley traces in The Tempest.29 Richard Farmer (1767) identifies other such allusions (notably in the ‘Elves of Hills . . .’ speech in 4.2) and argues that Shakespeare relied on translations of the classics – Arthur Goldings’s in this case – and often quoted them

 Introduction 7 exactly, errors and all.30 Closely related to the discussion of Shakespeare’s learning as evident in The Tempest was the discussion of literary influence and Shakespeare’s indebtedness to other writers. Richard Hurd’s comments (1757) occur in a longer reflection on Shakespeare’s imitation of the classics. Imitation is both in sentiment (or style) and theme (or subject matter) and the fact that Shakespeare’s work had benefited from earlier works (Hurd points out that the author’s pagan references echoes that of other writers) should not surprise, since this sort of learning could be picked up from many of the easily available translations of Greek and Latin works. However, Hurd writes, it is not easy ‘to fasten an imitation with certainty’ on Shakespeare because he makes even a work derived from influences very much his own.31 Hurd focuses on the masque in the play (so providing the first commentary, however brief, of this aspect of the play) as the most traditional portion of the play and the one that abounds with classical references. The interest in influence perhaps inevitably led to a scholarly attempt to trace allusions and references – Edward Capell, for instance, links Gonzalo’s commonwealth to translations of Montaigne’s comments on the Indians of the New World. These attempts to connect The Tempest to other literary and cultural texts that were either contemporary to him or preceded him is a significant critical move: the play is no longer a self-enclosed entity; it is certainly imaginative and original, yet it is better understood and appreciated in the context of other works. Johnson’s brief commentary (1756) is based on the premise that truly understanding the text is necessarily a scholarly endeavour. In his description to the edition of Shakespeare that he was planning, he writes that an author from the past was necessarily obscure as ‘every age has its modes of speech and its cast of thought; which . . . become sometime unintelligible’ with time. In the case of Shakespeare too, his ‘allusions are undiscovered, and many beauties . . . are lost with the objects to which they were united, as the figures vanish when the canvas has decayed’. In fact, Shakespeare, even more than other authors, ‘copied the manners of the world then passing before him, and has more allusions than other poets to the traditions and superstitions of the vulgar; which must therefore be traced before he can be understood’.32 Consequently, the task of the commentator is to draw attention to lost allusions. Johnson regards the system of enchantment in the play in the context of what a late-twentieth-century critic would describe as the ‘discourses’ of magic in Shakespeare’s era and the middle ages, so inaugurating a historicist commentary of a kind, where the critic draws attention to lost allusions and throws light on aspects of the play that have become obscure with time. So, in the case of The Tempest, explains Johnson, Prospero is best understood as an enchanter who had learned to command spirits and Ariel as a spirit who inhabited the air and was thus regarded as being less depraved than earthly spirits. Prospero’s final decision to renounce his powers was a necessary move, given that magic of the kind he practices was viewed as ‘unlawful’.33 At the time Johnson wrote, sustained archival work led to significant contributions to the study of Renaissance humanism, theatre history, Shakespeare’s life, as well as source criticism. As far as The Tempest is concerned, critics working in the vein of historical and/or intertextual criticism took another track that proved influential in determining the course of the play’s critical tradition, and it is with their works that this volume begins. By connecting The Tempest to voyages to the New World,

8

The Tempest

scholars set the stage for generations of critics who saw it as Shakespeare’s ‘American play’ or as his ‘colonial play’. While neither Edward Capell, George Chalmers (No. 1), nor Edmond Malone (Nos 4 and 8) discusses the politics or ideological bent of the play, they all attempt to identify the New World allusions.34 All these critics arrive at this manner of ‘source criticism’ from their interest in establishing a chronology of Shakespeare’s works – pinpointing the events and documents which inspired the storm and the reference to the ‘still vex’t Bermoothes’ (1.2.229) would help identify the date of the play. Malone locates the narratives on the wreck of Sir George Somers’s fleet off the coast of Bermuda as Shakespeare’s main source. Malone’s painstaking archival research on Virginia Company documents and travellers’ narratives on Bermuda and Virginia lead him to identify allusions the play makes to the historical event. Malone makes interesting statements regarding the relationship between the historical event (and their representation in narratives) and the fictional text: Shakespeare had to modify the location to an unnamed island since Bermuda, which was very much in the news, lacked the ‘mysterious dignity’ a play’s setting acquires, yet, Malone maintains, the play’s popularity, can also be attributed to the fact that it had the merit of topical allusion. The Tempest is the best kind of fictional work in that it makes connections to the current and the ‘real’ and yet modifies them appropriately to invest them with the mystique of the purely imaginary. Interestingly, Malone’s archival work also leads him to conclude that the tragi-comic nature of the historical experience had some influence on the genre of the fictional work. Chalmers, for his part, writes that there are connections between the documents and the play’s take on the colonists’ paradoxical state of freedom and restraint, but he does not take these comments much further than that. These studies were revolutionary in the sense that they broadened the scope of historical and source criticism in general, and, more specifically linked the play, for the first time, to the New World, but they continued to be challenged, even decades later, as seen in the writings of Joseph Hunter (No. 13), Charles Knight (No. 16) and other critics.35 Alongside these commentaries appears that of William Taylor (No. 2), an early enthusiast of German Romanticism. While Shakespeare’s mingling of tragedy and comedy had long been a subject of discussion – subject to censure from the neoclassicists and to defences of the tragi-comic form from the apologists who evoke either comic relief or truth to nature or reality in their defence of the form, The Tempest was rarely evoked in such debates. Taylor is one of the few critics who cites the play as an instance of tragicomedy. He writes that it mingles the solemn and the fantastical seamlessly and this kind of mingling was acceptable as long as a ‘unity of manners’ or a unified character construction was maintained.36 Shakespeare’s prestige grew through the eighteenth century – the large number of new editions produced between 1720 and 1790 helped strengthen the already prevalent conviction that he was an exceptionally important English literary figure. This led to an explosion of commentary on the play. Two aspects of eighteenth-century criticism on The Tempest are worth noting. First, there were no clear-cut critical trends or movements. While some of the early-eighteenth-century criticism is influenced to a great degree by neoclassical requirements, Tempest criticism also was part of what Vickers describes as a ‘climate of feeling . . . in which the rules, and the denigration of Shakespeare which their application would result in, could be played down or even

 Introduction 9 ignored’.37 Almost from the very start the fantastical nature of the play freed it from neoclassical strictures to a degree. Instead, critics were more interested in other aspects of the work – its unusual characters, its use of magic and its ability to capture human (and inhuman) passions. Second, taken as a whole, eighteenth-century criticism of The Tempest assesses the play in terms of its varied and often conflicting characteristics: so it is imaginative and wild, even as it painstakingly observes the unities; its characters are unreal and dream-like, even as they capture ‘Nature’ in all its vitality and energy; it is a fantastical creation while it is also a work inspired by real, historical events, notably the New World voyages. It is from such contradictions that a unique literary work emerges.

The Romantics and The Tempest Shakespeare’s position as a classic had been established by the dawn of the Romantic movement. Considered a universal genius and a national treasure, he was the subject of extravagant praise verging on idolatry. Romanticism, on the other hand, was conceived of as a progressive, even iconoclastic, movement. Interestingly, Shakespeare was appropriated by the Romantics as one of their own, and Shakespearean drama (and much of Elizabethan drama) was perceived as a literature in the Romantic tradition. As Charles Johnson explains, ‘in its general conception of the mystery of life, and the power of the human will, as well as its occasional violence and exaggeration, it is characterized by the methods and faults of romanticism.’38 Not surprisingly, the Romantics became the leading Shakespeare critics of their age. In Johnson’s words, ‘There was enough resemblance and inner sympathy between 1608 and 1808 to make the author of “The Ancient Mariner” the best interpreter of The Tempest and Hamlet indeed one of the best that had ever appeared’.39 Written in an intense, passionate style, the critical commentary of these writers invests Shakespeare with vibrant new life. In their criticism of Shakespeare, the Romantics reconceptualized the nature of beauty and the function of the artist. While Dr Johnson and others had already defended Shakespeare against the strictures of neoclassicism, the Romantics were of the opinion that Johnson did not go far enough in that he did not recognize the moral purpose of the plays, nor did he see them as organic wholes. The Romanticists also prefigured the character analysis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (after all Coleridge was the first Englishman to talk of a ‘psycho-analytical understanding’ in relation to literary criticism), the close reading approaches of the twentieth century, as well as the political criticism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Several Romantic critics of Shakespeare were German. As Jonathan Bate explains, German Romanticists appropriated Shakespeare to stimulate interest in a drama rooted in a national culture as opposed to a pan-European drama based on the classics. The French were the advocates of the latter model, while the German Romanticists, writing during the Napoleonic wars, feared that pan-European political hegemony would extend to the cultural sphere.40 While German criticism of The Tempest did not specifically address the question of a national literature, German critics use the imaginative and fantastic qualities of the play to celebrate a kind of drama that was

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The Tempest

marvellous, yet succeeded in evoking a response informed by familiarity and intimacy rather than the Aristotelean responses of terror and awe. In Ludwig Tieck’s reading (1793), the presentation of the marvellous in The Tempest is different from that of the tragedies: the poet ‘allows the imagination to dwell unhindered on the lovely images he creates; in these plays he initiates the spectator into his fairy-tale world and allows him close acquaintance with a hundred magical figures, without his being kept at a cruel distance from the mysterious workshop by terror and awe’.41 Tieck compares the experience of the play to that of a dream – as long as one is in the dream-state, the dream seems vivid and perfectly real. In this, Tieck anticipates Coleridge’s consideration of poetry as the rendering of the extraordinary as the ordinary. Following Tieck, Wilhelm Schlegel (No. 5) in 1801 delivered a series of lectures in Berlin where he surveyed European literature, dismissed Greco-Roman classicism and celebrated the output of the Middle Ages. He defended Shakespeare as the ‘product of his nation’, a poet untouched by ‘artificial polish’, but still ‘a profound artist, and not a blind and wildly luxuriant genius’ (a direct response to Voltaire’s description of Shakespeare’s untrained poetic genius).42 In his brief remarks on The Tempest, Schlegel once again links the play to local cultures when he points out that popular beliefs in ‘the invisible presence of spirits’ constitute an important part of the play. The Tempest became central to Romantic ideas regarding the creative imagination for German and English critics alike. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s description (No. 11) of the play as a ‘romantic drama’ is based on his understanding of it as a work that ‘addresses itself entirely to the imaginative faculty; . . . the moved and sympathetic imagination’.43 The romantic drama did not concern itself with historical events or fidelity to the real, nor did the plot depend on ‘the natural connection of events’. The imagination of the poet and that of the reader are central to the play’s creation, reception and appreciation, and the same imagination is capable of a far greater understanding than reasoning or other kinds of judgement. Interestingly, the Romantics insisted that the ethereal imagination on display in the play was accompanied by an engagement with the real. The ‘real’ for Coleridge was manifested by an ‘astonishing and intuitive knowledge’ of human nature, and an ability to describe ‘the life and principle of each being with organic regularity’ as opposed to the ‘mechanic’ reproduction which simply recreates the original from a mould.44 This ability is what made Shakespeare’s rendition of characters from the boatswain to Gonzalo authentic and interesting. William Hazlitt (No. 5) describes the function of the imagination as unifying – so the play brings together the marvellous and the real, imaginary characters and human ones, the grotesque and the dramatic. Following this, the preternatural takes on an air of truth, and, conversely, the real participates in the surreal and dream-like.45 Therefore, The Tempest brings together the two intersecting modes of poetry described and practiced by the early Romantics. First, it makes the extraordinary seem ordinary by inviting the ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’, in the famous words of Coleridge, who saw his own creative project as ‘directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’. Along these lines, the fantastical plot and characters of the play, all ‘shadows of the

 Introduction 11 imagination’, are rendered credible and convincing. Second, the play also elevates the ordinary to the level of the extraordinary or marvellous; William Wordsworth’s project, as described by Coleridge, was ‘to give the skill of novelty to the things of everyday, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural . . . by directing us to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us’.46 So the all-too-common aspects of human life – love, loss and ageing – are rendered sublime and wonderful. The paradoxical and yet unified nature of The Tempest is repeatedly invoked by the Romantics. It is often addressed by their discussions of the dual figures of Ariel and Caliban: Ariel is ethereal and amoral, writes Coleridge (No. 6), a being who ‘In air he lives, from air he derives his being, in air he acts’, while Caliban, brutal yet noble, is ‘a sort of creature of the earth’.47 Though neither Coleridge nor the other critics explicitly state it, the two beings are, in a way, the two aspects of the imagination as the Romantics conceived it – ethereal and elevating, yet fundamental and primal. In this way The Tempest seems to serve to illustrate the basic tenets of Romantic poetry itself. Coleridge’s brief discussions of the play’s politics is the only Romantic analysis of its kind. Although Coleridge often indicated that analysing a play in light of contemporary political events was a kind of ‘false criticism’, his lectures are often permeated by his political positions. Shortly after the French Revolution, Coleridge, like other Romantics, was stimulated by the possibility of social and political change, only to later be disillusioned by the Reign of Terror and to take an anti-Jacobin stance. Coleridge’s later Shakespeare criticism reflects this shift in his thinking – in these writings, Coleridge chooses to read Shakespeare as a prudent writer (in comparison to Milton and other republican poets), whose political neutrality made it possible for him to create great art with the support of the patronage system. In his ‘Notes on The Tempest’ (No. 11), Coleridge writes that Shakespeare does not promulgate ‘any party tenets’ in the play. However, almost immediately, he describes Shakespeare as a political conservative who has ‘a profound veneration for all the established institutions of society . . . a philosophical aristocrat, delighting in those hereditary institutions which have a tendency to bind one age to another, and in that distinction of ranks, of which, although few may be in possession, all enjoy the advantages’. The ‘mob’, signified by Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban, is described in the play with good humour and ‘affectionate superiority’ rather than with fear or disapproval.48 Interestingly, Hazlitt, who does not hesitate to express his liberal politics in other forums, does not touch on the politics of The Tempest in his essay. While the early German Romantics, notably Schlegel, found the plot to be essentially lacking progressive movement since the denouement is apparent in the introduction (although they added that plot did not matter as much as the poetry), Coleridge sees the arrangement of the scenes as worthy of consideration, with every scene carefully preparing the reader for the one to follow. Coleridge’s admiration for the play’s plot structure could well be a celebration of fiction or other narrative form. Indeed, the Romantics were not particularly interested in The Tempest as drama. Coleridge describes the play as poetry, a work meant to ‘have been recited rather than acted’ or reliant on ‘visual exhibition’.49 Because the play addresses itself ‘entirely to the imaginative faculty’, and ‘although the illusion may be assisted by the effect on the senses of the complicated scenery and decorations of modem times, yet this sort of assistance is dangerous’.50 Charles Lamb

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The Tempest

(No. 9) reiterates this point even more forcefully when he states that ‘Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they cannot, even be painted; they can only be believed’.51 Indeed, staging the play destroys the beautiful illusions the play creates – those are best imagined in the mind’s eye. Of course, much of this assessment of the play was a reaction to the overly extravagant productions (notably Charles Kean’s) of the mid-nineteenth century. Overall, the Romantics crowned the author of The Tempest as the poet of the imagination, the poet of the people, as well as the poet’s poet. The fact that Shakespeare himself wrote a play infused by the marvellous gave the so-called genre of romance a certain stature that was long owing to it.

The Victorian Tempest Although The Tempest continued to be generally admired by the successors of the Romantics, Victorian criticism of the play is diverse and varied in approach and focus. Strains of Romantic thought lingered well into the 1800s. The German scholar Hermann Ulrici (No. 17) writes of the play’s ‘double foundation’ in the real and unreal, the comic and the grave, the imaginative and the moral. The play provides an experience similar to a dream in which the real and unreal vie for control over the human mind: ‘The world of wonders into which the poet leads us, does not contradict the laws and customs of common reality, but not merely common, external reality; it is in perfect accordance with the higher laws of a reality which is indeed not common, but certainly general and ideal, but they are replaced by the ethical laws of the mind.’52 Charles Knight (No. 16) writes that ‘unbounded fancy’ is the dominant feature of the play, and on those grounds he cannot agree that it is the last work of Shakespeare because the final plays are less concerned with ‘the passionate and imaginative’. Knight also dismisses the historical findings of Malone and others. Shakespeare, argues Knight, had neither a particular location nor a particular storm in mind when he wrote The Tempest. What is important is the fact that ‘Tempests and enchanted islands are the oldest materials of poetry’.53 Once again, the most valid source for The Tempest is quite simply the imagination. Writing in 1880, Charles Swinburne (No. 22) finds The Tempest shaped by beauty (‘the breath of the song of Ariel’54) above all else. Even George Bernard Shaw (No. 25), the very antithesis of the romantic, echoes Romantic critics like Coleridge and Lamb, when he writes that a play of this nature defies staging, or, as Shaw puts it, ‘The poetry of The Tempest is so magical that it would make the scenery of a modem theatre ridiculous.’55 Malone’s findings were rejected on other grounds as well. Joseph Hunter (No. 13) rejects the New World setting and argues that the play predates the Bermuda voyages and traces the magic island to the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa. Hunter further underscores his argument that The Tempest is a Mediterranean (rather than New World) play by identifying Ariosto’s epic poem ‘Orlando Furioso’ (1519) as an important influence on its creation.56 Other Victorians appropriated the play in the sense that they derived meanings determined by their own social moment. Indeed, what Victorian criticism makes

 Introduction 13 apparent is that the play had successfully outlived its original circumstances of production and reception. Its continued value and significance are obvious at the points where it provokes critical commentary that intersects with some of the concerns and interests of the nineteenth century. Simply put, the Victorian age refashioned the play in its own image. The writings of W. J. Birch, John Ruskin and Daniel Wilson (Nos 18, 19 and 20) are most clearly affected by Victorian naturalistic, materialist and scientific thought. Birch in his 1848 book, An Inquiry into the Philosophy and Religion of Shakespeare, puts forward the argument that Shakespeare is an atheist, a reading that unsettled other critics of the time, including Edward Dowden (discussed later), who felt that Shakespeare’s faith cannot be ascertained ‘by bringing together little sentences from the utterances of this one of his dramatis personae and of that’.57 The Tempest, in Birch’s view, contributes to his argument. Shakespeare’s play is a morality play, but it is a morality based on sympathy, identification and the recognition of common humanity rather than on fear (of eternal punishment) and penitence in the Christian sense. Providence is invoked in the play, but only in deference to public opinion – it is accident and human action that determine the outcome of things. Birch reads Prospero’s ‘revels’ speech through an atheist-materialist lens: all matter is subject to change and dissolution; there is no essence in humans that is immortal and humans too will fade and ‘Leave not a rack behind’ (4.1.156). Birch’s reading of the play’s philosophical stance also addresses the play’s status as tragicomedy – both pleasure and pain are born of the realization of the transient nature of things and of the acceptance that the weight of the burden of goodness and evil lies on humans and humans alone.58 John Ruskin’s commentary (No. 19) on The Tempest occurs in the midst of his Munera Pulveris (1872), which attacks the classical economics of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. Ruskin was troubled by how materialist and utilitarian assumptions had come to be accepted as ways of explaining human behaviour. Although it is not entirely clear how his brief commentary on The Tempest fits into this overarching thesis, Ariel and Caliban are described as ‘respectively the spirits of faithful and imaginative labour, opposed to rebellious, hurtful and slavish labour’ while Prospero is a ‘true governor’ as opposed to the tyrannical Sycorax. Ariel’s labour is appreciated, while Caliban, alternatively resentful and foolishly worshipful, invites only condemnation.59 Daniel Wilson (No. 20) shifts the analytical framework from social relations to Darwinian theory, stressing the naturalistic elements in the play. Wilson’s Caliban: The Missing Link was written fourteen years after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and is the first book devoted entirely to a discussion of Caliban. Caliban, in Wilson’s study, is neither pitied nor condemned; he is simply categorized as the ‘missing link’ that Darwin hypothesized between primates and homo sapiens. In Wilson’s words, Caliban is ‘perfect as the study of a living creature distinct from, yet next in order below the level of humanity’. He not only has ‘brute instincts’ but also possesses a spark of ‘rational intelligence’; he cannot be condemned simply because he acts on the instincts natural to his kind. Indeed, Wilson proposes a new theory of morality ‘as modern science would teach us . . . our most human characteristics are but developed instincts of the brute’.60 Wilson’s reading of Caliban, idiosyncratic as it is, is testimony to the enduring interest in the character and also a significant instance of how scientific theory intersected with literary criticism and shaped the reception

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The Tempest

of a literary work in notable ways. Wilson’s reading impacted stage productions too: in the 1890s, Frank Benson played Caliban as a half-monkey, half human. He spent hours observing the behaviour of monkeys and apes in zoos and eventually portrayed Caliban as scampering around stage and swarming up trees, a curious amalgam of the human and the animal. Caliban was the subject of other, less ‘scientific’ readings than Wilson’s – Patrick MacDonnell (No. 15) provides the first overtly sympathetic reading of Caliban in response to a stage actor who departed from the usual style of portraying Caliban ‘in a rude and disagreeable’ manner. Caliban is uncouth and civilized, but that is not his fault, and overall, he is the object of sympathy rather than fear or detestation; even his plot to kill Prospero is fuelled by resentment at the wrong done to him rather than stemming from villainy. Caliban is therefore ‘stimulated to revenge, by the severity he suffers, he has withal, qualities of a redeeming character’. Treachery in the play is represented by Alonso’s party; indeed, the courtiers provide MacDonnell occasion to ponder over the nature and causes of evil, which he attributes to ‘corrupt prejudice’ and ‘low and selfish intelligence’.61 Horace Howard Furness (No. 24) the first American to provide a substantial commentary on The Tempest in his introduction to the Variorum edition of 1895 also provides a sympathetic reading of Caliban. He challenges the by then critical commonplace that read Ariel and Caliban as opposites, with Ariel being associated with the ethereal and Caliban with the brutish. ‘Is there really and truly no print of goodness in him [Caliban]?’62 asks Furness. His response sees goodness in Caliban’s lyricism and sensitivity. Furness paints a sentimental picture of the boy Caliban sitting by Miranda’s feet in the moonlight learning to name the bigger light and the less. Miranda’s tutelage and the beauties of the island breathe poetry into the monster’s soul. Furness does not touch on the victimization of Caliban nor does he address Caliban’s anger, resentment and rebellion. What matters is that Shakespeare allows him to speak in rhythmical cadence and so makes him part of the enchanting landscape of the play. The Victorian era also saw the first commentaries on The Tempest authored by women and often focused on women. The Romantics, particularly Coleridge, had certainly paid some attention to Miranda. Writing in 1836, Coleridge stated that Shakespeare saw that ‘it was the perfection of women to be characterless’63, an idea he develops in his ‘Notes on The Tempest’: ‘Shakespeare saw that the want of prominence . . . was the blessed beauty of the woman’s character, and knew that it arose not from any deficiency, but from the more exquisite harmony of all the parts of the moral being constituting one living total of head and heart.’64 So, Miranda is an instance of essential womanhood: simple, holy and tender. Indeed, she is different from the other women in Shakespearean comedy only because of the difference of her circumstances. The female critics of the later nineteenth century do echo Coleridge’s language of tenderness and simplicity to describe Miranda, but some of them, such as Anna Jameson (No. 10) in her book Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical (1832), anticipate feminist criticism of Shakespeare to the extent that she focuses entirely on Shakespeare’s female characters and draws attention to their distinctive traits. Although Jameson’s overall description conveys her understanding of the play’s sole female character as an idealized portrait rather than an individualized, realistic one, she, quite interestingly,

 Introduction 15 shifts the terms that had been applied to the Caliban–Ariel duo onto Miranda, who is, as Jameson describes her, a happy combination of the natural and the ideal, the unsophisticated and the refined. Her love for Ferdinand too is a blend of contradictory features: it is ‘fearless and submissive, delicate and fond’. In Jameson’s reading, Miranda is not simply amazed by the ‘brave new world’; instead she is her own object of wonder – ‘Miranda, the mere child of nature, is struck with wonder at her own new emotions.’ Therefore a young woman exploring and discovering her own feelings and desires is an important aspect of the play.65 Fanny Kemble (No. 23) in her 1882 Notes Upon Some of Shakespeare’s Plays reads characters in terms of gender roles. These roles are fairly conventional ones – Prospero is the wise, benevolent patriarch and an instance of humanity at its best; Ferdinand and Miranda (the latter characterized by ‘simplicity and sweetness’) are one rung below him in the social and moral hierarchy set up on the island.66 Kemble’s commentary is most interesting when she recounts her first experience of The Tempest story in a painting representing Prospero and Miranda and recalls how she identified Prospero with her own father and, by implication, herself with Miranda. Kemble’s anecdote reminds us how female readers’ and viewers’ experience of the play could be distinct from male readers’ and determined by gendered social roles. For all this interest in Caliban and Miranda, Prospero too continued to engage critics. And for two prominent nineteenth-century critics – Thomas Campbell (No. 12) and Edward Dowden (No. 21) – writing about Prospero was writing about Shakespeare. The association between Prospero and Shakespeare might have been initiated by Charles Gildon in his Shakespeariana: Or Select Moral Reflections, Topicks, Similies, and Descriptions from SHAKESPEARE (1719)67 when he quoted Prospero’s revels speech as Shakespeare’s personal statement on his art (the association was further underscored in 1741 when a statue of Shakespeare that contained an inscription of the speech was erected in Westminster Abbey), but it was Thomas Campbell who first wrote, in 1838, that Shakespeare represents himself in his last play as a powerful yet ageing magician.68 About four decades after Campbell, Edward Dowden is reluctant to read the play entirely in allegorical terms, to ‘attenuate Shakespeare to a theory’ and is not fully convinced by a reading where Prospero is the magician-artist, Miranda is fledgling art and Ariel as the ‘imaginative genius of poetry’. Yet Dowden argues that Shakespeare can be identified with Prospero, not simply because art is a compelling metaphor for magic but because the temper of Prospero, the grave harmony of his character, his selfmastery, his calm validity of will, his sensitiveness to wrong, his unfaltering justice, and with these, a certain abandonment, a remoteness from the common joys and sorrows of the world, are characteristic of Shakespeare as discover’d to us in all his latest plays. Prospero is a harmonious and fully developed will.69

Dowden’s framework is neither allegorical nor overtly biographical (he makes no specific connections between incidents in the author’s life and work), rather, he argues that the play brings us into the presence of Shakespeare’s mind, mood and personal disposition simply because it was the same mind, mood and disposition that shaped

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The Tempest

the plays. Dowden’s study possibly emerges from the Victorian cult of the artist. Shakespeare is more than a collection of his works; his humanity (which is movingly like that of other peoples and yet somehow also particularly interesting because he is, after all, Shakespeare) is worth paying attention to, and this leads to a greater appreciation of the work. Dowden’s approach also examines Shakespeare’s plays as a collectivity and looks for movement within the body as a whole. In any case, Dowden’s study was remarkably influential and informed classroom lectures, stage productions, other critical analyses and even Shakespeare biographies for decades after. The last notable critical trend of the nineteenth century is the American connection. As noted earlier, Malone and other eighteenth-century critics had already made connections between the Virginia Company travel narratives and The Tempest. Yet, in the works of these earlier writers, notwithstanding England’s connections with America, America remains a distant, romanticized foreign space. Following the American Revolution of 1776 and the creation of the United States, critics write of the America of The Tempest in somewhat different terms. America is a real geographical and cultural entity; increasingly, many of these critics visited America or were Americans themselves. The famous author Washington Irving (No. 14) was among the first Americans to write about The Tempest in light of its American connection. Finding himself in Bermuda, he sees in the history of the islands, as well as in the legends connected with it, ‘some of the elements of Shakespeare’s wild and beautiful drama of The Tempest’.70 Rudyard Kipling (No. 26), often considered the poet of British imperialism, lived for a time in the United States and reminds us of Malone’s findings and insists that the play’s setting is captivating because its vividness can be ascribed to Shakespeare obtaining his material from the prosaic yet imaginative narratives of sailors in London inns. So realistic is the setting of The Tempest that Kipling recognizes it when he visits the island of Bermuda. So, Kipling insists on the ‘earth basis’ of the play and insists that it was composed ‘in accordance with the great law that a story to be truly miraculous must be ballasted with facts’.71 As the century wore on, Americans appropriated Shakespeare as one of their own. He was both a cultural forbear, representing the best aspects of America’s cultural ties to England, and a living presence in modern nineteenth-century American culture. The Tempest, of course, was testimony to the connection. As Peter Rawlings writes, ‘by association and appropriation, The Tempest is a peculiarly American play.’72 The nineteenth-century critical history of The Tempest closes with an American critic who devotes an entire book to the subject of Shakespeare and America in which he develops the play’s American connection. Frank Bristol (No. 27), an American clergyman with a scholarly interest in Shakespeare, wrote, in the introduction to Shakespeare and America (1898), that ‘The New World was the dominant thought in the secular mind of England from the time of Henry VII to that of James I’. The travelogues on voyages to the Americas and the plays written for the popular stage were the two dominant literary productions of the time, and the latter was strongly influenced by the former. Indeed, the marvels, riches and wonders of the Americas enriched Shakespeare’s writing and especially influenced the comedies. Part of Bristol’s project is to ‘gather out of his plays the medical, classical, legal, botanical, entomological, scriptural, military and nautical terms and references which abound therein’, and ‘to study those expressions which may

 Introduction 17 be called “Americanisms” in Shakespeare’s works’. The American connection is most manifest in The Tempest – Bristol reiterates the arguments that the Bermuda narratives inspired the play and also painstakingly lists references to fauna, flora and other natural phenomenon that occur in it, and which Shakespeare might have derived from the travel narratives. The intent is to line up details from the text as evidence to shore up the play’s debt to America. While ‘Caliban’ was an anagram of ‘cannibal’ (as had been previously pointed out), Bristol is the first to state that ‘Shakespeare had the American Indian in mind when he invented the character and the form of Caliban’73 and that Shakespeare had the language applied to natives of the continent in mind when he described Caliban. Bristol is also the first critic to discuss Sycorax at any length – he traces the etymology of her name to the Greek words for ‘sow’, ‘raven’, ‘fig’ and ‘spider’, and insists that all of these had associations with Bermuda. So Sycorax is of the New World, almost as much as her son is, and The Tempest is undoubtedly Shakespeare’s American play.

The modern Tempest Another American scholar – this time from South America – inaugurates the twentieth-century critical history of The Tempest. The Uruguayan philosopher José Enrique Rodó (No. 48) is the first in a long line of authors from parts of the world which had experienced European colonialism to appropriate the play to his own ends. In a 1900 work (translated into English in 1922), Rodó invokes the figure of Shakespeare’s Ariel to describe man at his loftiest – idealistic, rational, civilized, refined, heroic and selfless – the kind of humanity Rodó desired his fellow-countrymen to aspire to in their quest for political freedom (for Ariel can fully realize himself only in freedom). The political use to which Rodó puts Ariel also serves as a reading of the play – Ariel is the superior being and he occupies his lofty position because he has overcome Caliban, who represents the savage and base aspect of the self. Rodó’s essay ‘Ariel’ inspired postcolonial critics writing decades after him, who both borrowed from and challenged his ideas, notably his identification of Caliban with the savage and primitive.74 Most of the other critical ideas on The Tempest emerged from late-nineteenthcentury ones and more commentators appear to be increasingly aware that they are participants in a dynamic critical tradition, engaging in dialogue with and adding to previous arguments. The ‘last play’ trend that had been pioneered by Dowden was certainly not forgotten. Lytton Strachey (No. 35) is less certain than Dowden about the validity of making connections between the author’s state of mind and his art, but he nevertheless adopts Dowden’s approach though his argument is different – Shakespeare’s final period (maintains Strachey) was not ‘serene’; the harmony and joy at the end of the play are not undiluted by Prospero’s weariness and cynicism and Caliban’s experience of misery. Dowden’s ‘serene’ author is replaced by Strachey’s bored one – bored with life and all it has to offer, and turning to the fantastical for consolation (and in the process leading to some careless characterization as seen in the figures of Gonzalo and Sebastian, for instance). But the consolation extended by art and beauty is not a simple one, Shakespeare cannot resort to the simple joys of the pastoral ending

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The Tempest

and the play is marked by disillusionment and bitterness. Strachey’s reading disturbed those who had invested in sentimental approaches to the play, but was nevertheless influential.75 Henry James (No. 36) follows in Strachey’s footsteps. When invited to write this essay on The Tempest, James declared that he’d take it on as a challenge: Shakespeare was the inscrutable author who could not be deciphered from his plays or characters, and James’s project was to ‘challenge this artist, the master of a thousand masks, and make him drop them, if only for an interval’.76 James considers what is known about The Tempest’s first performance as part of his attempt to get inside the author’s creative process; he also approaches it as a last play, less to pin down the author’s intention than to understand the wider issue of the author’s relationship with his own creative talent. The issue that tantalizes and bewilders James is Shakespeare’s decision to relinquish his literary career. James also lays the ground for the formalist criticism that was to dominate in a little over a decade when he argues that form (‘expression’) reigns supreme over story or moral lesson.77 However, in a sense, James also precedes a materialist interpretative mode in which art both reflects and intervenes in human culture. Thematic criticism also came into prominence as more commentators were of the opinion that themes or abstract propositions lie at the heart of the play – indeed the most important function of the play is to illustrate them, and that of the critic is to uncover them. From being a marvellous fantasy, The Tempest became a philosophical work, contemplative about life and art in a way that few of the comedies are considered to be. When A. C. Bradley (No. 33) writes on The Tempest, he momentarily sets aside his famous character-centric approach and reads the play as being informed by an awareness of the transitory nature of the material. In this respect it was a development of the tragedies, notably King Lear, though, unlike the tragedies where this realization is encountered with horror, The Tempest conveys the importance of patience and tranquil acceptance.78 Bradley’s and other such philosophical readings of The Tempest are countered by Stopford Brooke (No. 34), who believes that neither the author nor Prospero has time for the idea that life is a passing illusion – joy, love and life are too real and precious, as the young lovers have already instinctively realized.79 The perceived philosophical weightiness of the play stimulated a number of allegorical readings. John Churton Collins (No. 39) argues that the play is an example of extended symbolism signifying Christian understandings of life and divinity, with Prospero signifying a noble, forgiving Divine Power, and the resolution conveying the Christian message of hope.80 Colin Still (No. 47) reads the play as a ‘mystery play’, an allegory of a universal myth of the spiritual redemption of man – a myth that repeats itself in pagan myth’s initiation stories and in Christian narratives of redemption and salvation. While Still’s commentary was dismissed as eccentric and unscholarly by some, other critics, notably Wilson Knight, came to view it as a profound and significant work. Still moves between pagan legend, archetypal symbolism and Christian theology to uncover the play’s meanings, and he might have eventually influenced Northrop Frye’s brand of ‘archetypal criticism’. For these allegorically inclined critics, the meaning transcends story or, as Still puts it, the play is ‘a work in which a clear and dominant idea transcends the nominal story and determines the action, the dialogue,

 Introduction 19 and the characterization’.81 It is the underlying meaning that imposes unity on the text and even justifies aspects of it that might appear awkward or unappealing. Further, the allegory is not so clear that it need not be explained – and there lies the responsibility of the critic. If Still sees the play as drawing on universal archetypes, the New World connection continued to be laboured by critics who saw the play as emerging from and pointing to very specific historical events. According to Alden and Virginia Vaughan, the early twentieth century was a period of rapprochement between England and the United States after strained relations in the nineteenth century and ‘the times were propitious’ for drawing attention to The Tempest’s American affinities.82 Luce Morton’s introduction (No. 28) to the first Arden edition of The Tempest is the first among numerous twentieth-century scholarly introductions directed to an audience of scholars, teachers, students and general readers. Morton’s introduction touches on a variety of topics, but he does emphasize the American context and is among the first commentators to also read Caliban as an African slave.83 Sidney Lee’s two essays on the play (Nos 37 and 41) reinforce the American connection – Caliban is a type of the New World aboriginal, known to Shakespeare’s contemporaries through their visits to London as well as through narratives penned by Europeans.84 These commentaries are largely in what has come to be known as the ‘old historicist’ tradition, based on the notion that there existed a close association between the world of the fictional text and history. Critics who took this approach generally assumed that language, both in the play and in the historical sources, was objective and direct, fully capable of transmitting the real. What the criticism itself revealed was the historical basis of the play, the reality reflected in and transmitted through the literary text, so identified because it was akin to historical reality. Some early twentieth-century critics took their comments a step further than their predecessors who had been largely content with identifying parallels between the play and historical events; they maintained that the play expressed political and ideological stances with regard to slavery, the place of natives and the ends of colonization. Lee, for example, maintains that the play is quite clear that the American native is human but still lacks moral refinement, intellect and culture, that European civilization had fortunately moved beyond this savagery for the most part and that the native has hope in that he can learn and be educated into civilization. It is not entirely clear if these views were supposed to be Shakespeare’s own, though Lee, in another work, claims that ‘one may tentatively infer that Shakespeare gave voice through his created personages to sentiments which were his own’ and these sentiments include a political philosophy which for ‘clear eyed sanity’ and ‘robust common sense’ were unrivalled.85 It is the possession of such ‘common sense’ that apparently informs the play’s views on savagery and civilization. American critics such as Robert Ralston Cawley (1926) and Charles Gayley (No. 44) take the New World context beyond representations of the native. Cawley, in his essay, ‘Shakespeare’s Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest’, maintains that the play is not as idealistic in its views on the Virginia colony as its proponents were, nor is he as sceptical as its detractors. Gonzalo’s ‘commonwealth speech’ with its idealistic vision is gently derided, but the exploitative acts of the colonists are not spared either: ‘Shakespeare thrusts at the colonizers who were not intellectually honest enough to

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The Tempest

confess their real purpose. He saw clearly that much of what the white man taught his red brother was of a deleterious nature.’86 Gayley, for his part, contends that not only is Shakespeare part of the cultural inheritance of both England and America, but his work was in sympathy with the principles that America was eventually founded on – freedom and equality, due process of the law and representative government. In fact, writes Gayley, Shakespeare was directly or indirectly acquainted with members of the more liberal faction of the Virginia Company that espoused these principles.87 The Tempest not only draws inspiration from Virginia narratives, notably Strachey’s narratives and the 1609 document titled ‘A True Declaration of Virginia’, it is also shaped by these documents’ representation of the improvidence, sloth and chaos that overtook Virginia without proper governance. Stephano and Antonio are the figures of anarchy and treachery in the play, and neither comes to good end. Gayley appears not to consider Prospero an absolute ruler, but argues that the play propounds a system of governance that found the golden mean between anarchy and absolutism. So, The Tempest not only originates from American history, but might have anticipated the course it eventually took. The only notable essay from this time period by a female author is by Rachel Kelsey (No. 42). Her article ‘Indian Dances in The Tempest’ also belongs to the ‘New World’ school of criticism and is historicist in the tradition of other work that pursues this line of inquiry. However, Kelsey notably makes the argument that some of Ariel’s songs and the enchanted banquet scene are indebted to historical narratives describing Indian music and dance. So, for the first time, not only story and character but formal aspects of the play are read as being influenced by the Virginia experience.88 Of course, there continued to be those critics who would have nothing to do with the American context. John Rea (No. 45) dismisses the Virginia voyage narratives and instead sees a work by the humanist scholar Erasmus as the inspiration for the storm.89 The folklorist W. W. Newell’s study (No. 31), in turn, moves beyond both inspiration tracking and source criticism; Newell tracks the play’s motifs, structure and plot to popular folk narratives of European, Arabian, Buddhist and Hindu origin. He does not identify any of these older texts as sources but rather sees them as sharing structural elements with The Tempest. Unfortunately, work of the kind that Newell pursued remained the province of folklore studies and did not attain much popularity in literary criticism circles of time.90 There is a brief revival of interest in genre. Less invested than their predecessors in generic purity, twentieth-century critics identify features of tragicomedy and see it as an almost inevitable development in Shakespeare’s career. Walter Raleigh (No. 38), for instance, writes that ‘the darkness and burden of tragic suffering gave place, in the latest works that Shakespeare wrote for the stage, to daylight and ease’ but, unlike in the comedies, it is a ‘happiness wrung from experience’.91 The very title of Ashley Thorndike’s 1901 book, The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare (No. 29), challenges the nineteenth-century idea of Shakespeare’s absolute uniqueness.92 Thorndike considers the play as Shakespeare’s experiment with and development of the kind of romance popularized by Beaumont and Fletcher with its ‘tragi-idyllic’ plot, magical setting, the use of pageant, comic characters, monsters and magic. F. H. Ristine’s book, English Tragicomedy (No. 40), quite surprisingly, does not devote

 Introduction 21 too much space to The Tempest but clearly categorizes the play as a tragicomedy and indicates that it, along with other works, testifies to the success of the new form in the 1620s. While most early-twentieth-century critics approached Shakespeare as readers rather than theatre goers, some theatre historians challenged the trend as well as the nineteenth-century tendency to distance The Tempest – and indeed nearly all of Shakespeare – from its playhouse origins. Theatre history was revived by E. K. Chambers (No. 51), Ernest Law (No. 46) and Arthur Quiller-Couch (No. 43), who were interested in Shakespeare’s theatre as a material and cultural institution and in understanding plays by first studying the practical business of staging them.93 Scholars became interested in recuperating the earliest known performance of The Tempest: Arthur Quiller-Couch’s and Ernest Law’s analyses focus on what the first audience at court would have witnessed – the use of artificial lighting, the contribution of the orchestra and the more restrained delivery permitted by the indoor acoustics. Quiller-Couch also writes that imagining that first audience, now all long since gone, lends more poignance and depth to Prospero’s speech on the world which ‘like this insubstantial pageant’ would fade and ‘leave not a rack behind’ (4.1.156). Law attempts to link the New World criticism of the play with his scholarship on the first royal audience pointing out that the Virginia travel documents moved the young Prince Henry, who was himself planning a new expedition to the colony. Enid Welsford (No. 50) is interested in the art of the court masque, elevated by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, as a major influence on the play that goes beyond the writing of the masque in Act 4. Indeed, for Welsford, the play is more masque-like than dramatic, with character and contrasting ideas being displayed rather than conflict being dramatized through narrative and with Caliban embodying the idea of the antimasque.94 However, there was still little significant commentary on contemporary performances on The Tempest. After decades of critical commentary that dismissed stage realizations as inadequate, Max Beerbohm (No. 32) reviewing the successful 1903 revival of the play directed by J. H. Leigh at the London Court theatre is willing to consider the possibility of an effective performance. The emotional restraint and deliberate artistry of the play (writes Beerbohm) actually makes it suitable for the modern stage. Beerbohm also brings literary scholarship into conversation with production when he makes the point that if the play is an allegory of Shakespeare’s career as an artist, a good enactment of the role of Prospero would require the actor to also impersonate his creator – a task that requires the actor to possess ‘a double dignity and weight’.95 Bradley’s legacy of character study which emphasized the analysis of characters as a way to understanding plays, a tradition that ‘constitutes in all probability one of those eternal moments in criticism that will survive the predations of its competitors’ and that ‘manifested most triumphantly in the first two decades of the twentieth century’,96 strangely did not impact Tempest studies to a great extent. Perhaps the fantastic identity of the main characters – magician, monster, spirit – precluded any serious study of character. In fact, the most notable contribution of early-twentieth-century criticism was to move beyond Bradleyan character criticism. Psychological complexity was not the point of the plays – historical or literary or theatrical context were. But studies of

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The Tempest

context alone did not dominate – the philosophical profundity of the plays and their allegorical function also received critical attention. Some of this work established the ground for the formalist, structuralist, archetypal and New Historicist criticism that were to take over the critical landscape at various points later in the twentieth century. At the same time, it is worth noting that fewer women wrote on The Tempest in this period than in the nineteenth century and that there was relatively little attention paid to Miranda who had earlier vied with Caliban for critical attention.

The New Critics and beyond Writing in 1935, M. C. Bradbrook remarks, ‘The essential structure of Elizabethan drama lies not in the narrative or the characters but the words. The greatest poets are also the greatest dramatists.’97 Bradbrook’s insistence on ‘words’ or on the means by which ideas, emptions and thoughts find expression in language – and only language – is the idea at the heart of New Critical approached to The Tempest. The most important pieces of criticism between 1930 and 1952 approached the play in terms of poetic structure, metaphor, image, symbol, myth and ritual. Donald Stauffer (1949) writes that it is fortunate that such little is known about Shakespeare’s life – one therefore focuses on ‘the central evidence: the body of his dramatic work’.98 For Stauffer, notwithstanding Prospero’s speech on the transient nature of all things, it is concrete, vivid imagery that is the lifeblood of the play and it is the materialization of the abstract, the ability to give ideas a ‘local habitation and name’, that is the hallmark of the successful writer. These critics saw the play, like all literary works, as perfect poetic wholes, and perhaps because they insistently looked for unity, they usually found it in their readings. Besides, because it was not possible to discuss the unity of a work without discussing what these artistic wholes signified, the analysis of language was married to theme study, with the theme of the work being an outcome of its linguistic effects. Wilson Knight’s work on The Tempest (Nos 52 and 57) has proved a particularly notable instance of this approach. Forcefully anti-Bradleyan in his approach, in the ‘Introduction to The Shakespearean Tempest’ Knight also writes that the ‘principle of unity’ has been lacking in much Shakespeare criticism which tends to focus on parts of the text and neglect the whole. His purpose is to give attention to poetic colour and suggestion first, thinking primarily in terms of symbolism, not ‘character’; only through such reading will a play reveal ‘its richer significance, its harmony, its unity’. Knight tracks important patterns in the play: sea-love antagonism, tempest-animal association, and, most importantly, the music-tempest correlation, where music is associated with revival and restoration, and tempests with loss and dispersion. ‘Sea grief and final love’ are blended in the play, Knight writes, ‘in a richer, more musical, and more comprehensive design’. Resurrection is the theme of this and the other last plays, but this theme is realized in imagery and can only be experienced as such. The poetic faculty is itself a form of ‘tempest-stilling music’ and in The Tempest the poet attempts to create a work that recapitulates his progress from tempestuous tragedy to resurrection and music.99

 Introduction 23 E. E. Stoll (1932) takes the formalist approach a step further. He rejects even symbolic readings and insists that the story of The Tempest is ‘in its own right and for its own sake’. Caliban, Ariel and other characters are effective in their own right rather than as symbols because of the realism with which they have been invested. Stoll particularly rejects the idea that magic is an allegory for art – no such association existed in Shakespeare’s time, nor did he intend to establish one in the play. In any case, ‘allegory then . . . did not exist for the popular stage.’ Nor does Shakespeare project himself through Prospero; in a fundamental sense all speeches and characters are obviously Shakespeare’s, ‘Yet this does not mean that through the mask he himself is speaking, or puts his person on stage. He is a dramatist, and the greatest of dramatists for the very reason that, amid the multitude and plenitude of his characters, he does this less than any other’. In fact, the ability to erase the self, what Stoll describes as ‘self-forgetfulness’ (an idea somewhat reminiscent of the Keatsian ideas of the ‘chameleon poet’ and ‘negative capability’) was the greatest virtue of the dramatist, and Shakespeare possessed it in full measure. Those readers who read poetry for biography miss the beauty of the poetry. By extension, writes Stoll, the play cannot be reduced to history, particularly the voyages to the Americas. ‘Literature, not history, sheds most light upon literature’ and, furthermore, ‘literature stands in opposition to time.’100 This New Critical idea of The Tempest as a literary-aesthetic experience rather than a moral lesson or a reflection on ‘life’ was repeated by other critics. Even if the play did have a theological, moral or reflective purpose, that purpose was couched in an artistic work. Hardin Craig rejects the readings proposed by Dowden and others and says that such interpretations are based not on the play but on the critics’ understanding of life in general. Ultimately, for the literary scholar, maintains Craig in true formalist fashion, it is the ‘text itself ’ that matters. He reviews a number of works (including Jakob Ayrer’s 1618 play, Die Schone Sidea, Spanish romances and Italian commedia dell’arte) that might have served less as sources of The Tempest than as texts analogous to it with similar themes and motifs. Much of Craig’s essay is devoted to Prospero, who he reads as a Platonic scholar. However, his greatness lies in his humanity rather than in his status as magician and he is the realization of a Renaissance ideal of man.101 A slightly different critical track is taken by Walter Curry (1937). Curry still insists on the unity of the play, but it is its philosophical unity that he emphasizes (although, by implication this is part of the formal unity). Curry defines a ‘philosophical pattern’ as ‘any unified system of philosophy, involving definite relationships between man and an external world of given texture’. He argues that Shakespeare participated in important philosophical patterns of his time and used them as active, formative forces in his drama. The philosophical pattern that unifies The Tempest is Neoplatonism, particularly theurgy, a magical practice identified as an ‘honorable science’, although ‘For purely artistic purposes he [Shakespeare] has chosen only dramatically appropriate elements of theurgical science’.102 Prospero is a theurgist in the play (as opposed to Sycorax who is a practitioner of goety or black magic). Theurgy commands other lesser spirits, shapes the course of things (hence Prospero’s control over the course of action) and serves as a moral agent facilitating mercy and redemption. But it finally has to

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be renounced because the theurgist’s ultimate aim is union with the divine, a union brought about through self-purification and prayer. For Curry, the project of identifying and describing this philosophical pattern is not just to provide an intellectual backdrop to the play – ultimately, the pattern determines the protagonist’s character and plot structure; it provides the dramatist a rich store of myth to draw from; even more importantly, it serves to unify the play. The Neoplatonic impulse informing the play makes Curry classify it as a play shaped by classical myth and pagan philosophy rather than Christian thought. Curry’s scholarship went on to influence notable work later in the twentieth century on the nature of Prospero’s magic. John Dover Wilson (1932) sees the play as coming from an ageing author who looks for and finds serenity. Wilson writes that The Tempest is a religious play, exhibiting a ‘Christ-like spirit in its infinite tenderness . . . . Its conclusion of joyful atonement and forgiveness’.103 Derek Traversi (No. 60) too comments on how the artistic and moral purpose of the play is intertwined. Indeed, art serves morality and Shakespeare offers an analysis of the ‘nature and development of evil’. The acceptance of destiny and the endurance of painful experience (rather than the primeval innocence Gonzalo celebrates) were important to creating a ‘brave new world’ of social and spiritual harmony. The play ultimately exemplifies a Christian aesthetic.104 Another feature of criticism of this period is that it operates on the premise that all of Shakespeare’s plays make meaning in relation to each other, that ‘the essential formal unit for them cannot be found within the boundaries of a single work; the united artefact embraces all the plays and non-dramatic poems’.105 This is particularly discernible in Wilson Knight’s later work, The Crown of Life (No. 58), whose thesis is that Shakespeare’s final plays are ‘the culmination of a series which starts about the middle of Shakespeare’s writing career and exposes to careful analysis a remarkable coherence and significance’. They are in fact an ‘inevitable development’ of the earlier plays and, together, all the plays constitute a unified body of work. The Tempest is a work into which Shakespeare projects his own artistic and spiritual progress (and Knight links the two): ‘He is now the object of his own search and no other theme but that of his visionary self is now of power to call forth the riches of his imagination.’106 Knight writes that Shakespeare’s own dramatic material is the theme of the play – in it he reproduces character types and imagery he had created in the past. Building on Knight’s work, Wolfgang Clemen (1951) analysed the ways in which tempests and storms comprise the main stream of imagery in the play and function to convey the tension between disharmony and harmony.107 Similar ideas are repeated by Ernest Pettet who reads The Tempest in the context of the other romances. Pettet regards the play as a romance rather than a comedy in its treatment of love, its tendency to downplay comic elements and, above all, in its emphasis on ‘the larger and graver harmonies of Prospero’s vision of mortality and transience’.108 Eustace M. Tillyard’s (No. 53) interest lay in the tragedies. He maintains that the last plays were unified around the themes of tragic suffering though they close on a note of contemplation and regeneration or restoration. The tragic element is discernible in The Tempest in spite of its fantastical air. The theme of political treachery constitutes Prospero’s backstory and is once again re-enacted by Antonio on the island. Tillyard concedes that the themes of forgiveness and regeneration overshadow

 Introduction 25 the tragic theme at the end, so giving the play its unified structure. However, he still maintains that Prospero feels some of his old anger and bitterness, his talk of mercy and forgiveness notwithstanding.109 The premise of D. G. James’s ‘The Failure of the Ballad-Makers’ (1937) is that Shakespeare accepts the essentially tragic nature of human life that he presents in his tragedies. Unable to ‘see human life as a neat, orderly, and satisfying unity’ he resorted to myth to convey his ‘new imaginative apprehension of life’. In an analysis that is both structural and archetypal, James traces the basic myths underlying these last plays (the recovery of that which is lost, the revival of the dead, the recovery of lost royalty). In The Tempest, Shakespeare presents an omnipotent protagonist who controls the course of things, so a benevolent ending is assured. The play ends with a vision of the dissolution of all things, but since Prospero also stands for the poetic imagination, it is a desirable dissolution ‘in the face of transcendent and incomparably greater reality’.110 So the play is as sceptical as the tragedies, and yet, it exudes hope. This kind of conclusion is fairly characteristic of this generation of critics’ reading of The Tempest – even as they insist on the play as a unified artefact, they are aware of paradox, contradiction and ambiguity; in these critics’ opinion, it is in and through this pattern of tension and reconciliation that the play becomes a single aesthetic whole. Genre criticism was slightly recast by the New Critics. For Neville Coghill (No. 61), The Tempest is a comedy in the Christian sense – the harmony at the end is informed by an awareness of evil, and yet hope persists. The play’s foundation in Christian myth (the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel) is the reason for its appeal, thin plot and characterization notwithstanding. Coghill’s comments occur in the midst of a longer discussion on the allegorical nature of Shakespeare’s comedies; allegory was a tradition that Shakespeare inherited from the medieval writers, for whom it was ‘second nature . . . a habit of power to draw simultaneous meanings on parallel planes of experience’. The Tempest’s resemblance to the Christian story is what accounts for ‘the deep impression made upon us by the play’, and Shakespeare brings together older (Christian) stories and world views in new form.111 Once again, it is the unity of the piece that is of importance. Similarly, source criticism, influenced by the new emphasis on form, took a slightly different approach: James Nosworthy’s source criticism (No. 59) stems from his interest in a text’s narrative structure; The Tempest has a pattern that is repeated twice, comprising a ‘causal plot’, an ‘effectual plot’ and a ‘link episode’. Nosworthy identifies possible source texts (including the Aeneid) that have a similar structure and motifs and characterization. The Virginia documents are seen as providing detail rather than as a narrative sources.112 This period also saw, for the first time, some work on the songs in the play. According to Richard Noble (No. 49), songs in Shakespeare cannot be dismissed as incidental diversions; nor can they be regarded as uncultivated little lyrics. On the other hand, ‘the most painstaking labour [had been] bestowed on them’,113 and they served to forward dramatic action. Departing from his contemporaries, Noble’s work on the songs is based on his understanding of the plays as drama meant to be acted on stage for a popular audience rather than books to be read. Noble writes that The Tempest is a type of musical drama whose songs are both real and illusory. Most importantly, they are true to the character of the singers – so Ariel’s songs are ‘ethereal’,

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Stephano’s songs are rough, jolly sea ditties, and Caliban’s are suitably ‘primitive’. W. H. Auden’s essay ‘Music in Shakespeare’ (1948) is based on the premise that music is essential to the structure of Shakespeare’s plays. Auden examines the placement of songs, the mood they were intended to convey, the reasons why they were assigned to particular characters and their impact on other characters. Ariel’s voice in its purity is like an instrument, writes Auden, and its effect on Ferdinand is not to reinforce preexisting emotion but to inspire him to action. Ariel’s second song ‘Full fathom five thy father lies’ (1.2.397ff) conveys the lesson of acceptance of loss and suffering. However, the musical metaphor of the movement from discord to harmony does not apply to the play –the mood at the conclusion is more sombre than in most comedies, and, finally, Prospero seems to long for silence rather than song.114 As in the case of the Romantics, the New Critics’ emphasis on language and on Shakespeare as poet overshadowed the kind of work that placed the play in the commercial and cultural context of the theatre. However, G. E. Bentley (No. 58), in his much-reprinted essay ‘Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre’, claims that the single most important event influencing The Tempest is the King’s Men’s new affiliation with the private Blackfriars Theatre. This event called for a new kind of drama. Bentley even attributes the wider tragicomedy trend (which The Tempest might be part of) to these new circumstances. Shakespeare’s acute understanding of the workings of the theatre business, Bentley insists, does not take away from his literary merits.115 The American connection so emphasized in the prior decades took something of a backseat in this period. Commentary on Caliban does build on earlier work on his status as American aborigine, but the emphasis is on the play’s ordering of ideas and characters. So, a number of essays discuss both Caliban’s and Prospero’s places in the schemes set up within the world of the text. In Theodore Spencer’s work (No. 56), The Tempest’s characterization is based on the hierarchical (but not always tidy) ordering of Nature’s categories into the ‘sensible’ (Caliban), the ‘rational’ (all of the human characters, expect for Prospero) and the ‘intellectual’ (Prospero).116 For J. Middleton Murry (No. 54) the island becomes a space in which humans are recast in better moral and spiritual form through Art/Nurture (which, for Murry, is not necessarily opposed to Nature). Caliban is apparently not amenable to this manner of reform, and it is Ferdinand and Miranda in all their goodness and innocence (an innocence which is rather different from the primitive) who stand for humans who come as close to perfection as possible.117 Mark Van Doren (No. 1939) too reads Caliban as proof of the fact that no art in the world can remake the inhuman as human.118 Overall, the tendency to read Caliban as representative, whether of the ‘sensible’, the ‘Natural’ and so forth, does make these commentaries somewhat less sympathetic to the fullness and complexity that several earlier readers had noted in Shakespeare’s famous character. Other writings build on Tillyard’s thesis of The Tempest emerging from earlier plays. Harold C. Goddard (1960) takes the play as a sequel to King Lear. Prospero, a magician and a father, is informed by the contradictions of being harsh taskmaster and a loving parent. The greatest discovery at the end is finding goodness within the self. The themes of mercy and forgiveness make it a ‘profoundly Christian play’.119 This collection ends with Frank Kermode’s introduction (No. 62) to the Second Arden edition of The Tempest. Kermode’s analysis is based on the premise that

 Introduction 27 philosophical patterns and abstract elements cannot be seen separate from the text – the ‘complex in which they occur is unique’. Kermode also develops the Nature versus Art theme that critics starting with John Dryden touched on. The opposition between Nature and Art is fundamental to the play, with Caliban standing for Nature. Caliban (writes Kermode) serves to illuminate, by contrast, nurture, civility, civilization (both its good and less savoury aspects) and, most importantly, Art. Prospero is the figure of Art – through it he virtuously exercises knowledge, learns to control the passions and practices self-restraint. The play is a pastoral tragicomedy, a form ideal for the exploration of this theme. The pastoral has traditionally examined the categories of Art and Nature, while tragicomedy allows Shakespeare to explore, in concentrated form, both disaster and joy in a single story. So, Kermode develops some of the oldest terms that have informed the discussion of The Tempest.120

Further developments What follows here is by no means an exhaustive survey of the critical commentary on The Tempest that comes after this collection; it simply touches on those works that are the most influential and innovative, in this author’s opinion. Readings in the formalist and ‘close reading’ mode continued in the 1960s and 1970s: for instance, Reuben Brower (1962) produced a significant essay on the play’s rich metaphorical design, ‘the closeness and completeness with which its rich and varied elements are linked through almost inexhaustible analogy’.121 The play, for Brower, is a triumph of the union of dramatic action and poetic metaphor. The 1960s saw interest in readings inspired by anthropological theory. Northrop Frye (1965) bases his study of The Tempest on his earlier work on archetypes. Drama, he writes, is born of the renunciation of magic, and the play remembers that inheritance. The archetypes of initiation, rebirth and festivity marking the rising rhythms of life shape the play, and Frye sees these movements as literary genres rather than as social rituals alone. Frye also reads Caliban as a type of ‘natural man’ – not reasonable, but with his own dignity. Nature is not read as inferior to nature, but part of a cosmic and moral order tendered through education and virtue.122 Jan Kott (1966) applies Claude Levi-Strauss’s and Edmund Leach’s theory of myths to his study of the play to argue that The Tempest is a ‘great Renaissance tragedy of lost illusions’ – human aspiration is doomed by human corruption; the isle is more brutal than benign.123 Caliban is read as a hybrid of mythic monster and New World savage, Ariel as imprisoned spirit and creator of cruel spectacles, and Prospero as both exile and usurper. D. G. James (1967) draws on James Frazier’s The Golden Bough (1890) to read Prospero as a magician-king- priest who negotiates tensions ‘between public duty and visionary contemplation’.124 A. D. Nutall (1967) interprets the play as a dream-like metaphysical space that draws on allegory but is more than that.125 On a different track, William Empson (1964) objects to the ‘moral critics’’ (notably Traversi’s) readings of Caliban’s nature as bound to service as expressions of ‘the pure milk of the master race doctrine . . . presented with the usual sanctimoniousness as a traditional Christian moral, with no sign that it has ever been questioned’.126

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The period also saw a proliferation of interest in the nature of Prospero’s magic with critics building on the scholarship of Walter Curry (discussed earlier). C. J. Sisson in his essay (1958) argues that Shakespeare took pains (except for a slip up on the ‘Ye elves . . .’ speech in 5.1) to distant Prospero’s magic from that of contemporary magicians whose magic was considered unsavoury or even dangerous. On the other hand, Prospero’s magic is ‘white’, and Prospero himself is a type of ‘the learned and philosophical ruler’, intended to be reminiscent of James I.127 Harry Levin (1969) reads the play as a response to Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) – unlike the swindlers of Jonson’s work, Shakespeare’s protagonist is a legitimate figure whose moral purpose is made clear when he renounces his art.128 In a landmark work, Francis Yates (1975) argues that Prospero is a figure reminiscent of, perhaps even inspired by, John Dee, the Elizabethan mathematician, astrologer and occultist. Yates classifies Dee’s (and Prospero’s) magic as ‘Rosicrucian’ – a ‘magico-scientific’ stage between the Renaissance and the seventeenth century; the reformative impulse and utopic thought were characteristic of this system.129 Leo Marx and Leslie Fiedler return to the American theme. Leo Marx’s 1964 book links the pastoral impulse in the play to the American experience: an unspoiled landscape invaded by the forces of civilization. ‘It would be hard to imagine a more dramatic coming together of civilization and nature’, writes Marx.130 Leslie Fiedler (1972) writes that the troubled relationship between Caliban and Prospero raises the issues of race and colonialism. The Europeans’ sense of alienation from the island is expressed in their amazement which is also troubled by guilt. Fiedler also writes that the play foreshadows the founding of democracy by working-class European whites, distanced from upper-class cultures.131 In 1950, the French psychanalyst Octave Mannoni read 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 (the colonizer’s) inferiority complex, which makes him feel the need to overcompensate and establish himself as aggressor, as well as the ‘dependence complex’ that the Calibans of the world are victim to. Shakespeare’s play offered Mannoni the means to articulate his ideas, and although these ideas were criticized by subsequent postcolonial critics, his book remains a significant work.132 Literary criticism influenced by psychological (or, in some instances, specifically psychoanalytic) concepts also appeared in the late 1960s with Norman Holland linking psychoanalytic concepts to Kermode’s pastoral reading: the Art versus Nature theme acts out contrasts and tensions between age and childhood, maturity and infancy (1968).133 In 1969 Harry Berger arrived at a Freudian-influenced conclusion about Prospero who (writes Berger) feels responsible for his own usurpation even as he is unconscious of his own vindictiveness, a consciousness repressed behind his indulgence in false fantasies. Even at the end, Prospero feels the desire to protract the entertainment and delay the return to actuality.134 This period also saw writers from the colonized world making their own critical interventions. In 1960 the Caribbean writer George Lamming (1960), who describes himself as ‘a colonial and exiled descendent of Caliban’, attempted a postcolonial reading of The Tempest, decades before postcolonialism became institutionalized as a field of study. Lamming reads the play as ‘prophetic of a political future which is our present’

 Introduction 29 and Caliban as a native whose humanity has been reduced and unalterably marked by the colonial experience.135 In 1971, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, responding to the work of Rodó, claimed Caliban as a metaphor of postcolonial people. ‘Our symbol is not Ariel, as Rodó thought’, Retamar writes, ‘but Caliban . . . I know no other metaphor more expressive of our cultural situation, our reality’.136 Genre critics returned to the romance and pastoral genres. Hallet Smith (1972) writes that The Tempest was influenced by imported Greek romances, which Shakespeare’s fellow-playwright Robert Greene reworked in his plays Arbasto (1584) and Menaphon (1589). In his turn, Shakespeare adopted and transformed the romance genre, turning it from ‘literature of escape to a new vision of reality’.137 Howard Felperin (1972) also writes about the legacy of romance as a tradition from older Elizabethan plays. However, The Tempest demonstrates the inadequacies of the older models and the play implies ‘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’.138 Diana T. Childress (1974) writes that Shakespeare introduced, through Caliban, elements and moods not entirely typical of the mode, notably irony.139 David Young (1972) builds on Kermode’s work to study the structure, style and themes of the pastoral and writes that the play attempts to retrieve the serious purpose of the pastoral from polarized material.140 Joan Hartwig (1972) studies the play as a tragicomedy, although, she does not see the Beaumont and Fletcher brand of tragicomedy as overly influencing The Tempest. Tragicomedy is marked by the triumph of the status-quo, while Shakespeare’s tragicomedy features dislocation (signified by the storm in the play) with the characters moving towards expanded knowledge and awareness.141

Materialist readings and more ‘The time is perhaps near when some critic will radically alter the assumptions upon which criticism of The Tempest is at present founded’, wrote Frank Kermode (No. 62).142 The feminist, New Historicist, and postcolonial modes of criticism that emerged in the 1980s and the decades after have indeed been quite radical and dramatic with scholars challenging traditional understandings of the place and role of literature in general. Tempest critics have read the play in new ways to substantiate (and be substantiated by) waves of literary and cultural ‘theory’. Major changes in the reading of the play were prompted by Cultural Materialism and New Historicism, with their focus on historical context, on sociopolitical ideologies that influenced and were influenced by literary texts, and on the literary text as part of a larger ‘discursive field’. Building on the New Historicist interest in the operations of power, Gary Schmidgall (1981) argues that the play was structured around the eminence of royal power and social hierarchy, which are both challenged by Caliban, whom Schmidgall places in the context of Tudor sermons on the evils of rebellion.143 Stephen Greenblatt (1988) studies The Tempest alongside the Bermuda documents dealing with the suppression of working-class rebellion and the subsequent ‘affirmation of absolute control’.144 Greenblatt’s reading links these documents to Prospero’s exercise of power by manipulating his opponents’ fears and anxieties

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The Tempest

and transforming them into obedience. Curt Breight (1990) examines The Tempest in the context of writings on treason and argues that Prospero evokes the language of treason in order to legitimize his own power. Oppositional discourses (notably Caliban’s) do exist but are delegitimized and suppressed. 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.145 Jeffrey Rufo (2014) sustains this interest in issues of power and authority when he studies the play in light of late Tudor and early Stuart political culture. Issues of authority and resistance appear through the play, and Rufo writes that Shakespeare was influenced by direct or indirect exposure to classical and modern works on government. He proposes that the politics of The Tempest are ambiguous and complex and that the play ‘is ultimately more interested in prompting provocative political thought experiments in the mind of its audience than in resolving them’.146 Other New Historicist critics have moved beyond the ‘absolute power’ paradigm. Mark Thornton Burnett (1983) locates Caliban in the midst of numerous tales of monstrosity and prodigious births and reads Prospero as a kind of showman who exhibits the exotic and outlandish.147 Similarly, Trinculo’s desire to exhibit Caliban in England prompts Stephen Mullaney’s examination (1983) of Renaissance ‘wonder cabinets’.148 In ‘Prospero’s Books’, Barbara Mowat (2001) attempts an understanding of the volumes that Prospero brings with him into exile in relation to Renaissance books on magic and argues that Prospero’s magic is neither simply ‘black’ nor ‘white’. She also connects her study of books of magic to the English voyages to America by tracing the similarities between Renaissance books of magic and the language of exploration.149 Scott Maisano (2014) understands the play less as a relic of an age of magic and more as an early ‘scientific romance’ influenced by new understandings of the cosmos put forward by Copernicus and other thinkers. Maisano reads the revels speech’s reference to the dissolving, fading globe as influenced by these discoveries.150 Similarly, Mickaël Popelard (2017) studies the play alongside Francis Bacon’s scientific method, which suggests a more open, plastic idea of the universe, an idea that resonates in The Tempest. Popelard argues that the play occupies the threshold between traditional and modern thinking, with Prospero being both a magician and a modern man of science.151 Donald Carlson (2015) reads the play against the backdrop of scientific discoveries of the time and argues that Shakespeare issues a caution to his audience on the powerful new knowledge systems and the sense of unlimited power they confer on humans.152 The Tempest is among the first Shakespeare plays to be studied from the ‘postcolonial’ perspective. Peter Hulme (1981) argues that an emergent discourse of the ‘Caribbees’ constitutes an important context for the play – the discourse was influenced by knowledge of the ‘Old World’ as much as it was by encounters with the New World. Similarly, Caliban is a ‘compromise formation’ constituted by and also trapped between Old and New World discourses. Moreover, in Hulme’s reading, Prospero’s magic is equated with the colonizer’s technology in that it occupies ‘the space really inhabited in colonial history by gunpowder’.153 Terence Hawkes’s essay ‘Swisser-Swatter: Making a Man of English Letters’ (1985) gestures towards a postcolonial reading. Hawkes writes that the play draws attention to the fact that the category of the ‘human’ is subject to slippage and fluctuation, especially in the colonial context where the other’s humanity

 Introduction 31 is persistently questioned.154 Postcolonial readings typically place Caliban at the centre of the play; he signifies the colonized native, the complex villain-victim, political rebel, poet and dreamer of freedom. Paul Brown’s essay (1985) argues that The Tempest is not just a reflection or representation of colonial practices but is itself an example of romance functioning as colonial discourse. However, interestingly, it ‘declares no all-embracing triumph for colonialism’; rather it is an example of discourse that is ‘a site for radical ambivalence’.155 Another of Hulme’s essays, co-authored with Francis Barker, is another major intervention in Tempest criticism. Hulme and Barker (1985) 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’.156 The play is essentially Prospero’s narrative and plot, with Caliban reduced to the status of subplot. However, the abrupt interruption of the masque indicates Prospero’s anxiety about the legitimacy of his own power and the contradiction between his roles as usurped and usurper. This is the climax of the play, when the relationship between the main plot and the subplot is reversed and Caliban takes on a potentially threatening position. In spite of the comic closure, the play is shaped by the threat posed to its harmony and beauty by the history of conquest and control that surrounds it. Greenblatt returns to The Tempest in his essay ‘Learning to Curse – Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century’ (1992), which focuses on language and power relations. Prospero refuses to recognize Caliban’s language as legitimate and hence denies his humanity, but he also teaches Caliban his own language to refashion him. It is this ‘startling encounter between lettered and unlettered cultures’ that the play stages.157 Although, Alden Vaughan’s essay (2000) is not informed by postcolonial theory as such, it offers instances of Native Americans who were transported to Shakespeare’s London in order to provide a context for Trinculo’s statement that Englishmen would pay to see a ‘dead Indian’ (2.2.32) Vaughan clarifies that the intent of his reading is not to prove that Caliban is an American Indian but to reflect on the topicality of American Indians in Shakespeare’s England.158 Dozens of other works also focus on the ways in which the play functioned as colonial discourse. John Gillies (1986) argues that colonial writings as well as court entertainments that staged the figure of Virginia invested that alien landscape with moral meaning: it came to be associated with ‘fruitfulness’ – abundance and riches – as well as ‘temperance’ – modesty, self-control and moderation. The play represents both these discourses on the person of Miranda. On the other hand, Caliban’s monstrosity, ignorance and lust pose a threat to the discourse of temperance.159 Other critics have approached the theme of servitude in the play as a commentary on slavery. Caliban has been interpreted by Derek Cohen (1996) as the rebellious slave, while Ariel is read as the slave whose consciousness of self has paradoxically been blunted by the promise of freedom.160 Andrew Gurr (1996) reads Ariel as an indentured servant whose term of service is limited.161 Kim Hall (1995) points out that commercial exchange fostered interracial sexual relations; this led to the need to establish boundaries between the races. Miranda’s role is informed by this tension. Prospero’s anxiety about her chastity is in contest with Caliban’s need to revenge himself through her.162 Joyce MacDonald (2002) further points to Sebastian’s and Antonio’s remarks on Claribel’s marriage to an African king as expressions of the fear that political alliances with Africa could rupture

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much-desired racial purity.163 Both Hall and MacDonald also remind us of the African presence in the play in the figure of Sycorax, the Algerian witch. Ania Loomba’s reading of Caliban in her book Gender, Race, and Renaissance Drama (1989) combines colonial, race and gender concerns. Her reading of Caliban indicates that he is limited, even trapped, by Renaissance (and later) discourses on black male rapacity. Loomba also points out that gender and racial discrimination are closely connected with Sycorax, constructed in the play as the licentious witch-whore figure, in contrast to Miranda’s purity. In fact, the position of Miranda is a reminder that ‘in the colonial situation, patriarchalism makes specific and often contradictory demands on its own women’.164 Loomba’s essay also looks at the contexts in which The Tempest is read the world over, particularly in India, where Shakespeare is central to a colonial-influenced English curriculum, and how postcolonial reality has impacted Indian readers’ understanding of the play. Thomas Cartelli’s discussion (1987) also examines the colonial contexts in which the play was received. It has served as a reference point and even model for colonial rulers and anti-colonial intellectuals alike.165 A reluctance to homogenize the postcolonial world has led critics to focus on parts of the world outside America. Paul Brown’s essay (discussed earlier) suggested the importance of English colonization of Ireland to understand the play. Dympna Callaghan (2000) has also demonstrated that Ireland is indeed ‘the sublimated context’ of the play.166 Barbara Fuchs argues that the play encapsulates different parts of the world. While placing colonialism of the New World has ‘made it a fundamentally more interesting, and . . . more relevant text’, highlighting other contexts and locations helps to grasp the fact that colonial ideology was multilayered and condensed.167 Fuchs too examines Ireland as a possible context to the play, as well as the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean Muslim world in general: Sycorax is from Algiers and Claribel marries a Tunisian king. These two figures, distant yet threatening, recall English fears of the mighty Ottoman Empire. Other critics too have emphasized the play’s Mediterranean setting. While these critics do not focus on colonialism as such, they all raise issues of racial and religious difference and the complexities of international politics and commercial exchange. Jerry Brotton (1998) 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’.168 Brotton draws attention to Gonzalo’s reference to Carthage (2.1.84) as a way of deflecting attention from England’s complicated and often contradictory relationship with contemporary North African kingdoms. Richard Wilson (1997) links the themes of bondage and slavery to the North Africans’ enslavement of white Europeans.169 In summary, while postcolonial readings came to dominate the play’s critical landscape for several decades, they vary in focus and argument and the best of them are rooted in studies of the play’s language and structure and take into account the play’s contradictions and ambiguity. Not unexpectedly, postcolonial readings have not remained undisputed. Numerous critics have deemed them ahistorical, short-sighted or simply erroneous, and have proposed alternative histories and contexts, which they claim to be more accurate and relevant. Deborah Willis (1999) argues that postcolonial readings are reductive and, unlike typical colonial discourse (even if such a thing existed in the time period), the

 Introduction 33 play invites us to sympathize with Caliban even as it renders him ridiculous. She also contends that European politics are more important to the play than colonial politics, with the narrative being prompted by a political crisis in Italy.170 David Kastan (2000) adds that it is worth remembering that the play’s references to the Americas are few and far between, and that the Europeans in the play are all too glad to leave the island at the end. A truly historicist reading, writes Kastan, recognizes the play’s European dynastic concerns.171 Although interest in Shakespeare’s female characters predates the twentieth century, criticism that adopts an overtly and self-consciously feminist approach is relatively recent. Jyotsna Singh (1996) writes that postcolonial readings are often ‘oddly oblivious to the dissonances between race and gender struggle’. She turns to Claude Levi-Strauss’s ideas on the exchange of women between social groups to solidify sociopolitical bonds to comment on Miranda’s place in the island’s hierarchy, and on how Prospero, Caliban and Ferdinand are strangely bonded through competing claims on her.172 Lori Leininger (1980) reminds us that the occasion of the play’s first performance was the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth; similarly Miranda’s marriage is orchestrated by her father for his own political ends.173 Ann Thompson (1991) posits that white feminist critics must recognize that white women too benefited from colonialism and asks if a feminist reading must necessarily be a negative one?174 Later critics, whose readings have at least partially been informed by feminism, respond that this need not be the case. Barbara Sebek (2001) responds that Miranda does not simply submit to the circuits of exchange; she is, on the other hand, an active, desiring subject who violates paternal directions.175 Similarly, Melissa Sanchez (2008) too argues for Miranda’s agency – her relationship with Ferdinand is marked by mutual love that defies subjection.176 Denise Albanese (1996) makes interesting connections between gender, sexuality, race and science. Science and colonialism were mutually constitutive and similar to the extent that they both marked and managed bodies of women and non-white peoples. For Albanese, the ‘utopian island precipitates a fantasy, not of the library, but of the laboratory’.177 Prospero is a kind of proto-scientist, and Caliban and Miranda are figures who occupy an interesting place in the nature–culture divide. Marina Warner (1996) focuses on Sycorax. She argues that the contrast between Sycorax and Prospero is between metamorphosis and stasis, ‘unruly mutation and steady-state identity’.178 Warner links Sycorax with classical figures such as Circe and Medea, who are both associated with mutability. Leah Marcus (1996), in turn, focuses on Sycorax’s mysterious blue eyes and suggests that the figure of the blue-eyed witch thus has the potential to disturb the rigid self-other binary.179 Reading focusing on class relations (some of them Marxist-influenced) complement postcolonial readings. Bruce Erlich (1977) reads Prospero as a composite of both European feudal order and Virginian ambition. His ‘Art’ suppresses rebellion, reconciles enemies and arranges a marriage, which in turn reconciles ‘feudal legitimacy with capitalist striving’.180 In his book-length discussion of the connections between colonialism abroad and changing economic conditions within England, Mark Netzloff (2003) reads the play alongside other historical documents on the ejection of the labouring poor to foreign lands . His reading of the play argues for the tension between the indispensability of the working classes to the success of the colonial project and the

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ever-present threat of working-class rebellion. Caliban is the embodiment of this.181 Annabel Patterson (1999) resists the idea of the play as complicit with oppressive class ideologies. On the other hand, it does not demonize the servant, Caliban, and reads much like discourses of popular rebellion in the period.182 David Norbrook (1992) also argues that the play is ‘utopic’ in that the language of revolutionary change and libertarianism are pervasive in it.183 Similarly, Walter Cohen (1994) 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 class unity projected at the end is, however, at the expense of Caliban, revealing the ‘racist and imperialist basis of English nationalism’.184 Frances Dolan (1985) sees the Prospero– Caliban relationship as a primarily domestic one in which the threat posed by Caliban was a kind of ‘petty treason’ against the master. She sets the play against other texts on master–servant relations, in which servants were perceived as part-child and partsubhuman. Caliban’s rebellion has much in common with dramatic conventions of the period in which working-class rebellion were depicted as comic.185 Tom Lindsay (2016) reads Caliban as subject to the education and training through service that many young people experienced. Caliban’s training should have led from a place of deference and submission to autonomy, but it failed to do so, leaving him frustrated and seeking advancement through violent means.186 Jeffrey Doty (2017) examines the damaging effects of subordination and domination on personhood as revealed in the relationships of Ariel and Caliban with Prospero. Prospero’s notion of rigidly hierarchic order strips master–servant relations of any sense of mutual benefit, thereby violating contemporary ideals of service.187 The psychoanalytic approaches to The Tempest that were pioneered in the 1950s and 1960s were taken up by later critics. Coppelia Kahn (1980) deftly connects the romance motif of a storm-struck journey to the traumas of an individual growing into adulthood. In the journey from Milan to the isle, Prospero moved from ‘childlike, self-absorbed dependence to paternal omnipotence’.188 David Sundelson (1980) 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 father par excellence.189 Neil Cobb (1984) draws on the theories of Carl Jung to argue that Caliban and Ariel both represent contradictory aspects of Prospero’s nature; the union of Ferdinand and Miranda symbolizes the synthesis of these opposites in Prospero when he enters into a new relationship with the feminine aspect of his psyche.190 Stephen Orgel’s reading (1984) makes its premise the absence of women in the play. Prospero conceives of himself as a mother figure and so works through the trauma of having his younger brother usurp the role of authority figure. Orgel also links family structures and sexual relations in the play to Jacobean political structures.191 This approach that combines Freudian and historical methods is evident in Janet Adelman’s work (1992). The ‘debilitating’ maternal influence in the figure of Sycorax is removed from the play, and Prospero takes on the role of the ‘idealized father’. Caliban, in his turn, is estranged from the patriarchal world of Prospero. 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’.192 Meredith Skura (1989) argues that psychological and political motives intersect in the

 Introduction 35 play: Caliban is Prospero’s ego, childlike, narcissistic, lustful and desiring power and revenge. Prospero’s hatred for Caliban derives from his fear of his more primal self.193 Late-twentieth-century critics also work in the tradition of intertextual criticism. Donna Hamilton (1990) links the play’s colonial politics with Virgil’s Aeneid, which is ‘the archetypal colonizing text of all time’.194 Shakespeare’s Caliban (1991) by Alden and Virginia Mason Vaughan and their introduction to the third Arden edition of the play (1999) emphasize the historical and cultural narratives that might have influenced the creation and reception of Caliban. The Vaughans link Caliban to sites ranging from the Americas to Africa to Ireland, to cultural texts including works of Virgil and Ovid, narratives of ‘wild men’ in medieval literature, Renaissance civic pageants, Spenserian poetry, Jacobean antimasques and commedia dell’arte.195 Jonathan Bate (1993) approaches the play as a ‘kind of collaboration’ with Ovid. The reworking of epic material in romance form was similar to that attempted by Ovid in Metamorphoses. Bate also reads Caliban as an Ovidian type and the theme of change as central to the play.196 Barbara Mowat (2000) writes that The Tempest is an ‘intertextual mélange’ that echoes and bears traces of other works, notably Virgil’s epics, the Bible, and the Virginia travelogues all of which, together, trigger multiple cultural references that give us a sense of the multiple narratives and histories that Europeans drew upon as models for their colonial projects.197 David Wilson-Okamura (2003) focuses on Aeneas’s settlement Carthage and how this experiment was accompanied by sloth and internal dissent, not unlike the seventeenth-century English experience in Virginia.198 Andrew Gurr (2014) re-examines Shakespeare’s uses of Virgil, Ovid, Montaigne, Richard Eden and William Strachey as well as his less visible borrowings from the Bible, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and several of Ben Jonson’s plays in order to consider the essential role of sources in a writer’s creative process.199 Richard Andrews’s essay (2014) focuses on the play’s debt to improvised, unscripted drama from Italy. He writes that playwrights were artisans who worked with pre-existing material that moved through professional drama circuits and that Shakespeare was undoubtedly influenced by Italian material in the writing of The Tempest.200 Robert Henke (2014) connects the play to Italian pastoral tragicomedy and complicates the pastoral nature of the play – rather than simply introduce pastoral elements, Shakespeare takes on the pastoral as a question or problem; notably, the marvellous dimension of the pastoral ‘is a thing to be negotiated with the equally important claims of verisimilitude’.201 Similarly, Helen Whall’s discussion (2014) argues for seeing the contribution of Italian commedia dell’arte as part of a trans-European cultural exchange that impacted the writing of The Tempest, particularly in the creation of comical characters, certain dialogue patterns and various analogues of plot.202 Scholarship on the Renaissance stage and the play’s relationship to other forms of stage production also continues to flourish. C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler (1986) build on Enid Welsford’s scholarship on masques (discussed earlier) arguing that the play signals homage to the monarch even as it stages threats to his power. In The Tempest, Shakespeare uses the masque to be ‘critical of monarchs in ways that the courtly form would not allow’.203 Andrew Gurr (1989) demonstrates that the play was written for the upmarket Blackfriars Theatre rather than the Globe,204 while James Knowles (1999) links the play to non-royal masques that might have incorporated

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critiques of monarchical authority.205 Douglas Bruster (1995) writes that the play is about authority and work in early modern playhouses, and that Caliban represents the star actor William Kempe, who continually challenged the authority of the playscript and Ariel as the obedient and eager boy actor.206 Stephen Orgel (2008) studies the play as a reflection on the meaning and purpose of masques.207 For Patrick Cheney (2008) The Tempest indicates that Shakespeare fashioned himself in opposition to the poetlaureate model of scholarship favoured by Edmund Spenser in which writing is aligned with the national project. The play emerges from a deliberate shift from Spenserian epic romance to stage romance.208 A number of other critical approaches have enriched our understanding of the play. ‘History of the book’ studies have influenced recent scholarship: James Kearney (2002), for instance, constructs his essay around the idea that literacy and materiality are important to study self-other contacts.209 On another track, Martin Orkin (2005) emphasizes ‘local readings’ of the play, in which local knowledges and ideologies that audiences and readers bring to the play are privileged, rather than the archival knowledge available only to a privileged few. He points out that, for instance, for a South African readership, the island of the play would suggest Robben Island, where anti-apartheid activists were jailed.210 Vin Nardizzi (2013) takes an eco-critical approach when he attends to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural events that might have influenced the play and the ways the text can speak to environmental crises of the present.211 Rose McKenna (2017) writes that ‘the ecology of salvage’ informs both the story of The Tempest and its staging – the wreckage the man-made storm leaves in its wake shows the persistence of the past in the present despite human catastrophe.212 Other studies have focused on a range of philosophical questions pondered through rhetorical theory. Daniel Gibbons’s essay (2017) contends that at the heart of the dramatic action is a reflection on power, persuasion and free will. The play engages with common early modern concerns about the efficacy of reason and rhetoric in political life and interrogates the nature of Prospero’s victory at the end and how the exercise of power alters humans. These questions are examined by Gibbons through the lens of Augustinian moral ontology.213 John Kunat (2014) writes that The Tempest is not so much an historical allegory as an ‘imaginary reconstruction of the mode through which sovereign authority may have been instituted’ (323–4). It is a philosophical fiction, combining, in equal parts, the political discourse of natural law and the social discourse of love to produce a blend characteristic of the romance in the Renaissance.214 Kevin Curran (2017) studies the epilogue in relation to Renaissance performance practices and Aristotelean rhetorical theory. Curran writes that the epilogue participates not only in a theatrical convention but also in an allied intellectual tradition that views judgement as a form of making or invention rather than simply arriving at a decision.215 In her study of the play’s narrative form Silvia Bigliazzi writes that Shakespeare interrogated the nature of theatre itself, ‘it’s space-time dimension and representational potential, and positioned narrative and drama as two complementary, but also competing modes within a play that coalesced the opposed requirements of time-space capaciousness and unity in a continuous disruption of the chronotope of the island’.216 David Katz (2018) argues that the play is an instance of theatre as a force that promotes equal and effective exchange between

 Introduction 37 characters occupying different social positions. Ariel, for instance, achieves his goals of changing Prospero and gaining freedom through a set of persuasive practices aligned with commercial theatre and the romance tradition.217 This recent criticism not only does alter some of the critical assumptions that informed earlier periods but it also builds on them and expands them, recasts them in terms that speak as much about the era in which it has been produced as it does about the play. In all of this, it has only followed on the footsteps of earlier criticism. Shakespeare’s sources and influences for The Tempest, whatever those might be, have long fascinated critics, as we see in numerous excerpts in this collection. If sources and influences come before the text, the criticism comes after it. They become part of what Walter Benjamin calls a work’s ‘after history’.218 Most readers in the twentieth-first century cannot but help consume the play through and alongside this ‘after history’. As Jonathan Bate, borrowing the term from Benjamin, puts it: ‘Shakespeare cannot be approached directly; he has been modified by his own after-history’.219 Brian Vickers makes a further point when he writes that We can juxtapose our understanding of Shakespeare with the eighteenth century understanding of him, and with our understanding of them. This triple process of comparative interpretation ought to make us see that our position is also timebound, and culture-bound, ought to prevent us from feeling any easy sense of superiority. Another age will arise that may look at our Shakespeare criticism with reactions ranging from indulgent apology to disbelief and contempt.220

All of this is as true of the criticism of The Tempest as it is of commentary on the rest of Shakespeare’s work – four centuries of critical writing are part and parcel of The Tempest. In its journey through the centuries it has integrated them and borne them along, so that both literary work and criticism comprise our inheritance. As we continue to read, watch, perform and study The Tempest today, we will do well to keep in mind that full and rich legacy.

Notes 1 ‘The Chardges betwine the last of October 1611 . . . untell the first of November 1612 . . . The names of the playes And by what company played them herafter followeth As also what Maskes and Triumphes at the Tilts were presented before the Kings Majestic in this year 1612’ in The Revels Books (1611–12); reprinted London, 1922. 2 Ben Jonson, ‘Induction’, in Bartholomew Fair (London, 1735). 3 John Dryden, ‘Preface’, in The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island (London, 1670). 4 ‘Defense of the Epilogue’, in Essays of John Dryden, edited by W. P. Ker (Oxford, 1900), p. 172. 5 Brian Vickers, ‘Íntroduction’, in William Shakespeare – The Critical Heritage. Volume. 1. 1623–1692 (London and Boston, 1974), p. 5. 6 John Dryden, ‘Introduction’, in The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island (London, 1670). 7 Brian Vickers, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare – The Critical Heritage. Volume II. 1693–1733 (London and Boston, 1974), p. 1.

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8 John Dryden, ‘Essay on Dramatic Poetry’, in Essays of Sir John Dryden, p. 79. 9 John Dryden, ‘The Preface’, Troilus and Cressida (London, 1679), p. 29. 10 Charles Gildon, ‘Shakespeare and the Rules’, in Vickers, II, p. 322 and pp. 324–325. 11 Charles Gildon, ‘Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare’, in The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare, edited by Nicholas Rowe (London, 1709), p. 264. 12 Nicholas Rowe, ‘Some Accounts of the Life of Mr. William Shakespeare’, in The Works of William Shakespeare, pp. xxxiii–xxiv. 13 Joseph Addison, The Spectator (No. 279) 1812; reprinted London, 1891. 14 Lewis Theobald, ‘Edition of Shakespeare’, in Vickers, II, p. 484. 15 Richard Sill, Remarks on Shakespeare’s Tempest; Containing an Investigation of Mr. Malone’s Attempt to Ascertain the Date of the Play, and Various Notes and Illustrations of Abstruse Readings and Passages (Cambridge, 1797), pp. 67–68. 16 William Richardson, Essays on Shakespeare’s Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, and in his Imitation of Female Characters (New York, 1973). 17 William Warburton, ‘The Works of Shakespeare In Eight Volumes’, in Vickers, III, p. 228. 18 Peter Whalley, ‘On Shakespeare’s Learning’, in Vickers, III, pp. 271–289. 19 Joseph Warton, ‘Observations on The Tempest of Shakespeare’ and ‘Observations on The Tempest Concluded’, in The Adventurer 93 and 97 (New York, 1968). 20 Samuel Johnson, Works of William Shakespeare in Eight Volumes With the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators (London, 1765); Benjamin Heath, ‘On Restoring Shakespeare’s Text’, in Vickers, IV, pp. 550–564; George Steevens, The Plays of William Shakespeare in 10 Volumes (London, 1778). 21 Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, Works of William Shakespeare in Ten Volumes (London, 1773). 22 William Guthrie, ‘On Shakespearean Tragedy’, in Vickers, III, p. 194. 23 Warburton, Works, p. 225. 24 John Holt, ‘Remarks on The Tempest’, in Vickers, III, pp. 342–358. 25 Edward Capell, ‘Notes on Shakespeare’, in Vickers, VI, pp. 218–245. 26 Henry Kames, ‘Shakespeare’s Beauties and Faults’, in Vickers, IV, pp. 471–497; Joseph Priestley, ‘Lectures on Shakespeare’, in Vickers, VI, pp. 160–164; Daniel Webb, ‘Shakespeare’s Poetry’, in Vickers, IV, pp. 505–524. 27 Dryden, ‘Preface’, Troilus and Cressida. 28 Warburton, p. 227. 29 Peter Whalley, ‘On Shakespeare’s Learning’. 30 Richard Farmer, ‘On Shakespeare’s Lack of Classical Learning, 1767’, in Vickers, V, pp. 189–205. 31 Richard Hurd, ‘On Shakespeare’s Language and Learning, 1757’, in Vickers, IV, p. 305. 32 Samuel Johnson, ‘Proposal for an Edition of Shakespeare’, in Vickers, IV, pp. 268–273. 33 Samuel Johnson, The Dramatick Works of William Shakespeare – Printed Complete, with Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Preface and Notes to which is Prefixed the Life of the Author (Boston, 1802–1804), pp. 14–15. 34 Edmond Malone, Plays and Poems of Shakespeare in 10 Volumes – Volume 10 (London, 1790); Maurice Morgann, A Commentary on the Tempest (Oxford, 1972); George Chalmers, An Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare Papers, which were Exhibited on Norfolk Street (London, 1797); Edward Capell, Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare; Edmond Malone, An Account of the Incidents, from which the Title and Part of the Story of Shakespeare’s Tempest were Deriv’d, and Its True

 Introduction 39 Date Ascertained (London, 1808). Maurice Morgann, in A Commentary on the Tempest (written 1790, published Oxford, 1972) also comments on the New World connection; Morgann’s text could not be reproduced in this collection due to copyright restrictions. 35 Charles Knight, ‘Introductory Notice’, The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakespeare. Vol 1 – Comedies (London, 1843), pp. 125–137, and Joseph Hunter, A Disquisition on the Scene, Origin, Date etc., of Shakespeare’s Tempest (London, 1839). 36 William Taylor, from ‘A Review of A Commentary Illustrating the Poetic of Aristotle’, The Monthly Review, xvii (October 1795), p. 123. 37 Brian Vickers, ‘Introduction’, William Shakespeare – The Critical Heritage, Vol. 1, p. 11. 38 Charles Johnson, Shakespeare and His Critics (Boston and New York, 1909), p. 167. 39 Ibid; the quotation is from p. 168. 40 Jonathan Bate, The Romantics on Shakespeare (London, 1992). 41 Ludwig Tieck, ‘Shakespeare’s Treatment of the Marvelous’, in Bate, p. 63. Tieck’s writings on The Tempest have not been included in this collection due to copyright restrictions. 42 A. W. Schlegal, ‘Lectures in Art and Literature’, in The Romantics on Shakespeare, edited by Jonathan Bate, p. 88 and p. 91. 43 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Notes on The Tempest’, in The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge (London, 1838), pp. 94–95. 44 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Shakespeare’s Judgment Equal to His Genius’, Ibid. p. 67. Coleridge owes many of these ideas on mechanic and organic form to Schlegal. 45 William Hazlitt, Characters in Shakespeare’s Plays (London, 1817). 46 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London and Toronto, 1906), p. 160. 47 Samuel Taylor, Coleridge, ‘Lecture 9’, in Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, edited by J. Payne Collier, Vol. 2 (London, 1856), p. 118 and p. 12. 48 Coleridge, ‘Notes on The Tempest’, p. 101. 49 Coleridge, ‘Lecture 9’, p. 109. 50 Coleridge, ‘Notes on The Tempest’, p. 95. 51 Charles Lamb, ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’, in The Dramatic Essays of Charles Lamb, edited by Brander Mathews (New York, 1891), pp. 191–192. 52 Hermann Ulrici, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art – Vol. 2, translated by L. D. Schmidt (London, 1876); p. 40. 53 Knight, ‘Introductory Notice’, in The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakespeare, p. 398 and p. 402. 54 Charles Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare (London, 1902), p. 222. 55 George Bernard Shaw, ‘“The Tempest” – Performance by the Elizabethan Stage Society at the Mansion House, 5 November 1897’, The Saturday Review, 84 (13 November 1897), pp. 514–516. 56 Joseph Hunter, A Disquisition on the Scene, Origin, Date etc., of Shakespeare’s Tempest (London, 1839). 57 Edward Dowden, Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London, 1905), p. 33. 58 W. J. Birch, An Inquiry into the Philosophy and Religion of Shakespeare (London, 1848). 59 John Ruskin, Munera Pulveris (London, 1872), p. 127, p. 9. 60 Daniel Wilson, Caliban: The Missing Link (London, 1873), p. 78, 86, 79, 81.

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61 Patrick MacDonnell, An Essay on the Play of The Tempest (London, 1840), p. 19, 48. 62 Henry Howard Furness, ‘Introduction to The Tempest’, in A Variorum Edition of Shakespeare – Vol. 9 (Philadelphia, 1895), p. vi. 63 Coleridge, Table Talk, in Bate, p. 161. 64 Coleridge, Notes on The Tempest, p. 93. 65 Anna Brownell Jameson, ‘On Miranda’, in Shakespeare’s Heroines: Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (Boston and New York, 1900), p. 211. 66 Frances Kemble, Notes Upon Some of Shakespeare’s Plays (London, 1882), p. 134. 67 See Michael Dobson, ‘“Remember/First to Possess his Books”: Appropriations of The Tempest, 1700–1800’, in The Tempest – Critical Essays, edited by Patrick Murphy (London and New York, 2001), pp. 245–256. 68 Thomas Campbell, The Dramatic Works of W. Shakespeare with Remarks on His Life and Writing (London, 1838). 69 Dowden, p. 380, p. 371. 70 Washington Irving, Knickerbocker 15 (1840). 71 Rudyard Kipling, Letter, The Spectator (2 July 1898), pp. 91–103 reprinted as ‘How Shakespeare Came to Write The Tempest’ (New York, 1916). 72 Peter Rawlings, Americans on Shakespeare (Aldershot, 1999), p. 2. 73 Frank Bristol, Shakespeare in America (Chicago, 1898), p. 1. p. 8, pp. 50–51. 74 Jose Enrique Rodó, Ariel, translated by S. J. Stimpson (Cambridge, 1922). 75 Lytton Strachey, ‘Shakespeare’s Final Period’, in Books and Characters – French and English (London, 1922), pp. 47–64. 76 Quoted in William T. Stafford, ‘James Examines Shakespeare: Notes on the Nature of Genius’, PMLA 73 (1958), p. 122. 77 Henry James, ‘Introduction to The Tempest’, in Shakespeare’s Complete Works – Vol 16, edited by Sidney Lee (Cambridge, MA, 1907). 78 A. C. Bradley, ‘Lecture VIII, King Lear’, in Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1905). 79 Brooke Stopford, On Ten Plays of Shakespeare (London, 1905). 80 John Churton Collins, ‘Poetry and Symbolism: A Study of The Tempest’, Contemporary Review, XCIII (January 1908), pp. 65–83. 81 Collin Still, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: A Study of The Tempest (London, 1921), p. 6. 82 Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 1991), p. 130. 83 Luce Morton, ‘Introduction’, The Tempest (London, 1901), pp. lx–lxx. 84 Sidney Lee, ‘The Call of the West: America and Elizabethan England’, Scribner’s Magazine (1907), pp. 313–330 and ‘Caliban’s Visits to England’, Cornhill Magazine 34 (1913), pp. 333–345. 85 Sidney Lee, Shakespeare and the Modern Stage (New York, 1906), p. 151. 86 Robert Ralston Cawley, ‘Shakespeare’s Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest’, PMLA 41 (1926), p. 716. This essay could not be reproduced in this collection due to copyright restrictions. 87 Charles Gayley, Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America (New York, 1917), pp. 59–69. 88 Rachel Kelsey, ‘Indian Dances in The Tempest’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 13 (1914), pp. 98–103. 89 John Rea, ‘The Source for the Storm in The Tempest’, Modern Philology, 17.5 (1919), pp. 279–286. 90 W. W. Newell, ‘Sources of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, Journal of American Folklore, 16 (1903), pp. 234–257.

 Introduction 41 91 Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare (London, 1907). 92 Ashley Thorndike, The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare (Worcester, MA, 1901). 93 E. K. Chambers, ‘The Problem of Chronology’, in William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford, 1930–1); Ernest Law, Shakespeare’s Tempest as Originally Produced at Court (London, 1920); Arthur Quiller-Couch, Notes on Shakespeare’s Workmanship (New York, 1917). 94 Enid Welsford, The Court Masque – A Study in the Relationship between Poetry and the Revels (New York, 1927). 95 Max Beerbohm, ‘The Tempest’, The Saturday Review, No. 2506, Vol. 96 (7 November 1903), p. 576. 96 Michael Taylor, Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2001), p. 39. 97 M. C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, 1935), p. 5. 98 Donald Stauffer, Shakespeare’s World of Images – The Development of His Moral Ideas (Bloomington, IN, 1949), p. 311. Stauffer’s commentary could not be reproduced in this collection due to copyright restrictions. 99 Wilson Knight, The Shakespearean Tempest, p. 4. p. 252 and p. 257. 100 E. E. Stoll, ‘The Tempest’, PMLA 47 (1932), p. 705, 725, 726. This essay could not be reproduced in this collection due to copyright restrictions. 101 Hardin Craig, An Interpretation of Shakespeare (New York, 1948), pp. 341–356. Craig’s commentary could not be included in this collection due to copyright restrictions. 102 Walter Curry, Shakespeare’s Philosophical Patterns (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1937), p. vii, p. 198. Curry’s commentary could not be included in this collection due to copyright restrictions. 103 John Dover Wilson, The Essential Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1932), p. 144. Dover’s chapter could not be included in this collection due to copyright restrictions. 104 Derek Traversi, ‘The Tempest’, Scrutiny, 16.2 (1949), p. 140. 105 Michael Taylor, Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2001), p. 118. 106 Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays (London, 1961), p. 9, p. 23. 107 Wolfgang Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery (New York, 1951). This work has not been included in this collection due to copyright restrictions. 108 Ernest Pettet, Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition (London, 1949), p. 86. This commentary could not be included in this collection due to copyright restrictions. 109 E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Last Plays (London, 2014). 110 D. G. James, ‘The A Failure of the Ballad-Makers’, in Scepticism and Poetry: An Essay on the Poetic Imagination (London, 1937), p. 210, p. 241. James’s chapter could not be included in this collection due to copyright restrictions. 111 Neville Coghill, ‘The Basis of Shakespearean Comedy’, Essays and Studies, N. S. III (London, 1950), p. 17, p. 25. 112 James Nosworthy, ‘The Narrative Sources of The Tempest’, Review of English Studies, 249 (1948), pp. 281–94. 113 Richmond Noble, Shakespeare’s Use of Song (Oxford, 1923), p. 9. 114 W. H. Auden, ‘Music in Shakespeare’, in The Dyers Hand and Other Essays (London, 1948), pp. 500–527. This work has not been included in this collection due to copyright restrictions.

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115 G. E. Bentley, ‘Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre’, Shakespeare Survey, 33 (1948), pp. 40–49. 116 Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York, 1942). 117 J. Middleton Murry, Shakespeare (London, 1936). 118 Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (New York, 1939). This commentary could not be included in this collection due to copyright reasons. 119 Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Vol. 2 (Chicago, 1960), p. 290. This work could not be included due to copyright restrictions. 120 Frank Kermode, ‘Introduction’, The Tempest, pp. xi–xciii. 121 Reuben Brower, ‘The Mirror of Analogy’, in Shakespeare: ‘The Tempest’ – A Selection of Critical Essays, edited by D. J. Palmer (London and New York, 1991), p. 131. 122 Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York, 1965). 123 Jan Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary, translated by Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, NY, 1966), p. 271. 124 D. G. James, The Dream of Prospero (Oxford, 1967), p. 36. 125 A. D. Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory (London, 1967). 126 William Empson, ‘Hunt the Symbol’, The Times Literary Supplement (23 April 1964), reprinted in Essays on Shakespeare, edited by David B. Pirie (Cambridge, 1987), p. 239. 127 C. J. Sisson, ‘The Magic of Prospero’, Shakespeare Survey, 11 (1958), pp. 70–77. 128 Harry Levin, ‘The Tempest and The Alchemist’, Shakespeare Survey, 22 (1969), pp. 47–58. 129 Frances A. Yates, Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach (London, 1975), p. 177. 130 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford, 1964), pp. 35–36. 131 Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York, 1964). 132 Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (New York, 1956). 133 Norman Holland, ‘Caliban’s Dream’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 37 (1968), pp. 114–125. 134 Harry Berger Jr., ‘Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), pp. 253–283. 135 George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London, 1960, rev. ed. 1984), p. 13. 136 Roberto Fernandez Retamar, ‘Caliban: Notes Towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America’, trans. Lynn Garafola, David McMurray and Robert Marquez. Massachusetts Review 15 (1974), p. 14. 137 Hallet Smith, Shakespeare’s Romances (San Marino, CA, 1972), p. 20. 138 Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton, 1972), p. 281. 139 Diana T. Childress, ‘Are Shakespeare’s Late Plays Really Romances?’, in Shakespeare’s Late Plays, edited by R. C. Tobias and P. G. Zolbrod (Athens, OH, 1974), pp. 44–55. 140 David Young, The Heart’s Forest: A Study of Shakespeare’s Pastoral Plays (New Haven and London, 1972). 141 Joan Hartwig, Shakespeare’s Tragicomic Vision (Baton Rouge, LA, 1972). 142 Kermode, ‘Introduction’, pp. lxxxviii, lxxxxvii. 143 Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic (Berkeley, CA, 1981). 144 Stephen J. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Irvine, CA, 1988), p. 154. 145 Curt Breight, ‘“Treason Doth Never Prosper”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Treason’, Shakespeare Quarterly 41.1 (1990), pp. 1–28.

 Introduction 43 146 Jeffrey Rufo, ‘“He Needs Will be Absolute Milan”: The Political Thought of The Tempest’, in The Tempest – A Critical Reader, edited by Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan (London, 2014), p. 137. 147 Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘“Strange and Woonderfull Syghts”: The Tempest and the Discourses of Monstrosity’, Shakespeare Survey, 50 (1997), pp. 187–199. 148 Steven Mullaney, ‘Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance’, Representations, 3 (1983), pp. 40–67. 149 Barbara A. Mowat, ‘Prospero’s Books’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52.1(2001), pp. 1–33.Other relatively recent work on Prospero’s magic includes Alvin Kernan, The Playwright as Magician (New Haven, CT, 1979), John S. Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare (Lincoln, NE, 1989), and Michael Srigley, Images of Regeneration: A Study of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ and Its Cultural Background (Stockholm, 1985). 150 Scott Maisano, ‘Shakespeare’s Revolution – The Tempest as Scientific Romance’, in The Tempest – A Critical Reader, pp. 165–194. 151 Mickaël Popelard, ‘Unlimited Science: The Endless Transformation of Nature in Bacon and Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, in Spectacular Science, Technology and Superstition in the Age of Shakespeare, edited by Sophie Chiari et al. (Edinburgh, 2017), pp. 171–195. 152 Donald Carslon, ‘“‘Tis New to Thee”: Power, Magic, and Early Science in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, Ben Jonson Journal 22 (2015), pp. 1–22. 153 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, edited by Francis Barker, Jay Bernstein, John Coombes, Peter Hulme, Jennifer Stratton and Jon Stone (Colchester, 1981), p. 74. 154 Terence Hawkes, ‘Swisser Swatter: Making a Man of English Letters’, in Alternative Shakespeares, edited by John Drakakis (London, 1985), pp. 26–46. 155 Paul Brown, ‘“This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester, 1985), pp. 48–71. 156 Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, ‘“Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish” – The Discursive Con-Texts of The Tempest’, in Alternative Shakespeares, edited by John Drakakis and Terence Hawkes (London, 1985), p. 198. 157 Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York, 1992). 158 Alden T. Vaughan, ‘Trinculo’s Indians: American Natives in Shakespeare’s England’, in The Tempest and its Travels, edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (Philadelphia, 2000), pp. 49–59. 159 John Gillies, ‘Shakespeare’s Virginian Masque’, ELH, 53.4 (1986), pp. 673–707. 160 Derek Cohen, ‘The Culture of Slavery: Caliban and Ariel’, The Dalhousie Review, 75.2 (1996), pp. 153–175. 161 Andrew Gurr, ‘Industrious Ariel and Idle Caliban’, in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, edited by Jean Pierre Maquerlot and Michele Willems (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 193–208. 162 Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness; Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1995).

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163 Joyce Green MacDonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge, 2002). 164 Ania Loomba, Gender, Race and Renaissance Drama (Manchester and New York, 1989), p. 153. 165 Thomas Cartelli, ‘Prospero in Africa – The Tempest as Colonialist Text and Pretext’, in Shakespeare Reproduced – The Text in History and Ideology, edited by Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (New York and London, 1987), pp. 99–115. 166 Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare without Women (New York, 2000), p. 137. 167 Barbara Fuchs, ‘Conquering Islands: Contextualizing The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 48.1 (1997), pp. 45–46. 168 Jerry Brotton, ‘“This Tunis, Sir, was Carthage”: Contesting Colonialism in The Tempest’, in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, edited by Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London and New York, 1998), pp. 23–42. 169 Richard Wilson, ‘Voyage to Tunis: New History and the Old World of The Tempest’, English Literary History, 64.2 (1997), pp. 333–357. 170 Deborah Willis, ‘Shakespeare and the Discourse of Colonialism’, Studies in English Literature, 29.2 (1989), pp. 277–289. 171 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, edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan (Boston, 2000), pp. 268–286. 172 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, edited by Lindsay M. Kaplan and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge, 1996), p. 195. 173 Lori Leininger, ‘The Miranda Trap: Sexism and Racism in The Tempest’, in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, edited by Carolyn Ruth Swift, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana, IL, 1980), pp. 285–294. 174 Ann Thompson, ‘“Miranda, Where’s Your Sister?’: Reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, in Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, edited by Susan Sellers, Linda Hutcheon and Paul Perron (Toronto, 1991), pp. 45–55. 175 Barbara Ann Sebek, ‘Peopling, Profiting and Pleasure in The Tempest’, in The Tempest – Critical Essays, edited by R. S. White (New York, 2001), pp. 463–481. 176 Melissa E. Sanchez, ‘Seduction and Service in The Tempest’, Studies in Philology, 105.1 (2008), pp. 50–82. 177 Denise Albanese, New Science, New World (Durham, NC, 1996), p. 69. 178 Marina Warner, ‘The “Foul Witch” and her “Freckled Whelp”: Circean Mutations in the New World’, in The Tempest and Its Travels, p. 97. 179 Leah S. Marcus, ‘Introduction – The Blue-Eyed Witch’, in Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London, 1996), pp. 1–37. 180 Bruce Erlich, ‘Shakespeare’s Colonial Metaphor: On the Social Function of Theater in The Tempest’, Science and Society, 41 (1977), p. 52. 181 Mark Netzloff, England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capitalism and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism (New York, 2003). 182 Annabel Patterson, ‘“Thought is Free”: The Tempest’, in The Tempest – New Casebooks, edited by R. S. White (New York, 1999), pp. 123–134. 183 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, edited by Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope (London, 1992), pp. 21–54.

 Introduction 45 184 Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation – Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca and London, 1985), p. 404 and p. 401. 185 Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, 1994). 186 Tom Lindsay, ‘“Which First Was Mine Own King”: Caliban and the Politics of Service and Education’, in The Tempest Studies in Philology, 113.2 (2016 ), pp. 397–423. 187 Jeffrey Doty, ‘Experiences of Authority in The Tempest’, Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners: Digesting the New Social History, edited by Chris Fitter and Annabel Patterson (London, 2017), pp. 236–252. 188 Coppélia Kahn, ‘The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family’, in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn (Baltimore, 1980), p. 240. 189 David Sundelson, ‘“So Rare a Wonder’d Father”: Prospero’s Tempest’, in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, pp. 33–53. 190 Noel Cobb, Prospero’s Island: The Secret Alchemy at the Heart of ‘The Tempest’ (London, 1984). 191 Stephen Orgel, ‘Prospero’s Wife’, Representations, 8 (1984), pp. 1–13. 192 Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York, 1992), pp. 237, 238. 193 Meredith Anne Skura, ‘Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 40.1 (1989), pp. 42–69. 194 Donna B. Hamilton, Virgil and ‘The Tempest’: The Politics of Imitation (Columbus, OH, 1990), p. 65. 195 Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 1991); Alden T. Vaughan and T. Virginia Mason Vaughan, ‘Introduction’, in The Tempest, edited by Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, The Arden Shakespeare (Surrey, 1999), pp. 1–138. 196 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, 1993), p. 239. 197 Barbara A. Mowat, ‘“Knowing I Loved My Books”: Reading The Tempest Intertextually’, in The Tempest and its Travels, p. 27. 198 David Scott Wilson-Okamura, ‘Virgilian Modes of Colonization in The Tempest’, English Literary History, 70.3 (2003), pp. 709–737. 199 Andrew Gurr, ‘Sources and Creativity in The Tempest’, in The Tempest – A Critical Reader, pp. 93–114. 200 Richard Andrews, ‘The Tempest and Italian Improvised Theater’, in Revisiting The Tempest: The Capacity to Signify, edited by Silvia Bigliazzi et al. (New York, 2014), pp. 45–62. 201 Robert Henke, ‘Pastoral Tragicomedy and The Tempest’, in Revisiting ‘The Tempest’: The Capacity to Signify, pp. 63–76. 202 Helen Whall, ‘Commedia dell’ Arte, The Tempest, and Transnational Criticism’, in The Tempest – A Critical Reader. pp. 115–136. 203 C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development (Berkeley, CA, 1986), p. 337. 204 Andrew Gurr, ‘The Tempest’s tempest at the Blackfriars’, Shakespeare Survey, 91 (1989), pp. 91–102. 205 James Knowles, ‘Insubstantial Pageants: The Tempest and Masquing Culture’, in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, edited by Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 108–25.

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206 Doug Bruster, ‘Local Tempests – Shakespeare and the Work of the Early Modern Playhouse’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 25.1 (1995), pp. 33–53. 207 Stephen Orgel, ‘Introduction’, in The Tempest (Oxford, 2008), p. 1–89. 208 Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge, 2008). 209 James Kearney, ‘The Book and the Fetish: The Materiality of Prospero’s Text’, Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, 32.3.(2002), pp. 33–68. 210 Martin Orkin, Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power (London, 2005). 211 Vin Nardizzi, Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theaters and England’s Trees (Toronto, 2013). 212 Rose McKenna, ‘Surviving The Tempest: Ecologies of Salvage on the Early Modern Stage’, Shakespeare 13.3 (2017). 213 Daniel R. Gibbons, ‘Inhuman Persuasion in The Tempest’, Studies in Philology, 114.2 (2017), pp. 302–330. 214 John Kunat, ‘“Play Me False” Rape, Race, and Conquest in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 65.3 (2014), pp. 307–327. 215 Kevin Curran, ‘Prospero’s Plea: Judgment, Invention, and Political Form in The Tempest’, in Shakespeare and Judgment, edited by Kevin Curran (Edinburgh, 2017), pp. 159–171. 216 Silvia Bigliazzi, ‘“Dost Thou Hear?” – On the Rhetoric of Narrative in The Tempest’, in Revisiting ‘The Tempest’: The Capacity to Signify, p. 112. 217 David Katz, ‘Theatrum Mundi: Rhetoric, Romance, and Legitimation in The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale’, Studies in Philology, 115.4 (2018), pp. 719–741. 218 Walter Benjamin, ‘Edward Fuchs: Collector and Historian’, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York, 1982), p. 227. 219 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare Constitutions – Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 (Oxford, 1989), p. 4. 220 Brian Vickers, ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare – The Critical Heritage. Volume VI – 1774–1801 (London, 1981), p. 41.

1

Edmond Malone, date of composition 1790

From The Plays and Poems of Shakespeare, in Ten Volumes; Collated Verbatim with Most Authentick Copies, and Revised: with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators, to which are Added, An Essay on the Chronological Order of his Plays; An Essay Relative to Shakespeare and Jonson; A Dissertation on the Three Parts of Henry VI.; An Historical Account of the English Stage; and Notes; by Edmond Malone (10 vols in 11, London, 1790). Edmond Malone (1741–1812) went to Trinity College, Dublin. He practiced law for ten years before establishing himself in London as a private scholar. He was close friends with Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Hugh Walpole and George Steevens. He assisted Boswell with his biography of Johnson and edited several reprints of that work. He also edited the works of Oliver Goldsmith (1780), Joshua Reynolds (1791) and the prose writings of John Dryden (1800). His three supplemental volumes (1780–3) to Steevens’ edition of Johnson’s Shakespeare, which contained apocryphal, textual revisions and the first critical edition of the sonnets, is considered a landmark in Shakespearean studies. Malone’s Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage, and of the Economy and Usages of the Ancient Theatres in England (1800) was the first work on English drama based on original sources. His own edition of Shakespeare The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare in ten volumes appeared in 1790. The first volume of the 1790 edition included an essay (previously published in 1778) titled ‘An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays of Shakespeare Were Written,’ in which Malone mentions, for the first time, as he deliberates on the play’s date of composition, the connection between Sir George Somers’s sea voyage to the Bermudas and The Tempest.

[From ‘An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays of Shakespeare Were Written’] THE TEMPEST, 1612. Though some account of the Bermuda Islands, which are mentioned in this play, had been published in 1600 (as Dr. Farmer has observed) yet as they were not generally known till Sir George Somers arrived there in 1609, The Tempest may be fairly attributed to a period subsequent to that year; especially as it exhibits such strong internal marks of having been a late production.

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The entry at Stationers’ Hall does not contribute to ascertain the time of the composition; for it appears not on the Stationers’ books, nor was it printed, till 1623, when it was published with the rest of the author’s plays in folio: in which edition, having, I suppose be mere accident, obtained the first place, it has ever since preserved a station to which it indubitably is not entitled. As the circumstance from which this piece receives its name, is at and end in the very first scene, and as many other titles, all equally proper. Might have occurred to Shakespeare, (such as The Enchanted Island – The Banished Duke– Ferdinand and Miranda, &c) it is possible, that some particular and recent event determined him to call it The Tempest. It appears from Stowe’s Chronicle, p. 913, that in the October, November and December of the year 1612, a dreadful tempest happened in England, ‘which did exceeding great damage, with extreme shipwrack throughout the ocean.’ ‘There perished (says the historian) above a hundred ships in the space of two hours.’ – Several pamphlets were published on this occasion, decorated with prints of sinking vessels, castles toppling on their warders’ heads, the devil overturning steeples &c. in one of them, the author describing the appearance of the waves at Dover, says, ‘the whole seas appeared like a fiery world, all sparkling red.’ Another of these narratives recounts the escape of Edmond Pet, a sailor; whose preservation appears to have been no less marvellous than that of Trinculo or Stephano: and so great a terror did this tempest create in the minds of the people, that a form of prayer was ordered on the occasion, which is annexed to one of these publications above mentioned . . . it may not be thought a very improbable conjecture, that his comedy as written in the summer of 1612, and produced on the stage in the latter end of that year; and that the author availed himself of a circumstance then fresh in the mind of his audience, by affixing a title to it, which was more likely to excite curiosity than any other that he could have chosen, while at the same time it was sufficiently justified by the subject of the drama. Mr. Steevens, in his observations on this play, has quoted from the tragedy of Darius by the earl of Sterline, first printed in 1603, some lines1 so strongly resembling a celebrated passage in The Tempest, that one author must, I apprehend, have been indebted to the other, Shakespeare, I imagine, borrowed from lord Sterline.2 Mr Holt conjectured,3 that the masque in the fifth act of this comedy was intended by the poet as a compliment to the earl of Essex, on his being united in wedlock, in 1611, to lady Frances Howard, to whom he had been contracted some years before.4 However this might have been, the date which that the commentator has assigned to this play (1614) is certainly too late; for it appears from the Mss. Of Mr Vertue, that The Tempest was acted by John Heminge and the rest of the Kings’ Company, before prince Charles, the lady Elizabeth, and the prince Palatine elector, in the beginning of the year 1613. The name of Trinculo and Antonio, two of the characters in this comedy, are likewise found in that of Alhumazar; which was first printed in 1614, but was supposed by Dryden to have appeared some years before. (I, Part 1, 378–82)

2

William Taylor, as tragicomedy 1795

From ‘A review of A Commentary Illustrating the Poetic of Aristotle’, The Monthly Review, xvii (October 1795), 121–33. William Taylor (1765–1836) had a successful career as a literary critic. He was among the first English enthusiasts of German romantic literature and his translations of German poetry drew public notice. He was a regular contributor to journals such as The Monthly Review, The Monthly Magazine, The Annual Review and The Critical Review. A close associate of the poet Robert Southey, he also occasionally wrote poetry. This excerpt is from a review of a commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics by William Pye. Pye censured tragicomedy but Taylor’s statement that Pye’s critique is unqualified is not quite accurate (Pye does find Shakespearean tragicomedy mostly acceptable). While Pye does not include The Tempest in his discussions of tragicomedy, Taylor regards the play’s union of the ‘solemn’ and ‘ridiculous’ as an instance of tragicomedy.

In the second note to the 5th chapter, recurs an unqualified censure of the regular tragic comedy, or of two distinct fables, the one distressful, the other ridiculous, carried on together. This is surely a rash anathema. The Tempest so nearly realizes the perfect union of a solemn and a ludicrous fable into one inseparable whole, that a tragiccomedy cannot but seem practicable, in which all should delight, yet nothing could be spared. In Henry the Fourth, would Mr. Pye wish for the absence of the tragic or of the comic portion of the fable? It must, however, be conceded that heroic tragedy and low comedy are not easily united with good effect: but, if the pathetic and the ludicrous scenes be both drawn from middle life, there are innumerable instances, among the sentimental dramas, of their successful combination. Provided the unity of manners be preserved, complete transitions of temper may be introduced. (123)

3

George Chalmers, New World voyages 1797 From An Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare Papers, which were Exhibited on Norfolk Street (London, 1797). George Chalmers (1742–1825) was a Scottish antiquarian and political writer who studied law at the University of Edinburgh. Two of his uncles had settled in North America, and Chalmers visited Maryland in 1763 and even practiced law in Baltimore for several years. The outbreak of the American Revolution prompted his return to Britain. In 1786 he was appointed chief clerk to a committee of the Privy Council on matters pertaining to trade. This profession gave him time to pursue his scholarly interests. He wrote several political works, a history of Scotland, and planned a two-volume history of the English colonies in North America (of which one volume was subsequently published). He also wrote biographical sketches on literary and other figures and a book on Mary, Queen of Scots. While other commentators had pointed out The Tempest’s references to the New World, Chalmers makes somewhat deeper intertextual connections. He maintains that pointing out these connections will make Shakespeare’s ‘obscurities intelligible’ and ‘his beauties relishable’ to the reader.[1] His remark on the play as critiquing the colonial policies of the age is the first instance of criticism that links (however cursorily) the play to the colonial project as such.

We are, in this manner, carried forward to the question, which has been agitated, about the epoch, and the origin, of the Tempest. Theobald asserted, that this noblest effort of the sublime imagination of Shakespeare must have been written, after 1609, because the Bermuda islands, which are mentioned in it, were unknown to the English until that year. The ignorance of that useful editor has been properly corrected, by a reference to Hackluyt’s Voyages, 1600, for May’s description of Bermudas, where he was shipwrecked in 1593. But, we must go a step further back. And, we shall find, in Raleigh’s Narrative, which Shakespeare had read, and noted, the true source of our maker’s knowledge, about the still-vex’d Bermoothes,2 in displaying the advantages of Guiana, Raleigh says, with premature dogmatism, ‘the Channel of Bahama, coming from the West Indies, cannot be passed in the winter,’ and when it is ‘at the best, it is a perilous, and a fearful, place: ‘the rest of the Indies for calms, and diseases, are very troublesome; and the BERMUDAS, a hellish sea, for thunder, lightening, and storms’. Subsequent misadventures, in those seas, and posterior publications, in London, kept

 George Chalmers, New World Voyages 51 the still-vex’d Bermoothes constantly before the public eye. Jaurdan, who accompanied Sir George Somers, when he was shipwrecked on Bermudas, in 1609, published, in 1610, A Discovery of the Barmudas, otherwise called, the isle of Divels.3 A ship name Plough, sailed from the Thames, in April 1612, with adventurers for Bermudas, who, having a fair and comfortable passage, established the first colony in the isle of Devils, on the 11th of July 1612. This enterprize was followed, by the publication, in 1613, of A Plaine Description of the Barmudas now called Sommer islands.4 During the months of October, November and December, 1612, there was continued tempest, as Stowe inform us, which wrecked many ships along the coasts of England. Shakespeare’s Tempest was acted in the beginning of the year 1613. And, Ben Jonson, with unlucky self sufficiency, scoffed at this sublime effort of the human genius, in his Bartholomewfair, 1614. Now, these dates and those circumstances, fix the true epoch of the Tempest, not in 1612, according to Mr. Malone’s chronology, but is 1613, according to evidence. Shakespeare’s notion of the hellishness of the Bermudean sea, for thunder, lightening, and storms, was plainly derived from Raleigh, and his idea of the still-vex’d Bermoothes, being an inchanted place, which made every mariner avoid it, as Scylla and Charydis, was obviously taken from Jourdan, when his tract was republished, in 1613.5 These positions may be supported by other facts, and confirmed by additional reasonings, which will, at the same time, open new prospects to the inquisitive eye. Knowing the common opinion, that the Bermudean isles were enchanted, and governed by spirits, our maker showed great judgement, in causing, by enchantment, the King’s ship to be wrecked on the still-vex’d Bermoothes [1.2.228], with allusions to the shipwreck of Sommers, and the government by spirits. He goes on to show his own contempt for the marvels of voyage-writers, in that age of voyages, by saying; ‘But, the rarity of it is, which is indeed almost beyond credit; as many vouch’d rarities are.’ Showing thus the rectitude of his own faculties, he proceeds to ridicule, by the most marked sarcasm, The Plain Description of Bermudas, 16136: ‘Though this island seems to be desert: — Ha, ha, ha! Uninhabitable, and almost inaccessible: yet, yet; — He could not miss it: it must needs be of subtle, tender and delecate temperance: Ay, and subtle: The air breathes upon us here most sweetly: as if it had lungs, and rotten ones: — or as if ’twere perfum’d by a fen. Here, is everything advantageous to life: — True; save means to live. How lush, and lusty the grass looks. The ground is indeed tawny, – with an eye of green in it. But, the rarity of it all is, that our garments, being, as they were, drenched in the sea, hold notwithstanding, their freshness’ [2.1]. After laughing, in this manner, at such absurd descriptions, Shakespeare continues to laugh at the colonial policy of that age, which made the colonies subject, yet sovereign, dependent, yet independent, taxable, yet not taxable, obedient, yet disobedient: — ‘Had I a plantation of this isle’, says Gonzalo, an honest old counsellor, ‘and were the king of it’, [Quotes rest of Gonzalo’s ‘commonwealth’ speech: 2.1.148 ff]7 In The Tempest, which has so many references to the new-found, and new-settled, world, there is an allusion to a dead Indian, that has defied the commentators skill. Trinculo says, with more sarcasm, than truth, that, in England, when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten, to see a dead Indian (n)8. It must be remembered, that Shakespeare wrote this, in 1612/13, when he was catching at contemporary topicks. I will endeavour to show the street, where the Indian died,

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though I pretend not to know the House, wherein he was to be seen, when dead. Lord Southampton, and Sir Francis Gorges, engaging in voyages of discovery, sent out, in 1611 two vessels under the command of Harlie, and Nicolas, who sailed along the New England coast, where they were sometimes well, and often ill, received, by the natives; and returned to England, in the same year with five savages, on board.9 In 1614, Captain Smith carried out to New England, one of those savages named Tantum; Captains Harlie and Hopson transported, in the same year, two other of those savages, called Epenow, and Manawet; one of those savages adventured to the European continent; and the fifth Indian, of whom no account is given, we may easily suppose died in London, and was exhibited for a show.10 In 1613, Pocahontas, the daughter of Powbatan, the King of Virginia, marrying Master John Rolf, went with him to London, where she was noticed by the King and Queen, was much visited by the fashionable world; and unhappily died at Gravesend, on her return to her native kingdom, in 1617. But Pocahontas, who is greatly praised for her accomplishments, died regretted by everyone; and certainly was not exposed for hapless gain.11 (577–87)

4

Edmond Malone, Virginia voyages 1808

From An Account of the Incidents, from Which the Title and Part of the Story of Shakespeare’s Tempest Were Deriv’d, and Its True Date Ascertained (London, 1808). For biographical notes on Edmond Malone, see No. 1. In this work Malone makes a thorough and complete attempt to trace connections between The Tempest and the voyages to Virginia. He provides a list of pamphlets and narratives on Virginia, and quotes extensively from an eighteenth-century historical document published in Williamsburg, Virginia, which provides extensive details on Sir George Somers’s shipwreck in Bermuda. Malone is also the first investigator to study Sylvester Jourdain’s narrative on the same journey and quotes extensively from several other accounts. Malone believes that all of these documents were read by Shakespeare. Notably, he implies that the tragicomic nature of the play can be attributed to the storm and its aftermath as depicted in a 1610 document. Malone also maintains that that the best kind of fictional work is one that has connections to the current and the ‘real’ and yet modifies the real appropriately to give it the mystique of the purely imaginary.

In the Essay on the Chronological Order of Shakespeare’s Plays, published in 1790, I observed, that probably some particular and late misfortune at sea gave rise to the comedy now under our consideration, and induced our poet to denominate it THE TEMPEST. On further investigation of the subject, and after perusing some curious and very scarce tracts of that time, which I had not then seen, I have no doubt that my conjecture was perfectly well founded, and that the leading circumstance of this play, from which its title is derived, was suggested to Shakespeare by a recent disaster, which doubtless engaged much of the conversation of his contemporaries, – the dreadful hurricane that dispersed the fleet of Sir George Somers and Sir Thomas Gates, in July 1609, on their passage with a large supply of provisions and men for the infant colony in Virginia; by which the Admiral-ship, as it was called, having those two commanders on board, was separated from the rest of the fleet, and wrecked on the Island of Bermuda. The principal circumstances indeed correspond so precisely, that at the first view it may appear strange, that the true origin of this comedy was not long since found out; but the wonder on that head will cease, when it is considered

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how very difficult it is to ascertain the minute particulars of an event that happened near two hundred years ago, and that accident alone can furnish us with the volumes which composed Shakespeare’s library. Without the aid of those tracts, in which the various circumstances of this misadventure were related, the resemblance between certain passages in the play and the archetype on which it was formed, could not be discovered. I may add, that our poet himself also, in some measure, contributed to lead the most sedulous inquirer astray, by very properly making the scene of his piece an island at a considerable distance from Bermuda, in order to give the magical part of his drama a certain mysterious dignity which Bermuda itself, then the general topick of conversation, could not have had. Without having read Tacitus, he well knew that OMNE IGNOTUM PRO MAGNIFICO EST; that an unknown island would give a larger scope to his imagination, and make a greater impression on theatrical spectators, than one of which the more enlightened part of his audience had recently read a minute and circumstantial account.– Unquestionably, however, the circumstance of Bermuda’s having been considered an enchanted island gave rise to the magick of THE TEMPEST, and was immediately in his thoughts during its composition. Our poet’s great patron, the Earl of Southampton, had early shewn a strong disposition to encourage voyages of discovery; in which a principal motive that actuated him and other distinguished persons of those times, seems to have been, the hope of civilizing and converting the savages of remote countries to Christianity. In the year 1605, in conjunction with his brother-in-law, Lord Arundelof Wardour, he had fitted out a ship under the command of Captain George Weymouth, with a view to make discoveries on the coast of Virginia. On what part of the large district which then bore that name he landed, is not exactly known; but a very intelligent writer supposes that he sailed up the river of Connecticut. His stay, however, was very short: for after having for some time explored the country, and carried on some traffick with the natives, from whom he had taken five Indians as hostages during his intercourse with them, finding reason to believe that some treachery was intended towards him, he speedily set sail for England, where he arrived on the18th of July, after an absence of about three months; bringing with him the Indians above-mentioned. Two of those savages, NAMONTACK and MACHUMPS lived to sail for their own country with Sir George Somers in 1609; another named TANTUM sailed for Virginia with Captain Smith in 1614; and the other two probably died in London, and were exhibited as a show after their deaths, a circumstance to which Shakespeare has alluded in the second ac of this comedy, sc. 2; and which, though then unacquainted with these particulars, I formerly suggested, as likely to contribute some aid in fixing the date of THE TEMPEST: but if even the day of the death of either of them were known, it would only ascertain a time before which the play could not have been composed, unless it were shewn that some Indian had previously died, and been exhibited in London; and I am now not under the necessity of having recourse to such uncertain grounds of conjecture, as I shall be able to point out the precise period when this beautiful comedy was written and first represented. In 1608, Captain Harlow was sent to Cape Cod by Lord Southampton and some of the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight, and brought back with him five Indians, one of

 Edmond Malone, Virginia Voyages 55 whom was named EPINEW or EPINOW, a man of extraordinary stature and strength, who was exhibited for money in various parts of London. I have mentioned the voyages of Captains Weymouth and Harlow, because they were undertaken partly at the charge of Lord Southampton, and must on that account alone have attracted our poet’s notice, and drawn his attention to the colonial projects that took place at this period. Men’s thoughts indeed were then so strongly directed towards the new world, that the successes and miscarriages of the several adventurers who went there could not but have been a very general topick of conversation, as is envinced by the various publications on those subjects.1 A new charter having been granted in May 1609, to the Company for making a plantation and settlement in Virginia, it was resolved by the Treasurer and Council of that Company to send thither immediately a large supply of men and provisions. Of the disaster which befell the fleet employed on that occasion, the following clear and succinct account has been given by a very sensible modern historian. To his narrative I shall sub-join the more minute and particular relation of one engaged in this adventure, as well as that printed by authority of the council; which will fully shew that the incidents attending it suggested to Shakespeare the leading circumstance of this comedy: ‘The New Charter’, says the Reverend Mr. Stith, ‘was granted to the Earl’s of Salisbury, Suffolk, SOUTHAMPTON, Pembroke, and other peers, to the number of twenty-one; to the Honourable George Percy, and Francis West, Esquires; to Sir Humphry Weld, Lord Mayor of London, and ninety-eight other knights; and to Dr. Mathew Sutcliffe, with a great multitude more of doctors, esquires, gentlemen, officers, merchants, and citizens, together with many corporations and companies of London. So many persons of great power, interest, and fortune, engaging in the enterprise, and the Lord Delaware with the other gentlemen of distinction being appointed to the several offices [of Captain-General, &c.] soon drew in such large sums of money, that they dispatched away Sir Thomas Gates, [who had been constituted by the council of Virginia, Lieutenant- General,] Sir George Somers, [Admiral,] and Captain Newport, [Vice-Admiral,] with nine ships and five hundred people. These three gentlemen had each of them a commission, – who first arrived to call in the old. But because they could not agree for place, it was concluded that they should all go in one ship, called the SEA-VENTURE. They sailed from England that latter end of May,2 1609; but the 25th of July the ADMIRAL-SHIP WAS PARTED FROM THE REST OF THE FLEET by the tail of a hurricane, having on board the three commanders, an hundred and fifty men, their new commission and bills of lading, together with all manner of instructions and directions, and the best part of their provisions. She arrived not, but was foundered at Bermudas, as shall be hereafter related. A small catch likewise perished in the hurricane; but the seven other ships came safe’ [to Virginia].3 ******* ‘It hath been before said (continues the historian) that the Admiral-ship, with Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers, and Captain Newport, on board, was separated from the rest of the fleet in a storm. She was so racked and torn by the violent working

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of the sea, and became so shattered and leaky, that the water rose in the hold above two tire of hogsheads; and they were obliged to stand up to their middles, with kettles, buckets, and other vessels, to bail it out. And thus they bailed and pumped three days and nights, without intermission; and yet the water seemed rather to gain upon them than decrease. At last, all being utterly spent with labour, and seeing no hope, in man’s apprehension, but of presently sinking, THEY RESOLVED TO SHUT UP THE HATCHES, and to commit themselves to the mercy of the sea and GOD’S good providence. In this dangerous and desperate state, some who had good and comfortable waters, fetched them, and drank to one another, as TAKING THEIR LAST LEAVES, till a more happy and joyful meeting in the other world. But it pleased GOD in his most gracious providence, so to guide their ship to her best advantage, that they were all preserved and came safe to shore. ‘For Sir George Somers had sat all this time upon the poop, scarce allowing himself leisure either to eat or sleep, cunning the ship, and keeping he upright, or she must otherwise, long before this, have foundered. As he there sat looking wishfully about, he most happily and unexpectedly descried land. This welcome news, as if it had been a voice from heaven, hurried them all above hatches, to see what they could scarce believe. But thereby improvidently forsaking their work, they gave such an advantage to their greedy enemy, the sea, that they were very nigh being swallowed up. But none were now to be urged to do his best. Although they knew it to be BERMUDAS, a place then dreaded and shunned by all men, yet they spread all the sail, and did everything else, in their power, to reach the land. It was not long before the ship STRUCK UPON A ROCK, but a surge of the sea cast her from thence, and so from one to another, till she was MOST LUCKILY THROWN UP BETWEEN TWO, AS UPRIGHT AS IF SHE HA BEEN ON THE STOCKS. And now the danger was, lest the billows, overtaking her, should in an instant have dashed and shivered her to pieces. But all on a sudden the wind lay, and gave place to a calm, and the sea became so peaceable and still, that with the greatest conveniency and ease the unshipped all their goods, victuals, and people, and in their boats, with extreme joy, almost to amazement, ARRIVED IN SAFETY WITHOUT THE LOSS OF ANY MAN, although more than a league from the shore.4 ‘How these islands came by the name of BERMUDAS, is not certainly agreed. Some say, that they were so named after John Bermudaz, a Spaniard, who first discovered them about the year 1522. Others report, that a Spanish ship called THE BERMUDAS was cast upon them, as she was carrying hogs to the West-Indies; which swam ashore and increased to incredible numbers. But they had been in all times before infamous and terrible to mariners, for the wreck of many Spanish, Dutch, and French vessels. They were therefore, with the usual elegance of the sea style, by many called THE ISLE OF DEVILS, and were esteemed the hell or purgatory of seamen, the most dangerous, unfortunate, and forlorn place in the world. ‘But the safe arrival of this company is not more strange and providential, than their feeding and support was beyond all their hopes or expectation: for they found it the richest, pleasantest, and most healthful place they had ever seen. Being safe on shore, they dispersed themselves, some to search the islands for food and water, and others to get ashore what they could, from the ship. Sir George Somers had not ranged far, before he found such a fishery, that in half an hour he took with a hook and line as many as

 Edmond Malone, Virginia Voyages 57 sufficed the whole company. In some places they were so thick in the coves, and so big, that they were afraid to venture in amongst them. – Two of these rock-fish would have loaded a man, neither could anywhere be found fatter or more excellent fish than they were. Besides, there were infinite numbers of mullet, pilchards, and other small fry; and by making a fire in the night they would take vast quantities of large craw-fish. As for hogs, they found them in that abundance, that at their first hunting they killed thirty-two. And there were likewise multitudes of excellent birds in their seasons; and the greatest facility to make their cabins with palmeta leaves. This caused them to live in such plenty, ease, and comfort, that many forgot all other places, and never desired to return from thence’.5 Such is the narrative collected from authentick papers of those times, and published at Williamsburg, about sixty years ago, by the historian of Virginia, which I have thought it proper to lay before the reader in the first instance, because it describes this misadventure in a very lively manner, and is extremely well written. But from these facts, it must be acknowledged, no satisfactory and decisive conclusion can be drawn respecting the date of this play, unless it can be shewn that they were known by Shakespeare. I shall therefore proceed to state not only how, but when, he became acquainted with the peculiar circumstances attending this disaster, to which he has alluded in THE TEMPEST; so as by this means, with the aid of other documents, to ascertain precisely the time of its composition. It has already been mentioned that seven ships of Sir George Somers’s fleet got to the place of their destination, Virginia; and having landed about three hundred and fifty persons, they set sail for England. Two of them were wrecked and perished on the point of Ushant; and ‘the rest of the fleet (says a writer of those times) returned to England in 1610, ship after ship, laden with nothing but bad reports and letters of discouragement; and, which added the more to our crosse, they brought us newes, that the ADMIRAL-SHIP, with the two knights and Captain Newport, were missing, severed in a mightie storme outward, and could not be heard of, which were therefore yielded as lost for many months together; and so that virgine voyage, as I may terms it, which went out smiling on her lovers with pleasant looks, after her warie travailes did thus return with a rent and disfigured face, for which how justly her friends took occasion of sorrow, and others to insult and scoffe, let me of reason judge.’6 The account of this disaster probably reached England some time in December 1609, and was brought either by Captain Smith, the former Governour of Virginia, who left it at Michaelmas in that year, or by the first of the five ships that arrived in an English port. To dispel the gloom which this ill news spread among the undertakers who had fitted out the fleet, the Council of Virginia very speedily issued out a pamphlet, which was published either in December 1609, or early in January 1609–10, with a view of preventing the bad effects that any exaggerated reports of this calamity might produce. In this piece, after stating that Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers, and Captain Newport, with seven ships and two pinnaces, sailed from Falmouth on the 8th of June [1609], they add, that ‘in the height of the Canaries, short of the West-Indies 150 leagues, on St. James’s day, a TERRIBLE TEMPEST overtook them, and lasted in extremity forty-eight hours, which scattered the whole fleet, and wherein some of them spent their masts, and others were much distressed.’ Within three days, (they say

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in substance) four of the fleet met in consort, and hearing no news of the Admiral, they bore away for the bay of Virginia, and arrived in the King’s River on the 11th of August. In eleven days afterwards arrived two more; they having resolved to steer, not for Barwada, (as originally determined in case of separation,) but for the harbour; ‘which,’ (say the Council) ‘doubtless the Admiral himself did not observe, but obeyed his own directions, and is the true or probable cause of his being cast so far into suspicion; where [whereas] perhaps bound in with the winde, or perhaps enforced to stay the masting or mending somewhat in his ship, torn or lost in the TEMPEST, we doubt not but by the mercy of GOD hee is safe, with the pinnace7 which attended him, and shall both or are by this time arrived at our colony’. Not long afterwards (this tract informs us) one of the pinnaces arrived in the river or bay of Virginia; making seven out of the nine vessels that had sailed from England. Four hundred persons were landed from the several ships; ‘who being put ashore without their Governour or any order from him, (all the commissioners and principal persons being aboord him,) no man would acknowledge a superior, nor could from this headlesse and unbrideled multitude be anything expected but disorder and ryot, nor any counsel prevent or forsee the successe of these ways’. Still further to dispel the gloom which had arisen on the failure, after stating the difficulties the Spaniards had experienced in similar settlements, the Council add,– ‘But to come hence to our purpose; That which seems to dishearten or shake our first grounds in this supplye, ariseth from two principal sources, of which one as the cause of the other; first, THE TEMPEST; and can any man expect to answer for that? next, the absence of the Governor, (an effect of the former,) for the LOSS OF HIM IS IN SUSPENSE, and much reason of his safetye against some doubt and the hand of GOD reacheth all the earth’. They further inform the publick, that to redeem the defects and misadventures of the last supply, they had resolved to send forth the Lord De la Ware as Governor, by the last of January [1609–10].8 Not content with giving this statement of their affairs, in the month of January or February 1609–10, the issued out a paper, which bears the title of ‘A PUBLICATION by the Counsell of Virginia, touching the plantation there.’ ‘However it came to pass by God’s appointment that governes all things, that the fleet of eight shippes lately sent to Virginea, by meanes the Admirall, wherein were shipped the chief Governours, Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Sommers, and Captain Newport, by tempestuous windes and forcible current were driven so farre to the westward, that thy could not in so convenient time recover Cape Henrie, and the port in Virginea, as by returne of the same fleete to answer the expectation of the Adventures, in some measure; ‘By occasion whereof some few of those unruly youths sent thither, (being of most leaud and bad condition, and such as no ground can hold,) for want of good directions there were suffered by stealth to get aboard the shippes returning thence, and are come for England againe, giving out in all places where the come, (to colour their own misbehavior and the cause of their returne with some pretence,) most vile and scandalous reports, both of the country itself, and of the carriage of the business there:

 Edmond Malone, Virginia Voyages 59 ‘Which hath also given occasion that sundry false rumours, and despightful speeches, have beene devised and given out by men that seeme of better sort, being such as lie at home, and doe gladly take all occasions to cheere themselves with the prevention of happy success in any action of publicke good, disgracing both the action and actors of such honourable enterprises, as whereof they neither know nor understand the true intents and honest ends; ‘Which howsoever for a time it may deterre and keepe backe the hands and helpe of many well disposed men, yet men of wisdome and better resolution doe well conceive and know that these devices infused into the tongues and heads of such devisors, by the father of untruths, doe serve for nothing else but as a cloke to cover the wretched and leaud prancks of the one sort, and the stupidity and backwardness of the other, to advance any commendable action that taxeth their purse, and tendeth not wholly to their own advantage. ‘And therefore those of his Majesties Counsell in this honourable plantaion, the Lords, Knights, Gentlemen, and Merchants, intressed therein rightly considering that as in all other good services, so in this, much losse and detriment may many waies arise and grow to the due meanes and manner of proceeding, which yet no way toucheth nor empeacheth the action itself, nor the ends of it, which do still remaine entire and safe upon the same gorunds of those manifold christian duties, whereon it was first resolved, are so farre from yielding or giving way to any hindrance or impeachment of their cheerful going on, that many of them, both honourable and worshipfull, have given their hands and subscribed to contribute againe and againe to new supplies, if need require. ‘And further the doe instantly prepare and make ready a certain number of good shippes with all necessaries, for the Right Honourable Lord De la Ware, who intendeth, (God assisting) to be ready with all expedition to second the aforesaid Generals, WHICH WE DOUBT NOT ARE LONG SINCE SAFELY ARRIVED AT THEIR WISHED PORT IN VIRGINEA. ‘And for that former experience hath too dearely taught, how much and manie waies it hurteth, to suffer parents to disbourden themselves of lascivious sonnes, masters of bad servants, and wives of ill husbands, and soe to clogge the businesse with such an idle crue as did thrust them elves in the last voyage, that will rather starve for hunger, then lay their hands to any labour: It is therefore resolved, that no such unnecessary person shall now be accepted, but onely such sufficient, honest, and good artificers, as Smiths, Bricklayers, Shipwrights, Mineral men, Sturgeon-dressers, Bakers, Joyners, Gun-founders, Carpenters, Fishermen, Gardeners, Plough-wrights, Turners, Brewers, Coopers, Sawyers,

The Tempest

60 Saltmakers, Ironmen, for furnasse and hammer, Brickmakers,

Fowlers, Vine-dressers, Surgeons, and

Physicians for the body, and learned Divines to instruct the Colony, and to teach the Infidels to worship the true God: of which so many as will repaire to the house of Sir Thomas Smith, Treasurer of the Company, to proffer their service in this action, before the number be full, and will put in good suretie to be readie to attend the said Honourable Lord in the voyage shall be entertained with those reasonable and good conditions, as shall answer and be agreable to each man’s sufficiency in his several profession’.9 In April or May 1610, Lord De la Ware, with three ships sailed for Virginia, and arrived at James-town on the 9th of June. Here first he learned, that Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers were not lost, as had been supposed in England, the two knights having arrived at Virginia about a fortnight before him, in two cedar vessels which they had built at Bermuda, from which the sailed on the 10th of May, after having spent about nine months on that island. Shortly afterwards, (June 19, 161010) the new Governour sent Sir George Somers for a fresh supply of victuals to Bermuda, where he died, Nov. 9, 1610, as appears by an inquisition taken at Dorchester on the 26th of July 1611.11 During a great part of the year 1610, the fate of Somers and Gates was not known in England; but the latter, having been sent home by Lord Delaware, arrived there in August or September, 1610; and before the end of the year, in order to quiet the minds of those who were concerned in this adventure, and to assure the publick of the safety of Sir George Somers, the Council of Virginia published a Narrative12 of the disasters which had befallen the fleet that had been sent out in 1609, from materials furnished by Sir Thomas Gates.13 Previously however to its appearance. One Jourdan, who probably returned from Virginia in the same ship with that gentleman, pursuing a course which we have seen practiced in our own time, and availing himself of the publick curiosity, anticipated the authentick account by hastily drawing up a narrative of this disastrous voyage, which appears to have been issued out very expeditiously; for his Dedication, which is addressed ‘to Master John Fitzjames, Esquire, Justice of Peace in Dorsetshire,’ is dated on the 13th of October, 1610; but from an apprehension, doubtless, that his publication might have been forbidden by authority, if any previous notice of it had been given, this pamphlet was published without a license, not being entered in the Stationers’ Register. It is entitled, ‘A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called THE ISLE OF DIVELS; by Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Sommers, and Captain Newport, with divers others.’14 Though the substance of this narrative has already been given in Mr. Stith’s detail of the disaster produced by the storm of July, 1609, it is necessary to repeat some part of it, because here and in the subsequent tract published by authority, it was, that Shakespeare found those materials of which he has availed himself in the comedy now under our consideration.

 Edmond Malone, Virginia Voyages 61 Jourdan, after informing his reader that he was one of those who sailed from England with Sir George Somers and Sir Thomas Gates, in the Sea-adventure,15 proceeds to relate the circumstances of the storm which happened on the 25th of July 1609. They were bound for Virginia, and at that time in thirty degrees, north latitude. The whole crew, amounting to one hundred and fifty persons, weary with pumping, had given all for lost, and began to drink their strong waters, AND TO TAKE LEAVE OF EACH OTHER, intending to commit themselves to the mercy of the sea. Sir George Somers, who had sat three days and nights on the poop, with no food and little rest, at length descried land, and encouraged them (MANY FROM WEARINESS HAVING FALLEN ASLEEP) to continue at the pumps. They complied; and fortunately the ship was driven and JAMMED BETWEEN TWO ROCKS, ‘fast lodged and locked for further budging’. One hundred and fifty persons go ashore; and by means of their boat and skiff, for this was ‘half a mile from land,’ they saved such part of their goods and provisions as the water had not spoiled, all the tackling and much of the iron of their ship, which was of great service to them in fitting out another vessel to carry them to Virginia. ‘But our delivery,’ says Jourdan, ‘was not more strange in falling so opportunely and happily upon the land, as [than] our feeding and provision was, beyond our hopes, and all men’s expectations, most admirable; for the Islands of the Bermudas, as every man knoweth that hath heard or read of them, were NEVER INHABITED by any Christian or heathen people, but ever esteemed and reputed a most prodigious and INCHANTED PLACE, affording nothing but gusts, storms, and foul weather; which made every navigator and mariner to avoid them as Scylla and Charybdis, or as they would shunne the Divell himself: and no man was ever heard to make for this place, but as against their wils, they have, by storms and dangerousnesse of the rocks lying seven leagues into the sea, suffered shipwracke. Yet did we finde there THE AYRE SO TEMPERATE and the COUNTRY SO ABOUNDANTLY FRUITFULL of all fit necessaries for the sustentation and preservation of man’s life, that, most in a manner of all our provision of bread, beere, and victual, being quite spoiled in lying long drowned in salt water, notwithstanding we were there for the space of nine months (few days over or under) we were not only well refreshed, comforted, and with good satiety contented, but out of the aboundance thereof provided us some reasonable quantity and proportion of provision to carry us for Virginia, and to maintain our selves and that company we found there: — wherefore my opinion sincerely of this island is, that whereas it hath beene, and is still accounted the most dangerous, unfortunate, and forlorne place of the world, it is in truth the richest, healthfullest, and pleasing land, (the quantity and bignesse thereof considered,) and merely natural, as ever man set foote upon’. On the 28th of July they landed. They all then began to search for provision. In half an hour Sir Thomas Gates took as many fishes with hookes, as sufficed the whole company for one day. When a man stept into the water, the fish came round about him. ‘These fishes were very fat and sweete, and of that proportion and bignesse, that three of them will conveniently lade two men: those we called ROCK-FISH. Besides, there are such aboundance of mullets, that with a seane might be taken at one draft one thousand at the least; and infinite store of pilchards’. There was also a great plenty

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of cray-fish. The country afforded such an abundance of hogs, that Sir George Somers, who hunted them, brought in thirty-two at one time. ‘There is fowle in great aboundance in the islands, where they breed, that there hath beene taken in two or three howres a thousand at the least, being of the bignesse of a good pigeon. ‘Another sea-fowle there is, that lyeth in little holes in the ground, like unto a coneyhole, and are great in numbers; exceeding good meat, very fat and sweet, (those we had in the winter,) and their eggs are white, and of that bignesse, that they are not to be knowne from hen-egges.’ The birds he describes as exceedingly tame: they came so near them, that they killed many of them with a stick. They found great store of tortoises or turtles; prickled pears in abundance, which continued green on the trees all the year. The island, he adds, was supplied with many mulberry trees, white and red, palmits and cedar trees; and no venomous creature was found there. Having built their new cedar bark, they set sail from the Bermudas, May 10, 1610 (leaving, as appears by other accounts, three men behind,) and landed on the coast of Virginia, May 24, when they found sixty persons only living and in distress. On this account they determined to return to England; and accordingly embarked, June 8, 1610, at James-Town for Newfoundland, to get provisions, for their voyage; when fortunately, having got half-way down the river, the met Lord De la Ware, who arrived from England with three ships. After a while, Lord De la Ware sent Sir George Somers, ‘a man of sixty years of age,’ to Bermuda, for provisions. He embarked at James-Town in the small cedar bark of thirty tons, which he had built at Bermuda, June 19, 1610; and the writer concludes with a hearty wish for his good success and safe return. To dissipate the gloom and despondency occasioned by the disaster of the former year, and to shew the practicability and use of settling a colony in Virginia, were the principal objects of the pamphlet published under the authority of the Council in the latter end of 1610; which is written with a vigour and animation, rarely found in the tracts of those times. Though that part of it with which alone we are concerned, or in other words, which relates to Bermuda, differs but little in substance from the account that preceded it, relating nearly the same facts and events in much better language, it is yet necessary to be briefly noticed; because Shakespeare assuredly would not neglect to peruse this authentick narrative. It has indeed an additional claim to our attention; for the writer of this tract, having compared the disastrous tempest which wrecked Sir George Somers and his associates on the island of Bermuda, and their subsequent escape from the immediate destruction which threatened them, to those dramatick compositions in which similar changes of fortune are represented, and sorrow and mirth artfully intermingled, perhaps suggested to Shakespeare the thought of forming these adventures into a play; and to him, in some measure, we may have been indebted for this delightful comedy. ‘True it is,’ (says this Narrative,) ‘that when Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Summers, and Captaine Newport, were in the height of 27, and the 24th of July, 1609, there arose such a storme, as if Jonas had been flying unto Tarshish: the heavens were obscured, and made an Egyptian night of three daies perpetuall horror; the women lamented; the hearts of passengers failed; the experience of the sea-captaines was amased; the

 Edmond Malone, Virginia Voyages 63 skill of the marriners was confounded; the ship most violently leaked; and though two thousand tunne of water by pumping from Tuesday noone till Fryday noone was discharged, notwithstanding, the ship was halfe filled with water; and those who labored to keepe others form drowning, were halfe drowned themselves in laboring. But GOD, that heard Jonas crying out of the belly of hell, he pittied the distress of his servants; for behold, in the last period of neccessitie, Sir George Summers descried land, which was by so much the more joyfull, by how much their danger was despairefull. The island on which they fell, were the Bermudos; a place hardly ACCESSABLE, through the invironing rocks and dangers: notwithstanding, they were forced to runne their ship on shoare, which through GOD’s providence fell betwixt two rockes, that caused her to stand firme, and not immediately to be broken; GOD continuing his mercie unto them, that with their long boats they transported to land before night all their company, men, women, and children, to the number of one hundred and fiftie; they carried to shoare all the provision of unspent and unspoiled victuals, all their furniture and tackling of the ship, leaving nothing but bared ribs as a pray unto the ocean. ‘These islands of the Bermudos have ever been accounted as an INCHANTED pile of rockes, and A DESERT INHABITATION FOR DIVELS; but all the fairies of the rocks were but flocks of birds, and all the divels that haunted the woods were but heards of swine. Yea, and when Acosta, in his first book of the hystories of the Indies, averreth, that though in the Continent there were diverse beasts and cattell, yet in the islands of Hispaniola, Jamica, Marguarita, and Dominica, there was not one hoofe, it increaseth the wonder how our people in the Bermudos found such abundance of hogs, that for nine moneths’ space they plentifully sufficed; and yet the number seemed not much diminished. – Again; as I the great famine of Israell GOD commanded Elias to flie to the brooke Cedron, and there fed him by ravens, so GOD provided for our disconsolate people in the midst of the sea by foules; but with an admirable difference: unto Elias the ravens brought meat, unto our men the foules brought themselves for meate; for when they whisteled or made any strange noyse, the foules would come and sit on their shoulders; they would suffer themselves to be taken and weighed by our men, who would make choise of the fattest and fairest, and let flie the leane and lightest; an accident I take it, that cannot be parallel’d by any hystorie, except when GOD sent abundance of quayles to feed his Israel in the barren wildernesse. Lastly, they found the berries of cedar, the palmetto tree, the prickle peare, sufficient fish, plenty of tortoises, and divers other kinds which sufficed to sustaine nature. They found diversity of woods, which ministered materials for the building of two pinaces, according to the direction of the three provident Governours. ‘Consider all these things together. At the instant of neede they descried land; halfe an hower more had buried their memorial in the sea. if they had fel by night, what expectation of light from an uninhabited desart? They fell betwixt a laberinth of rockes, which they conceive are mouldred into the sea by thunder and lightning. This was not Ariadne’s threed, but the direct line of GOD’s providence. If it had not beene SO NEERE LAND, their companie or provision had perished by water; if they had not found hogs, and foule, and fish, they had perished by famine; if there had not beene fuell, they had perished by want of fire; if there had not beene timber, they could not have transported themselves to Virginia, but must have beene forgotten forever.

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Nimium timet, qui DEO non credit; he is too impiously fearefull, that will not trust in GOD so powerful. ‘What is there in all this TRAGICALL-COME-DIE, that should discourage us with impossibilitie of the enterprise? when of all the fleete, oneonely ship by a secret leake was imdangered, and yet in the gulfe of despaire was so graciously preserved. Quce videtur paena, est medecina; that which we accompt a punishment of evill, is but a medicine against evill’.16 From the preceding statements it appears, that during a great part of the year 1610, it was supposed in England, that the ship containing the Lieutenant-Governor of the settlement in Virginia, and Sir George Somers the Admiral, which had been separated from the rest of the fleet, was lost; but Shakespeare, when he wrote his play, KNEW THAT IT WAS SAFE: a circumstance ascertained by Jourdain’s pamphlet, and that issued out by the Council; and therefore this comedy could not have been written till after their publication, or at least the publication of one of them; unless we suppose that our poet had the very earliest intelligence of the arrival of Sir Thomas Gates in August or September in that year: and even on that supposition the play must have been composed subsequently to that period. However that may have been, it is reasonable to suppose that it was not produced on the stage till the winter or spring of 1611, and we may safely ascribe it to the early part of that year. That it was performed before the middle of 1611, we have already seen.17 It now remains to shew that Shakespeare, when he wrote THE TEMPEST, had in view the particular disaster of which so ample an account has been given. To fix as nearly as possible the exact time of his writing it, I have said that he knew that the Admiral-ship was safe; and this appears by the following lines, which manifestly allude to that circumstance and several others attending the tempest that dispersed Sir George Somers’s fleet, and finally wrecked the vessel he was in, on the island of Bermuda. [Quotes 1.2.193–237: ‘Hast thou, spirit,/ Perform’d to point the tempest that I bade thee?’. . . .]. It is obvious, that we have here a direct allusion to several circumstances minutely described in the papers quoted in the preceding pages; to the circumstance of the Admiral-ship of Sir. George Somers’s fleet, after a tremendous tempest, being jammed between two of the Bermuda rocks, and ‘fast lock’d’, as Jourdan expresses it, ‘for further budging;’18 to the disaster happening very near the shore, and not a single person having perished;19 to the mariners having fallen asleep from excessive fatigue; to the dispersion of the rest of the ships; to their meeting again, as the council of the Virginia company have it, ‘in consort;’20 and to all those who were thus dispersed and thus met again, being ‘bound sadly’, for Virginia, supposing that the vessel which carried the Governour was lost, and that his ‘great person had perished.’21 In various other passages in the second Act, where the preservation of Alonzo and his companions is termed ‘miraculous’; – where Stephano asks, ‘have we DEVILS here?’ – where the same person makes a very free use of his bottle, and liberally imparts it to Caliban and Trinculo;22 where it is said, ‘though this island seem to be DESERT, UNINHABITABLE, and almost INACCESSIBLE, it must needs be of subtle, tender, and delicate temperance’ [1.2.35, 38, 42]; that’ the air breathes most sweetly’, and that ‘here is everything advantageous

 Edmond Malone, Virginia Voyages 65 to life;’ [2.1.50], we find evident allusions to the extraordinary escape of Somers and his associates, and to Jourdan’s and Gates’s descriptions of Bermuda;23 as, in the first scene of the play, the circumstance of the sailors and passengers taking leave of each other, and bidding farewell to their wives and children, was manifestly suggested by the earlier of those narratives.24 Having thus, I hope decisively, ascertained the date of this comedy, it is unnecessary to consider any other of the notes of time, which it may furnish. In this light the Masque, in the fourth Act, has been represented; having been supposed to refer to the consummation (in 1610) of the marriage of the young Earl of Essex with Lady Frances Howard.25 to whom he had been betrothed in 1606: but, not to insist on their cohabitation having taken place in the year 1609, as appears from the depositions in the suit for a divorce instituted by the Countess some years afterwards, this masque may be more justly as well as more obviously accounted for, by the prevailing fashion of the period when I have shewn it was written; a fashion which gave birth to a similar exhibition in the play of TIMON OF ATHENS, produced not long before. Equally inconclusive is the circumstance of the exhibition of the dead Indian, alluded to in the second Act, which, as I have already observed, proves nothing precisely; for it might have taken place at any time between 1605 and 1611. Non tali auxilio tempus eget.[26] Dryden, probably on the authority of Sir William D’Avenant, tells us, that THE TEMPEST was a very popular and successful play; which may well be believed, when it is considered, that, in addition to its intrinsick excellence, it had also the adventitious merit of temporary allusion and reference to interesting circumstances, which had been the subject of discourse during an entire year preceding its representation; topicks so embellished by poesy, and so blended with fictions of the happiest kind, that a single disastrous event appears to have been converted by the magical hand of Shakespeare almost into a Fairy Tale. (1–36)

5

August Wilhelm Schlegel, as poetry 1809–11

From A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Translated by John Black (London, 1846). August Wilhelm Von Schlegel (1767–1845) was a German essayist, translator, poet, philosopher and critic. He is well-known as a promulgator of the philosophy of romanticism in Germany and many of his ideas influenced English romanticists, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Schlegel studied philology and aesthetics at the University of Gottingen, and became a professor at the University of Jena. While at Jena he began his long-planned translation of the works of Shakespeare. He himself translated seventeen plays; the remaining were translated by others under Schlegel’s supervision. These translations are still considered among the finest German translations of Shakespeare. In a lecture series delivered in Vienna in 1808, published as Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature), 1809–11, Schlegel attacks French neoclassical drama and exalts Shakespeare and Romantic Drama. This work made a great impact on English romanticists. Schlegel used Shakespeare to stimulate interest in a national drama rooted in a national culture as opposed to a pan-European drama derived from the classics. In his comments on The Tempest Schlegel observes that plot and structure are subsidiary to the ‘fascinations of poetry’ and the execution of the story. For Schlegel, the play draws attention to an important feature of literature: that it springs from the creative imagination and is incompatible with the real.

The Tempest has little action or progressive movement; the union of Ferdinand and Miranda is settled at their first interview, and Prospero merely throws apparent obstacles in their way; the shipwrecked band go leisurely about the island; the attempts of Sebastian and Antonio on the life of the King of Naples, and the plot of Caliban and drunken sailors against Prospero, are nothing but a feint, for we foresee that they will be completely frustrated by the magical skill of the latter; nothing remains therefore but the punishment of the guilty by the dreadful sights which harrow up their consciences, and then the discovery and final reconciliation. Yet this want of movement is so admirably concealed by the most varied display of the fascinations of poetry, and the exhilaration of mirth, the details of the execution are so very

 August Wilhelm Schlegel, as Poetry 67 attractive, that it requires no small degree of attention to perceive that the denouement is, in some degree, anticipated in the exposition. The history of the loves of Ferdinand and Miranda, developed in a few short scenes, is enchantingly beautiful: an affecting union of chivalrous magnanimity on the one part, and on the other of the virgin openness of a heart which, brought up far from the world on an uninhabited island, has never learned to disguise its innocent movements. The wisdom of the princely hermit Prospero has a magical and mysterious air; the disagreeable impression left by the black falsehood of the two usurpers is softened by the honest gossiping of the old and faithful Gonzalo; Trinculo and Stephano, two good-for-nothing drunkards, find a worthy associate in Caliban; and Ariel hovers sweetly over the whole as personified genius of the wonderful fable. Caliban has become a by-word as the strange creation of a poetical imagination. A mixture of gnome and savage, half demon, half brute, in his behavior we perceive at once the traces of his native disposition, and the influence of Prospero’s education. The latter could only unfold his understanding, without, in the slightest degree, taming his rooted malignity: it is as if the use of reason and human speech were communicated to an awkward ape. In inclination Caliban is malicious, cowardly, false, and base; and yet he is essentially different from the vulgar knaves of a civilized world, as portrayed occasionally by Shakespeare. He is rude, but not vulgar; he never falls into the prosaic and low familiarity of his drunken associates, for he is, in his way, a poetical being; he always speaks in verse. He has picked up everything dissonant and thorny in language to compose out of it a vocabulary of his own; and of the whole variety of nature, the hateful, repulsive, and pettily deformed, have alone been impressed upon his imagination. The magical world of spirits, which the staff of Prospero has assembled on the island, casts merely a faint reflection into his mind, as a ray of light which falls into a dark cave, incapable of communication to it either heat or illumination, serves merely to set in motion the poisonous vapours. The delineation of this monster is throughout inconceivably consistent and profound, and, notwithstanding its hatefulness, by no means hurtful to our feelings, as the honour of human nature is left untouched. In the zephyr-like Ariel the image of air is not to be mistaken, his name even bears an allusion to it; as, on the other hand Caliban signifies the heavy elements of earth. Yet they are neither of them simple, allegorical personifications but beings individually determined. In general we find in The Midsummer Night’s Dream, in The Tempest, in the magical part of Macbeth, and wherever Shakespeare avails himself of the popular belief in the invisible presence of spirits, and the possibility of coming in contact with them, a profound view of the inward life of nature and her mysterious springs, which, it is true, can never be altogether unknown to the genuine poet, as poetry is altogether incompatible with the mechanical physics, but which few have possessed in an equal degree with Dante and himself. (394–6)

6

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, commentary 1811–12 From ‘The Ninth Lecture’, Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton By the Late S.T. Coleridge. Edited by J. Payne Collier (London, 1856). Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher. Along with William Wordsworth, he is considered a pioneering figure in the English romantic movement. Together, the two poets published a joint volume of poetry in 1798 titled Lyrical Ballads, which established romantic poetry in England. Apart from wellknown poems, including ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘Christabel’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Coleridge wrote Biographia Literaria (1817), which is both a literary autobiography and literary criticism. Coleridge’s lectures of 1811–12 were influential in the revival of interest in Elizabethan drama. He never put his writings on Shakespeare together (except in a chapter on Biographia Literaria on Shakespeare’s narrative poems and an essay on Shakespeare’s methods) but left them in manuscript form. After his death, his nephew, Henry Nelson Coleridge, edited them and they appeared in print in 1836–9 as Coleridge’s Literary Remains. Most of Coleridge’s Shakespeare criticism is read in this form, although it is important to note that Coleridge’s nephew wove marginalia together, reworded occasionally and expanded shorthand notes into sentences. Coleridge, at his best, demonstrates how poetic language works in Shakespeare, line to line and sentence to sentence. This excerpt is from ‘Lecture 9’. For this work, we rely on John Payne Collier’s transcript since Coleridge’s own notes have not been discovered. In this lecture, Coleridge evokes ‘organic form’ in terms similar to the contemporary German critic August Wilhelm Schlegel (see No. 5). Coleridge’s (and Schlegel’s) idea of organic form had a long-reaching influence – the understanding of the work of art as an organism, growing out of itself and autonomous, went on to become an important idea in twentieth-century criticism, for instance. Unlike Schlegel, who sees the play’s plot as lacking movement, Coleridge demonstrates that every scene of the play emerges from the previous one, hence contributing to the creating of a unified organic whole.

Among the ideal plays, I will take The Tempest, by way of example. Various others might be mentioned but it is impossible to go through every drama, and what I remark on The Tempest will apply to all Shakespeare’s productions of the same class. In this play Shakespeare has especially appealed to the imagination, and he has constructed a plot well adapted to the purpose. According to his scheme, he did not

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Commentary 69 appeal to any sensuous impression (the word ‘sensuous’ is authorised by Milton) of time and place, but to the imagination, and it is to be borne in mind, that of old, and as regards mere scenery, his works may be said to have been recited rather than acted – that is to say, description and narration supplied in the place of visual exhibition: the audience was told to fancy that they saw what they only heard described; the painting was not in colours, but in words. This is particularly to be noted in the first scene – a storm and its confusion on board the king’s ship. The highest and the lowest characters are brought together, and with what excellence! Much of the genius of Shakespeare is displayed in these happy combinations – the highest and the lowest, the gayest and the saddest; he is not droll in one scene and melancholy in another, but often both the one and the other in the same scene. Laughter is made to swell the tear of sorrow, and to throw, as it were, a poetic light upon it, while the tear mingles tenderness with the laughter. Shakespeare has evinced the power, which above all other men he possessed, that of introducing the profoundest sentiments of wisdom, where they should be least expected, yet where they are most truly natural. One admirable secret of his art is that separate speeches frequently do not appear to have been occasioned by those which preceded, and which are consequent upon each other, but to have arisen out of the peculiar character of the speaker. Before I go further, I may take the opportunity of explaining what is meant by mechanic and organic regularity. In the former the copy must appear as if it had come out of the same mould with the original; in the latter there is a law which all the parts obey, conforming themselves to the outward symbols and manifestations of the essential principle. If we look to the growth of trees, for instance, we shall observe that trees of the same kind vary considerably, according to the circumstance of soil, are, position; yet we are able to decide at once whether they are oaks, elms, or poplars. So with Shakespeare’s characters: he shows us the life and principle of each being with organic regularity. The Boatswain, in the first scene of The Tempest, when the bonds of reverence are thrown off as a sense of danger impresses all, give a loose to his feeling, and thus pours forth his vulgar mind to the old Counsellor: ‘Hence! What care these roarers for the name of King? To cabin: silence! Trouble us not’. Gonzalo replies: ‘Good; yet remember whom thou hast aboard.’ To which the Boatswain answers – ‘None that I more love than myself. You are a counsellor; 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; if you cannot, give thanks that you have lived so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if it so hap, – Cheerly, good hearts! – Out of our way, I say’ [1.1.16–27]. An ordinary dramatist would, after his speech, have represented Gonzalo ‘as moralising, or saying something connected with the Boatswain’s language; for ordinary dramatists are not men of genius: they combine their ideas by association, or by logical affinity: but the viral writer, who makes men on the stage what they are in nature, in a moment transports himself into the very being of each personage, and, instead of cutting out artificial puppets, he brings before us the men themselves. Therefore, Gonzalo soliloquises – ‘I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks, he hath no drowning marks upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good fate, to

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his hanging! Make the rope of his destiny our cable, for our own doth little advantage. If he be not born to be hanged, our case is miserable’ [1.1.28–30]. In this part of the scene we see the true sailor with his contempt of danger, and the old counsellor with his high feeling, who, instead of condescending to notice the words just addressed to him, turns off, meditating with himself, and drawing some comfort to his own mind, by trifling with the ill expression of the boatswain’s face, founding upon it a hope of safety. Shakespeare had predetermined to make the plot of his play such as to involve a certain number of low characters, and at the beginning be pitched the note of the whole. The first scene was meant as a lively commencement of the story; the reader is prepared for something that is to be developed, and in the next scene he brings forward Prospero and Miranda. How is this done? By giving to his favourite character, Miranda, a sentence which at once expresses the violence and fury of the storm, such as it might appear to a witness on the land, and at the same time displays the tenderness of her feelings – the exquisite feelings of a female brought up in a desert, but with all the advantages of education, all that could be communicated by a wise and affectionate father. She possesses all the delicacy of innocence, yet with all the powers of her mind unweakened by the combats of life. Miranda exclaims: ‘O! I have suffered/ With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel./Who had, no doubt, some noble creatures in her, Dash’d all to pieces’ [1.2.5–8]. The doubt here intimated could have occurred to no mind but to that of Miranda, who had been bred up in the island with her father and a monster only: she did not know, as others do, what sort of creatures were in a ship; others never would have introduced it as a conjecture. This shows, that while Shakespeare is displaying his vast excellence, he never fails to insert some touch or other, which is not merely characteristic of the particular person, but combines two things – the person, and the circumstances acting upon the person. She proceeds: [Quotes: 1.2.8–13: ‘O! the cry did knock . . . .’]. She still dwells upon that which was most wanting to the completeness of her nature – these fellow creatures from whom she appeared banished, with only one relict to keep them alive, not in her memory, but in her imagination. Another proof of excellent judgement in the poet, for I am now principally adverting to that point, is to be found in the preparation of the reader for what is to follow. Prospero is introduced, first in his magic robe, which, with the assistance of his daughter, he lays aside, and we then know him to be a being possessed of supernatural powers. He then instructs Miranda in the story of their arrival in the island, and this is conducted in such a manner, that the reader never conjectures the technical use the poet has made of the relation, by informing the auditor of what is necessary of him to know. The next step is the warning by Prospero, that he means, for particular purposes, to lull his daughter to sleep; and here he exhibits the earliest and mildest proof of magical power. In ordinary and vulgar plays we should have had some person brought upon the stage, whom nobody knows or cares anything about, to let the audience into the secret. Prospero having cast a sleep upon his daughter, by that sleep stops the narrative at the very moment when it was necessary to break it off, in order to excite curiosity, and yet to give the memory and understanding sufficient to carry on the progress of the history uninterruptedly.

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Commentary 71 Here I cannot help noticing a fine touch of Shakespeare’s knowledge of human nature, and generally of the great laws of the human mind: I mean Miranda’s infant remembrance. Prospero asks her: ‘Canst thou remember/ A time before we came unto this cell?/ I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not/ Out three years old’. Miranda answers. ‘Certainly, sir, I can’. Prospero inquires, ‘By what? By any other house or person?/ Of anything the image tell me, that/ Hath kept with thy remembrance’. To which Miranda returns, ‘’Tis far off;/ And rather like a dream than an assurance/ That my remembrance warrants. Had I not/ Four or five women once, that tended me?’ [1.2 38–47]. This is exquisite! In general, our remembrances of early life arise from vivid colours, especially if we have seen them in motion: for instance, persons when grown up will remember a bright green door, seen when they were quite young: but Miranda, who was somewhat older, recollected four or five women who tended her. She might know men from her father, and her remembrance of the past might be worn out by the present object, but women she only knew by herself, by the contemplation of her own figure in the fountain, and she recalled to her mind what had been. It was not, that she had seen such and such grandees, or such and such peeresses, but she remembered to have seen something like the reflection of herself: it was not herself, and it brought back to her mind what she had seen most like herself. In my opinion the picturesque power displayed by Shakespeare, of all the poets that ever lived, is only equalled, is equalled, by Milton and Dante. The presence of genius is not shown in elaborating a picture: we have had many specimens of this sort of work in modern poems, where all is so dutchified, if I may use the word, by the most minute touches, that the reader naturally asks why words, and not painting, are used? I know a young lady of much taste, who observed, that in reading recent versified accounts of voyages and travels, she, by a sort of instinct, cast her eyes on the opposite page, for coloured prints of what was so patiently and punctually described. The power of poetry is, by a single word perhaps, to instill that energy into the mind, which compels the imagination to produce the picture. Prospero tells Miranda, ‘One midnight/ Fated to the purpose, did Antonio open/ The gates of Milan and i’ the dead of darkness./ The ministers for the purpose hurried thence/ Me, and thy crying self ’ [1.2.128–32]. Here, by introducing a single happy epithet, ‘crying,’ in the last line, a complete picture is presented to the mind, and in the production of such pictures the power of genius consists. In references to preparation, it will be observed that the storm, and all that precedes the tale, as well as the tale itself, serve to develop completely the main character of the drama, as well as the design of Prospero. The manner in which the heroine is charmed asleep fits us for what follows, goes beyond our ordinary belief, and gradually leads us to the appearance and disclosure of a being o the most fanciful and delicate texture, like Prospero, preternaturally gifted. In this way the entrance of Ariel, if not absolutely forethought by the reader, as foreshewn by the writer: in addition, we may remark, that the moral feeling called forth by the sweet words of Miranda: ‘Alack, what trouble Was I then to you!’ [1.2.151–2]. In which she considered only the sufferings and sorrows of her father, puts the reader

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in a frame of mind to exert his imagination in favour of an object so innocent and interesting. The poet makes him wish that, if supernatural agency were to be employed, it should be used for a being so young and lovely. ‘The wish is father to the thought,’ and Ariel is introduced. Here, what is called poetic faith is required and created, and our common notions of philosophy give way before it: this feeling may be said to be much stronger than historic faith, since for the exercise of poetic faith the mind is previously prepared. I make this remark, though somewhat digressive, in order to lead to a future subject of these lectures – the poems of Milton. When advertising to those. I shall have to explain farther the distinction between the two. Many Scriptural poems have been written with so much of Scripture in them, that what is not Scripture appears to be not true, and like mingling lies with the most sacred revelations. Now Milton, on the other hand, has taken for his subject that one point of Scripture of which we have the mere fact recorded, and upon on this he has most judiciously constructed his whole fable. So of Shakespeare’s King Lear, we have a little historic evidence to guide or confine us, and the few facts handed down to us, and admirably employed by the poet, are sufficient, while we read, to put an end to all doubt as to the credibility of the story. It is idle to say that this or that incident is improbable, because history, as far as it goes, tell us that the fact was so and so. Four or five lines in the Bible include the whole that is said of Milton’s story, and the Poet has called up the poetic faith, that conviction of the mind, which is necessary to make that seem true, which otherwise might have been deemed almost fabulous. But to return to The Tempest, and to the wondrous creation of Ariel, if a doubt could ever be entertained whether Shakespeare was a great poet, acting upon laws arising out of his own nature, and not without law, as has sometimes been ideally asserted, that doubt must be removed by the character of Ariel. The very first words uttered by this being introduce the spirit, not as an angel, above man; not a gnome, or a fiend, below man; but while the poet gives him the faculties and the advantages of reason, he divests him of all mortal character, not positively, it is true, but negatively. In air he lives, from air he derives his being, an air he acts; and all his colours and properties seem to have obtained from the rainbow and the skies. There is nothing about Ariel that cannot be conceived to exist either at sunrise or at sunset; hence all that belongs to Ariel belongs to the delight the mind is capable of receiving from the most lovely eternal appearances. His answers to Prospero are directly to the question, and nothing beyond; or where he expatiates, which is not unfrequently, it is to himself and upon his own delights, or upon the unnatural situation in which he is placed, though under a kindly power and to good ends. Shakespeare has properly made Ariel’s very first speech characteristic of him. After he has described the manner in which he had raised the storm and produced its harmless consequences, we find that Ariel is discontented – that he has been freed, it is true, from a cruel confinement, but still that he is bound to obey Prospero, and to execute any commands imposed upon him. We feel that such a state of bondage is most unnatural to him, yet we see that it is delightful for him to be so employed. It is as if we were to command one of the winds in a different direction to that which nature dictates, or one of the waves, no rising and now sinking, to recede before it bursts upon

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Commentary 73 the shore: such is the feeling we experience, when we learn that a being like Ariel is commanded to fulfil any mortal behest. When, however, Shakespeare contrasts the treatment of Ariel by Prospero with that of Sycorax, we are sensible that the liberated spirit ought to be grateful, and Ariel does feel and acknowledge the obligation; he immediately assumes the air being, with a mind so elastically correspondent, that when once a feeling has passed from it, not a traced is left behind. Is there anything in nature from which Shakespeare caught the idea of this delicate and delightful being, with such child-like simplicity, yet with such preternatural powers? He is neither born of heaven, nor of earth; but, as it were, between both, like a May-blossom kept suspended in air by the fanning breeze, which prevents it from falling to the ground, and only finally, and by compulsion, touching earth. This reluctance of the Sylph to be under the command even of Prospero is kept up through the whole play, and in the exercise of his admirable judgement Shakespeare has availed himself of it, in order to give Ariel an interest in the event, looking forward to that moment when he was to gain his last and only reward – simple and eternal liberty. Another instance of admirable judgement and excellent preparation is to be found in the creature contrasted with Ariel – Caliban, who is described in such a manner by Prospero, as to lead us to expect the appearance of a foul, unnatural monster. He is not seen at once; his voice is heard; this is the preparation; he was too offensive to be seen first in all his deformity, and in nature we do not receive so much disgust from sound as from sight. After we have heard Caliban’s voice he does not enter, until Ariel has entered like a water-nymph. All the strength of contrast is thus acquired without any of the shock of abruptness, or of that unpleasant sensation, which we experience when the object presented is in any way hateful to our vision. The character of Caliban is wonderfully conceived; he is a sort of creature of the earth, as Ariel is a sort of creature of the air. He partakes of the qualities of the brute, but is distinguished from brutes in two ways – by having mere understanding without moral reason; and by not possessing the instincts which pertain to absolute animals. Still, Caliban in some respects a noble being: the poet has raised him far above contempt: he is a man in the sense of the imagination; all the images he uses are drawn from nature, and are highly poetical; they fit in with the images of Ariel. Caliban gives us images from the earth. Ariel images from the air. Caliban talks if the difficulty of finding fresh water, of the situation of morasses, and of other circumstances which even brute instinct, without reason, could comprehend. No mean figure is employed, no mean passion displayed, and repugnance to command. The manner in which the lovers are introduced is equally wonderful, and it is the last point I shall now mention in reference to this, almost miraculous, drama. The same judgement is observable in every scene, still preparing, still inviting, and still gratifying. Like a finished piece of music. I have omitted to notice one thing, and you must give me leave to advert to it before I proceed: I mean the conspiracy against the life of Alonzo. I want to shew you how well the poet prepares the feelings of the reader for this plot, which was to execute the most detestable of all crimes. And which in another play, Shakespeare has called ‘the murder of sleep’.

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Antonio and Sebastian at first had no such intention; it was suggested by the magical sleep cast on Alonzo and Gonzalo; but they are previously introduced scoffing and scorning at what was said by others, without regard to age or situation, without an sense of admiration for the excellent truths they heard delivered, but giving themselves up entirely to the malignant and unsocial feeling, which induced them to listen to everything that was said, not for the sake of profiting by the learning and experience of others, but of hearing something that might gratify vanity and self-love, by making themselves believe that the person speaking as inferior to themselves. This, let me remark, is one of the grand characteristics of a villain and it would not be so much a presentiment, as an anticipation of hell, for men to suppose that all mankind were as wicked as themselves, or might be so if they were not too great fools. Pope, you are perhaps aware, objected to this conspiracy but in my mind, if it could be omitted, the play would lose a charm which nothing could supply. Many, indeed innumerable, beautiful passages might be quoted from this play, independently of the astonishing scheme of its construction. Everybody will call to mind the grandeur of the language of Prospero in that divine speech, where he takes leave of his magic art; and were I to indulge myself by repetitions of the kind, I should descend from the character of a lecturer to that of a mere reciter. Before I terminate, I may particularly recall one short passage, which has fallen under the very severe, but inconsiderate, censure of Pope and Arbuthnot, who pronounce it a piece of the grossest bombast. Prospero thus addresses his daughter, directing her attention to Ferdinand: ‘The fringed curtains of thine eye advance,/ And say what thou seest yond’ [1.2.410–11]. Taking these words as a periphrase of ‘Look what is coming yonder,’ it certainly may to some appear to border on the ridiculous, and to fall under the rule I formerly laid down – that whatever, without injury, can be translated into a foreign language in simple terms, ought to be in simple terms in the original language; but it is to be borne in mind, that different modes of expression frequently arise from difference of situation and education: a blackguard would use very different words, to express the same thing, to those a gentleman would employ, yet both would be natural and proper; difference of feeling gives rise to difference of language; a gentleman speaks in polished terms, with due regard to his on rank and position, while a blackguard, a person little better than half a brute, speaks like half a brute, showing no respect for himself, nor for others. But I am content to try the lines I have just quoted by the introduction to them; and then, I think, you will admit, that nothing could be more fit and appropriate than such language. How does Prospero introduce them? He has just told Miranda a wonderful story which deeply affected her, and filled her with surprise and astonishment, and for his own purposes he afterwards lulls her to sleep. When she awakes, Shakespeare has made her wholly inattentive to the present, but wrapped up in the past. An actress, who understands the character of Miranda, would have her eyes cast down, and her eyelids almost covering them, while she was, as it were; living her dream. At this moment Prospero sees Ferdinand, and wishes to point him out to his daughter, not only with great, but with scenic solemnity, he standing before her, and before the spectator, in the dignified character of a great magician.

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Commentary 75 Something was to appear to Miranda on the sudden, and as unexpectedly as if the hero of a drama were to be on the stage at the instant when the curtain is elevated. It is under such circumstances that Prospero says, in a tone calculated at once to arouse his daughter’s attention. ‘The fringed curtains of thine eye advance,/ And say what thou seest yond’ [1.2.410–11]. Turning from the sight of Ferdinand to his thoughtful daughter, his attention was first struck by the downcast appearance of her eyes and eyelids; and, in my humble opinion, the solemnity if the phraseology assigned to Prospero is completely in character, recollecting his preternatural capacity, in which the most familiar objects in nature present themselves in a mysterious point of view. It is much easier to find fault with a writer by reference to former notions and experience, than to sit down and read him, recollecting his purpose, connecting one feeling with another, and judging of his words and phrases, in proportion as they convey the sentiments of the persons represented. Of Miranda we may say, that she possesses in herself all the ideal beauties that could be imagined by the greatest poet of any age or any country: but it is not my purpose now, so much to point out the high poetic powers of Shakespeare, as to illustrate his exquisite judgement, and it is solely with this design that I have noticed a passage with which, it seems to me, some critics, and those among the best, have been unreasonably dissatisfied. If Shakespeare be the wonder of the ignorant, he is, and ought to be, much more the wonder of the learned; not only from profundity of thought, but from his astonishing and intuitive knowledge of what man must be at all time, and under all circumstances, he is rather to be looked upon as a prophet than as a poet. Yet, with all these unbounded powers, with all this might and majesty of genius, he makes us feel as if he were unconscious of himself, and of his high destiny, disguising the half god in the simplicity of a child. (108–26)

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William Hazlitt, commentary 1817 From Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (London, 1838). William Hazlitt (1768–1830) was an English essayist and critic. Apart from several essays on politics, Hazlitt published Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817). Although, like most Shakespearian critics of the age, Hazlitt analyzed the psychological motivation of the central figures in each play, the word ‘characters’ in the title refers to the defining characteristics of the work itself. As a theater critic, he admired the work of leading Shakespearean actors of his time, including Edmund Kean and Sarah Siddons. Hazlitt collected his reviews of Shakespeare productions in a work titled A View of the English Stage (1818). He also compiled his public lectures into Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819) and Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1820). Hazlitt’s criticism was influenced by Wilhelm Schlegel and Samuel Taylor Coleridge though he found the former too theoretical and the latter too metaphysical. He emphasized the vigor and beauty of Shakespeare’s language and his ability to create a range of characters with a vivid and sympathetic imagination. As Hazlitt put it in his preface to Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, ‘He seemed scarcely to have an individual existence of his own, but to borrow that of others at will, and to pass successively through every variety of untried being – to be now Hamlet, now Othello, now Lear, now Falstaff, now Ariel’.[1] Hazlitt also reformulated Coleridge’s ideas on the real and ideal and emphasized the unifying powers of the imagination. For Hazlitt, what is most interesting about The Tempest is its elegant blending of opposites (the real and the unreal, the graceful and the grotesque, the ethereal and the earthy, the human and the non-human). Interestingly, the famously liberal Hazlitt, does not address the politics of the play, except to mention the utopian ideas voiced in Gonzalo’s ‘commonwealth’ speech.

There can be little doubt that Shakespeare was the most universal genius that ever lived. ‘Either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited, he is the only man. Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light for him’. He has not only the same absolute command over our laughter and our tears, all the resources of passion, of wit, of thought, of observation, but he has the most unbounded range of fanciful invention, whether terrible or playful, the same insight into the world of imagination that he has into the world of reality; and over all there presides the same truth of character and nature, and the same spirit

 William Hazlitt, Commentary 77 of humanity. His ideal beings are as true and natural as his real characters; that is, as consistent with themselves, or if we suppose such beings to exist at all, they could not act, speak, or feel otherwise than as he makes them. He has invented for them a language, manners, and sentiments of their own, from the tremendous imprecations of the Witches in Macbeth, when they do ‘a deed without a name,’ to the sylph-like expressions of Ariel, who ‘does his spiriting gently’; the mischievous tricks and gossiping of Robin Goodfellow, or the uncouth gabbling and emphatic gesticulations of Caliban in this play. The Tempest is one of the most original and perfect of Shakespeare’s productions, and he has shown in it all the variety of his powers. It is full of grace and grandeur. The human and imaginary characters, the dramatic and the grotesque, are blended together with the greatest art, and without any appearance of it. Though he has here given ‘to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’, yet that part which is only the fantastic creation of his mind, has the same palpable texture, and coheres ‘semblably’ with the rest. As the preternatural part has the air of reality, and almost haunts the imagination with a sense of truth, the real characters and events partake of the wildness of a dream. The stately magician, Prospero, driven from his dukedom, but around whom (so potent is his art) airy spirits throng numberless to do his bidding; his daughter Miranda (‘worthy of that name’) to whom all the power of his art points, and who seems the goddess of the isle; the princely Ferdinand, cast by fate upon the haven of his happiness in this idol of his love; the delicate Ariel; the savage Caliban, half brute, half demon; the drunken ship’s crew – are all connected parts of the story, and can hardly be spared from the place they fill. Even the local scenery is of a piece and character with the subject. Prospero’s enchanted island seems to have risen up out of the sea; the airy music, the tempest-tossed vessel, the turbulent waves, all have the effect of the landscape background of some fine picture. Shakespeare’s pencil is (to use an allusion of his own) ‘like the dyer’s hand, subdued to what it works in’. Everything in him, though it partakes of ‘the liberty of wit,’ is also subjected to ‘the law’ of the understanding. For instance, even the drunken sailors, who are made reeling-ripe, share, in the disorder of their minds and bodies, in the tumult of the elements, and seem on shore to be as much at the mercy of chance as they were before at the mercy of the winds and waves. These fellows with their sea-wit are the least to our taste of any part of the play: but they are as like drunken sailors as they can be, and are an indirect foil to Caliban, whose figure acquires a classical dignity in the comparison. The character of Caliban is generally thought (and justly so) to be one of the author’s masterpieces. It is not indeed pleasant to see this character on the stage any more than it is to see the God Pan personated there. But in itself it is one of the wildest and most abstracted of all Shakespeare’s characters, whose deformity whether of body or mind is redeemed by the power and truth of the imagination displayed in it. It is the essence of grossness, but there is not a particle of vulgarity in it. Shakespeare has described the brutal mind of Caliban in contact with the pure and original forms of nature; the character grows out of the soil where it is rooted uncontrolled, uncouth and wild, uncramped by any of the meannesses of custom. It is ‘of the earth, earthy’. It seems almost to have been dug out of the ground, with a soul instinctively superadded to it answering to its wants and origin. Vulgarity is not natural coarseness, but conventional

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coarseness, learnt from others, contrary to, or without an entire conformity of natural power and disposition; as fashion is the commonplace affectation of what is elegant and refined without any feeling of the essence of it. Schlegel, the admirable German critic on Shakespeare observes that Caliban is a poetical character, and ‘always speaks in blank verse’. He first comes in thus: [Quotes 1.2.321–44: ‘As wicked dew as e’er my mother brush’d . . . .’] And again, he promises Trinculo his services thus, if he will free him from his drudgery. [Quotes 2.2.160–72: ‘I’ll show thee the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries . . . .’] In conducting Stephano and Trinculo to Prospero’s cell, Caliban shows the superiority of natural capacity over greater knowledge and greater folly; and in a former scene, when Ariel frightens them with his music, Caliban to encourage them accounts for it in the eloquent poetry of the senses:[Quotes 3.2.135–43: ‘Be not afraid, the isle is full of noises . . . .] This is not more beautiful than it is true. The poet here shows us the savage with the simplicity of a child, and makes the strange monster amiable. Shakespeare had to paint the human animal rude and without choice in its pleasures, but not without the sense of pleasure or some germ of the affections. Master Barnardine in Measure for Measure, the savage of civilized life, is an admirable philosophical counterpart to Caliban. Shakespeare has, as it were by design, drawn off from Caliban the elements of whatever is ethereal and refined, to compound them in the unearthly mould of Ariel. Nothing was ever more finely conceived than this contrast between the material and the spiritual, the gross and delicate. Ariel is imaginary power, the swiftness of thought personified. When told to make good speed by Prospero, he says, ‘I drink the air before me’. This is something like Puck’s boast on a similar occasion, ‘I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes’. But Ariel differs from Puck in having a fellowfeeling in the interests of those he is employed about. How exquisite is the following dialogue between him and Prospero! [Quotes 5.1.17–24: Your charm so strongly works ’em, . . . .’] It has been observed that there is a peculiar charm in the songs introduced in Shakespeare, which, without conveying any distinct images, seem to recall all the feelings connected with them, like snatches of half-forgotten music heard indistinctly and at intervals. There is this effect produced by Ariel’s songs, which (as we are told) seem to sound in the air, and as if the person playing them were invisible. We shall give one instance out of many of this general power: Enter Ferdinand; and Ariel invisible, playing and singing. [Quotes 1.2.375–408: ‘Come unto these yellow sands . . . .’] The courtship between Ferdinand and Miranda is one of the chief beauties of this play. It is the very purity of love. The pretended interference of Prospero with it heightens its interest, and is in character with the magician, whose sense of preternatural power makes him arbitrary, tetchy, and impatient of opposition. The Tempest is a finer play than the Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has sometimes been compared with it; but it is not so fine a poem. There are a greater number of beautiful passages in the latter. Two of the most striking in The Tempest are spoken by Prospero. The one is that admirable one when the vision which he has conjured

 William Hazlitt, Commentary 79 up disappears, beginning, ‘The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,’ &c., which has so often been quoted that every schoolboy knows it by heart; the other is that which Prospero makes in abjuring his art: [Quotes 5.1.33–57: ‘Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves . . . .’] We must not forget to mention among other things in this play, that Shakespeare has anticipated nearly all the arguments on the Utopian schemes of modern philosophy: [Quotes 2.1.144–69: ‘Had I the plantation of this isle, my lord . . . .’] (115–25)

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Edmond Malone, Caliban as savage 1821

From The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare With the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators: Comprehending a Life of the Poet, and an Enlarged History of the Stage By the Late Edmond Malone, with a New Glossarial Index, Edited by James Boswell (21 volumes, London, 1821). For biographical notes on Edmond Malone see No. 1. A new octavo edition of Shakespeare’s works, unfinished at Malone’s death, was completed by James Boswell, the son of Samuel Johnson’s biographer, who collected and organized Malone’s materials and published them in 1821 in 21 volumes. This work was regarded as the standard edition of Shakespeare’s writings for more than a century. This excerpt is taken from ‘Preliminary Remarks’ to The Tempest, among which Boswell includes Malone’s comments. Here Malone supplements his earlier historical research with a further exploration of two of the play’s features: the burning of the magus’ books and the monstrous figure of Caliban. While Malone treats the travel writings that mention strange monsters as sources that Shakespeare might have had in mind when he created Caliban, he regards the earlier play that he mentions, which figures the magus and his books, less as a source and more as an instance of the use of ‘archetypes’ Shakespeare repeats in his play.

With respect to the magick of this piece, it was unquestionably Shakespeare’s own. The popular notions that the Bermuda Islands were an enchanted region possessed by devils, naturally suggested the necromancy of Prospero and the agency of Ariel and the other ministering spirits introduced in The Tempest; yet, necromancy had been employed on the stage before our author’s time. In an old play, of which but one copy is known to exist, entitled ‘The rare Triumphes of Love and Fortune, Plaide before the Queenes most excellent majestie, wherein are manie fine conceites with great delight’ (1589), Romelio, on a false charge having been banished by Duke Phyzantius, assumes the disguise of a hermit, takes refuge in a cave, and studies the black art, which he practices with such success that he strikes Armenio, the Duke’s son dumb; and then assuming the character of an uplandish Physician, he by his art cures him again and restores him to his speech. Hermione, his son, who is in love with Fidelia, the Duke’s

 Edmond Malone, Caliban as Savage 81 daughter, is so disgusted with necromancy, that in his father’s absence he resolves to burn his books, which being done the father loses his power, and goes mad. Previously to this act, Hermione enters with some of his father’s books under his arm and recites the following lines: ‘And therefore I perceive he strangely useth it, ‘Inchaunting and transforming that his fancy doth not fit: ‘As I may see by these his vile blasphemous books ‘My soule abhorres, as often as mine eye upon them looks. ‘What gaine can countervaile the danger that they bring? ‘For man to sell his soule to sinne, is’t not a grievous thing? ‘To captivate his minde and all the giftes therein ‘To that which is of others all the most ungratious sinne. ‘Such is this are: such is the studie of this skill, ‘This supernaturall devise, this magicke, such it will. ‘In ransacking his cave, these books I lighted on, ‘And with his leave I’ll be so bolde, whilste he abroad is gone, ‘To burne them all, for the best that serveth for this stuffe, ‘I doubt not but at his returne to please him well enough; ‘And, gentlemen, I pray, and so desire I shall, ‘You would abhor this study, for it will confound you all.’

Here clearly is no other archetype than what many of the romances of the time would have furnished. It is one of the first principles of necromancy, that when the books of the magician are destroyed, his power is at an end; and accordingly Prospero when be abjures magick, says, he will bury his staff or rod, and ‘deeper than ever plummet sounded drown his book’. We have now considered the several parts of the story of this piece. It remains only to investigate and trace the character of Caliban, which, though in some respects invented by our author, was not yet entirely without an archetype. This archetype, as my very learned friend Dr. Vincent, Dean of Westminister, suggests to me, may be found in Pigafetta’s Account of Magliani’s, or as we call him, Magellan’s voyage to the Southern Pole; and I entirely agree with him in thinking that the Savage, who came aboard his ship, by that voyager called a Patagonian, was the progenitor of the servantmonster in The Tempest. Of this savage our poet found a particular account in Robert Eden’s History of Travaile, . . . which contains an abbreviated translation of Pigafetta’s work. Eden’s book being far from common, it will be proper here to extract from it what relates to our present subject: ‘Departyng from hence (says the translator) they sayled to the 49 degree and a halfe under the pole antartike; where being wintered, they were inforced to remayne there for the space of two monethes; all which tyme they saw no man: except that one day by chaunce they espied a man of the stature of a giant, who came to the haven dounsing and singyng, and shortly after seemed to cast dust over his head. The captayne sent one of his men to the shore, with the shippe boate, who made the

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The Tempest lyke signe off peace. The which thing the giant seeing, was out of feare, and came with the captayne’s servant, to his presence, into a little ilande. When he sawe the captayne with certayne of his company about him, he was greatly amased, and made signes, holding up his hande to heaven, signifying thereby, that our men came from thence. This giant was so byg, that the head of one of our men of a meane stature came but to his waste. He was of good corporation, and well made in all partes of his bodie, with a large visage painted with divers colours, but for the most parte yellow. Upon his cheeks were paynted two hartes, and red circles about his eyes. The heare of his head was coloured whyte, and his apparel was the skynne of a beast sowed togeather. This beast (as seemed unto us) had a large head, and great eares lyke unto a mule, with the body of a camel and tayle of a horse. The feete of the giant were foulded in the sayde skynne, after the manner of shooes. He had in his hand a bygge and shorte bowe, the sleyng whereof was made of sinewe of that beaste. He had also a bundle of long arrows made of reedes, feathered after the manner of ours, typte with sharp stones, in the stead of iron heads. The captayne caused him to eate and drinke, and gave him many things and among other a great looking glasse, in which as soone as he sawe his likeness was sodaynly afrayde, and started backe with suche violence, that hee overthrewe two that stood nearest about him. When the captayne had thus given him certayne haukes belles, and other great belles, with also a lookyng glasse, a combe, and a payre of beades of glasse, he sent him to lande with foure of his own men well armed. Shortly after, they sawe an other gaint of somewhate greater stature with his bowe and arrows in his hande. As hee drew nearer unto our men, hee layde his hand on his head, and pointed up towards heaven, and our men did the lyke. The captayne sent his shippe boate to bring him to a little ilande, being in the haven. This giant was very tractable and pleasaunt. Hee soong and daunsed, and in his daunsing lefte the print of his feete on the ground. – After other xv days were past, there came foure other giantes, without any weapons but had hid their bowes and arrows in certaine bushes. The captayne retained two of these, which were youngest and best made. He tooke them by a deceite, in this maner; – that giving them knyves, sheares, looking glasses, belles, beades of shrystal and such oteh trifles, he so fylled their hands, that they coulde holde no more; then caused two payre of shackles of iron to be put on their legges. Making signes that he would give thme those chaynes, which they liked very well, because they were made of bright and shining metall. And whereas they could not carry them bycause theyr hands were full, the other giantes would have caryed them, but the captayne would not suffer them. When they felt the shackels fast about theyr legges, they began to doubt; but the captayne dyd put them in comfort, and bade them stande still. In fine, when the sawe how they were deceived, they roared lykke bulles, and cryed upon their great devil, Setebos, to help them – they say, that whenany of the dye, there appeare or xii devils, leaping and daunsing about the bodie of the dead, and seeme to have their bodies paynted in divers colours, and that amont other there is one seene bigger then the residue, who maketh great mirth and rejoysing. This great Devyll the call Setebos, and call the lesse Cheleule. One of these giantges which the tooke, declared by signes that

 Edmond Malone, Caliban as Savage 83 he had seene devylles with tow hornes above their heads, with long heare downe to theyr feete, and that they caste foorth fyre at theyr throats, both before and behind. The captyne named these people Patagoni. The most parte of them were the skynnes of such beastes whereof I have spoken before. They lyve of raw fleshe, and a certayne sweete roote which they call capar’.

When various passages in this comedy, and the language, dress, and general demeanour of Caliban1 are considered; there can, I think, be little doubt that in the formation of that character Shakespeare had the foregoing passages in his thoughts. Holland’s translation of Pliny also, I think, furnished him with some traits of his monster. In the first chapter of the seventh book of the Natural History, which treats of the ‘strange and wondrous shapes of sundrie nations,’ we find the following passage: ‘Tanson writeth that the Choromandae are a savage and wild people: distinct voice, and speech they have none2, but instead thereof they keep an horrible nashing and hideous noise; rough they are, and hairy all over their bodies; eyes they have red like the howlets, and brothed they bee like dogges3 See also Spenser, in the dedication of his Wild Man, Fairy Queen, book vi. c​.civ​.​st. II [for a special purpose, however, the great poet has given some other tints to his portrait.]: ‘For other language had he none nor speech,/ But a soft murmur and confused sound/ Of senselesse words (which Nature did him teach/ To express his passions) which his reason did empeach.’

I may add, that having formed the character of his savage by blending together these several descriptions, and made him the offspring of a devil and Sycorax; he also in its composition availed himself of the current notions prevalent in his own time respecting the Devil and the Powke or Robin Goodfellow, as appears from various passages in this comedy.4 .... Caliban, as was long since observed by Dr. Farmer, is merely the metatheses of Canibal. Of the Canibals a long account is given by Eden, ubi supra. .... The origin of Setebos, who, like Claribel, is only spoken of, has been already pointed out; and an ingenious critic has with great probability shown that the name of Sycorax may have been formed from a passage in Batman’s revised translation of Bartholome de Proprietatibus, edit. 1582, lib. Iii. C. 10.5 .... The three principal incidents of The Tempest, independent of the magick, we have seen, are, the storm, and consequent shipwreck on a desert island; the previous deposition of the Duke of Milan, and the banishment of him and his daughter; and the marriage of

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the daughter of the King of Naples to the King of Tunis. Having found disjecti membra poetae, the ground and seed-plot of the first of these incidents, in a real fact of the time; of the second, in a dramatick fiction of a writer with whom Shakespeare was well acquainted, and to whom in another instance in the year immediately preceding he was indebted; and the hint, at least, which might have given rise to the third; it is, I conceive, unnecessary, and would be in vain, to seek for any tale or novel comprising a connected series of circumstances and adventures, similar to those which form the subject of this comedy. In uniting two very different events in this play, and connecting that of the storm with the fabricated story of the Duke of Milan, (formed probably, in a certain degree, on some of the circumstances in Greene’s Alphonsus,) he has only followed the course which he appears to have pursued in The Merchant of Venice; for the story of the bond, and that of the caskets, are two distinct tales, wholly independent of each other; and no narrative has yet been found in which they were united previously to the appearance of that play. The hints which gave rise to the beautiful comedy before us, are so slight that they leave our author in full possession of the highest praise that the most original and transcendent genius can claim. The character of Prospero considered, not as Duke of Milan, but as the father of Miranda, and a magician; those of Miranda herself, of Ariel, and of Caliban (in a great measure), and all the comick characters, in which our poet took great delight, and of which he had an inexhaustible fund in his mind, are unquestionably all the creatures of his own boundless imagination. (XV, 10–17)

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Charles Lamb, The Tempest staged 1822

From The Dramatic Essays of Charles Lamb. Edited With An Introduction and Notes by Brander Mathews (New York, 1891). Charles Lamb (1775–1834) was an English essayist and critic. Though best known for his Essays of Elia, a collection of writings on a range of topics written in a personal and conversational style, Lamb showed a life-long interest in Shakespeare. In 1807 he and his sister Mary published a retelling of Shakespeare’s plays for children titled Tales From Shakespeare. In 1808 he published Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare, a selection of scenes from Elizabethan drama. He also contributed critical papers on Shakespeare to Reflector magazine. Lamb had a deep love for the stage and for Shakespearean plays in particular. In spite of being a theatre critic and dabbling in playwrighting himself, Lamb could not help but feel that The Tempest is best experienced in the mind’s eye than on stage. He was writing in response to mid-nineteenth-century productions of the play, such as Charles Kean’s 1848 one, which were dominated by grand spectacle and an almost absurd literalism.

Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile mixture which Dryden has thrown into The Tempest doubtless without some such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would never have sat out to hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the sweet courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is The Tempest of Shakespeare at all a subject for stage representation? It is one thing to read of an enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale while we are reading it; but to have a conjuror brought before us in his conjuring-gown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself and some hundred of favoured spectators before the curtain are supposed to see, involves such a quantity of the hateful incredible that all our reverence for the author cannot hinder us from perceiving such gross attempts upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they cannot even be painted they can only be believed. But the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended. That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher faculties positively’ destroys

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the illusion which it is introduced to aid. A parlour or a drawing-room, a library opening into a garden, a garden with an alcove in it, a street, or the piazza of Covent Garden, does well enough in a scene; we are content to give as much credit to it as it demands; or rather, we think little about it, it is little more than reading at the top of a page, ‘Scene, a garden’ we do not imagine ourselves there, but we readily admit the imitation of familiar objects. But to think, by the help of painted trees and caverns which we know to be painted, to transport our minds to Prospero and his island and his lonely cell, or by the aid of a fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an interval of speaking, to make us believe that we hear those supernatural noises of which the isle was full, The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more possible to be shown on a stage than the Enchanted isle, with its no less interesting and innocent first settlers. (191–3)

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Anna Brownell Jameson, on Miranda 1832

From Shakespeare’s Heroines: Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (Boston and New York, 1900). Anna Murphy Brownell Jameson (1794–1860) was born in Dublin and moved to London as a child. She had a fairly illustrious writing career, authoring biography, history, Shakespeare criticism, travel writing and art history. She described her work as primarily about women and intended for women readers. Thomas Carlyle described her as the ‘celebrated Mrs. Jameson’ for her popular study of Shakespeare’s heroines. This work, published as Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical in 1832, later came to be known as Shakespeare’s Heroines, was the first book devoted to Shakespeare’s female protagonists. Although Jameson insists on Miranda’s humanity, her overall description conveys her understanding of the play’s sole female character as an idealized portrait rather than an individualized, realistic one. However, by deliberately keeping the critical spotlight on Miranda (and other heroines) Jameson anticipates modern feminist critics’ studies of the representation of Shakespeare’s female characters.

We might have deemed it impossible to go beyond Viola [in Twelfth Night], Perdita [in The Winter’s Tale], and Ophelia [in Hamlet], as pictures of feminine beauty to exceed the one in tender delicacy, the other in ideal grace, and the last in simplicity – if Shakespeare had not done this; and he alone could have done it. Had he never created a Miranda, we should never have been made to feel how completely the purely natural and the purely ideal can blend into each other. The character of Miranda resolves itself into the very elements of womanhood. She is beautiful, modest, and tender, and she is these only: the comprise her whole being, external and internal. She is so perfectly unsophisticated, so delicately refined, that she is all but ethereal. Let us imagine any other woman placed besides Miranda-even one of Shakespeare’s own loveliest and sweetest creations – there is not one of them that could sustain the comparison for a moment; not one that would not appear somewhat coarse or artificial when brought into immediate contrast with this pure child of nature . . . .

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[Shakespeare] has removed far from all the comparisons with her own sex; he has placed her between the demi-demon of earth and the delicate spirit of air. The next step is into the ideal and supernatural; and the only being ho approaches Miranda, with whom she can be contrasted, is Ariel. Besides the subtle essence of this ethereal sprite, this creature of elemental light and air, that ‘ran upon the winds, rode the curl’d clouds, and in the colours of the rainbow lived.’ Miranda herself appears a palpable reality, a woman, ‘breathing thoughtful breath’ . . . walking the earth in her mortal loveliness, with a heart as frail-strung, as passion-touched, as ever fluttered in a female bosom. I have said that Miranda possesses merely the elementary attributes of womanhood; but each of these stand in her with a distinct and peculiar grace. She resembles nothing upon earth; but do we therefore compare her, in our own minds, with any of those fabled beings with which the fancy of ancient poets peopled the forest depths, the fountain, or the ocean-dread or dryad fleet, sea-maid or naiad of the stream? We cannot think of them together. Miranda is a consistent, natural, human being. Our impression of her nymph-like beauty, her peerless grace and purity of soul, has a distinct and individual character. Not only is she exquisitely lovely, being what she is, but we are made to feel that she could not possibly be otherwise than as she is portrayed. She has never beheld one of her own sex: she has never caught from society one imitated or artificial grace. The impulses which have come to her, in her enchanted solitude, are of heaven and nature, not of the world and its vanities. She has sprung up into beauty beneath the eye of her father, the princely magician; her companions have been the rocks and woods, the many-shaped, many-tinted clouds, and the silent stars; her playmates the ocean billows, that stooped their foamy crests and ran rippling to kiss her feet. Ariel and his attendant sprites hovered over her head, ministered duteous to her every wish, and presented before her pageants of beauty and grandeur. The very air, made vocal by her father’s art, floated in music around her. If we can pre-suppose such a situation with all its circumstances, do we not behold in the character of Miranda not only the credible, but the natural, the necessary results of such a situation? She retains her woman’s heart, for that is unalterable and inalienable, as a part of her being; but her deportment, her looks, her language, her thoughts-all these, from the supernatural and poetical circumstances around her, assume a cast of the pure ideal; and to us, who are in the secret of her human and pitying nature, nothing can be more charming and consistent than the effect which she produces upon others, who never having beheld anything resembling her, approach her as ‘a wonder’ as something celestial – ‘Be sure! The goddess on whom these airs attend!’ [1.2.422]. And again – ‘What is this maid? . . . Is she the goddess who hath sever’d us? And brought us thus together?’ [5.1.587–8]. And Ferdinand exclaims, while gazing on her [Quotes 1.2.487–94: ‘My spirits as in a dream are all bound up! . . . .’] Contrasted with the impression of her refined and dignified beauty, and its effect on all beholders, is Miranda’s own soft simplicity, her virgin innocence, her total ignorance of the conventional forms and language of society. It is most natural that, in a being thus constituted, the first tears should spring from compassion, ‘suffering with those that she saw suffer’ . . . and that her first sigh should be offered to a love at one fearless and submissive, delicate and fond. She has no taught scruples of honor like Juliet; no coy concealments like Viola; no assumed dignity standing in its own defense.

 Anna Brownell Jameson, on Miranda 89 Her bashfulness is less a quality that an instinct; it is like the self-folding of a flower, spontaneous and unconscious. I suppose there is nothing of the kind in poetry equal to the scene between Ferdinand and Miranda. Ferdinand, who is a noble creature, we have all the chivalrous magnanimity with which man, in a high state of civilisation, disguises his real superiority, and does humble homage to the being of whose destiny he disposes; while Miranda, the mere child of nature, is struck with wonder at her own new emotions. Only conscious of her own weakness as a woman, and ignorant of those usages of society which teach us to dissemble the real passion, and assume (and sometimes abuse) an unreal and transient power, she is equally ready to place her life, her love, her service beneath his feet . . . . [Quotes 3.1.73–87 Miranda. I am a fool, / To weep at what I am glad of . . . .] As Miranda, being what she is, could only have had a Ferdinand for her lover, and an Ariel for an attendant, so she could have had with propriety no other father than the majestic and gifted being ho fondly claims her as ‘a thread of his own life-nay, that for which he lives’. Prospero, with his magical powers, his superhuman wisdom, his moral worth and grandeur, and his kingly dignity, is one of the most sublime visions that ever swept with ample robes, pale brow, and sceptred hand before the eye of fancy. He controls the invisible world, and works through the agency of spirits; not by any evil and forbidden compact, but solely by superior might of intellect-by potent spells gathered from the lore of ages, and abjured when he mingles again as a man with his fellow-men. He is as distinct a being from the necromancers and astrologers celebrated in Shakespeare’s age as can well be imagined; and all the wizards of poetry and fiction, even Faust and St. Leon, sink into common-places before the princely, the philosophic, the benevolent Prospero. (207–16)

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as romantic drama 1836

From The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected and Edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge (2 vols, London, 1839). For biographical note on Coleridge, see No. 6. Coleridge had elsewhere noted that ‘the works of Shakespeare are romantic poetry revealing itself in the drama . . . they may be called romantic dramas or dramatic romances . . . .’[1]. He was emphasizing Shakespeare’s mingling of tragic and comic modes. In these Notes, Coleridge, for the first time, characterized The Tempest as a ‘romantic drama’ – a description that led to later critics terming it a ‘romance’. For Coleridge, the play is ‘romantic’ because its primary impulse is not ‘mimetic’. In this he departs from earlier English critics who emphasized the mimetic impulse in Shakespeare, which was often framed in critical commentary as a faithfulness to ‘nature.’ Interestingly, even as Coleridge reads the play as romance, he also addresses its politics: he first maintains that they are not really evident, but then goes on to describe the depiction of the ‘mob’ (represented by Stephano, Trinculo and perhaps Caliban) as unruly and absurd, though not as necessarily dangerous or evil. Coleridge shifts from this brief reflection on the play’s politics to a discussion of characterization: the actions of characters in the play are shaped by the author’s understanding of human nature and human impulses rather than his political ideology.

[From ‘Notes on The Tempest’] THERE is a sort of improbability with which we are shocked in dramatic representation, not less than in a narrative of real life. Consequently, there must be rules respecting it; and as rules are nothing but means to an end previously ascertained – (inattention to which simple truth has been the occasion of all the pedantry of the French school), – we must first determine what the immediate end or object of the drama is. And here, as I have previously remarked, I find two extremes of critical decision; – the French, which evidently presupposes that a perfect delusion is to be aimed at, – an opinion which needs no fresh confutation; and the exact opposite to it, brought forward by Dr. Johnson, who supposes the auditors throughout in the full reflective knowledge of

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as Romantic Drama 91 the contrary. In evincing the impossibility of delusion, he makes no sufficient allowance for an intermediate state, which I have before distinguished by the term, illusion, and have attempted to illustrate its quality and character by reference to our mental state, when dreaming. In both cases we simply do not judge the imagery to be unreal; there is a negative reality, and no more. Whatever, therefore, tends to prevent the mind from placing itself, or being placed, gradually in that state in which the images have such negative reality for the auditor, destroys this illusion, and is dramatically improbable. Now the production of this effect – a sense of improbability – will depend on the degree of excitement in which the mind is supposed to be. Many things would be intolerable in the first scene of a play, that would not at all interrupt our enjoyment in the height of the interest, when the narrow cockpit may be made to hold The vasty fields of France, or we may cram ‘Within its wooden ‘O the very casqnes That did affright the air at Agincourt’. [Henry V, 12–14] Again, on the other hand, many obvious improbabilities will be endured, as belonging to the groundwork of the story rather than to the drama itself, in the first scenes, which would disturb or disentrance us from all illusion in the acme of our excitement; as for instance, Lear’s division of his kingdom, and the banishment of Cordelia. But, although the other excellences of the drama besides this dramatic probability, as unity of interest, with distinctness and subordination of the characters, and appropriateness of style, are all, so far as they tend to increase the inward excitement, means towards accomplishing the chief end, that of producing and supporting this willing illusion, – yet they do not on that account cease to be ends themselves; and we must remember that, as such, they carry their own justification with them, as long as they do not contravene or interrupt the total illusion. It is not even always, or of necessity, an objection to them, that they prevent the illusion from rising to as great a height as it might otherwise have attained; – it is enough that they are simply compatible with as high a degree of it as is requisite for the purpose. Nay, upon particular occasions, a palpable improbability may be hazarded by a great genius for the express purpose of keeping down the interest of a merely instrumental scene, which would otherwise make too great an impression for the harmony of the entire illusion. Had the panorama been invented in the time of Pope Leo X., Raffael would still, I doubt not, have smiled in contempt at the regret, that the broomtwigs and scrubby bushes at the back of some of his grand pictures were not as probable trees as those in the exhibition. The Tempest is a specimen of the purely romantic drama, in which the interest is not historical, or dependent upon fidelity of portraiture, or the natural connexion of events, – but is a birth of the imagination, and rests only on the coaptation and union of the elements granted to, or assumed by, the poet. It is a species of drama which owes no allegiance to time or space, and in which, therefore, errors of chronology and geography – no mortal sins in any species – are venial faults, and count for nothing. It addresses itself entirely to the imaginative faculty; and although the illusion may be assisted by the effect on the senses of the complicated scenery and decorations of modem times, yet this sort of assistance is dangerous. For the principal and only genuine excitement ought to come from within, – from the moved and sympathetic imagination; whereas, where so much is addressed to the mere external senses of seeing and hearing, the spiritual vision is apt to languish, and the attraction from without will

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withdraw the mind from the proper and only legitimate interest which is intended to spring from within. The romance opens with a busy scene admirably appropriate to the kind of drama, and giving, as it were, the keynote to the whole harmony. It prepares and initiates the excitement required for the entire piece, and yet does not demand anything from the spectators, which their previous habits had not fitted them to understand. It is the bustle of a tempest, from which the real horrors are abstracted; – therefore it is poetical, though not in strictness natural – (the distinction to which I have so often alluded) – and is purposely restrained from concentering the interest on itself, but used merely as an induction or tuning for what is to follow. In the second scene, Prospero’s speeches, till the entrance of Ariel, contain the finest example, I remember, of retrospective narration for the purpose of exciting immediate interest, and putting the audience in possession of all the information necessary for the understanding of the plot [Quotes 1.2.17–21: ‘Mark his condition, and th’event; then tell me . . . .’] Theobald has a note upon this passage, and suggests that Shakespeare placed it thus: — Pro. Good wombs have bore bad sons, – Now the condition. [Mr. Coleridge writes in the margin: ‘I cannot but believe that Theobald is quite right.’ – Ed.] Observe, too, the perfect probability of the moment chosen by Prospero (the very Shakespeare himself, as it were, of the tempest) to open out the truth to his daughter, his own romantic bearing, and how completely anything that might have been disagreeable to us in the magician, is reconciled and shaded in the humanity and natural feelings of the father. In the very first speech of Miranda the simplicity and tenderness of her character are at once laid open; – it would have been lost in direct contact with the agitation of the first scene. The opinion once prevailed, but, happily, is now abandoned, that Fletcher alone wrote for women; – the truth is, that with very few, and those partial, exceptions, the female characters in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are, when of the light kind, not decent; when heroic, complete viragos. But in Shakespeare all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the sweet, yet dignified feeling of all that continuates society, as sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, because it rests not in the analytic processes, but in that same equipoise of the faculties, during which the feelings are representative of all past experience, – not of the individual only, but of all those by whom she has been educated, and their predecessors even up to the first mother that lived. Shakespeare saw that the want of prominence, which Pope notices for sarcasm, was the blessed beauty of the woman’s character, and knew that it arose not from any deficiency, but from the more exquisite harmony of all the parts of the moral being constituting one living total of head and heart. He has drawn it, indeed, in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude, – shown in all of them as following the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive faculty, sees all things in and by the light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of love alone. In all the Shakespearian women there is essentially the same foundation and principle; the distinct individuality and variety

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as Romantic Drama 93 are merely the result of the modification of circumstances, whether in Miranda the maiden, in Imogen the wife, or in Katherine the queen. But to return. The appearance and characters of the super or ultra-natural servants are finely contrasted. Ariel has in everything the airy tint which gives the name; and it is worthy of remark that Miranda is never directly brought into comparison with Ariel, lest the natural and human of the one and the supernatural of the other should tend to neutralize each other; Caliban, on the other hand, is all earth, all condensed and gross in feelings and Images; he has the dawnings of understanding without reason or the moral sense, and in him, as in some brute animals, this advance to the intellectual faculties, without the moral sense, is marked by the appearance of vice. For it is in the primacy of the moral, being only that man is truly human; in his intellectual powers he is certainly approached by the brutes, and, man’s whole system duly considered, those powers cannot be considered other than means to an end, that is, to morality. In this scene, as it proceeds, is displayed the impression made by Ferdinand and Miranda on each other; it is love at first sight; – at the first sight /They have chang’d eyes: — [1.2.441–2] and it appears to me, that in all cases of real love, it is at one moment that it takes place. That moment may have been prepared by previous esteem, admiration, or even affection, – yet love seems to require a momentary act of volition, by which a tacit bond of devotion is imposed, – a bond not to be thereafter broken without violating what should be sacred in our nature. How finely is the true Shakespearian scene contrasted with Dryden’s vulgar alteration of it in which a mere ludicrous psychological experiment, as it were, is tried – displaying nothing but indelicacy without passion. Prospero’s interruption of the courtship has often seemed to me to have no sufficient motive; still his alleged reason – lest too light winning / Make the prize light – [1.2.452–3] is enough for the ethereal connections of the romantic imagination, although it would not be so for the historical: Fer. Yes, faith, and all his Lords, the Duke of Milan, And his brave son, being twain [1.2.437–8]. Theobald remarks that nobody was lost in the wreck; and yet that no such character is introduced in the fable, as the Duke of Milan’s son. [Mr. C. notes: ‘Must not Ferdinand have believed be was lost in the fleet that the tempest scattered?’ – Ed.] The whole courting scene, indeed, in the beginning of the third act, between the lovers, is a masterpiece; arid the first dawn of disobedience in the mind of Miranda to the command of her father is very finely drawn, so as to seem the working of the Scriptural command, Thou shalt leave father and mother, &c. O! with what exquisite purity this scene is conceived and executed! Shakespeare may sometimes be gross, but I boldly say that he is always moral and modest. Alas! in this our day decency of manners is preserved at the expense of morality of heart, and delicacies for vice are allowed, whilst grossness against it is hypocritically, or at least morbidly, condemned. In this play are admirably sketched the vices generally accompanying a low degree of civilization; and in the first scene of the second act Shakespeare has, as in many other places, shown the tendency in bad men to indulge in scorn and contemptuous expressions, as a mode of getting rid of their own uneasy feelings of inferiority to the good, and also, by making the good ridiculous, of rendering the transition of others

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to wickedness easy. Shakespeare never puts habitual scorn into the mouths of other than bad men, as here in the instances of Antonio and Sebastian. The scene of the intended assassination of Alonzo and Gonzalo is an exact counterpart of the scene between Macbeth and his lady, only pitched in a lower key throughout, as de-signed to be frustrated and concealed, and exhibiting the same profound management in the manner of familiarizing a mind, not immediately recipient, to the suggestion of guilt, by associating the proposed crime with something ludicrous or out of place, – something not habitually matter of reverence. By this kind of sophistry the imagination and fancy are first bribed to contemplate the suggested act, and at length to become acquainted with it. Observe how the effect of this scene is heightened by contrast with another counterpoint of it in low life, – that between the conspirators Stephano, Caliban, and Trinculo in the second scene of the third act, in which there are the same essential characteristics. In this play and in this scene of it are also shown the springs of the vulgar in politics, – of that kind of politics which is inwoven with human nature. In his treatment of this subject, wherever it occurs, Shakespeare is quite peculiar. In other writers we find the particular opinions of the individual; in Massinger it is rank republicanism; in Beaumont and Fletcher even jure divino principles are carried to excess; – but Shakespeare never promulgates any party tenets. He is always the philosopher and the moralist, but at the same time with a profound veneration for all the established institutions of society, and for those classes which form the permanent elements of the state – especially never introducing a professional character, as such, otherwise than as respectable. If he must have any name, he should be styled a philosophical aristocrat, delighting in those hereditary institutions which have a tendency to bind one age to another, and in that distinction of ranks, of which, although few may be in possession, all enjoy the advantages. Hence, again, you will observe the good nature with which he seems always to make sport with the passions and follies of a mob, as with an irrational animal. He is never angry with it, but hugely content with holding up its absurdities to its face; and sometimes you may trace a tone of almost affectionate superiority, something like that in which a father speaks of the rogueries of a child. See the good-humoured way in which he describes Stephano passing from the most licentious freedom to absolute despotism over Trinculo and Caliban. The truth is, Shakespeare’s characters are all general intensely individualized; the results of meditation, of which observation supplied the drapery and the colours necessary to combine them with each other. He had virtually surveyed all the great component powers and impulses of human nature, – had seen that their different combinations and subordinations were in fact the individualizers of men, and showed how their harmony was produced by reciprocal disproportions of excess or deficiency. The language in which these truths are expressed was not drawn from any set fashion, but from the profoundest depths of his moral being, and is therefore for all ages. (II, 92–102)

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Thomas Campbell, Shakespeare as Prospero 1838 From The Dramatic Works of W. Shakespeare with Remarks on His Life and Writing (London, 1838). Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) was born in Glasgow and is best remembered today for his didactic poem ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ and patriotic poems such as ‘Ye Mariners of England’. He was also one of the initiators of the proposal to establish the University of London. Campbell published several books of literary commentary, including Specimens of the English Poets (1819). The following extract is from a long essay that prefaced an 1838 edition of Shakespeare. In this essay, Campbell first attempts to reconstruct Shakespeare’s life, often drawing on earlier scholarship by Nicholas Rowe and Edward Malone. The biographical exploration is followed by brief commentary on the plays. His remarks on The Tempest are noteworthy because he is among the first critics to see Prospero as Shakespeare, a connection picked up and elaborated on by later critics.

THE TEMPEST (1611) – this is believed to be the last written of Shakespeare’s plays. The public feelings of England had recently been much interested by the adventures of Sir George Sommers, admiral of a fleet that sailed from England for the settlement of a colony in Virginia. Sir George’s ship was separated by a tremendous storm from the rest of the fleet, and wrecked on the Bermudas shore, in the year 1609. The history of his voyage was given to the public by Sylvester Jourdan, one of his crew, with the following title, ‘A Discovery of Bermudas, otherwise called the isle of Divels, by Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers, and Captayne Newport, and divers others.’ In this publication Jourdan informs us ‘that the islands of the Bermudas, as every one knoweth who hath heard or read of them, were never inhabited by any Christian or heathen people, but ever esteemed and reputed a most prodigious and enchanted place, affording nothing but gusts, storms, and foul weather; which made every navigator and mariner to avoid them as Seylla and Charybdis, or as they would shun the devil himself ’. This drama is comparatively a grave counterpart to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I say comparatively, for its gaiety is only less abandoned and frolicsome. To be condemned to give the preference to either would give me a distress similar to that of being obliged to choose between the loss of two very dear friends.

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The Tempest, however, has a sort of sacredness as the last work of the mighty workman Shakespeare, as if conscious that it would be his last, and as if inspired to typify himself, has made its hero a natural, a dignified, and benevolent magician, who could conjure up spirits from the vasty deep, and command supernatural agency by the most seemingly natural and simple means. And this final play of our poet has magic indeed; for what can be simpler in language than the courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda, and yet what can be more magical than the sympathy with which it subdues us? Here Shakespeare himself is Prospero, or rather the superior genius who commands both Prospero and Ariel. But the time was approaching when the potent sorcerer was to break his staff, and bury it fathoms in the ocean – Deeper than did ever plummet sound [5.1.56–7]. That staff has never been, and never will be recovered. (44)

13

Joseph Hunter, the Mediterranean 1839

From A Disquisition on the Scene, Origin, Date etc etc. of Shakespeare’s Tempest in a Letter to Benjamin Heywood Wright, Esq. (London, 1839). Joseph Hunter (1783–1861) was an antiquarian and records scholar. He pursued his interests as a prominent fellow and a vice-president of the Society of Antiquaries, making significant discoveries among the public records concerning early settlements in England and identifying documents, which so Hunter suggested, proved that the original Robin Hood was a porter working in the household of Edward II in 1324. Hunter also studied English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly Shakespeare and Milton. In A Disquisition on the Scene, Origin, Date etc., of Shakespeare’s Tempest, Hunter challenges Edmond Malone and other writers who trace The Tempest to English voyages to the New World and the play’s setting to Bermuda. Instead, Hunter’s own literary-genealogy research locates the island in the Mediterranean, while the storm itself is reminiscent of the storms evoked by the Italian writer Ariosto in the epic poem, Orlando Furioso (1516).

If in a story, whether it be one of fact or fiction, we find the persons who are the actors in it carried to a deserted and enchanted island in a stormy sea, and we find such an island precisely in the situation, geographically, which the exigencies of the story require, can any supposition be more reasonable than that we have found the island which was in the mind of the writer, though the name of it may not occur in his work? If, in addition to its geographical position, we find that there are points of resemblance of a peculiar and critical nature, must not the probability be converted into certainty? Now, I mean to shew you that such an island there is. The words of Ariel, on which so much stress has been laid by the advocates of the Bermudean theory, ‘in the deep nook, where once/Thou call’dst me up at midnight to fetch dew/ From the still-vex’d Bermoothes,’ [1.2.227–9]. So far from serving as an index to the island which afforded what I may call the prima stamina of some part of this beautiful work, have proved, like the fires of the same spirit, a deluding light, which has led commentators and critics into seas far remote from those on which, with a story of Italy and Africa before them, their attention ought to have been directed. Their minds have been tossing on the Atlantic,

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when they ought to have been musing on the Mediterranean, ‘peering in maps for ports and piers and rocks,’ and, I add, diminutive and obscure islands which lie basing in the sun between Tunis and Naples. Where should Alonzo, when he returned from the marriage of Claribel, be wrecked, but on an island which lies between the port from which he sailed, and the port to which he was bound? Did we not know how much still remains to be done in the criticism of these plays, it would be scarcely credible that no one seems to have thought of tracing the line of Alonzo’s track, or of speculating, with the map before him, on the island on which Prospero and Miranda may be supposed to have been cast. Yet such appears to be the case; for had the spirits of the commentators been attentive to those seas, and to the many islands with which they are studded, they could scarcely have failed to discover that there was one which has all needful points of resemblance to the island of Prospero, in the general, and withal others so peculiar and so minute, that there can, I think, be no hesitation in admitting that it is the island on which the incidents of the drama take placed. The island I mean, is that known to geographers by the name LAMPEDUSA, or LAMPEDOSA, LIPADUSA, or LOPADUSA I call your attention, first, to its geographical position. It lies midway between Malta and the African coast. It is therefore precisely in the situation which the circumstances of every part of the story require. Sailors from Algiers land Sycorax on its shores. Prospero, sailing from and Italian port, and beating about at the mercy of the waves, is found at last with his lovely charge at Lampedusa. Alonzo sailing from Tunis, and steering his course for Naples, is driven by a storm a little out of his track, and lights on Lampedusa. In its dimensions, Lampedusa is what we may imagine Prospero’s island to have been; in circuit thirteen miles and a half. Lampedusa is situated in a stormy sea. In the few notices which we find of it in the writers contemporary with Shakespeare, the name generally comes accompanied by the notice of a storm. In 1555, Andrew Doria anchored the fleet of Charles the Fifth on the island, after an engagement with the Turks: but a furious gale came on, when several of the ships were driven upon the rocks and lost. Crusius quotes from the narrative of a voyager, who in 1580, spent four days on the island, during the whole of which time there was one continued storm. Lampedusa is in seas where the beautiful phenomenon is often seen, called by sailors the Querpo Santo, or the Fires of Saint Helmo. The commentators have told us that these fires are the fires of Ariel. But the very name of the island itself, Lampedusa, may seem to be derived, as Fazellus says it is from flames, such as Ariel’s. Lampedusa is a deserted island, and was so in the time of Shakespeare. The latest English traveler who has visited it, informs us that, ‘except a solitary anchoret or two, and a few occasional stragglers, it does not authentically appear to have been regularly inhabited in modern times’. The Earl of Sandwich, who visited the island in 1739, found only one person living upon it. [The author proceeds to summarize a number of accounts of Lampedusa provided by eighteenth-cenury scholars.] . . . . You see that in the time of Shakespeare, Lampedusa was not only a small and desert island in a storm sea, but that it also lay under the reputation, or imputation

 Joseph Hunter, the Mediterranean 99 shall I say, of being enchanted and I may add, that I have been told that The Enchanted Island is a familiar appellation by which Lampedusa is known among the mariners on the African coast. . . . . Besides, there is in the literature of the age of Shakespeare a description of another storm at sea, in which a vessel, having a king and prince on board, is wrecked, by a writer whose work was more likely to catch the attention of Shakespeare, and to fasten on his imagination, than Jourdan’s. This description is by the pen of no less celebrated a poet than Ariosto, who of all the Italian poets was best known in England in the age of Elizabeth, and who had, of all the Italian poets, the greatest influence on our literature. The Supposes of Gascoign is a translation of the Suppositi of Ariosto. The structure of the Arcadia reminds of the abrupt transitions of the Orlando. The design of the Fairy Queen may be reasonably supposed to have been suggested by Ariosto, and the influence of the Italian over the English poet has been traced by Warton in many particulars. And, finally, Francis Harington translated the first fifty stanzas of the thirtysecond book of the Orlando; and his elder brother, Sir John Harington, translated the rest of the poem before the year 1591, in which year the translation was published in a folio volume. Shall we then wonder if we find Shakespeare a reader of Ariosto, and indebted to him occasionally for an incident or an expression? No writer was ever more self-dependent than Shakespeare, but there is as certainly a pedigree of thoughts and expressions running through the writings of the men of high poetic renown, as there is of particular races in man. I have mentioned the date of Harington’s translation, to shew that the Orlando might be read in English in 1591, for the satisfaction of those who find a pleasure in depreciating the learning and attainments of Shakespeare and, without entering far into the question of the extent of Shakespeare’s acquaintance with the ancient or modern languages, I willingly admit that Shakespeare read translations when translations were provided for him. The Tempest itself contains the most manifest evidence that he read a translation of the Latin Ovid, and of the French of Montaigne. I shall shew you immediately that it contains proof that he read this translation from the Italian of Ariosto. . . . . Whether the evidence I have produced, each portion of which I admit not to be very strong, but which, in the sum, I apprehend to be all-powerful, is sufficient to prove to you that Shakespeare was indebted (as far as he was indebted to any one) to Ariosto, for the storm scene with which the play opens, and from which the play derives its name, you will admit that there is much more resemblance between the storm of Ariosto and the storm of Shakespeare, than there is between Shakespeare’s storm and that which is described in the narrative of Jourdan, just as there is much more resemblance between Lampedusa and the isle of Prospero, than there is between that island and Bermuda. There is therefore no longer any necessity for resorting to the narrative of the shipwreck of the two Englishmen for the origin of the storm in Shakespeare’s play of The Tempest, any more than that we should look to the Bermudas for having suggested the enchantment, or anything else, in the island of Prospero. (17–25, 35–6, 50)

14

Washington Irving, The Tempest and America 1840

From ‘The Bermudas, a Shakespearean Research’, Knickerbocker 15 (1840), 17–25. Washington Irving (1783–1849), sometimes described as the ‘first American man of letters’, was an American author best known for the stories ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle’, which appeared in The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819–20). He also wrote Bracebridge Hall (1822), A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829) and The Alhambra (1832). Irving’s comments on The Tempest are not entirely original but are still notable because he is the first American to draw attention to the play’s American connection and to state that this very connection makes the play particularly interesting to American readers.

In the course of a voyage home from England, our ship had been struggling, for two or three weeks, with perverse headwinds and a stormy sea. It was in the month of May, yet the weather had at times a wintry sharpness, and it was apprehended that we were in the neighborhood of floating islands of ice, which at that season of the year drift out of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and sometimes occasion the wreck of noble ships. Wearied out by the continued oppositions of the elements our Captain bore away to the south, in hopes of catching the expiring breath of the trade winds, and making what is called the Southern passage. A few days wrought, as it were, a magical ‘sea change’ in everything around us. We seemed to emerge into a different world. The late dark and angry sea lashed up into roaring and swashing surges, became calm and sunny, the rude winds died away and gradually a light breeze sprang up directly aft, filling out every sail, and wafting us smoothly along on an even keel. The air softened into a bland and delightful temperature. Dolphins began to play about us; the nautilus came floating by, like a fairy ship, with its mimic and sail rainbow tints; and flying fish, from time to time, made their short exclusive flights, and occasionally fell upon the deck. The cloaks and over-coats in which we had hitherto wrapped ourselves, and moped about the vessel, were thrown aside; for a summer warmth had succeeded to the late wintry chills. Sails were stretched as awnings over the quarter-deck, to protect us from the midday sun. Under these we lounged away the day, in luxurious indolence, musing with half-shut eyes, upon the quiet ocean. The night was scarcely less beautiful

 Washington Irving, The Tempest and America 101 than the day. The rising moon sent a quivering column of silver along the undulating surface of the deep, and, gradually climbing the heaven lit up our towering top sails and swelling main-sails, and spread a pale, mysterious light around. As our ship made her whispering way through this dreamy world of water, every boisterous sound on board was charmed to silence; and the low whistle or drowsy song, of a sailor from the forecastle, or the tinkling of a guitar, and the soft warbling of a female voice from the quarter-deck, seemed to derive a witching melody from the scene and hour . . . . A day or two of such fanciful voyaging, brought us in sight of the Bermudas, which first looked like mere summer clouds, peering above the quiet ocean. All day we glided along in sight of them, with just wind enough to fill our sails and never did land appear more lovely. They were clad in emerald verdure beneath the serenest of skies: not an angry wave broke upon their quiet shores, and small fishing craft riding the crystal waves, seemed as if hung in air . . . . In contemplating these beautiful islands, and the peaceful sea around them, I could hardly realize that these were the ‘still vext Bermoothes’ [1.2.229] of Shakespeare, once the dread of mariners, and infamous in the narratives of the early discoverers, for the dangers and disasters which beset them. Such, however, was the case; and the islands derived additional interest in my eyes, from fancying that I could trace, in their early history, and in the superstitious notions connected with them, some of the elements of Shakespeare’s wild and beautiful drama of The Tempest. I shall take the liberty of citing a few historical facts, in support of this idea, which may claim some additional attention from the American reader, as being connected with the first settlement of Virginia. [Here Irving summarizes Somers’ Bermuda voyage narrative.] . . . . The accounts given by Captain Matthew Somers and his crew of the delightful climate, and the great beauty, fertility, and abundance of these islands, excited the zeal of enthusiasts, and the cupidity of speculators, and a plan was set on foot to colonize them. The Virginia company sold their right to the islands to one hundred and twenty of their own members, who erected themselves into distinct corporation, under the name of ‘Somer Island Society’; and Mr. Richard Moore was sent out in 1612 as governor, with sixty men to found a Colony; and this leads me to the second branch of this research.

The Three Kings of Bermuda And Their Treasure of Ambergris At the time Sir George Somers was preparing to launch his cedar-built bark, and sail for Virginia, there were three culprits among his men, who had been guilty of capital offenses. One of them was shot; the others, name Christopher Carter and Edward Waters, escaped. Waters, indeed made a very narrow escape, for he had actually been tied to a tree to be executed, but cut the rope with a knife, which he had concealed about his person, and fled to the woods, where he was joined by Carter. These two worthies kept themselves concealed in the secret parts of the island, in quest of supplies for the Virginia Colony, these culprits hovered about the landing-place, and succeeded in persuading another seaman, named Edward Chard, to join them, giving him the most seductive picture of the ease and abundance in which they reveled.

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When the bark that bore Sir George’s body to England had faded from the watery horizon these three vagabonds walked forth in their majesty and might, the lords and sole inhabitants of these islands. For a time their little commonwealth went on prosperously and happily. They built a house, sowed corn, and the seed of various fruits: and, having plenty of hogs, wild fowl, and fish of all kinds. With turtle in abundance, carried on their tripartite sovereignty with great harmony and much feasting. All kingdoms, however, are doomed to revolution, convulsion, or decay; so it fared with the empire of these three kings of Bermuda, albeit they were monarchs without subjects. In an evil hour, in their search after turtle, among the fissures of the rocks, they came upon a great treasure of ambergris, which had been cast on shore by the ocean. Besides a number of pieces of smaller dimensions, there was one great mass, the largest that had ever been known, weighing eighty pounds, and which, of itself, according to the market value of ambergris in those days, was worth about nine or ten thousand pounds! From that moment, the happiness and harmony of the three kings of Bermuda were gone forever. While poor devils, with nothing to share but the common blessings of the island, which administered to prevent enjoyment, but had nothing of convertible value, they were loving and united; but here was actual wealth, which would make them rich men, whenever they could transport it to market. Adieu the delights of the island! They now became flat and insipid. Each had pictured to himself the consequence he might now aspire to in civilized life, could he once get there with this mass of ambergris. No longer a poor Jack Tar, frolicking in the low taverns of Wapping, he might roll through London in his coach, and, perchance arrive like Whittington at the dignity of Lord Mayor. With riches came envy and covetousness. Each was now assuming the supreme power, and getting the monopoly of the ambergris. A civil war at length broke out; Chard and Waters defied each other to mortal combat, and the kingdom of Bermuda was on the point of being deluged with royal blood. Fortunately, Carter took no part in the bloody feud. Ambition might have made him view it with secret exultation, for if either or both of his brother potentates were slain in conflict, he would be a gainer in purse and ambergris. But he dreaded to be left alone in this uninhabited island, and to find himself the monarch of a solitude: So he secretly purloined and hid the weapons of the belligerent rivals, who, having no means of carrying on the war, gradually cooled down into a sullen armistice. The arrival of Governor More, with an overpowering force of sixty men, put an end to the empire. He took possession of the kingdom, in the name of the Somer Island Company, and forthwith proceeded to make a settlement. The three kings tacitly relinquished their sway but stood up stoutly for their treasure. It was determined, however, that they had been fitted out at the expense and employed in the service, of the Virginia Company; that they had found the ambergris while in the service of that company, and on that company’s land; that the ambergris, therefore belonged to the company, or rather to the Somer Island Company, in consequence of their recent purchase of the island, and all their appurtenances. Having thus legally established their right, and being moreover able to back it by might, the company laid the lion’s paw upon the spoil; and nothing more remains on historic record of the Three Kings of Bermuda, and their treasure of ambergris.

 Washington Irving, The Tempest and America 103 The reader will now determine whether I am more extravagant than most of the commentators on Shakespeare, in my surmise that the story of Sir George Somers’ shipwreck, and the subsequent occurrences that took place on the uninhabited island, may have furnished the bard with some of the elements of his drama The Tempest. The tidings of the shipwreck, and of the incidents connected with it, reached England not long before the production of the drama, and made a great sensation there. A narrative of the whole matter, from which most of the foregoing particulars are extracted, was published at the time in London, in a pamphlet form, and could not fail to be eagerly perused by Shakespeare, and to make a vivid impression on his fancy. His expression, in The Tempest, of ‘the still vext Bermoothes,’ [1.2.229] accords, exactly with the storm beaten character of those islands. The enchantments, too, with which he has clothed the island of Prospero, may they not be traced to the wild and superstitious notions entertained about the Bermudas? I have already citied two passages from a pamphlet published at the time, showing that they were esteemed ‘a most prodigious and inchanted place,’ and the ‘habitation of divells’; and another pamphlet, published shortly afterwards, observes: ‘And whereas it is reported that this land of the Bermudas, with the islands about, [which are many, at least a hundred] are inchanted and kept with evil and wicked spirits, it is a most idle and false report.’1 The description, too, given in the pamphlets, of the real beauty and fertility of the Bermudas, and their serene and happy climate, so opposite to the dangerous and inhospitable character with which they had been stigmatized, accords with the eulogium of Sebastian on the island of Prospero: ‘Though this island seem to be desert, uninhabitable, and almost inaccessible, it must needs be of subtle, tender, and delicate temperance. The air breathes upon us here most sweetly. Here is everything advantageous to life. How lush and lusty the grass looks! How green!’ [2.1.35, 37, 42, 46, 50, 53] I think too. In the exulting consciousness of ease, security, and abundance felt by the late tempest-tossed mariners, while reveling in the plenteousness of the island, and their inclination to remain there, released from the labors, the cares, and the artificial restraints of civilized life, I can see something of the golden commonwealth of honest Gonzalo: [Quotes 2.1.144–65: ‘Had I planation of this isle, my lord . . . .’] But above all, in the three fugitive vagabonds who remained in possession of the island of Bermuda, on the departure of their comrades, and in their squabbles about supremacy, on the finding of their treasure, I see typified Sebastian, Trinculo, and their worthy companion Caliban: ‘Trinculo, the king and all our company being drowned,/ We will inherit here’ [2.2.174–5]. ‘Monster, I will kill this man; his daughter and I will be king and queen, (save our graces!) and Trinculo and thyself shall be viceroys’. (3.2.106–8] I do not mean to hold up the incidents and characters in the narrative and in the play as parallel, or as being strikingly similar: neither would I insinuate that the narrative suggested the play; I would only suppose that Shakespeare, being occupied about that time on the drama of The Tempest, the main story of which, I believe, is of Italian origin, had many of the fanciful ideas of it suggested to his mind by the shipwreck of Sir George Somers on the ‘still vext Bermothes,’ and by the popular superstitions connected with these islands, and suddenly put in circulation by that event. (17–25)

15

Patrick MacDonnell, on Caliban 1840

From An Essay on the Play of The Tempest. With Remarks on the Superstitions of the Middle Ages; Some Original Observations on the Character of Caliban; With Various Reflections of the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (London, 1840). No biographical information is available on Patrick MacDonnell. Patrick MacDonnell’s piece is notable for his comments on Caliban. He sees Caliban as a pitiful victim of the tyrannical Prospero, rather than as simply an uncouth and savage monster. He is particularly appreciative of one stage production, an 1838 revival of the Shakespearean original (rather than the Dryden-Davenant versions that had dominated for a while) by the actor-director William Charles Macready. This production was among the first to confirm the sympathetic readings of Caliban put forth by romantic critics such as Coleridge and Hazlitt. The ‘Mr. Bennet’ whom MacDonnell refers to in his commentary was George Bennet, an actor who excelled in both tragic and comic roles, who played Caliban. For MacDonnell, Bennet reminds us that Caliban, savage though he might be, is also chafing under Prospero’s tyranny and rebels against it.

Many of the principles of natural philosophy were well known to the ancients, but the darkness and barbarism, which prevailed over Europe during the middle ages, threw the knowledge of those principles into obscurity, till the revival of learning again developed them. The elements of science in modern times, are, therefore, now so well understood, that to every well-informed mind, those supernatural powers, in the credence of which the energies of man for ages were paralyzed, have entirely vanished, and are looked upon in no other light, than the mere creation, of disordered imaginations. Our immortal poet, though he has in The Tempest, and other plays, brought forward those agencies, to give effect to the scenes which he drew, well knew that they did not exist in nature; his great and comprehensive mind, extended far beyond the prejudices of his time, for, when alluding to the Ghost of Hamlet, he very beautifully says – it was seen ‘in the mind’s eye,’ an observation closely corresponding with the philosophy of the present day.

 Patrick MacDonnell, on Caliban 105

[On Caliban] After receiving the orders of Prospero, to appear shortly again to him, in the shape of a sea-nymph, Ariel departs, when Miranda at this moment awakes; and here we meet with Caliban, a creature in his nature, possessing all the rude elements of the savage, yet maintaining in his mind, a strong – resistance to that tyranny, which held him in the thralldom of slavery: Caliban creates our pity, more than our detestation. This ‘rude uncouth monster’ as he is generally termed by some of the commentators of Shakespeare, it should be remembered, is seen only in this scene, free from the influence of those intoxicating wines, given him by Trinculo and Stephano; and, certainly, amidst the intemperance, in which he so freely indulges, we see awakened in him, all the worst passions of savage life. We learn, however, in this first introduction to Caliban, that the policy of Prospero, led him to impart, to this unhappy slave a knowledge of language; but deeply impressed with the cruel usage he receives, Caliban remarks to Prospero – Ýou taught me language – and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse; the red-plague rid you For learning me your language!’ [1.2.363–4] – a rebuke, which Prospero evidently seems, at a loss, how to answer. Shakespeare has drawn Caliban, rude as he is, with feelings of strong aversion to slavery, and it is with the view of destroying the bondage under which he labours, that urges him, in an after part of the play, to form the plot against the life of Prospero: refusing, however, at this interview, to obey the commands of Prospero, Caliban is threatened to be racked, with old cramps, and his bones to be filled with aches, so as to make him roar, That beasts shall tremble at his din – The scene excites much interest, and, at all events, develops some very favourable marks, in the character of Caliban, who seems to feel keenly, the severe terms of reproach – as when he is addressing Prospero, when alluding to his more early residence in the island, he says – ‘When thou came’st first, Thou stroak’dst, and mad’st much of me, would’st give me water with berries in’t; and teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night and then I lov’d thee, And sheivd thee all the qualities o’ the isle, The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place, and fertile’. [1.2.332–8] – an artless and simple narration, which certainly indicates much kind feeling. Prospero, however replies, that he used Caliban with human care, and lodged him in his cell till he did seek to violate the honour of his child, a circumstance, which though it renders Caliban guilty, can never justify the conduct of Prospero, in such harsh and cruel treatment, for, it ought to be kept in view, that this wild and untutored creature, was imprudently placed enough in the way, to enable him, to make the attempt complained of the noble and generous character of Prospero, therefore suffers, by this severe conduct to Caliban, and I confess, I have never read, or witnessed this scene, without experiencing a degree of pity, for the poor, abject, and degraded slave. The part of Caliban has generally been exhibited on the stage, in a manner, so as to excite feelings, almost approaching to a painful and disagreeable kind but it has remained for the excellence of Mr. G Bennett, to delineate, the rude and uncultivated savage, in a style, which arouses our sympathies, in behalf of those, whose destiny, it has never been, to enjoy the advantages of civilization. Caliban, amidst the rudeness of his nature, and possessing an exterior, ugly and misshapen, will always, however,

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create attention; – stimulated to revenge, by the severity he suffers, he has withal, qualities of a redeeming character. The study of the part, therefore, requires both energy and judgement; – the task is one of great difficulty, but Mr. Bennett, by his just conception of it, has arrived at the acme of his art, and no one, who has witnessed his performance, of this ‘creature of Shakespeare’s imagination,’ but must have acknowledged, the unrivalled talents, which have guided him to so much success. The arduous performance of Caliban, has secured to this excellent actor, the well-merited applause of many an enlightened audience; the spontaneous tribute of praise, that affords a strong proof, of the truth of these observations – for by the judgement of an unprejudiced public, and not of false and self-interested criticism, the merits of every performer should be ultimately decided. . . . . We have now arrived at the denouement, of this beautiful drama, which conveys to our view, a scene of the most pleasing and agreeable kind; Prospero, with a mind, endowed by all those high and exalted qualities, which render man, in the possession of such attributes, a being truly magnificent, draws from us every feeling of admiration; – we see in his character, the human heart influenced by every virtuous and noble sentiment but when we behold the opposite picture, in the base treachery of Alonzo and his companions, we lament, that such degeneracy, should be found, so prevalent amongst mankind: there is virtue, in the world, but, alas! vice has ever had the predominance, and to find out truly the cause of such moral evil, has, as yet, baffled the enquirers of philosophy; there is one consideration, however, which should not be overlooked; – man never yet has enjoyed in states, which are called civilized, the full extent of those advantages, that Nature has given to him; the powers of his intellect crippled, and the qualities of his heart obscured, by false and narrow views of education, he has been, in all ages, the victim of corrupt prejudice, combined with low and selfish ignorance, which have greatly been the means of perpetuating those wars, intestine broils, and bitter malignant passions, that have sullied and disgraced his character. (5, 16–19, 47)

16

Charles Knight, commentary 1843

From The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakespeare (8 vols, London, 1838–43) Comedies – Volume II (London, 1843). Charles Knight (1791–1873) was a publisher and writer. The best known and most significant of his publications was the lavishly illustrated Penny Magazine (1832–45). The joint idea of Matthew Davenport Hill and Knight, it was aimed primarily at a working-class readership and served up informative articles on art, literature, natural history, science, history and biography to the ‘artisan class’ (though the publication probably enjoyed a large middle-class audience as well). Knight’s first major project as an author took shape in 1837 when he resolved to produce a sumptuously illustrated edition of Shakespeare’s works, with plates by the best artists of the time and a critical reading of the texts. His edition was based substantially on the first Folio edition, although he made comparisons with the quartos. His background reading for the edition led to an interest in Shakespeare’s life, and the edition, published between 1838 and 1841, was prefaced with a one-volume biography. The following excerpt is taking from the introduction to The Tempest. Knight dismisses the idea that the play is Shakespeare’s last one and also dismisses the historical and antiquarian criticism practiced by the likes of Edmund Malone and Joseph Hunter on the grounds that poetry cannot be treated as if it were history or chronology.

Until the last year or so the general opinion of the readers of Shakespeare had settled into the belief that The Tempest was the last of his works. We are inclined to think that this belief was rather a matter of feeling than of judgement . . . . But this feeling, pretty and fanciful as it is, is certainly somewhat deceptive. It is not borne out by the internal evidence of the play itself. Shakespeare never could have contemplated, in health and intellectual vigour, any abandonment of that occupation which constituted his happiness and glory. We have no doubt that he wrote on till the hour of his last illness. His late plays are unquestionable those in which the mighty intellect is more tasked than the unbounded fancy. His later plays, as we believe, present the philosophical and historical aspect of human affairs rather than the passionate and the imaginative. The Roman historical plays are, as it appears to us, at the end of his career, as the English historical plays are at the beginning. Nothing can be more than the principle of art

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upon which the Henry VI and the Antony and Cleopatra are constructed. The Roman plays denote, we think, the growth of an intellect during five-and twenty years. The Tempest does not present the characteristics of the latest plays. It has the playfulness and beauty of the comedies, mingled with the higher notes of passionate and solemn thought which distinguish the great tragedies. It is essentially, too, written wholly with reference to the stage, at a period when Ariel could be represented to an imaginative audience without the prosaic encumbrance of wings. The later plays, such as Troilus and Cressida, and the three Roman subjects, are certainly written without any very strong regard to dramatic effect. .... We believe that the poet had no locality whatever in his mind, just as he had no notion of any particular storm. Tempests and enchanted islands are of the oldest materials of poetry. Mr. Hunter says Shakespeare had Ariosto’s description of a storm in his mind. Who, we may ask, suggested to Ariosto his description? Has anyone fixed the date of Ariosto’s storm? Has not the poet described the poet’s office? [Quotes A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.7–12: ‘The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling . . . .’] Franz Horn asks whether Prospero left Caliban to govern the island? We believe the island sunk into the sea, and was no more seen, after Prospero broke his staff and drowned his book. (397–8, 402)

17

Hermann Ulrici, the wonderful and the real 1846

From Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art. History and Character of Shakespeare’s Plays. By Dr. Hermann Ulrici. Translated from the Third Edition of the German, with Additions and corrections by the Author. By L. Dora Schmitz (2 vols, London, 1876). Hermann Ulrici (1806–1844) was a German philosopher. He was trained in law but gave up his profession to study literature, philosophy and science. In 1834 he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Halle. Apart from several works on philosophy, he wrote a treatise titled Ueber Shakespeare’s Dramatische Kunst un sein (1839). A third edition of the work (dated 1868–9) was translated by L. D. Schmitz in 1846. In this work Ulrici provides a historic outline of Shakespeare’s life and times, reviews the plays and examines the order in which they might have been written. Ulrici clearly takes a romantic approach to Shakespeare: those Shakespeare plays which include an element of the fantastical have a ‘double foundation’ in the marvelous and the real; the real as Ulrici understands it is a ‘higher reality’ which he describes as being governed by the ‘ethical laws of the mind’. The marvelous is thus interwoven with the real, and in fact acquires meaning and significance only in relation to the real. This is in accordance with Ulrici’s philosophy which saw the real and the ideal as mutually complementary entities. The symbolic nature of the marvelous is more apparent in tragedy; in comedy it must be drawn attention to and explained. This excerpt is taken from an 1876 English translation, which was based on the third (1868–9) edition of Ulrici’s book.

[From Volume II] Every person of an imaginative or poetical turn of mind, probably knows from his own experience that peculiar state of mind, in which everything appears so strange, so mysterious and mystic that we can become wholly absorbed in the contemplation of a wild flower, of a murmuring brook, or of the hurrying clouds; a mood in which we feel as if, at every moment, something unheard-of must happen, or in which, at least, we long from the depths of our heart for some kind of wonderful occurrence, although in our immediate neighbourhood everything moves on in its usual course, nay although we ourselves feel perfectly content and happy in the everyday relations

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of our life and in our ordinary activity. There are, in fact, hours in which – illuminated only by single scattered stars – the deep darkness of the Mysterious and the Mystic struggles with the bright daylight of the well-known, for the possession of our soul, – hours, in which the dark, wonder-seeing eye of the imagination confronts the clear, sober look of reason, and man, as it were, beholds himself and the world around him from two entirely opposite points of view, as if he himself were two entirely different individuals. This state of mind forms, we may say, the psychological foundation of that fantastic, poetical picture which – as in the case of Shakespeare’s Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream – blends into one, two perfectly heterogeneous and contradictory forms of existence, in order to shape them into a new, strange, halfknown, half-unknown world. On the one side we are met by figures with which we are perfectly well acquainted – human faults and failings, feelings, passions and thoughts – all in the usual form of actual reality; we fancy we see ourselves and our surroundings but reflected in the mirror of poetry. On the other side, however, the magic power of the marvelous reveals its whole force, the laws of nature are set aside, the figures represented are at most but the imitations of common reality; their nature, and frequently also their appearance, is wholly different; everything contradicts the experience of every-day life, or at all events, exceeds its limit on either side. And yet we seem, nevertheless, to feel ourselves at home in this abnormal, unknown world of wonders. It is not pure illusion, for it touches a chord in our hearts, which forms a harmonious accompaniment to the mysterious sounds that reach us from the other world; we find ourselves possessed of a mysterious feeling that sympathises with the wonderful beings. The imagination of the true poet, in fact only throws life into the unexplained wonder which is reflected in the heart of man. The world of wonders into which the poet leads us, does not contradict the laws and customs of common reality, but merely common, external reality; it is in perfect accordance with the higher laws of a reality which is indeed not common, but certainly general and ideal; the physical laws of nature are set aside, but they are replaced by the ethical laws of the mind. Both are, in fact, one in their origin and aim; we mentally perceive and feel this unity, and on this very account find ourselves equally at home in both spheres. Shakespeare’s fantastic drama is distinguished from the fairy tale by this double foundation, this double view of life which forms its basis. The fairy tale has but one world in which it moves, and this world is wholly wonderful, wholly a play of fancy. The fairy tale does not pretend to describe reality, but envelopes it in the gay, halfdazzling, half-transparent veil of haziness and mustiness of light and colour, of which its own structure is composed. Its thoughts are but assonances of thought, so to say, but separate of a rich harmonious chord, the missing notes of which have to be discovered by the reader’s own imagination. It does not intend to express one definite view of life, one idea, but to allude to the whole substance of thought and of life, to touch and to strike it every now and again, so that the bell (which is cast of a combination of all the different metals) gives back the separate sounds, which must harmonise among one another in spite of the looseness of their connection. It is this harmony alone, which, as it were, floats over the whole, that constitutes the general meaning and the truth of the fairy tale, because, in fact, it expresses the one side of real life. The fairy tale, accordingly, has no desire to be explained, it does not wish to appeal to the reason but

 Hermann Ulrici, the Wonderful and the Real 111 merely to the imagination. To presume to explain it would be much the same thing as anatomically to dissect a flower to seek for its scent. Plays like The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, however, are particularly in need of explanatory criticism, for, on the one hand, they possess the character of the fairy tale, which is apparently quite beyond explanation, but, on the other hand, this fairy-tale character of the representation is merely woven into common reality like a couple of fragrant, exotic flowers in to a northern wreath of oak leaves. The Wonderful is so closely blended with the Natural and the Real, that the one cannot become clear if the other is not also explained. To leave the dramas uninterpreted would be to acknowledge them mere tales or fairy tales. But mere fairy tales they are evidently not. For while the fairy tale never expresses astonishment at what is wonderful – inasmuch as it does not consider it wonderful, but its own peculiar property – in The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Wonderful appears throughout rather as an actual wonder; the Magical, the Extraordinary and the Supernatural cause as much amazement as they would in our own everyday life. The dramas, evidently take their standpoint on the ideal boundary where the airy kingdom of the land of wonders and mystery looks into the reality of ever-day life, and conversely is looked at by it. They here stand midway in connection with both, with a foot on either side; its centre of gravity, however, lies only on the one side, it rests, in fact, only upon the firm ground of Reality. But by the fact of the Wonderful referring only to the latter, and appearing interwoven only with actual life it loses its independence, it exists only for reality; only in connection with Reality can it have any meaning and significance. And just because the Wonderful does not merely signify what it is itself, but at the same time denotes Reality, pointing to and embracing it, this double significance is obviously symbolical or allegorical. In other words, the Wonderful is and signifies, not merely that which it seems to be, but something else besides, to which it is connected as a part with its whole. The Symbolical however, by reason of its very nature, requires significance to be explained; it is no symbol, if that which it denotes cannot also be recognised. In this case also explanatory criticism has not only to examine the unity of the conception upon which the play is founded, but has also to explain why, within this view of life. The Marvellous is so closely connected with the Real, and that is its symbolical significance in this connection. The different manner in which Shakespeare treats the Wonderful in tragedy and comedy is very remarkable. If we examine the strange forms of the witches in Macbeth, and the appearances of the ghosts in the same tragedy or in Hamlet, Julius Caesar, etc., we shall find that the symbolical element is there brought prominently forward. It is clear that the witches are introduced to express the idea, that the powers of nature exercise a demoniacal influence over the man who, owing to his passionate ambition, his pride and lust for dominion, in reality already bears the crime within his own heart; the whistling of the wind will to him speak of murder, the murmuring brook of kingdoms. It is clear that the appearance of the ghost in Hamlet is likewise the ghost of the unnatural crime itself, which creeps about like a spectre, forcing its way through bolts and bars, raising an anxious and uncomfortable feeling in the minds of the inmates of the house, and striving amid the pain and the anguish to betray itself, and to find its own punishment. In tragedy, however, the symbolical assumes the form of a terrible, even though concealed Reality; its moral significance

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appears in external, actual objectivity, because the bearer of the tragic pathos is the one distinct side of Reality itself. The ghosts that appear are the ghosts of real, deceased persons; the witches – although half natural, half supernatural, and yet, at the same time, actual human beings – appear raised above the human standard only on account of their unmeasurable wickedness, and the co-operation of higher powers. In comedy, on the other hand, as in The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Marvellous is magical throughout; the elves and spirits have nothing in common with Reality; they belong to a perfectly different, independent species of beings, distinct from the creatures of this world. This, in fact, constitutes the fantastic character of these creatures, and for this very reason, their nature is even more symbolical than that of their kindred in tragedy. And this distinction between tragedy and comedy is again a corroboration of Shakespeare’s clear perception and fine feeling of the difference of the species, in fact, an actually fantastic tragedy such as the Spanish imagination of a Calderon endeavoured to produce, ceases to be truly tragic, the fantastic is appropriate only in the sphere of comedy. If, in accordance with these preliminary remarks, we look more closely into the Shakespearian idea of comedy in general, and its affinity to the fantastic, it will, in the first place, lead us to discover the general significance of the Wonderful in his comedies. Man, in his folly and perversity, in his selfish arbitrariness and caprice loses the dominion over himself, and thereby over the outer world: caprice and arbitrariness are, in fact, but the consequences and expression of the want of self-control. Man, thereby, unavoidably falls beneath the sway of accident, and the unaccountable change of outward circumstances; he becomes a slave to a power foreign to himself, which soon he can no longer resist, because from the very first he had no wish to resist. This power is, in reality, nature and its own natural condition; for in consequence of man’s want of a just and true, i.e. of an ethical conception of things, and of a moral dominion over himself, he immediately becomes a slave to his natural impulses and passions, to the momentary conditions of his mind, inclinations and desires, and to his selfish resolves, ideas and fancies. This is no doubt what Shakespeare, in general, intend to intimate symbolically by making elves or spirits like Ariel and his fellows carry on their pranks only with fools or such persons as are decidedly immoral or excited by some violent passion, – whereas they not only spare those that are good and noble in character, but even appear subject to them. This, on the other hand, is the reason why Shakespeare’s comic spirits are evidently but the personified powers of nature, as will be seen by a closer examination, and shall be proved more definitely in what we have still to say. For the present I shall content myself with drawing attention to the fact that, in consequence of the manner in which Shakespeare conceives and treats the Fantastic, the Wonderful, and what is like a fairy tale in character, the very improbability attached to these – and, therefore, to be avoided as much as possible in a drama – seems almost to vanish, because the spectator does not become clearly conscious of the improbability. Coleridge, in his remarks on ‘The Tempest,’ justly maintains that there is a sort of improbability with which we are shocked in dramatic representation not less than in a narrative of real life, because it not only contradicts the latter, but also the poetical reality, or that reality which we – lost in the region of the imagination, as in a dream – unconsciously grant to the figures of poetry, and which constitutes the

 Hermann Ulrici, the Wonderful and the Real 113 so-called illusion. The result of this is that in a simple tale or fairy tale, for instance, the conscious of a glimmering of deep seriousness lying at the foundation of the whole and shining through every line of the merry play; the poem although gliding past our view like a vision, possesses nevertheless an inward and deeper gravity, and the comic parts even excite such as number of suggestive thoughts that our laughter involuntarily change into a thoughtful smile. (39–43)

18

W. J. Birch, religion 1848

From An Inquiry into the Philosophy and Religion of Shakespeare (London, 1848). John William Birch (1811–63), a professor at Oxford University, was the first scholar to investigate Shakespeare’s views on religion. He saw Shakespeare as a successor to the Christian morality tradition, but one who rewrote it by heralding a new non-religious drama. Birch is of the opinion that Shakespeare was disposed to ‘undress the miracles and more especially the morals of the plays, and reduce them to the nakedness of nature and the truth of history, which has gained for Shakespeare with some, not only the idea he had no religion but no “moral purpose” in his works’.[1] Thus, Birch argues that Shakespeare was a sceptic in matters of religion and spirituality. This thesis is continued in Birch’s reading of The Tempest, although he does not see the play’s atheism precluding morality. Although Birch’s ideas disturbed some of his contemporaries (H. H. Furness, for instance, described Birch’s statements as a ‘rare tissue of perverted ingenuity’[2]), his criticism was clearly influential: a few decades later Herbert Thurston, writing in the 1912 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia, questioned not only Shakespeare’s Catholicism, but wondered ‘whether Shakespeare was not infected with the atheism, which . . . was rampant in the more cultured society of the Elizabethan age.’[ 3]

The Boatswain, in the storm, has no religion – neither reverence for God or man, but a love of life, which he respects more in himself than others. He says you are to be thankful you have lived so long, and be ready for the mischance of death. ‘Readiness is all,’ as Hamlet said [Hamlet 5.2.222], and Gloster in Lear. The more pious old counsellor of Naples derives consolation from the idea that such a boatswain was rather fated to be hanged than drowned: – ‘Stand fast, good fate, to his hanging! make the rope of his destiny our cable, for our own doth little advantage! If he be not born to be hanged, our case is miserable’ [1.1.3–33]. This appears to be rather an ill timed mockery of prayer. On the re-appearance of the royal party the Boatswain receives them no better, but asks what do they there? and Sebastian gives the character of him and his language, by which again we may know what is considered blasphemous and derogatory of men and gods: ‘A pox o’ your throat! You bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog!’ [1.1.40].

 W. J. Birch, Religion 115 The Boatswain tells them to work. And when they rest fly to prayers, deeming all lost, he says, what, must our mouths be cold? Thinking of the different liquid and results when he should have to take in sea water instead of engulphing fiery spirits. The moral of this appears to be that on such occasions it would be better to work and endeavour to save yourself than waste time in prayer and lamentations, when a common fate must embrace all who expose themselves to it – the pious, the blasphemous, the good and the bad, the royal and the ignoble. Such has been the case in a wreck, when the only one saved has reported that whilst he stripped, committed himself to the waves, and the assistance of objects around him, the rest he left in supplication to heaven. ‘Mira. O! I have suffer’d/ With those that I saw suffer’ [1.2.5–6]. This is a sentiment of morality coming from an unsophisticated child of nature. The love of humanity, which is at once awakened in the heart of one of the same species, though ignorant of her kind before. This love, or this pity, left to itself, or cherished, would not bear to do injury, or see it done. ‘Mira. O! the cry did knock/ Against my very heart: poor souls, they perish’d’ [1.2.8–9]. The love of mankind and creatures of this earth, which she feels, she thinks ought to extend to heaven; and thus she passes judgement on the want of mercy in the higher powers, who permit shipwrecks and other mundane calamities. ‘Mira. Had I been any God of power, I would/ Have sunk the sea within the earth; or e’er/It should the good ship so have swallow’d, and/ The fraughting souls within her’ [1.2.10–13]. Shakespeare here does not spare to gird the gods, of whatever religion, for their want of mercy, which he represents, as he has done before, more an attribute of humanity. He puts it comparison that higher powers, if there be such, are not so good as men; and he has often rated them for their cruelty. The inference to be drawn is, that as before, prayer or not prayer, piety or impiety, good, or bad, were shown to be all alike before the causes of nature; so Shakespeare, in Miranda, gives the conclusion that there was no interference of Providence, no instance of is exercise on earth. Enough we see in these introductory strokes and from what we know of the end of the play, to suppose that Shakespeare framed this drama on the moral of Measure for Measure, and other plays: a human system of love, mercy, and forgiveness here, greater in extent, than in any religious scheme, present, or to arrive hereafter. Shakespeare gives an instance in Prospero of mentioning, in the same breath, Providence and fortune. [Quotes 1.2.159 Mira. How came we ashore? and 1.2.177–84 Pro. Know thus far forth/ By accident most strange, bountiful fortune . . . .] Thus Shakespeare mixed at random causes with providence or chance; sometimes revising one with the other, but adhering more to the one than to the other, showing to which he inclined; sometimes affirming it and the denying it, which induces us to think that he sometimes introduces Providence in propriety with the times, whilst he adhered on the whole to nature. Here, as in Hamlet, Providence is assumed immediately to be negatived; we think this is as strong evidence of the direction of a man’s mind, as if, from appearance, it was all on one side. It shows that he was aware of the other side of the question; of the religious belief in a Providence, that he held it up in deference to public opinion and to be opposed by his own opinion. As to speaking in character, here is one declaring himself, as Hamlet did in opposition to himself; and of the two ideas, it must be asked, which of them belongs to the writer? If it be

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said that Shakespeare only painted nature, as Shaftesbury has in his characteristics, declaring that men are visited with different and opposite ideas on the subjects of religion, then Shakespeare drew men as infidels, where in poetry he might have made them uniform, showed that he had the same opinion of men as another infidel, and that he was of that opinion in which he most often declared himself – the test which Shaftesbury says is applicable to the discovery of a man’s real private thoughts on questions of religion. Prospero, having gone from Providence to accident, proceeds to account for things present and to come from his own knowledge, and a star which presides over his fortunes. Caliban says to Stephano, he will show him where he may knock a nail into the head of Prospero sleeping. Why not have said where he might slay him, instead of mentioning a particular sort of death to a man sleeping, which occurs in the Bible, in the story of Sisera? Such an allusion in the mouth of Caliban on the stage we do not think reverential. The case here was one of folly and wickedness whilst in the Scriptures there were extenuating circumstances in the commission of the deed, the death of an enemy to one’s country, which Prospero was not, although so thought of by the half man and half brute, Caliban. On the provocations of Ariel, Trinculo says: ‘O forgive me my sins./ Ste. He that dies pays all debts: I defy thee. Mercy upon us’ [3.2.130–1]. In this drunken party is a repetition of Cassio under the same circumstances, using the Lord’s Prayer, with the joking response of Falstaff and denial of a future state. The conversation between these drunken associates is otherwise not very reverential in its allusions. Where you might expect to find it there is no mention of a future state; and in the dialogue between Antonio and Sebastian, there seems the conviction, whatever might happen on earth, there was no reckoning after death, and that the sleep of death, into which they propose to put Gonzalo and Alonzo, would be eternal and material. We shall find it fully developed by Prospero. Prospero enacts a scene of spirits to please his future son-in-law; when finished, Prospero turns what has been witnessed into argument and philosophy. Perhaps exception may be made physically to the extent which he allows to the wearing out of matter; but, both with regard to the universe, and particularly with regard to man, his conclusions as to their existence are most mortal and material. [Quotes 4.1.146–63 ff: Pro. You look, my son, in a mov’d sort,/ As if you were dismay’d; be cheerful, sir: . . .] It will be observed that he speaks of thin air, matter yet, however attenuated. Whether does he mean by ‘all which it inherit,’ these things he has mentioned upon the earth, or in continuation of the idea, that what succeeds his globe will come to the same end, and leave not a rack behind? Nothing can be more conclusive of the end of all things, great and small. Perpetual change of matter is proclaimed – perpetual loss of identity, which is the case with ourselves: as those spirits vanished, so shall we disappear. There is nothing more immortal or eternal in us than in the rest of the matter; what happens to them, in a shorter time, having a shorter time, having a shorter life, must happen to us. As these illusions, so are our dreams, and as these dreams are rounded by a sleep, so are our lives. We slept and knew not before we came into the world, so we shall when we leave it, of such stuff as to identity and eternity are we made. As is a dream in a sleep, so is life in eternity. Of such ‘stuff,’ not a very ennobling term, are we made.

 W. J. Birch, Religion 117 . . . . ‘Our revels ended,’ express the pleasure of life ended as well as the pangs. Life rounded with a sleep seems well expressed by Seneca in consolations to a friend, though, for the same purpose as Shakespeare has in speaking of death, he makes the consolation to consist, as Shakespeare does generally, in it being the termination of our pains. ‘Death finishes all our pains; beyond, there remains nothing to suffer; it restores us to that profound tranquility in which we were softly extended before that we saw the day’. Jean Jacques Rousseau, in a letter to Voltaire on his poem of Lisbon, says, ‘The question of Providence belongs to that of the immortality of the soul, which I have the happiness of believing, without being ignorant that reason may doubt it.’ Those have generally been considered atheists who have denied the immortality of the soul. Suidas, in his lexicon, vol. 1, p.108, says ‘Antheum est immortalitatem animae non conservare.’ That is to say, ‘It is atheistical not to hold the doctrine of the immortality of the soul’. After this natural philosophy of Shakespeare’s, we have a splendid example of this morality, in theory and practice, quite in conformity with similar sentiments and actions of his dramas. Ariel relates to Prospero the afflictions of the royal party wrecked on his island: [Quotes 5.1.17–32: Your charm so strongly works them,/ That if you now beheld them, your affections/ Would become tender’.] The sight of evil, as we have said before, in a natural condition of humanity, is and would be a sufficient guarantee against the commission of injuries. The consequences of one being like another, of whatever difference of opinion – of whatever different circumstances, which should result in mutual love, and which was so finely delivered by Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, are here repeated by Prospero. Reason properly exercised is a sufficient counterpoise to fury; the rarer, that is, the more excellent action, is rather in the forgiveness of injuries than in taking vengeance. Punishment should go no further than producing repentance, into which me should be led, and should not be given retaliation, or as precluding repentance and reform. Here is the moral of the play, which we remarked in the beginning. Miranda has the sentiments of her father and Ariel, and she says if she had been a god of power she would have saved the crew. Prospero had acted on, and was proceeding to the practice of, these percepts of morality. Can we help, therefore, thinking that with so marked a reference to what a god ought to do Shakespeare had in mind that neither man nor Providence should add to evil, but do all the good they could in this world, and that judgement in the next should exercise mercy and general pardon – that justice was not in eternal punishments, and should reach no further than repentance? These comparisons between a supposed god of power and man – the contrast between the feelings and practice of Miranda, Ariel, and Prospero – the introduction of spirits, and what they must be as well as man – the delivery of Prospero’s prisoners to a momentary place of trivial torment, and their release from it at the intercession of a spirit agreeing with his own intentions – all seems to us strongly to mar intentions towards a system of divine and religious judgement, as well as human. We do not any the more admit that Shakespeare believed in a future state; but how common it is for infidels to argue in the strain of Shakespeare – that from the attributes given to the Deity, particularly benevolence, he must excel in this virtue more than his creature – that he is not worse,

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as he is represented, but must be better and more merciful than man. We have before remarked that the purpose exhibited in this is more or less seen in other plays – was the sole drift of his purpose in Measure for Measure, where, villainy frustrated, Justice did not extend a frown further, to the penitent or not penitent – but, having rewarded the good, it left the bad to become better. The injuries of Alonzo and Sebastian, and the recent intended murderers, Antonio and Sebastian, are alike forgiven, and absolution made of their offences. Gonzalo addresses the re-appearance of the Boatswain, who had not suffered at all: ‘Now, blasphemy/That swear’st grace o’erboard not an oath on shore?/ Hast thou no mouth by land? what is the news?’ [5.1.218–20]. It appears blasphemy was none the worse, had got rid only of the wicked out of his ship, and having said no prayers, expressed no thanksgiving for his deliverance, no repentance of his blasphemy, in reply to the question of the pious Gonzalo, merely says [Quotes 5.1, 221–5: ‘The best news is that we have safely found . . . .’] There is no expression even of reverence for a miracle. Though Alonzo says – ‘And there is in this, business more than nature/Was ever conduct of,’ [5.1.242–3], Caliban is pardoned who is another Barnardine, though more a monster of fancy. Caliban being commanded to do his duty as servant, with his drunken associate, says: — Ay, that I will; and I’ll be wise hereafter,/ And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass/ Was I, to take this drunkard for a god?/ And worship this dull fool?’ [5.2.295–8]. Barnardine did not answer the exhortation of the Duke to repentance; and we say the idea given to this half-and half beast and human of turning to grace, is done in ridicule of religion, and is plainly expressed to produce that effect. There is the additional satire, or what may be called the philosophy of religion, as the Shaftesbury and Humes have it, that man makes his religion: according to what he is, so will he construct his divinity. An ass will have a fool for his god. (522–7, 530–3)

19

John Ruskin, slavery 1872

From Munera Pulveris: Six Essays on the Elements of Political Economy (New York, 1872). John Ruskin (1819–1900) was an important critic of art and architecture, a notable painter and a social commentator. While his career before 1858 was largely devoted to art criticism, starting that year and influenced by the philosopher Thomas Carlyle, Ruskin began to take interest in the social conditions of his age. Unto His Last (1862) and Munera Pulveris directly attacked the classical economics of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. Ruskin was disturbed by how utilitarian and materialistic concerns had taken over society and were perceived to be normal determinants of human behavior. The excerpt appears in the midst of a short discussion of slavery. Before he turns to The Tempest, Ruskin ponders various definitions of slavery: slavery simply as the equivalent of captivity (which is expedient and necessary in many cases, argues Ruskin, though the abuse of captives cannot be justified), as the purchase of the right to forced labour, and the purchase of the entire being, both body and soul. Following this, Ruskin considers The Tempest as an allegory of slavery and Ariel and Caliban as two types of slaves – Ariel as the generous and free-spirited one and Caliban as the tormented one. Ruskin indicates that he would return to the subject of Caliban later in his work, but fails to do so – in this discussion Caliban is fully enslaved, and unlike Ariel, slavery leaves an enduring mark on him.

The fact is that slavery is not a political institution at all, but an inherent naturally and eternal inheritance of a large portion of the human race – to whom, the more you give of their own freewill, the more slaves they will make themselves. In common parlance, we idly confuse captivity with slavery, and are always thinking of the difference between pine-trunks (Ariel in the pine), and cowslip-bells (‘In the cowslip-bell I lie’), or between carrying wood and drinking (Caliban’s slavery and freedom), instead of noting the far more serious differences between Ariel and Caliban themselves, and the means by which, practically, that difference may be brought about and diminished. Plato’s slave, in the Polity who, well dressed and washed, aspires to the hand of his master’s daughter, corresponds curiously to Caliban attacking Prospero’s ceil; and there is an undercurrent of meaning throughout, in The Tempest as well as in The

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Merchant of Venice; referring in this case to government, as in that to commerce. Miranda the wonderful, so addressed first by Ferdinand, (‘Oh, you wonder!’) corresponds to Homer’s Arete: Ariel and Caliban are respectively the spirits of faithful and imaginative labour, opposed to rebellious, hurtful, and slavish labour. Prospero (‘or hope’), a true governor, is opposed to Sycorax, the mother of slavery, her name ‘Swine-raven’ indicating at once brutality and deceitfulness; hence the line – ‘As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed with raven’s feather,’ – etc. for all these dreams of Shakespeare, as those of true and strong men must be, are . . . divine phantasms, and shadows of things that are. We hardly tell our children, willingly, a fable with no purport in it; yet we think God send his best messengers only to sing fairy tales to fond and empty. The Tempest is just like the grotesque in a rich missal, ‘clasped where paynims pray.’ Ariel is the spirit of generous and free-hearted service, in early stages of human society oppressed by ignorance and wild tyranny: venting groans as fast as mil-wheels strike; in shipwreck of states, dreadful; so that ‘all but mariners plunge in the brine, and quit the vessel, then all afire with yet having in itself the will and sweetness of truest peace, whence that is especially called Ariel’s song, ‘Come unto these yellow sands, and there, take hands, courtesied when you have, and kissed, the wild waves whist:’ [1.2.375–9] (mind, it is ‘cortesia,’ not ‘curtsey,’) and read ‘quiet’ for ‘whist,’ if you want the full sense. Then you may indeed foot it featly, and sweet spirits bear the burden for you – with watch in the night, and call in early morning. The vis viva in elemental transformation follows – ‘Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made’ [1.2.397–8]. Then, giving rest after labour, it fetches dew ‘from the still vext Bermoothes,’ and, ‘with a charm joined to their suffered labour, leaves men asleep’ [1.2.229–32]. Snatching away the feast of the cruel, it seems to them as a harpy; followed by the utterly vile, who cannot see it in any shape, but to whom it is the picture of nobody, it still gives shrill harmony to their false and mocking catch, ‘Thought is free;’ – but leads them into briars and foul places, and at last hollas the hounds upon them. Minister of fate against the great criminal, it joins itself with the ‘incensed seas and shores’ [3.3.74] – the sword that layeth as it cannot hold, and may ‘with bemocked at stabs as soon kill the still-closing waters, as diminish one dowle that is in its plume.’ As the guide and aid of true love, it is always called by Prospero ‘fine’ (the French ‘fine,’ not the English), or ‘delicate’ – another long note would be needed to explain all the meaning in this word. Lastly, its work done, and war, it resolves itself into the elements. The intense significance of the last song, ‘Where the bee sucks,’ I will examine in its due place. The types of slavery in Caliban are more palpable, and need not be dwelt on now; though I will notice them also, severally, in their proper places; – the heart of his slavery is in his worship: ‘That’s a brave god, and bears celestial liquor’. But, in illustration of the sense in which the Latin ‘benigmus’ and ‘malignus’ are to be coupled with Eleutheria and Douleia, note that Caliban’s torment is always the physical reflection of his own nature – ‘cramps’ and ‘side stitches that shall pen thy breath up; thou shalt be pinched, as thick as honeycombs:’ [1.2.326, 328–9] the whole nature of slavery being one cramp and cretinous contraction. Fancy this of Ariel! You may fetter him, but you set no mark on him; you may put him to hard work and far journey, but you cannot give him a cramp. (125–9)

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Daniel Wilson, Caliban as the ‘missing link’ 1873

From Caliban: The Missing Link (London, 1873). Daniel Wilson (1816–92) was an anthropologist and historian who studied the native peoples of Canada and of pre-historic Scotland. Charles Darwin had published his groundbreaking and controversial On the Origin of Species in 1859. Clearly influenced by Darwin’s thesis on the evolution of life, Wilson posits Caliban as the (now generally discredited) ‘missing link’ between ape and man. Caliban is certainly savage, but he is still ‘essentially human’, is capable of rational intelligence, and is trainable. Wilson’s reading of Caliban received a great deal of attention, partly because of the general prominence enjoyed by Darwin’s theories. It also influenced many stage renditions of Caliban – in the 1890s Frank Benson, who played Caliban as a half-monkey and half human, spent hours observing the behavior of monkeys and apes and portrayed Caliban as scampering around stage and swarming up trees. Apart from its influence on the theatre, Wilson’s reading is interesting in that it is among the earliest attempts to apply scientific ideas to literature.

The Caliban of evolution The poor monster – sole lord of his nameless island in an unknown sea, has excited mingled feelings of wonder, admiration, and disgust. But the latter feeling must be transient with all but the superficial student. With truer appreciation, Franz Horn has said: ‘In spite of his imperfect, brutish, half-human nature, Caliban is something marvelously exciting, and as pretender to the sovereignty of the island ridiculously sublime. He is inimitable as a creation of the most powerful poetic fancy; and the longer the character is studied the more marvelous does it appear’. It is by reason of this imperfect, brutish, half-human nature, that Caliban anew invites our study, in relation to disclosures of science undreamt of in that age which witnessed his marvelous birth. The idea of beings, monstrous and brutal in every physical characteristic, and yet in some not clearly defined sense human, as the inhabitants of strange lands, was familiar not only in Shakespeare’s day but long before. Medieval chroniclers describe

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the Huns who ravaged Germany, Italy, and France in the ninth and tenth centuries, as hideous, boar-tusked, child-devouring ogres; and after somewhat the same type, Marco Polo represents the Andaman Islanders as ‘a most brutish, savage race, having heads, eyes, and teeth resembling those of the canine species:’ cruel cannibals who ate human flesh raw, and devoured everyone on whom they could lay their hands. Yet after all, much of this was only an exaggeration of the actual savage, such as he is to be met with even in our own day. An older English writer, the famous traveler, Sir John Mandeville, who commenced his wanderings in 1322, tells how he had ‘ben long tyme over the see, and seyn and gon thorgh manye dyverse londes, and many provynces and kyngdomes and iles: where dwellen many dyverse folk, and of dyverse maneres and lawes, and of dyverse schappes of men; of whiche I shalle speke more pleynly hereafter.’ And so he accordingly does: telling, for example, of ‘the land of the Bacharie, where be full of evil folk and full cruel. In that country been many Ipotaynes, that dwell sometimes inn the water and sometimes on the land: half-man and half-horse, and they eat men when they may take them’. Besides these, he also describes the griffons of the same country, half-eagle, half-lion, but so large that they carry off a horse or couple of oxen to their nest; in proof of which Mandeville tell us, the griffon’s talons are as big as great oxen’s horns, ‘so that men maken cuppes of hem to drynken of ’. No doubt Milton had Mandeville’s griffon in view when he compared the fiend to this monster, as he laboriously winged his way up from the nethermost abyss of Hell. Of the like travellers’ tales of more modern date, there will be occasion to speak by and by. The classification of men by the naturalists of Mandeville’s and Marco Polo’s days, was into Christians and infidels; and it seemed then not only natural, but most logical, to conceive of the latter as of betusked ogres, hippo-centaurs, or any other monstrous half-brutish and wholly devilish humanity. But a different ideal of imperfect transitional human beings originated at a later date in the very natural exaggerations of gorilla, chimpanzee, or orang, as first seen or reported of in their native haunts. If The Tempest was indeed the latest production of Shakespeare’s pen, then the date of that most amusing old book of travels, Purchas his Pilgrimage, closely corresponds in point of time with its appearance on the English stage. Published in 1613, that is within less than three years before Shakespeare’s death, its author embodies among its miscellaneous contents, the story of his friend, Andrew Battle, who while a serjeant in the service of the Portuguese, in the kingdom of Congo, on quarrelling with his masters fled to the woods, where he lived eight or nine months; and there he saw ‘a kinde of great apes, if they might be so termed, of the height of a man, but twice as bigge in feature of their limmes, with strength proportionable, hairie all over, otherwise altogether like men and women in their whole bodily shape.’ At a later date Purchas described more minutely the pongo, a huge brute-man, sleeping in the trees, building a roof to shelter himself from the rain, and living wholly on fruits and nuts. ‘They cannot speake,’ he says, ‘and have no understanding more than a beast. The people of the countrie, when they travail in the woods, make fires where they sleepe in the night; and in the morning, when they are gone, the pongoes will come and sit about the fire till it goeth out; for they have no understanding to lay the wood together.’

 Daniel Wilson, Caliban as the ‘Missing Link’ 123 This may suffice to illustrate the ‘wild men’ who, with greater or less exaggeration, figure in the traveller’s tales of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They attract us now with a fresh interest, when we are being taught by novel inductions of science to look, in recent or tertiary life, for some such link between then lowest type of savage man and the highest of the anthropomorpha. . . . . To recognize that man and the ape are both animals, and so to determine their classification in the same animal kingdom solely by means of physical tests on which the whole system is based, is one thing; to assume that man is but the latest phase of development in a progressive scale of evolution, of which the ape is an earlier stage, is the other and more startling affirmation which is permeating the minds of the present generation of thinkers, and revolutionizing the science of the nineteenth century. ....

The monster Caliban . . . . ‘Do you put tricks upon us with savages and men of Ind?’ says Stephano [2.1.57– 8]; while the drunken Trinculo, puzzling, in his besotted fashion, over Caliban who has fallen flat at his approach in the hope of escaping notice, exclaims: [Quotes 2.1.24 ff: ‘What have we here? a man or a fish? . . .’] It would be curious to recover an exact delineation of the Caliban of the Elizabethan stage. ‘This is a strange thing as e’er I looked on,’ is in the exclamation of the King of Naples, when Caliban is driven in, along with the revellers who have been plotting who should ‘be king o’ the isle;’ and on his brother, Sebastian, asking, ‘What things are these my Lord Antonio?’ he replies: ‘One of them is a plain fish, and no doubt marketable.’ There was obviously something marine, or fish-like, in the aspect of the island monster. ‘In the dim obscurity of the past’, says Darwin, ‘we can see that the early progenitor of all the vertebrae must have been an aquatic animal’; in its earliest stages ‘more like the larvae of our existing marine Ascidians than any other known form,’ but destined in process of time, through lancelot, ganoid, and other kindred transitions, to – Suffer a sea change/ Into something rich and strange’ [1.2.401–2]. In Caliban there was undesignedly embodied, seemingly, an ideal of the latest stages of such an evolution . . . . In reality, though by some scaly or fin-like appendages, the idea of a fish, or sea-monster, is suggested to all, the form of Caliban is, nevertheless, essentially human. In a fashion more characteristic of Milton’s than of Shakespeare’s wonted figure of speech, this is affirmed in language that no doubt purposely suggests the opposite idea to the mind, where Prospero says: — ‘Then was this island/ Save for the son that she did litter here/A freckled whelp, hag-born, not honoured with/ A human shape’ [1.2.281–4]. The double bearing of this is singularly expressive: — save for this son of Sycorax, the island was not honoured with a human shape. And, having thus indicated that his shape was human, by the use of the term ‘whelp’ and ‘littered’ the brutish ideal is strongly impressed on the mind. But his strictly anthropomorphic character is delicately suggested in other way. When Miranda says of Ferdinand ‘This/ Is the third

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man that e’er I saw, the first/ That e’er I sigh’d for’ [1.2.445–7], she can only refer to her father and Caliban. . . . .Caliban is, therefore, to all appearances in his twenty fifth year, as we catch a first glimpse of this pre-Darwinian realisation of the intermediate link between brute and man. It seems moreover to be implied that he has already passed his maturity. At an earlier age than that at which man is capable of self-support, the creature had been abandoned to the solitude of his island-home, and learned with his long claws to dig for pig-nuts; and now, says Prospero, ‘as with age his body uglier grows, so his mind cankers.’ We may conceive of the huge canine teeth and prognathous jaws which in old age assume such prominence in the higher quadrumana. Darwin claims for the bonnet-monkey ‘the forehead which gives to man his noble and intellectual appearance;’ and it is obvious that it was not wanting in Caliban: for when he discovers the true quality of the drunken fools he has mistaken for gods, his remonstrance is, ‘we shall all be turned to apes with foreheads villainous low.’ Here then is the highest development of ‘the beast that wants discourse of reason’. He has attained to all the maturity his nature admits of, and so is perfect as the study of a living creature distinct from, yet next in order below the level of humanity. The being thus called into existence for the purposes of dramatic art is a creation well meriting the thoughtful study of the modern philosopher, whatever deductions he may have based on the hypotheses of recent speculation. Caliban’s is not a brutalised, but a natural brute mind. He is a being in whom the moral instincts of man have no part; but also in whom the degradation of a savage humanity is equally wanting. He is a novel anthropoid of a high type – such as on the hypothesis of evolution must have existed intermediately between the ape and man, – in whom some spark of rational intelligence has been enkindled under the tutorship of one who has already mastered the secrets of nature. We must not be betrayed into a too literal interpretation of the hyperboles of the wrathful Duke of Milan. He is truly enough the ‘freckled whelp’ whom Prospero has subdued to useful services, as he might break in a wild colt, or rear a young wolf to do his bidding, though in token of higher capacity he specially trained him to menial duties peculiar to man. For not only does he ‘fetch in our wood,’ as Prospero reminds his daughter, ‘and serves in offices that profit us,’ but ‘he does make our fire’ [1.2.312, 1.2.311]. No incident attending the discovery of the New World is more significant than that of Columbus stationed on the poop of the Santa Maria, his eye ranging along the darkened horizon, when the sun had once more gone down on the disappointed hopes of the voyagers. Suddenly a light glimmered in the distance, once and again reappeared to the eyes of Pedro Gutierrez and others whom the great admiral summoned to catch this gleam of realised hopes; and then darkness and doubt resumed their reign. But to Columbus all was light. That feeble ray had told of the presence of the fire-maker, man. The natural habits of Caliban, however, are those of the denizen of the woods. We may conceive of him like the pongoes of Mayombe, described by Purchas, who would come and sit by thee travellers’ deserted camp-fire, but had not sense enough to replenish it with fuel. We have no reason to think of him as naturally a cooking or fire-using animal though, under the training of Prospero, he proves to be so far in advance of the most highly developed anthropoid as to be capable of learning the art of fire-making.

 Daniel Wilson, Caliban as the ‘Missing Link’ 125 ‘We’ll visit Caliban. my slave, who never yields us kind answers,’ Duke Prospero says to his daughter in the second scene of The Tempest [1.2.308], where they first appear, and Caliban is introduced; but the gentle Miranda recalls with shuddering revulsion the brutal violence of their strange servitor, and exclaims with unwonted vehemence; ‘‘Tis a villain, sir, I do not love to look on’ [1.2.309]. But repulsive as he is, his services cannot be dispensed with. ‘As ‘tis, we cannot miss him’ [1.2.309–10], is Prospero’s reply; and then, irritated alike by the sense of his obnoxious instincts and reluctant service, he heaps opprobrious epithets upon him: ‘What, ho! slave! Caliban! thou earth, thou! Come forth, I say, thou tortoise!’ [1.2.313] and at length, as he still lingers, muttering in his den, Prospero breaks out in wrath – ‘Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself upon thy wicked dam, come forth!’ Schlegel and Hazlitt accordingly speak in nearly the same terms of ‘the savage Caliban, half brute, half demon;’ while Gervinus – although elsewhere characterizing him with more appreciative acumen as ‘an embryonic being defiled as it were by his earthly origin from the womb of savage nature,’ – does, with prosaic literalness, assume that his mother was the witch Sycorax, and the devil his father. Shakespeare assuredly aimed at the depiction of no such foul ideal. It is the recluse student of nature’s mysteries, and not the poor island monster that is characteristically revealed in such harsh vituperations. Prospero habitually accomplishes his projects through the agency of enforced service. He has usurped a power over the spirits of air, as well as over the earth-born slave; and both are constrained to unwilling obedience. Hence he has learned to exact and compel service to the utmost; to count only on the agency of enslaved power: until an imperious habit disguises the promptings of a generous and kindly nature. With all his tenderness towards the daughter whose presence alone has made life endurable to him, he flashes up in sudden ire at the slightest interference with his plans for her; as when she interposes on behalf of Ferdinand, he exclaims – ‘Silence! One word more shall make me chide thee, if not hate thee’ [1.2.476–7]. He is indeed acting an assumed part, ‘lest too light winning’ [1.2 53] should make the lover undervalue his prize; but it is done in the imperious tone with which habit has taught him to respond to the slightest thwarting of his command. This is still more apparent in his dealings with the gentle Ariel, who owes to him delivery from cruelest bondage. The relations subsisting between them are indicated with rare art, and are as tender as is compatible with beings of different elements. The sylph is generally addressed in kindly admiring terms, as ‘my brave spirit,’ ‘my tricksy spirit,’ ‘my delicate and dainty Ariel.’ yet on the slightest questioning of Prospero’s orders, he is told: ‘Thou liest, malignant thing!’ [2.2.256] and on the mere show of murmuring is threatened with durance more terrible than that from which he has been set free. In all this the characteristics of the magician are consistently wrought out. According to the ideas of an age which still believed in magic, he has usurped the lordship of nature, and subdued to his will the spirits of the elements, by presumptuous, if not altogether sinful arts. They are restrained in subjection by the constant exercise of this supernatural power, and yield him only the reluctant obedience of slaves. This has to be borne in remembrance, if we would not misinterpret the ebullitions of imperious harshness on the part of Prospero towards beings who can only be retained in subjection by such enforced mastery. That Caliban regards him with as malignant a

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hatred as the caged and muzzled bear may be supposed to entertain towards his keeper, is set forth with clear consistency. Nor is it without abundant reason. He is dealt with not merely as a ‘lying slave, who stripes may move, not kindness;’ but by his master’s magical art, the almost familiar objects of nature are made instruments of torture. They pinch, affright him, pitch him into the mire, as deceptive fire-brands mislead him in the dark, grind his joints with convulsions, contort his sinews with cramp, and, as he says, [Quotes 2.2.8–14: ‘For every trifle are they set upon me . . . .’]. To reconcile such harsh violence with the merciful forgiving character of Prospero in his dealings with those who, after having done him the cruellest wrongs, are placed in his power, we have to conceive of the outcast father and child compelled in their island solitude to subdue a gorilla, or other brute menial, to their service; and, after in vain trying kindness, driven in self-defence to protect themselves from its brutal violence. The provocation which has roused the unappeasable wrath if Miranda’s father was indeed great; but recognizing the ‘most poor credulous monster’ as the mere brute that he is, it involved no moral delinquency; and therefore he is not to be regarded as devilish in origin and inclinations, because he tells Stephano what is literally true – ‘I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer, that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island.’ He accordingly invites the drunken butler to be his supplanter: — ‘If thy greatness will/ Revenge it on him, –for I know thou darest. – / Thou shalt be lord of it, and I’ll serve thee’ [3.2.52–4]. He gloats on the idea of braining the tyrant, just as an abused human slave might, and indeed many a time has done [Quotes 3.2.87–95: ‘Why, as I told thee, ‘tis a custom with him/ I’ the afternoon to sleep there thou mayst brain him . . . .’] All this would be hateful enough in a human being: but before we pronounce Caliban a ‘demi-devil,’ we must place alongside of him the butler Stephano, who, with no other provocation than that of a base nature, and with no wrongs whatever to avenge, is ready with the response – ‘Monster, I will kill this man; his daughter and I will be king and queen, and Trinculo and thyself shall be viceroys;’ and so the poor servant monster already fancies his slavery at an end, and exclaims, ‘Freedom, hey-day! Hey-day, freedom!’ [2.2.184]. He who undertakes to subdue the wild nature of ape, leopard, wolf, or tiger, must not charge it with moral delinquency when it yields to its native instincts. It may be, as modern science would teach us, that our most human characteristics are but developed instincts of the brute; for the churl, ‘Will let his coltish nature break/ At seasons through the gilded pale.’[1] The savage, though familiarised with habits of civilisation, reverts with easy recoil to his barbarian licence; and the highest happiness which the tamed monster of the island could conceive of, was once more to range in unrestrained liberty, digging up the pignuts with his long nails, or following the jay and the nimble marmoset over rock and tree. But there is nothing malignant in this; and that nothing essentially repulsive is to be assumed as natural to his is apparent from the very invectives of Prospero – [Quotes 1.2.344–8: ‘Thou most lying slave . . . .’]. Leaving aside, then, the exaggerations of the incensed Prospero, which have their legitimate place in the development of the drama, let us study, as far as may be, the actual characteristics of the strange islander. His story is told, briefly indeed, yet with adequate minuteness. Prospero retorts on him the recapitulation of kindness which

 Daniel Wilson, Caliban as the ‘Missing Link’ 127 had been repaid with outrage never to be forgiven: [Quotes 1.2.352–60: ‘Abhorred slave,/ Which any print of goodness will not take . . . .’] In other words he proved to be simply an animal, actuated by the ordinary unrestrained passions and desires which in the brute involve no moral evil, and but for the presence of Miranda would have attracted no special notice. Situated as he actually is, he is not to be judged of wholly from the invectives of his master. With brute instincts which have brought on him the condign punishment of Prospero, and a savage nature which watches, like any wild creature under harsh restraint, for escape and revenge, his feelings are nevertheless rather those of the captive bear than of ‘one who treasures up a wrong’. There is in him still a dog-like aptitude for attachment, a craving even for the mastership of some higher nature, and an appreciation of kindness not unlike that of the domesticated dog, though conjoined with faculties of intelligent enjoyment more nearly approximating to humanity. When compelled reluctantly to emerge from his den, he enters muttering curses; yet even they have a smack of nature in them. They are in no way devilish, but such as the wild creature exposed to the elements may be supposed to recognize as the blight and mildew with which Nature gratifies her ill-will. He imprecates on his enslaver – [Quotes 1.2.321– 324: ‘As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed . . . .’]. Prospero threatens him with cramps, side stitches that shall pen his breath up, urchins to prick him, and pinching pains more stinging than the bees; but his answer has no smack of fiendishness, though he does retort with bootless imprecations. He stolidly replies – [Quotes 1.2.330–43: ‘I must eat my dinner/This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother . . . .’]. Prospero replies to him as a creature ‘whom stripes may move, not kindness,’ who had been treated companionably, with human care, till his brute instincts compelled the subjection of him to such restraint. He describes the pity with which he at first regarded the poor monster, whose brutish gabble he had trained to the intelligent speech which is now used for curses. In all this do we not realise the ideal anthropoid in the highest stage of Simian evolution, stroked and made much of like a favourite dog, fed with dainties, and at length taught to frame his brute cries into words by which his wishes could find intelligible utterance. The bigger and the lesser light receive names, and are even traced, as we may presume their origin. But the intellectual development compasses, at the utmost, a very narrow range and when the drunken Stephano plies him with his bottle of sack, the dialogue runs in this characteristic fashion: — [Quotes: 2.2.136–49: Steph ‘How now, moon-calf? How does thine argue? . . . .’]. But we presently see Caliban in another and wholly different aspect. Like the domesticated animal, which he really is, he has certain artificial habits and tastes superinduced in him; but whenever his natural instincts reveal themselves we see neither a born devil, nor a being bearing any likeness to degraded savage humanity. He is an animal at home among the sounds and scenes of living nature. ‘Pray you, tread softly, that the blind mole may not hear a footfall,’ is his exhortation to his drunken companions as the approach the entrance of Prospero’s cell. When Trinculo frets him, threatened revenge is. ‘He shall drink nought but brine; for I’ll not show him where the quick freshes are;’ and he encourages his equally rude companion with the assurance – [Quotes 3.2.135–43: ‘Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, . . . .’]. To the

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drunken butler and his comrade, Caliban is a most poor credulous monster ! a puppyheaded, scurvy, abominable monster ! a most ridiculous monster ! and when by their aid, he has drowned his tongue in sack, he is no more to them than a debauched fish. But Shakespeare has purposely placed the true anthropomorphoid alongside of these types of degraded humanity, to shew the contrast between them. He is careful to draw a wide and strongly-marked distinction between the coarse prosaic brutality of debased human nature, and the inferior, but in no ways degraded, brute nature of Caliban. ‘He is,’ says Prospero, ‘as disproportioned in his manners as in his shape’ [5.1.291]. He had associated for years in friendly dependence, lodged with Prospero in his own cell; for we have to remember that Miranda was but three years old when her father took in hand the taming of the poor monster, and used him with human care until compelled to drive him forth to his rocky prison. His narrow faculties have thus been forced into strange development; but though the wrathful Prospero pronounce him a creature ‘which any print of goodness will not take, being capable of all ill,’ that is by no means the impression which the poet designs to convey. Man, by reason of his higher nature which invites him to aspire, and his moral sense which clearly present to him the choice between good and evil, is capable of a degradation beyond reach of the brute. The very criminality which has so hardened Prospero’s heart against his poor slave, involves to himself no sense of moral wrong. ‘O ho! O ho! would it had been done!’ is his retort to Prospero; ‘thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else this isle with Calibans’ (1.2.350–1). The distinction between the coarse sensuality of degraded humanity, and this most original creation of poetic fancy, with its gross brute-mind, its limited faculties, its purely animal cravings and impulses, is maintained throughout. . . . . If we can conceive of a baboon endowed with speech, and moved by gratitude, have we not here the very ideas to which its nature would prompt it. It is a creature native to the rocks and woods, at home in the haunts of the jay and marmoset: a fellowcreature of like nature and sympathies with themselves. The talk of the ship’s crew is not only coarse, but even what it is customary to call brutal; while that of Stephano and Trinculo accords with their debased and besotted humanity. Their language never assumes a rhythmical structure, or rises to poetic thought. But Caliban is in perfect harmony with the rhythm of the breezes and the tides. His thoughts are essentially poetical, within the range of his lower nature; and so his speech is, for the most part, in verse. He has that poetry of the senses which seems natural to his companionship with the creatures of the forest and the seashore. Even his growl, as he retorts impotent curses on the power that has enslaved him, is rhythmical. Bogs, fens, and the infectious exhalations that the sun sucks up, embody his ideas of evil; and his acute senses are chiefly at home with the dew, and the fresh springs, the clustering filberts, the jay in his leafy nest or the blind mole in his burrow. No being of all that people the Shakespearean drama more thoroughly suggests the idea of a pure creation of the poetic fancy than Caliban. He has a nature of his own essentially distinct from the human beings with whom he is brought in contact. He seems indeed the half-human link between the brute and man; and realizes, as no degraded Bushman or Australian savage can do, a conceivable intermediate stage of the anthropomorphous existence, as far above the most highly organized ape as it

 Daniel Wilson, Caliban as the ‘Missing Link’ 129 falls short of rational humanity. He excites a sympathy such as no degraded savage could. We feel for the poor monster, so helplessly in the power of the stern Prospero, as for some caged wild beast pining in cruel captivity, and rejoice to think of him at last free to range in harmless mastery over his island solitude. He provokes no more jealousy as the inheritor of Prospero’s usurped lordship over his island home than the caged bird which has escaped to the free forest again. His is a type of development essentially non-human, – though, for the purposes of the drama, endued to an extent altogether beyond the highest attainments of the civilized, domesticated animal, with the exercise of reason and the use of language; a conceivable civilization such as would, to a certain extent, run parallel to that of man, but could never converge to a common centre (14–17, 73–91).

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Edward Dowden, Shakespeare as Prospero 1875

From Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London, 1875). Edward Dowden (1843–1913) was a critic, poet and lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin. While at Trinity, Dowden delivered a number of lectures entitled ‘The Mind and Art of Shakespeare’. These lectures became the materials for what was to be his most influential work, Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), a book that went through a number of editions and was translated into a number of languages. Dowden also wrote on the English poets including Robert Southey, Robert Browning and P.B. Shelley, and another work on Shakespeare titled Shakespeare Primer. Dowden’s best-known contribution to criticism of The Tempest is to identify Prospero with Shakespeare. Prospero’s status as magician, his decisions regarding his art, and his general disposition are characteristic of the older Shakespeare.

The wrong-doers of The Tempest are a group of persons of various degrees of criminality, from Prospero’s perfidious brother, still active in plotting evil to Alonzo, whose obligations to the Duke of Milan has been of a public or princely kind. Spiritual powers are in alliance with Prospero, and these, by terror and the awakening of remorse, prepare Alonzo for receiving the balm of Prospero’s forgiveness. He looks upon his son as lost, and recognizes in his son’s loss the punishment of his own guilt. ‘The powers delaying, not forgetting’ have incensed the sea and shores against the sinful men; nothing can deliver them except ‘heart-sorrow, and a clear life ensuing.’ Goethe, in the opening of the second part of Faust, has represented the ministry of external nature fulfilling functions with preference to the human conscience precisely the reverse of those ascribed to it in The Tempest. Faust, escaped from the prisonscene and the madness of Margarete, is lying on a flowery grass-plot, weary, restless, striving to sleep. The Ariel of Goethe call upon his attendant elvish spirits to prepare the soul of Faust from renewed energy by bathing him in the dew of Lathe’s stream, by assuaging his pain, by driving back remorse: ‘Besantftiget des Herzens grimmen Strauss;/ Entfernt des Vorwurfs glühend bittre Pfeils,/ Sein Innres reinigt von erlebtem Graus’. To dismiss from his conscience the sense of the wrong he has done to a dead woman, is the initial step in the further education and development of Faust.

 Edward Dowden, Shakespeare as Prospero 131 Shakespeare’s Ariel, breathing through the elements and the powers of nature, quickens the remorse of the king, for a crime of twelve years since. [Quotes 5.1.95–102: ‘O tis monstrous, monstrous! Methought the/ Billows spoke and told me of it . . . .’].The enemies of Prospero are now completely in his power. How shall he deal with them? They had perfidiously taken advantage of his unworldly and unpractical habits of life; they had thrust him away from his dukedom; they had exposed him with his threeyears’-old daughter in a rotten boat to the mercy of the waves. Shall he not now avenge himself without remorse? What is Prospero’s decision? [Quotes 5.1.25–30: ‘Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick . . . .’]. We have seen how Timon turned fiercely upon mankind, and hated the wicked race, ‘I am Misanthropos and hate mankind’. The wrongs inflicted upon Prospero were crueler and more base than those from which Timon suffered. But Prospero had not lived in a summer mood of lax and prodigal benevolence, he had lived severely, ‘all dedicated and to closeness and the bettering of my mind’ [1.2.102–3]. And out of the strong comes forth sweetness . . . . . . . Prospero’s forgiveness is solemn, judicial, and has in it something abstract and impersonal. He cannot wrong his own higher nature, he cannot wrong the nobler reason, by cherishing so unworthy a passion as the desire of vengeance. Sebastian and Antonio, from whose conscience no remorse has been elicited, are met by no comfortable pardon. They have perceived their lesson of failure and of pain, and may possible be convinced of the good sense and prudence of honourable dealing, even if they cannot perceive its moral obligation. Alonzo who is repentant is solemnly pardoned. The forgiveness of Prospero is an embodiment of impartial wisdom and loving justice. A portion of another play certainly belongs to this latest period of Shakespeare’s authorship – a portion of King Henry VIII.1 Dr. Johnson observed that the genius of Shakespeare comes in and goes out with queen Katherine. What then chiefly interested the dramatist in this designed and partly accomplished Henry VIII? The presence of a noble sufferer, one who was grievously wronged, and who by a plain loyalty to what is faithful and true, by a disinterestedness of soul and enduring magnanimity, passes out of all passion and personal resentment into the reality of things, in which much indeed of pain remains, but no ignoble wrath or shallow bitterness of heart. Her earnest endeavour for the welfare of her English subjects is made with fearless and calm persistence in the face of Wolsey’s opposition. In its integrity and freedom from self-regard set over against guile, and power, and pride. In her trial-scene the indignation of Katherine flashes forth against the Cardinal, but is an indignation which unswervingly progresses towards and penetrates into the truth. When a man has attained some high and luminous table-land of joy or of renouncement when he has really transcended self, or when some one of the everlasting, virtuous powers of the world-duty for sacrifice, or the strength of anything higher than oneself-has assumed authority over him, forthwith a strange pathetic, ideal light is shed over all beautiful things in the lower world which has been abandoned. We see the sunlight on our neighbour’s field, while we are preoccupied about the grain that is growing in our own. And when we have ceased to hug our souls to any material possession, we see sunlight wherever it falls. In the last chapter of George

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Eliot’s great novel, Romola, who has ascended into her clear and calm solitude of selftranscending duty, bends tenderly over the children of Tito, uttering in words made simple for their needs, the lore she has learnt from life, and seeing on their faces the light of strange, ideal beauty. In the latest plays, of Shakespeare, the sympathetic reader can discern unmistakable a certain abandonment of the common joy of the world, a certain remoteness from the usual pleasures and sadness of life, and at the same time, all the more, this tender bending over those who are like children still absorbed in their individual joys and sorrows. Over the beauty of youth and the love of youth, there is shed, in these plays of Shakespeare’s final period a clear yet tender luminousness, not elsewhere to be perceived in his writings. In his earlier plays, Shakespeare writes concerning young men and maidens, their loves, their mirth, their griefs, as one who is among them, who has a lively, personal interest in their concerns, who can make merry with them, treat them familiarly, and, if need be, can mock them into good sense. There is nothing in these early plays wonderful, strangely beautiful, pathetic about youth and its joys and sorrows. In the histories and tragedies, as was to be expected, more massive, broader, or more profound objects of interest engaged the poet’s imagination. But in these latest plays, the beautiful pathetic light is always present. There are the sufferers, aged, experienced, tried – Queen Katherine, Prospero, Hermione. And over against these there are the children absorbed in their happy and exquisite egoism – Perdita and Miranda, Florizel and Ferdinand, and the boys of the old Belarius The same means to secure ideality for these figures, so young and beautiful, in each case (instinctively perhaps rather than deliberately) resorted to. They are lost children, princes or a princess removed from the court, and its conventional surroundings, into some scene of rare, natural beauty. There are the lost princes – Arviragus and Guiderius, among the mountains of Wales, drinking free air, and offering their salutations to the risen sun. There is Perdita, the shepherdess-princess, ‘queen of curds and cream,’ sharing with old and young her flowers lovelier and more undying than those that Proserpina let fall from Dis’ s waggon. There is Miranda, (whose very name is significant of wonder) made up of beauty, and love, and womanly pity, neither courtly nor rustic, with the breeding of an island of enchantment, where Prospero is her tutor and protector, and Caliban her servant, and the Prince of Naples her lover. In each of these plays we can see Shakespeare, as it were, tenderly bending over the joys and sorrows of youth. We recognize this rather through the total characterization, and through a feeling and a presence, than through definite incident or statement. But some of this feeling escapes in the disinterested joy and admiration of old Belarius when he gazes at the princely youths, and in Camillo’s loyalty to Florizel and Perdita; while it obtains more distinct expression in such a word as that which Prospero utters, when from a distance he watches with pleasure Miranda’s zeal to relieve Ferdinand from his task of log-bearing – ‘Poor worm, thou are infected’.2 It is not chiefly because Prospero is a great enchanter, now about to break his magic staff, to drown his book deeper than ever plummet sounded, to dismiss his airy spirits, and to return to the practical service of his Dukedom, that we identify Prospero in some measure with Shakespeare himself. It is rather because the temper of Prospero, the grave harmony of his character, his self-mastery, his calm validity of will, his

 Edward Dowden, Shakespeare as Prospero 133 sensitiveness to wrong, his unfaltering justice, and with these, a certain abandonment, a remoteness from the common joys and sorrows of the world, are characteristic of Shakespeare as discovered to us in all his latest plays. Prospero is a harmonious and fully developed will. In the earlier play of fairy enchantment, the ‘human mortals,’ wander to and fro in a maze of error, misled by the mischievous frolic of Puck, the jester and clown of Fairyland. But here the spirits of the elements, and Caliban the gross genius of brute-matter needful for the service of life are brought under subjection to the human will of Prospero.3 What is more, Prospero has entered into complete possession of himself. Shakespeare has shown us his quick sense of injury, his intellectual impatience, his occasional moment of keen irritability, in order that we may be more deeply aware of his abiding strength and self-possession, and that we may perceive how these have been grafted upon a temperament, not impassive or unexcitable. And Prospero has reached not only the higher levels of moral attainment, he has also reached an altitude of thought from which he can survey the whole of human life, and see how small and yet how great it is. His heart is sensitive, he is profoundly touched by the joy of the children, with whom in the egoism of their love he passes for a thing of secondary interest; he is deeply moved by the perfidy of his brother. His brain is readily set a-work, and can with difficulty be checked from eager and excessive energizing; he is subject to the access of sudden and agitating thought. But Prospero masters his own sensitiveness, emotional and intellectual: – [Quotes: 4.1.156–63: ‘We are such stuff/ As dreams made on . . . .’]. ‘Such stuff as dreams are made on’. Nevertheless, in this little life, in this dream. Prospero will maintain his dream rights and fulfil his dream duties. In the dream, he, a Duke, will accomplish Duke’s work. Having idealized everything, Shakespeare left everything real. Bishop Berkeley’s foot was no less able to set a pebble flying than was the lumbering foot of Dr. Johnson. Nevertheless no material substance intervened between the soul of Berkeley and the immediate presence of the play of Divine power.4 A thought which seems to run through the whole of The Tempest, appearing here and there like a coloured thread in some web, is the thought that the true freedom of man consists in service. Ariel, untouched by human feeling, is panting for his liberty; in the last words of Prospero are promised his enfranchisement and dismissal to the elements. Ariel reverences his great master, and serves him with bright alacrity; but he is bound by none of our human ties, strong and tender, and he will rejoice when Prospero is to him as though he never were.5 To Caliban, a land-fish, with the duller elements of earth and water in his composition, but no portion of the higher elements, air and fire, though he receives dim intimations of a higher world, – a musical humming, or a twangling, or a voice heard in sleep-to Caliban, service is slavery.6 He hates to bear his logs; he fears the incomprehensible power of Prospero, and obeys, and curses. The great master has usurped the rights of the brute-power Caliban. And when Stephano and Trinculo appear, ridiculously impoverished specimens of humanity, with their shallow understandings and vulgar greeds, this poor earth-monster is possessed by a sudden schwarmerei, a fanaticism for liberty! – ‘ ’Ban, ‘ban. Ca’-Caliban,/ Has a new master; get a new man./Freedom, heyday! Heyday, freedom! freedom! freedom! heyday freedom!’ [2.2.184–6]. His new master also sings his impassioned hymn of liberty,

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the Marseillaise of the enchanted island: ‘Flout’em and scout’em. And /Scout ’em and flout’em;/ Thought is free’ [3.2.121–3]. The leaders of the revolution escaped from the stench and foulness of the horse-pond. King Stephano and his prime minister Trinculo, like too many leaders of the people, bring to an end their great achievement on behalf of liberty by quarrelling over booty, the trumpery which the providence of Prospero had placed in their way. Caliban, though scarce more truly wise or instructed than before, at least discovers his particular error of the day and hour. ‘What a thrice-double ass/ Was I, to take this drunkard for a god,/And worship this dull fool!’ [5.1.296–8]. It must be admitted that Shakespeare, if not, as Hartley Coleridge asserted, ‘a Tory and a gentleman,’ had within him some of the elements of English conservatism. But while Ariel and Caliban, each in his own way, is impatient of service, the human actors, in whom we are chiefly interested, are entering into bonds-bonds of affection, bonds of duty, in which they find their truest freedom. Ferdinand and Miranda emulously contend in the task of bearing the burden which Prospero has imposed upon the prince: [Quotes 3.1.59–67: ‘I am in my condition/ A prince, Miranda I do think, a king . . .’]. And Miranda speaks with the sacred candour from which spring the nobler manners of a world more real and glad than the world of convention and proprieties and pruderies: [Quotes 3.1.81–9: ‘Hence, bashful cunning! . . .’] In an earlier part of the play, this cord which runs through it had been playfully struck in the description of Gonzalo’s imaginary commonwealth, in which man is to be enfranchised from all the laborious necessities of life. Here is the ideal of notional liberty, Shakespeare would say, and to attempt to realise it at once lands us in absurdities and self-contradictions. [Quotes 2.1.149–58: ‘For no kind of traffic Would I admit: no/ name of magistrate; `’] Finally, in the Epilogue, which was written perhaps by Shakespeare, perhaps by someone acquainted with his thoughts, Prospero in his character of a man, no longer a potent enchanter, petitions the spectators of the theatre for two things, pardon and freedom. It would be straining matters to discover in this Epilogue profound significances. And yet in its playfulness it curiously falls in with the moral purport of the whole. Prospero, the pardoner, implores pardon. Shakespeare was aware-whether such be the significance (aside-for the writer’s mind) of this Epilogue or not-that no life is ever lived which does not need to receive as well as to render forgiveness. He knew that every energetic dealer with the world must seek a sincere and liberal pardon for many things. Forgiveness and freedom: these are keynotes of the play. When it was occupying the mind of Shakespeare, he was passing from his service as artist to his service as English country gentleman. Had his mind been dwelling on the question of how he should employ his new freedom, and had been enforcing upon himself the truth that the highest freedom lies in the bonds of duty?7 It remains to notice of The Tempest that it has had the quality, as a work of art, of setting its critics to work as if it were an allegory, and forthwith it baffles them, and seems to mock them for supporting that they had power to ‘pluck out the heart of its mystery’. A curious and interesting chapter in the history of Shakespearian criticism might be written if the various interpretations were brought together of the allegorical significances of Prospero, of Miranda, of Ariel, of Caliban. Caliban, says Kreyssig[8] is the People. He is Understanding apart from Imagination, declares Professor Lowell. He

 Edward Dowden, Shakespeare as Prospero 135 is the primitive man abandoned to himself, declares M Mezieres:[9] Shakespeare would say to Utopian thinkers, predecessors of Jean Jacques Rousseau. ‘Your hero walks on four feet as well as on two’. That Caliban is the missing link between man and brute (Shakespeare anticipating Darwinian theories), has been elaborately demonstrated by Daniel Wilson. Caliban is one of the powers of nature over which the scientific intellect obtains command, another critic assures us, and Prospero is the founder of the Inductive Philosophy. Caliban is the colony of Virginia. Caliban is the untutored early drama of Marlow.10 Such allegorical interpretations, however ingenious, we cannot set much store by. But the significance of a work of art like the character of a man is not to be discovered solely by investigation of its inward essence. Its dynamical qualities, so to speak, must be considered as well as its statical. It must be viewed in action; the atmosphere it effuses, its influence upon the minds of men must be noted. And it is certainly remarkable that this, the last or almost the last of Shakespeare’s plays, more than any other, has possessed this quality, of soliciting men to attempt the explanation of it, as of an enigma, and at the same time of baffling their enquiry. If I were to allow my fancy to run out in play after such an attempted interpretation, I should describe Prospero as the man of genius, the great artist, lacking at first in practical gifts which lead to material success, and set adrift on the perilous sea of life, in which he finds his enchanted island, where he may achieve his works of wonder. He bears with him Art in its infancy, – the marvelous child, Miranda. The grosser passions and appetites – Caliban – he subdues to his service, Mir. ‘Tis a villain, sir, I do/ Not love to look on. Pros. But as ‘tis We/ Cannot miss him’ [2. 1. 309–10]. And he partially informs this servant-monster with intellect and imagination; for Caliban has dim affinities with the higher world of spirits. But these grosser passions and appetites attempt to violate the purity of art. Caliban would seize upon Miranda and people the island with Calibans; therefore his servitude must be strict. And who is Ferdinand? is he not, with his gallantry and beauty, the younger Fletcher, in conjunction with whom Shakespeare worked upon The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII? Fletcher is conceived as a follower of the Shakespearian style and method in dramatic art; he had ‘eyed full many a lady with best regard,’ for several virtues had liked several women, but never any with whole-hearted devotion except Miranda. And to Ferdinand the old enchanter will entrust his daughter, ‘a third of his own life.’ But Shakespeare had perceived the weak point in Fletcher’s genius – its want of hardness of fibre, of patient endurance, and of a sense of the solemnity and sanctity of the service of art. And therefore he finely hints to his friend that his winning of Miranda must not be too light and easy. It shall be Ferdinand’s task to remove some thousands of logs, and pile them according to the strict injunction of Prospero. ‘don’t despise drudgery and dry as dust work, young poets’, Shakespeare would seem to say, who had himself so carefully labored over his English and Roman histories; ‘for Miranda’s sake such drudgery may well seem light.’ Therefore, also, Prospero surrounds the marriage of Ferdinand to his daughter with a religious awe. Ferdinand must honour her as sacred and win her by hard toil. But the work of the higher imagination is not drudgery, – it is swift and serviceable among all the elements, fire upon the topmast, the sea-nymph upon the sands, Ceres the goddess of earth, with harvest blessings, in the Masque. It is essentially Ariel, an airy spirit, – the imaginative genius of poetry but recently delivered

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in England from long slavery to Sycorax. Prospero’s departure from the island is the abandoning by Shakespeare of the theatre, the scene of his marvelous works: – ‘Graves at my command/ Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth,/By my so potent art’ [5.1.48–50]. Henceforth Prospero is but a man; no longer a great enchanter. He returns to the dukedom he had lost, in Stratford upon Avon, and will pay no tribute henceforth to any Alonzo or Lucy of them all.11 Thus one may be permitted to play with the grave subject of The Tempest, and I ask no more credit for the interpretation here proposed than is given to any other equally innocent, if trifling, attempt to read the supposed allegory. Shakespeare’s work, however, will indeed not allow itself to be lightly treated. The prolonged study of any great interpreter of human life is a discipline. Our loyalty to Shakespeare must not lead us to assert that the discipline of Shakespeare will be suitable to every nature. He will deal rudely with the heart, and will, and intellect, and lay hold of them in unexpected ways, and fashion his disciple, it may be, in a manner which at first is painful, and almost terrible. There are persons who, all through their lives, attain their highest strength only by virtue of the presence of certain metaphysical entities which rule their lives: and in the lives of almost all men there is a metaphysical period, when they need such supposed entities more than the real presences of those personal and social forces which surround them. For such persons, and during such a period, the discipline of Shakespeare will be unsuitable. He will seem precisely the reverse of what he actually is: he will seem careless about great facts and ideas; limited, restrictive, deficient in enthusiasms and imagination. To one who finds the highest poetry in Shelly, Shakespeare will always remain a kind of prose. Shakespeare is the poet of concrete things and real. True, but are not these informed with passion and with thought? A time not seldom comes when a man, abandoning abstractions an metaphysical entities, turns to the actual life of the world, and to the real men and women who surround him for the sources of emotion, and thought, and action – a time when he strives to come into communion with the Unseen, not immediately, but through the revelation of the Seen. And then he finds the strength and sustenance with which Shakespeare has enriched the world. ‘The true question to ask,’ says the Librarian of Congress, in a paper read before the Social Science Convention, at New York, October 1869. ‘The true question to ask respecting a book is, Has it helped any human soul?’ This is the hint, statement, not only of the great Literatus, his book, but of every great Artist. It may be that all works of art are to be first tried by their art-qualities, their image-forming talent and their dramatic, pictorial, plot-constructing, euphonious, and other talents. Then, whenever claiming to be first-class works, they are to be strictly and sternly tried by their foundation in and radiation, in the highest sense, and always indirectly, of the ethic principles, and eligibility to free, arouse, dilate’.12 What shall be said of Shakespeare’s radiation through the art of the ultimate truths of conscience and of conduct? What shall be said of his power of freeing, arousing, dilating? Something may be gathered out of the foregoing chapters in answer to these questions. But the answers remain insufficient. There is an admirable sentence by Emerson ‘A good reader can in a sort nestle into Plato’s brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare’s. We are still out of doors’.

 Edward Dowden, Shakespeare as Prospero 137 We are still out of doors: and for the present let us cheerfully remain in the large good space. Let us not attenuate Shakespeare to a theory. He is careful that we shall not thus lose our true reward; ‘The secrets of Nature have not more gift in taciturnity’.13 Shakespeare does not supply us with a doctrine, with an interpretation, with a revelation. What he brings to us, is this – to each one, courage, and energy, and strength, to dedicate himself and his work to that, – whatever it be – which his life has revealed to him as best, and highest, and most real. (410–30)

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A.C. Swinburne, commentary 1880

From A Study of Shakespeare (London, 1880). Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) was a poet and literary critic. He is best known for his long poem Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and the poems in his collection titled Poems and Ballads (1866). Swinburne was associated with and influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite artists, D. G. Rossetti and William Morris. His notable critical works include monographs on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and others.

True or false, and it would now seem something less than likely to be true, the fancy which assumed the last lines spoken by Prospero to be likewise the last words of the last completed work of Shakespeare was equally in either case at once natural and graceful . . . . In no nook or corner of the island as we leave it is any savor left or any memory lingering of any inexpiable evil. Alonzo is absolved; even Antonio and Sebastian have made no such ineffaceable mark on it by the presence of their pardoned crimes as is made by those which cost the life of Mamillius [in The Winter’s Tale] and the labors of Imogen [in Cymbeline]. Poor Caliban is left in such comfort as may be allowed him by divine grace in the favorable aspect of Setebos; and his comrades go by us ‘reeling ripe’ and ‘gilded’ not by ‘grand liquor’ only but also by the summer lightning of men’s laughter: blown softly out of our sight, with a sound and a gust of music, by the breath of the song of Ariel. (221–2)

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Frances Anne Kemble, commentary 1882

From Notes Upon Some of Shakespeare’s Plays (London, 1882). Frances Anne (Fanny) Kemble (1809–93) was a British actress and writer whose works included plays, poems, memoirs, travel writing and literary and theatrical commentary. She married an American and moved to the United States and, although the marriage ended in divorce, she stayed on in the United States, acting on stage and giving public readings of Shakespeare plays. She also became involved in the abolitionist movement and wrote and spoke against the injustices of slavery. She returned to England in 1877 where she continued writing and publishing. Notes Upon Some of Shakespeare’s Plays begins with the musings of an actress on the nature of the theatrical and the dramatic, but the chapters on The Tempest are largely in the textual tradition with Kemble commenting on the notes in the 1632 edition of Shakespeare supposedly discovered by Payne Collier in 1849. These emendations were eventually proven to be forgeries made by Collier himself – a fact not fully established when Kemble wrote. She however insists that she is interested in the ‘intrinsic value’ of the emendations rather than in the question of their authenticity. Kemble also provides her own direct responses to the play, particularly to Prospero and Miranda.

But let is consider Shakespeare’s text, rather than the corrector’s additions, for a moment. Within reach of the wild wind and spray of the Tempest, though sheltered from their fury, Miranda had watched the sinking ship struggling with the mad elements, and heard when ‘rose from sea to sky the wild farewell’. Amazement and pity had thrown her into a paroxysm of grief which is hardly allayed by her father’s assurance, that ‘there’s no harm done’. After this terrible excitement follows the solemn exordium to her father’s story: – ‘The hour’s now come;/ The very minute bids thee ope thine ear/ Obey and be attentive’. [2.1.36–8]. The effort she calls upon her memory to make to recover the traces of her earliest impressions of life – the strangeness of the events unfolded to her – the duration of the recital itself, which is considerable – and, above all, the poignant personal interest of its details, are quite sufficient to account for the sudden utter prostration of her overstrained faculties and feelings, and the profound sleep that falls on the young girl. Perhaps Shakespeare knew this, though his commentators, old and new, seem not to have done so; and without a professed faith, such as some of us moderns indulge in, in

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the mysteries of magnetism, perhaps he believed enough in the magnetic force of the superior physical as well as the mental power of Prospero’s nature over the nervous, sensitive, irritable female organisation of his child to account for the ‘I know thou canst not choose’ with which he concludes his observation on her drowsiness, and his desire that she will not resist it. The magic gown may, indeed, have been powerful; but hardly more so, I think, than the nervous exhaustion which, combined with the authoritative will and eyes of her lord and father, bowed down the child’s drooping eyelids in profoundest sleep. . . . . But the picture – in the midst of a stormy sea, on which night seemed fast settling down, a helmless, mastless, sailless bark lay weltering giddily, and in it sat a man in the full flower of vigorous manhood. His attitude was one of miserable dejection, and, oh, how I did long to remove the hand with which his eyes were covered, to see what manner of look in them answered to the bitter sorrow which the speechless lips expressed! His other hand rested on the fair curls of a girl-baby off three years old, who clung to his knee, and, with wide wondering blue eyes and laughing lips, looked up into the half-hidden face of her father. – ‘And that,’ said the sweet voice at my side, ‘was the good Duke of Milan, Prospero, – and that was his little child Miranda’. There was something about the face and figure of the Prospero that suggested to me those of my father; and this, perhaps, added to the poignancy with which the representation of his distress affected my childish imagination. But the impression made by the picture, the story, and the place where I heard the one and saw the other, is among the most vivid that my memory retains. And never, even now, do I turn the magic page that holds that marvelous history, without again seeing the lovely lady, the picture full of sad dismay, and my own six-year-old self listening to that earliest Shakespearian lore that my mind and heart ever received. I suppose this is partly the secret of my love for this, above all other of the poet’s plays: – it was my first possession in the kingdom of unbounded delight which he has since bestowed upon me.

Notes on The Tempest No. II The Tempest is, as I have already said, my favourite of Shakespeare’s Dramas. The remoteness of the scene from all known localities allows a range to the imagination such as no other of his plays affords – not even the Midsummer Night’s Dream, where though the dramatis personae are half of them superhuman, the scene is laid in a wood ‘near Athens’; and Theseus and Hypolita, if fabulous folk, are among the mythological acquaintance of our earliest school days. But the ‘uninhabited Island,’ lost in unknown seas, gives far other scope to the wandering fancy. As the scene is removed from all places with which we hold acquaintance, so the story, simple in the extreme, has more reference to past events than to any action in the play itself, which involves but few incidents, and has little to do with common experience. But chiefly I delight in this play, because of the image which it presents to my mind of the glorious supremacy of the righteous human soul over all things by which it is

 Frances Anne Kemble, Commentary 141 with surrounded. Prospero is to me the representative of wise and virtuous manhood, in its true relation to the combined elements of existence – the physical powers of the external world, and the varieties of character with which it comes into voluntary, accidental, or enforced contact. Of the wonderful chain of being, of which Caliban is the densest and Ariel the most ethereal extreme, Prospero is the middle link. He the wise and good man – is the ruling power, to whom the whole series is subject. First, and lowest in the scale, comes the gross and uncouth but powerful savage, who represents both the more ponderous and unwieldy natural elements (as the earth and water), which the wise Magician by his knowledge compels to his service; and the brutal and animal propensities of the nature of man, which he, the type of its noblest development, holds in lordly subjugation. Next follows the drunken, ribald, foolish retainers of the King of Naples, whose ignorance, knavery, and stupidity represent the coarser attributes of those great unenlightened masses, which in all communities threaten authority by their conjunction with brute force and savage ferocity; and only under the wholesome restraint of a wise discipline can be gradually admonished into the salutary sub-serviency necessary for their civilisation. Ascending by degrees in the scale, the next group is that of the cunning, cruel, selfish, treacherous worldlings – Princes and Potentates – the peers in outward circumstances of high birth and breeding of the noble Prospero – whose villainous policy (not unaided by his own dereliction of his duties as a governor in pursuit of his pleasure as a philosopher) triumphs over his fortune, and, through a devilish ability and craft, for a time gets the better of truth and virtue in his person. From these who represent the baser intellectual as the former do the baser sensual properties of humanity, we approach by a most harmonious moral transition, through the agency of the skillfully interposed figure of the kindly gentleman, Gonzalo, those charming types of youth and love, Ferdinand and Miranda – the fervent chivalrous devotion of the youth, and the yielding simplicity and sweetness of the girl, are lovely representations of those natural emotions of tender sentiment and passionate desire which, watched and guided and guarded by the affectionate solicitude and paternal prudence of Prospero, are pruned of their lavish luxuriance and supported in their violent weakness by the wise will that teaches forbearance and self-control as the only price at which these exquisite flowers of existence may unfold their blossoms in prosperous beauty, and bear their rightful harvest of happiness as well as pleasure. Next in this wonderful gamut of being, governed by the sovereign soul of Prospero, come the shining figures of the Masque – beautiful bright apparitions, fitly indicating the air, the fire, and all the more smiling aspects and subtler forces of nature. These minister with prompt obedience to the magical behests of Science, and, when not toiling in appointed service for their great task-master, recreate and refresh his senses and his spirit with the every-varying pageant of this beautiful Universe. Last – highest of all crowning with a fitful flame of lambent brightness this poetical pyramid of existence, flickers and flashes the beautiful Demon, without whose exquisite companionship we never think of the royal Magician with his grave countenance of command – Ariel seems to me to represent the keenest perceiving intellect – apart from

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all moral consciousness and sense of responsibility. His power and knowledge are in some respects greater than those of his master – he can do what Prospero cannot –he lashes up the Tempest round the Island – he saves the King and his companions from the shipwreck – he defeats the conspiracy of Sebastian and Antonio, and discovers the clumsy plot of the beast Caliban – he wields immediate influence over the elements, and comprehends alike without indignation or sympathy – which are moral results – the sin and suffering of humanity. Therefore, because he is only a spirit of knowledge, he is subject to the spirit of love – and the wild, subtle, keen, beautiful, powerful creature is compelled to serve with mutinous waywardness and unwilling subjection the human soul that pitied and rescued it from its harsher slavery to sin – and which, though controlling it with wise severity to the fulfilment of its duties, yearns after it with the tearful eyes of tender human love when its wild wings flash away into its newly-recovered realm of lawless liberty. . . . . Before closing my observations on the second and third Acts of The Tempest, I would suggest to the reader’s consideration the curious felicity of the scene when Ferdinand and Miranda acknowledge their affection to each other. I mean in the harmonious contrast between a young prince, bred in a Court, himself the centre of a sphere of the most artificial civilisation, and a girl not only without any knowledge of the world and society, but even without previous knowledge of the existence of any created man but her father and Caliban. Brought up in all but utter solitude, under no influence but that of her wise and loving father one earth, and he wise and loving Father in Heaven, Miranda exhibits no more coyness in her acceptance of Ferdinand’s overtures than properly belongs to the instinctive modesty of her sex, unenhanced by any of the petty pretty arts of coquetry and assumed shyness, which are the express result of artificial female training. The simple emotion of bashfulness, indeed, which (in spite of her half-astonished, halfdelighted exclamation – ‘Do you love me?’ [3.1.68]. That elicits her lover’s passionate declaration causes her to ‘weep at what she’s glad of,’ is so little comprehensible to herself, that she shakes it off with something like selfreproach, as an involuntary disingenuousness: ‘Hence, bashful cunning;’ and then with the most pathetic and exquisite invocation to ‘plain and holy innocence’ offers he life to her lover with the perfect devotion and humility of the true womanly nature: – ‘To be your fellow/ You may deny me, but I’ll be your servant/ Whether you will or no’ [3.1.74–86]. In the purity and simplicity of this ‘tender of affection’, Ferdinand made acquaintance with a species of modesty to which assuredly none of those ladies of the Court of Naples, ‘whom he had eyed with best regard’ had ever introduced him; and indeed to them Miranda’s proceeding might very probably have appeared highly unlady-like, as I have heard it pronounced more than once by – ladies. The young prince, however, was probably himself surprised for a little while into a sphere of earnest sincerity, as different from the artificial gallantry with which he had encountered the former objects of his admiration as the severe manual labour he was undergoing for the sake of Miranda was different from the inflated offers of service, and professions of slavery, which were the jargon of civilized courtesy; . . . . The transparent simplicity and sweet solemnity of the girl’s confession of love could not but awaken an almost religious sense of honour

 Frances Anne Kemble, Commentary 143 and tenderness in the young man’s soul, and though his Neapolitan Court vocabulary speaks a little in the ‘Admired Miranda/ Indeed the top of admiration,’ [3.1.37–8], The ‘I / Beyond all limit of what else I’ the world / Do love, prize, honour you,’ [3.1.72–3]. Is love’s true utterance, as free from sophistication as the girl’s own guileless challenge. (117–45, 155–8)

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Horace Howard Furness, on Caliban 1895

From A Variorum Edition of Shakespeare – The Tempest (Philadelphia, 1892). Horace Howard Furness (1883–1912) was a notable American scholar, born into a Philadelphia literary family. His interest in Shakespeare was first kindled by the public readings of Frances Kemble (No. 23) Furness was member of Philadelphia’s Shakespeare Society and a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. He devoted forty years to editing the highly acclaimed ‘New Variorum’ editions of Shakespeare, often called the ‘Furness Variorum’, in which he collected 300 years of references and commentaries. His son, Horace Howard Furness, Jr., joined as co-editor of the Variorum’s later volumes, and annotated three additional plays and revised two others. In the preface to The Tempest, Furness provides yet another sympathetic reading of Caliban, though he restricts his discussion to Caliban as a lyrical soul, rather than as wronged man.

[From ‘The Preface’ – Vol.9] Unquestionably, a large portion of this attention from editors and critics must be owing to the enduring charm of the Play itself, dominated as it is by two such characters as Prospero and Ariel, whose names have become almost the symbols of an overruling, forgiving wisdom, and of an ‘unbodied joy whose race has just begun.’ There is yet a third character that shares with these two my profound wonder, and, as a work of art, my admiration. It is not Miranda, who, lovely as she is, is but a girl, and has taken no single step in that brave new world just dawning on the fringed curtains of her eyes. ‘To me’, says Lady Martin, in a letter which I am kindly permitted to quote, ‘Miranda’s life is all to come’. We know, indeed, that to her latest hour she will be the top of admiration, but, as a present object, the present eye sees in her only the exquisite possibilities of her exquisite nature. In Caliban it is that Shakespeare has risen, I think, to the very height of creative power, and, by making what is absolutely unnatural thoroughly natural and consistent, has accomplished the impossible. Merely as a work of art, Caliban takes precedence, I think, even of Ariel . . . it has become one of the commonplaces in criticism on the play to say that Caliban is the contrast to Ariel (sometimes varied by substituting Miranda for Ariel), and that as the tricksy sprite is the type of the air

 Horace Howard Furness, on Caliban 145 and of unfettered fancy, so is the abhorred slave typical of the earth and of all brutish appetites; the detested hag-seed is then dismissed blistered all o’er with expressions of abhorrence and with denunciations of his vileness, which any print of goodness will not take. Is there, then, nothing to be said in favour of Caliban? Is there really and truly no print of goodness in him? Kindly Nature never wholly deserts her offspring, nor does Shakespeare. We may be very sure that he, who knew so well that there is always some soul of goodness in things evil, would not have abandoned even Caliban without infusing into his nature some charm which might be observingly distilled out. Why is it that Caliban’s speech is always rhythmical? There is no character in the play whose words fall at times into sweeter cadences; if the Jeolian melodies of the air are sweet, the deep bass of the earth is no less rhythmically resonant. We who see Caliban only in his prime and, a victim of heredity, full grown, are apt to forget the years of his childhood and of his innocency, when Prospero fondled him, stroked him, and made much of him, and Miranda taught him to speak, and with the sympathetic instinct of young girlhood interpreted his thoughts and endowed his purpose with words. When Caliban says that it was his mistress whose showed him the man in the moon with his dog and his bush, what a picture is unfolded to us of summer nights on the Enchanted island, where, however quiet lies the landscape in the broad moonlight, every hill and brook and standing lake and grove is peopled with elves, and on the shore, overlooking the yellow sands where fairies foot it featly, sits the young instructress deciphering for the misshapen slave at her feet the features of the full-orbed moon. With such a teacher, in such hours, would it be possible for Caliban, even were he twice the monster that he is, to resist, at the mot impressible age, the subtle influence of the atmosphere of poetry which breathed in every nook and corner of the enchanted island? The wonder is not that he ever after speaks in rhythm; the wonder would be if he did not? [Footnote to ‘Abhorred slave . . .’ lines – 1.2.351 ff. Furness attributes the lines to Miranda: This is Footnote 413 in the original]. THEOBALD: I am persuaded the author never designed this speech for Miranda. In the first place ‘tis probable Prospero taught Caliban to speak, rather than left that office to his daughter. In the next place, as Prospero was here rating Caliban, it would be a great impropriety for her to take the discipline out of his hands; and, indeed, in some sort an indecency in her to reply to what Caliban was last speaking of. I can easily guess that the change was first deriv’d from the players, whom not loving that any character should stand too long silent on the stage, to obviate that inconvenience with regard to Miranda, clap’d this speech to her part. [Theobald also noted that Dryden had given this speech to Prospero.] – CAPELL: What [Theobald] says of the change’s cause may be right, – that it sprang of the players’ not liking that a character of Miranda’s importance should stand so long on the stage without a share of the dialogue. – Philadelphia S. Soc.: Rev. Dr Krauth urged that the distribution as it stands in F, be retained, because: 1st,That the strong language was such as would naturally spring from the inborn purity of a woman; and this, too, without attributing to Miranda any precocious knowledge of the extent of Caliban’s offered insult. She knew that his intentions were of such vileness as to arouse the utmost wrath of her calm father, and to bring upon him the severest punishment. In her first allusion to Caliban she calls him a ‘villain’; and the epithet ‘slave’ seems to have been her father’s ordinary style of address to him. 2nd. That if this

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speech be attributed to Prospero, a most charming picture of Miranda’s youth will be lost, which needs but to be contemplated to be appreciated. 3rd. The supposition that Miranda was the youthful instructress of Caliban receives a confirmation, suggested by Mr. Dickson, in Caliban’s assertion, /or/, II, ii, 149, where, in reply to Stephano’s announcement that he was the man in the moon, Caliban says: ‘I have seen thee in her – My mistress mowed me thee’. [With Dr Krauth the present editor then agreed, and has not since then seen reason to change his opinion. – Ed.] – On the other hand, the Dean, Judge Sharswood[1], and Prof. Allen, maintained; that the speech is, – if not unfeminine, – utterly discrepant, in tone, from everything else Miranda says, while it is, in every respect, identical in character with the speeches of Prospero which precede and follow it. It is a continuation of the history of Caliban’s education; and Prospero should be the one to continue it, for Caliban had begun it by saying that Prospero was his teacher. Prospero stood pressingly in need of Caliban’s services from the moment of his landing on the island. He therefore must have begun to educate him, – and Caliban says he did, –when he first came. But at that time Miranda was ‘not full out three years old’ [1.2.41]; so that, – while her father taught him ‘how to name the bigger light and how the less,’ she could hardly have been competent so early even to ‘show him the man i’ the moon and his dog and his bush,’ far less ‘to endow his purposes with words to make them known’ when he did not know his own meaning. It may be added, too, that, – while such error in the names of the speakers is sufficiently accounted for by the known carelessness of the compositors of F, – the capitals M and P (in Mira. and Pro.) are so much alike, in the hand-writing of the time, that they might easily be mistaken the one for the other. – Staunton (Athetuem, 16 Nov. 1872): A careful examination of this speech and its surroundings convinces me that it is Miranda’s. It lacks much of the delicacy and gentleness which pervades her language in other scenes, yet not more than is natural, considering the crime her father has just laid to Caliban’s charge. Moreover, if it sounds harsh for her, it is infinitely too mild for Prospero when compared with his pervious and subsequent language to this ‘poisonous slave’. (Staunton’s final reason is the same as that put forth by Theobald and Capell, that without this speech Miranda would have been too much of a ‘dummy in the scene’. – Ed) (v–vi, 73–4)

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George Bernard Shaw, review 1897

From ‘“The Tempest” – Performance by the Elizabethan Stage Society at the Mansion House, 5 November 1897’, The Saturday Review, 84 (13 November 1897), 514–16. George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was an Irish playwright, pamphleteer, polemicist and critic of the arts. He emerged as the force behind the Fabian Society, a socialist group founded in 1844, which aimed to transform intellectual and political life. As a theatre critic for The Saturday Review, Shaw campaigned in its columns from January 1895 to May 1898 to displace the artificialities of the Victorian stage with a new kind of theatre based on real characters with real ideas. Shaw was also impatient with what he saw as the Victorian adulation of Shakespeare, though he himself eventually did come to view Shakespeare as a talented writer. In any case, in this review of a performance of The Tempest by William Poel’s semi-professional group dedicated to the production of Shakespeare in the Elizabethan style (without elaborate scenery and scene shifts), Shaw, like several commentators before him, believes that a production of The Tempest is marred rather than aided by sets and props, and that the setting and mood are best left to the imagination.

The poetry of The Tempest is so magical that it would make the scenery of a modern theatre ridiculous. The methods of the Elizabethan Stage Society (I do not commit myself to their identity with those of the Elizabethan stage) leave to the poet the work of conjuring up the isle ‘full of noises, sounds and sweet airs’. And I do not see how this plan can be beaten. If Sir Henry Irving[1] were to put the play on at the Lyccum next season (why not, by the way?). What could he do but multiply the expenditure enormously, and spoil the illusion? He would give us the screaming violin instead of the harmonious viol; characteristic’ music scored for wood-wind and percussion by Mr. German instead of Mr. Dolmetsch’s[2] pipe and tabor; an expensive and absurd stage ship and some windless, air-less, changeless, soundless, electric-lit, woodenfloored mockeries of the haunts of Ariel. They would cost more but would they be an improvement on the Mansion House arrangement? Mr. Poel[3] says frankly, ‘See that singers’ gallery up there! Well, let’s pretend that it’s the ship’. We agree; and the thing is done. But how could we agree to such a pretense with a stage ship? Before it we should say, ‘Take that thing away: if our imagination is to create a ship, it must not

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be contradicted by something that apes a ship so vilely as to fill us with denial and repudiation of its imposture’. The Singing gallery make no attempt to impose on us; it disarms criticism by unaffected submission to the facts of the case, and throws itself honestly on our fancy, with instant success. In the same way a rag doll is fondly nursed by a child who can only stare at a waxen simulacrum of infancy. A superstitious person left to himself will see a ghost in every ray of moonlight on the all and every old coat hanging on a nail; but make up a really careful, elaborate, plausible, picturesque, blood-curdling ghost for him, and his cunning will proclaim that he sees through it at a glance. The reason is, not that a man can always imagine things more vividly than art can present them to him, but that it take an altogether extraordinary degree of art to compete with the pictures which the imagination makes when it is stimulated by such potent forces as the maternal instinct, superstitious awe, or the poetry of Shakespeare. The dialogue between Gonzalo and that ‘bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog’ [1.1.37] the boatswain, would turn the House of Lords into a ship: in less than ten words – ‘What care these roarers for the name of king?’ [1.1.16–17] – you see the white horses and the billowing green mountains playing football with crown and purple. But the Elizabethan method would not do for a play like The White Heather, excellent as it is of its kind. If Mr. Poel, on the strength of the Drury Lane dialogue, were to leave us to imagine the singers’ gallery to be the bicycling ring in Battersea Park, or Boulter’s Lock, we should flatly decline to imagine anything at all. It requires the nicest judgement to know exactly how much help the imagination wants. There is no general rule, not even for any particular author. You can do best without scenery in The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because the best scenery you can get will only destroy the illusion created by the poetry; but it does not at all follow that scenery will not improve a representation of Othello. Maeterlinck’s plays[4], requiring a mystical inscenation in the style of Fernand Knopf5, would be nearly as much spoiled by Elizabethan treatment as by Drury Lane treatment. Modern Melodrama is so dependent on the most realistic scenery that a representation would suffer far less by the omission of the scenery than of the dialogue. This is why the manager who stages every play in the same way is a bad manager, even when he is an adept at his one way. A great deal of the distinctions of the Lyccum productions is due to the fact that Sir Henry Irving, when the work in hand is at all within the limits of his sympathies, knows exactly how far to go in the matter of scenery. When he makes mistakes, they are almost always mistakes in stage management, by which he sacrifices the effect of some un-appreciated passage of dialogue of which the charm has escaped him. Though I as sufficiently close to the stage at The Tempest to hear, or imagine I heard, every word of the dialogue, yet it was plain that the actors were not eminent afterdinner speakers, and had consequently never received in that room the customary warning to speak to the second pillar on the right of the door, on the pain of not being heard. Though they all spoke creditably, and some of them remarkably well, they took matters rather too easily, with the result that the quieter passages were inaudible to a considerable number of the spectators. I mention the matter because the Elizabethan Stage Society is hardly yet alive to the acoustic difficulties raised by the lofty halls it performs in. They are mostly troublesome for a speaker; for if he shouts, his vowels

 George Bernard Shaw, Review 149 make such a roaring din that his consonants are indistinguishable; and if he does not, his voice does not travel far enough. They are too resonant for noisy speakers and too fast for gentle ones. A clean, athletic articulation, kept up without any sentimental or indolent relaxations, is indispensable as a primary physical accomplishment for the Elizabethan actor who ‘takes to the halls’. (514)

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Rudyard Kipling, commentary 1898 From How Shakespeare Came to Write The Tempest (New York, 1916). Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was a writer and poet. Born in India, educated in England and resident of both countries, as well as of South Africa and the United States, Kipling’s writing, including novels such as The Jungle Book (1894), Just So Stories (1902) and Kim (1901), won him world-wide acclaim and popularity. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. This piece on The Tempest first appeared as a letter in the July 1898 volume of The Spectator (pp. 91–103). In spite of the fact that much of his fiction addresses the experiences of Englishmen in British India, Kipling does not see The Tempest as a play influenced by the power dynamics of colonization as such. But he does depart from the romantic strain that informs much nineteenth-century criticism and insists that the play’s setting is captivating and vivid because Shakespeare possibly got his material (plot, imagery, details of setting) from the prosaic, yet imaginative, narratives of sailors. Consequently, Kipling insists on the ‘earth basis’ of the play and writes that it was composed ‘in accordance with the great law that a story to be truly miraculous must be ballasted with fact’ – a statement that possibly describes Kipling’s fiction as much as Shakespeare’s play.

SIR: Your article on ‘Landscape and Literature’ in the Spectator of June 18th has the following, among other suggestive passages: ‘But whence came the vision of the enchanted island in The Tempest? It had no existence in Shakespeare’s world, but was woven out of such stuff as dreams are made on’. May I cite Malone’s suggestion connecting the play with the casting away of Sir George Somers on the island of Bermuda in 1609; and further may I be allowed to say how it seems to me possible that the vision was woven from the most prosaic material from nothing more promising in fact, than the chatter of a half-tipsy sailor at a theatre? Thus: A stage-manager, who writes and vamps plays, moving among his audience, overhears a mariner discoursing to his neighbour of a grievous wreck, and of the behaviour of the passengers, for whom all sailors have ever entertained a natural contempt. He describes, with the wealth of detail peculiar to sailors, measures taken to claw the ship off a lee-shore, how helm and sails were work, what the passengers did and what he said. One pungent phrase to be rendered later into: ‘What care these brawlers for the name of King?’ [1.1.16–17] strikes the manager’s ear, and he stands behind the

 Rudyard Kipling, Commentary 151 talkers. Perhaps only one-tenth of the earnestly delivered, hand-on-shoulder sea talk was actually used of all that was automatically and unconsciously stored by the inland man who knew all inland arts and crafts. Nor is it too fanciful to imagine a half-turn to the second listener as the mariner, banning his luck as mariners will, says there are those who would not give a doit to a poor man while they will lay out ten to see a rare-show, a dead Indian. Were he in foreign parts, as he now is in England, he could show people something in the way of strange fish. Is it to consider too curiously to see a drink ensue on this hint (the manager dealt but little in his plays with the sea at first hand, and his instinct for new words would have been waked by what he had already caught), and with the drink a sailor’s minute description of how he went across the reefs to the island of his calamity, or islands rather, for there were many? Some you could almost carry away in your pocket. They were sown broadcast like the nutshells on the stage there. ‘Many islands, in truth,’ says the manager patiently, and afterwards his Sebastian says to Antonio: ‘I think he will carry the island home in his pocket and give it to his son for an apple’. [2.1.91]. To which Antonio answers: ‘And sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands’ [2.1.92]. ‘But what was the island like?’ says the manager. The sailor tries to explain. ‘It was green, with yellow in it; a tawny-coloured country’ the colour, that is to say, of the coral-beached, cedar-covered Bermuda of today ‘and the air made one sleepy, and the place was full of noises, the muttering and roaring of the sea among the islands and between the reefs and there was a sou’-west wind that blistered one all over’. The Elizabethan mariner would not discriminate finely between blisters and prickly heat; but the Bermudian of today will tell you that the sou’-west or Lighthouse wind in summer brings that plague and general discomfort. That the coral rock, battered by the sea, rings hollow with strange sounds, answered by the winds in the little cramped valleys, is a matter of common knowledge. The man, refreshed with more drink, then describes the geography of his landing place, the spot where Trinculo makes his first appearance. He insists and reinsists on details which to him at one time meant life or death, and the manager follows attentively. He can give his audience no more than a few hangings and a placard for scenery, but that his lines shall lift them beyond that bare show to the place he would have them, the manager needs for himself the clearest possible understanding, the most ample detail. He must see the scene in the round solid ere he peoples it. Much, doubtless, he discarded, but so closely did he keep to his original information that those who go today to a certain beach some two miles from Hamilton will find the stage set for Act II, Scene 2 of The Tempest, a bare beach, with the wind singing through the scrub at the land’s edge, a gap in the reefs wide enough for the passage of Stephano’s butt of sack, and (these eyes have seen it) a cave in the coral within easy reach of the tide, whereto such a butt might be conveniently rolled. (‘My cellar is in a rock by the seaside where my wine is hid’ [2.2.134–5]). There is no other cave for some two miles. Here’s neither bush nor shrub; one is exposed to the wrath of and here the currents strand wreckage. It was so well done that, after three hundred years, a stray tripper and no Shakespeare scholar, recognized in a flash that old first set of all.

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So far good. Up to this point the manager has gained little except some suggestions for an opening scene, and some notion of an uncanny island. The mariner (one cannot believe that Shakespeare was mean in these little things) is dipping to a deeper drunkenness. Suddenly he launches into a preposterous tale of himself and his fellows, flung ashore, separated from their officers, horribly afraid of the devil-haunted beach of noises, with their heads full of the fumes of broacht liquor. One castaway was found hiding under the ribs of a dead whale which smelt abominably. They hauled him out by the legs – he mistook them for imps – and gave him drink. And now, discipline being melted, they would strike out for themselves, defy their officers, and take possession of the island. The narrator’s mates in this enterprise were probably described as fools. He was the only sober man in the company. So they went inland, faring badly as they staggered up and down this pestilent country. They were prick’t with palmettoes, and the cedar branches rasp’t their faces. Then they found and stole some of their officers’ clothes which were hanging up to dry. But presently they fell into a swamp, and, what was worse, into the hands of their officers; and the great expedition ended in muck and mire. Truly an island bewitch. Else why their cramps and sickness? Sack never made a man more than reasonably drunk. He was prepared to answer for unlimited sack; but what befell his stomach and head was the purest magic that honest man ever met. A drunken sailor of today wandering about Bermuda would probably sympathize with him; and today, as then, if one takes the easiest inland road from Trinculo’s beach, near Hamilton, the path that a drunken man would infallibly follow, it ends abruptly in swamp. The one point that our mariner did not dwell upon was that he and the others were suffering from acute alcoholism combined with the effects of nerve-shattering peril and exposure. Hence the magic. That a wizard should control such an island was demanded by the beliefs of all seafarers of that date. Accept this theory, and you will concede that The Tempest came to the manager sanely and normally in the course of his daily life. He may have been casting about for a new play; he may have purposed to vamp an old one say – Aurelio and Isabella[1]; or he may have been merely waiting on his demon. But it is all Prospero’s wealth against Caliban’s pignuts that to him in a receptive hour, sent by heaven, entered the original Stephano fresh from the seas and half-seas over. To him Stephano told his tale all in one piece, a two hours’ discourse of most glorious absurdities. His profligate abundance of detail at the beginning, when he was more or less sober, supplied and surely established the earth-basis of the play in accordance with the great law that a story to be truly miraculous must be ballasted with facts. His maunderings of magic and incomprehensible ambushes, when he was without reservation drunk (and this is just the time when a lesser-minded man than Shakespeare would have paid the reckoning and turned him out) suggested to the manager the peculiar note of its supernatural mechanism. Truly it was a dream, but that there may be no doubt of its source or of his obligation, Shakespeare has also made the dreamer immortal. (25–32)

27

Frank Bristol, The Tempest and America 1898

From Shakespeare and America (Chicago, 1898). Frank Bristol (1851–1932) was a bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington DC and a literary scholar. He authored several books on religion and theology as well as two books of literary criticism – Shakespeare in America (1898) and Heroines of History Typical Heroines of Mythology, of the Bible, of Shakespeare (1914). In his introduction to Shakespeare in America, Bristol writes that ‘The New World was the dominant thought in the secular mind of England from the time of Henry VII to that of James I’. The travelogues on voyages to the Americas and the plays written for the popular stage were the two major forms of literary production at the time, and the latter was strongly influenced by the former. Part of Bristol’s project is to gather out of Shakespeare’s plays ‘the medical, classical, legal, botanical, entomological, scriptural, military and nautical terms and references which abound therein’, and ‘to study those expressions which may be called “Americanisms” in Shakespeare’s works’. [1] This intention is carried out in his discussion of The Tempest. For the first time, Bristol, quite explicitly, identifies Caliban as a Native American, described in the same terms that real natives of America were. He is also the first critic to discuss Sycorax at any length.

Shakespeare’s interest in America is quite clearly manifest in his comedy of The Tempest, which was very probably inspired by the shipwreck of a company of Virginia colonists on the Bermudas in 1609. It would strike one as most remarkable if none of the many stirring events connected with the discovery, exploration and colonization of America had engaged Shakespeare’s pen or furnished materials for at least one of his immortal compositions. Toward the close of the poet’s career one event excited the public mind to such a degree that Shakespeare was moved to take advantage of its truly dramatic features and write a comedy based upon its general outlines. If we could agree with Campbell in looking upon The Tempest as the last child of the poet’s brain we might have additional inspiration to rhapsody in the thought that Shakespeare’s last dramatic dream was of America! The Bermuda Islands were discovered by John Bermudez in 1522. This is the inaccurate state-pamphlets of 1610 were the more immediate sources of Shakespeare’s inspiration.

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Although the details of the shipwreck are not as full in the ‘True Declaration’ as they are in ‘A Discovery of the Bermudas’ they are more tersely and forcibly written. ‘When Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Summers, and Captain Newport were in the height of 27, and the 24, of July, 1609, there arose such a storme, as if Jonas had been flying unto Tarshish; the heavens were obscured and made an Egyptian night of three daies perpetuall horror; the women lamented; the hearts of the passengers failed; the experience of the sea Captains was amazed; the skill of the marriners was confounded; the ship most violently leaked. But God that heard Jonas crying out of the belly of hell, he pittied the distresses of his servants; For behold, in the last period of necestitie, Sir George Summers descried land. The Islands on which they fell were the Bermudos, a place hardly accessible through the environing rocks and dangers; notwithstanding they were forced to runne their ship on shoare, which through God’s providence fell betwixt two rockes, that caused her to stand firme and not immediately to be broken, God continuing his mercie unto them, that with their long Boats they transported to land before night, all their company, men, women, and children, to the number of one hundred and fiftie, they carried to shoare all the provisions of unspent ad unspoyled victules, all their furniture and tackling of the ship, leaving nothing but bared ribs, as a pray unto the ocean. These Islands of the Bermudos, have ever beene accounted as an inchanted pile of rockes, and a desert inhabitation for Divels; but all the Faries of the rocks were but flocks of birds, and all the Divels that haunted the woods were but heards of swine’. After giving these and other details of hardship and dangers through which the Virginia colonists had struggled the pamphlet contains the following very striking question which must have caught the eye of Shakespeare as he read it: ‘What is there in all this tragical Comaedie that should discourage us with impossibilities of the enterprises?’ Did not the very words, ‘tragical Comaedie’ suggest to Shakespeare’s mind in The Tempest? Did not the dramatist see rising before the fine eye of his imagination all the essential elements of a ‘tragical Comaedie’. Whatever dramatic material for his plot he may have found in literature, the title of the play, with its opening incident of storm and shipwreck, the place of action, many of the minor elements, at least one character prominent in the play, and another mentioned, were very probably suggested by new-world happenings, by the Gates shipwreck on the Bermudas and by descriptions of the new world found in the current literature of Shakespeare’s age and country. When we compare the play with the history of the Gates shipwreck these parallels appear: In the history, as in the play, there is a Tempest, accompanied with thunder and lightning such as Bermudas are noted for; the Tempest scatters the fleet of Sir George Somers and also the fleet of King Alonzo; one ship of each fleet is driven upon an uninhabited, rock-bound, almost inaccessible island; in each case this is the ship of the Commander of the fleet; in the history, as in the play, the ship finally lodges in a nook or between rocks and is not wholly wrecked; no lives are lost in either shipwreck, all get safely to land, ‘and for the rest o’ the fleet, they all have met again’. The island in the play is like the island described in the history of the Gates shipwreck, uninhabited, fertile in spots and in other parts barren, with pits, springs, caves, trees, coral reefs, &c. Again, the Bermudas, ‘the still-vex’d Bermoothes’, is represented as an enchanted island. In

 Frank Bristol, The Tempest and America 155 the play, it is subject to Prospero’s power of enchantment, and fairies, furies, monsters and devils inhabit the place. In obedience to Prospero’s command, Ariel raised the storm of lightning and thunder. [Quotes 1.2.188–205: ‘Approach, my Ariel, come . . . .’] The fearful meteoric display accompanying the tempest filled the shipwrecked men with such alarm that they imagined the region was under demoniacal enchantment. [Quotes 1.2.212–14: ‘The King’s son, Ferdinand, . . . .’] The conception of the demoniacal enchantment of the island was suggested to Shakespeare by Jourdan’s tract, in which he speaks of the Bermudas as ‘a habitation of Divells’ . . . . [Quotes 2.2.166–72: ‘I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow; . . . .’] This passage is a most remarkable illustration of the Bermudan theory of The Tempest. The ‘crabs’ mentioned are not crab-apples, as some have supposed, but marine crustacea, and these abounded in Bermudan waters. They are called cray-fish, craw-fish, or crabs, and are mentioned by nearly every old writer who has described the Bermudas. If the ground-nut, or ‘pig-nut’, did not grow there, there was doubtless some root or nut indigenous to the soil which furnished food for the hogs for which the island was famous, or infamous, and was therefore called ‘pig-nut’. The early writers also mentioned the great variety and tameness of the birds of the Bermudas. ‘A jay’s nest’ was easily found in that island and the bird was doubtless identical with the well-known Florida jay. ‘The nimble marmoset’ [2.2.170] was a small South American monkey, not far out of its habitat when in the Bermudas. ‘Clustering filberts’ [2.2.171] describe our American hazel-nuts which grow wild in clusters on bushes or shrubs from two to five feet in height. ‘Young scamels from the rocks’ [2.2.172] have given the commentators much perplexity. Steevens identifies them as ‘sea-mels’, what Sir Joseph Banks classified as gulls. The bird which Caliban had in mind, and the bird Shakespeare had in mind, was very probably the very bird which Captain John Smith describes in the manuscript published by Lefroy; it is called the Cahow and found in the Bermudas . . . . It is not reasonable to suppose that even these trifling allusions to the fauna and flora of the enchanted island are accidental or simply co-incidental when they are so true to the authentic descriptions of the Bermudas which were given by writers in Shakespeare’s time and have since been corroborated by later authorities. . . . Shakespeare’s knowledge of the cannibal, derived from reading the ‘new world’ literature, suggested the character of Caliban. The name which Shakespeare gives to this monster is but a variant of ‘Canibal’. The descriptions of Indians, giant cannibals, land and sea monsters, found in the books of voyages and travels enabled Shakespeare to make up a character which suggested all these creatures to the men who found Caliban on the enchanted island with Prospero and Miranda. .... Caliban’s appearance suggests to Trinculo and Stephano ‘salvages’, ‘men of Ind’, a ‘dead Indian’. Shakespeare had the American Indian in mind when he invented the character and the form of Caliban, and although Caliban is not represented in the comedy as a man-eating Indian, he is called ‘a monster’, a most perfidious and drunken

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monster’, a ‘puppy-headed monster’ [2.1.155], a ‘most ridiculous monster’ [2.1.165], ‘a howling monster’ [2.1.179], and a ‘bully-monster’ [5.1.258]. These terms remind us of the characteristics of the giant cannibals described by Pigafetta, as we found in Eden’s translation ‘having a voyce like a bul’ . . . . By introducing Setebos the devil-god of the cannibals of America, by relating him to Caliban as his god and his ‘dam’s god’, and by having the men who discover Caliban call him a devil, Shakespeare indicates that Caliban in character and form was suggested to him by the descriptions of cannibals which were to be found in much of the new-world literature of his time. .... This Sycorax is a strange being who does not belong to any known pantheon of witches or of goddesses. She is a creature of Shakespeare’s imagination. Nevertheless, classical scholars have tried to find the interpretation of her character in the etymology of her name. The name is of a Greek construction, though Shakespeare doubtless invented it, and yet the meaning of the name may have come from what Shakespeare knew of the Bermudas. The two most etymological explanations of the name ‘Sycorax’ have been suggested by Clement and Hales. The former argues that the name is composed of the two words Sukon, a fig, and Rex, a spider. Hales constructs the name out of Sus, a sow, and Korax, a raven. If Dr. Clement is correct, it is interesting to know that the insect whose name enters into the name ‘Sycorax’ was the only very conspicuous and noticeable insect found in the Bermudas. In Lefroy’s publication of the Captain John Smith manuscript we learn that in the Bermudas ‘Certaine spiders, indeed, of a very large size, are found hangeinge upon the trees, and their webbs are found to be of perfect silk – and so stronge they are generally that birds bigger and by much stronger than sparrows, are often taken and snarled in them as in netts’. Are these spiders ‘found hangeinge’ upon fig trees? If so possibly this fact and further fact that these spiders are harmless gave Shakespeare suggestions for his creation of Sycorax. .... If we favor Hales’ etymology of the name Sycorax and find it made up of the words ‘sow’ and ‘raven’, it is not uninteresting to know that both the sow and raven belong to the Bermudas. One passage from The Tempest would seem to favor this interpretation of the name of the ‘foul witch’. This passage has already been quoted in support of another point. Caliban. As wicked dew as e’er my mother brush’d/ With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen/ Drop on you both! [1.2.321–3]. If Sycorax combined and embodied the characteristics of the sow and the raven she must indeed have been a ‘foul witch’. The Bermudas from the day of its discovery was described as full of black hogs, and abounding in birds among which the raven, or the large black crow, a bird at least of the species Corvus, was conspicuous. Shakespeare might have found in these creatures which gave the Bermudas a bad name just the foul characteristics which suggested Sycorax. (67–88)

28

Luce Morton, commentary 1901

From The Tempest, Arden Shakespeare (London, 1901). Luce Morton (1849–1943) was an associate of Edward Dowden and editor of the first Arden edition of The Tempest. He was the author of other works on Renaissance literature and Shakespeare, including books such as A Handbook to the Works of Shakespeare, (1906) and Shakespeare: The Man and His Work. (1913). Morton’s introduction to the play is the first of the three Arden edition introductions of the twentieth century. While he touches on a variety of features of the play, Morton’s thoughts on Caliban and his view on the play as a ‘criticism of life’ are particularly significant. Morton is among the first critics to dwell at any length on Caliban’s identity as African slave and on his mother’s origins in Algiers. Morton also, quite originally, argues that the play engages with the ethical and moral problems that accompany colonization.

[From ‘The Introduction’] [Y]et, judging from Shakespeare’s usual method of adapting material ready to his hand, we may fairly assume that some story – or indeed some drama – containing more than ‘traces’ of the plot of The Tempest has yet to be discovered. Such a story or drama may have served Jacob Ayrer, a Nurnberg notary, whose Comedia von der schonen Sidea has something in common with The Tempest. Like Prospero, Price Ludolph in the German drama is a magician; he has an only daughter, and is attended by a demon or ‘spirit,’ who bears some resemblance to Ariel. Further, as regards incident, the son of Ludolph’s enemy becomes his prisoner, his sword having been held in its sheath by the magician’s ‘art’; and later in the play he is made bearer of logs for Ludolph’s daughter, die Schone Sidea; she with something more than Miranda’s frankness falls in love with the captive prince, and ultimately the marriage of the lovers leads to the reconciliation of their parents. Jacob Ayrer died in 1605, it may therefore be taken for granted that he did not borrow from The Tempest; and it is possible that Shakespeare used Ayrer’s play, for ‘the English comedians’ were at Nurnberg in 1604, where they may have seen, and possibly themselves have acted. Die Schone Sidea. But it is more likely, as suggested above, and

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the same is probably true of Much Ado About Nothing – that both writers derived the main incidence of their plots from the same hidden source. I think the more probable, as none of the names of the German play has been adopted by Shakespeare, nor has he drawn upon its material generally; nor does it explain, as an original should, some apparent omissions and inconsistencies in The Tempest? But whatever the relation between the two plays, this much seems to be certain, that The Tempest may be said to have a double origin; some novel, probably Italian, or some dramatized version of it, furnished the poet with a skeleton plot and three of his famous characters; but not a little supplied by the topics of the time, the stirring of a year; colonization, and the disaster to the Virginia fleet of 1609, these suggested the title of the poet’s drama; they furnished him with his island, his atmosphere of magic, his Caliban; and, as I shall endeavour to show later, and may here mention, the Masque was introduced chiefly in order to perfect the supernatural tone of the whole work. . . . . Two of the leading characters, Prospero and Miranda are obvious enough, and they need no interpreter; but Caliban and Ariel are the most complex of all the creations of the great artist who ‘exhausted worlds and then imagined new’. Indeed, we may fairly say that if Browning got too little out of Caliban, Shakespeare certainly tried to get too much into him; and the first and last fact to bear in mind in any attempt to understand this supreme puzzle of the commentator is simply this: Caliban is not one character, but three. He is a compound of three typical ideas. First, he is the embodiment of the supernatural; he is deformed; he was the offspring of a witch, hence his deformity. Who was his father the poet has told us in two or three passages1 that fall in with the popular superstition of the day; and the uncanny parentage was regarded by Dryden at his much later date as ‘not wholly beyond the bounds of credibility’. But a further stage of development under this head is due to books of travel with their wonderful accounts of island aborigines, and to the popular Utopias of the time, and their more imaginary islands peopled by beings strange but with human attributes, and free at least from the vices of civilisation. To this phase of Caliban’s being such narratives as those of the wreck almost certainly contributed; and thus the conventional monster was made up afresh as a sea-monster,2 and placed with his mother on an island. At this point we must resume for a moment. That her whelp was ‘freckled,’ ‘a misshapen knave,’ ‘not honoured with a human shape,’ [1.2.83] merely emphasises the two leading facts that he was the conventional monster, and his mother the conventional witch, ‘with age and envy . . . . grown into a hoop’ (I.ii.258, 259). Yet, as befits the later plays, she has supernatural powers beyond the popular witches of the earlier stage. Next we see that Algiers, that notable nest of pirates, was made her birth place. This also is suggestive enough; there was no love for Algiers or Africans in those days;3 and the place was appropriate for many other reasons. It was in the neighbourhood of Tunis, and, as we might put it, with incredible distance from the poet’s island; its atmosphere was sufficiently charged with the marvelous, and familiar as such to his audience. Not far from hence would be the region of the ‘Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders’; and here we have both the cannibal, of which the name Caliban4 is an obvious transposition, and also the men of the present play, ‘Whose heads stood in their breasts’ (III​.iii​​.47). But possibly the more significant fact has yet

 Luce Morton, Commentary 159 to be stated; how was with any show of plausibility to get his witch transported to an uninhabited island? And we answer, by banishment as was Prospero. Now, almost undoubtedly, his witch was already located at Algiers in the earlier account conjectured by Charles Lamb,5 that would tell us of a witch of Algier who was ‘richly remunerated’ for having saved the city. Yet were her sorceries so terrible, says Shakespeare, that she must pay at length not the usual death penalty, but a mitigated sentence of banishment (I.ii.263–8).6 So much for the mother and Algiers but finally, Africa is further suited to Caliban in his capacity of slave, which again will be noticed later. He is about twenty-four years old; and it is in this his first and supernatural character that he is a foil to Ariel, who is primarily ‘but air’ (V.i.21),7 whereas Caliban at the very outset is addressed by Prospero as ‘Thou earth, thou’ ( I.ii.313); and at the risk of being fanciful we might add that Caliban represents the other of the two heavier elements, water, that is; for he is a fish, or fish-like; and for many reasons: ‘a strange fish’ (II​.ii​​.27); ‘a plain fish’ (V.ii.266) ‘ legged like a man and his fins like arms’ (II​.ii​​.33), the revers of Milton’s Dagon. This is Shakespeare’s first view of him as he turns the pages of old narratives; though we must not forget that the poet had begun to sketch him in Troilus and Cressida, for he makes Thersites thus describe Ajax, ‘He’s grown a very land-fish, languageless a monster’ (III​.iii​.​264).8 But the physical form of Caliban is as vague and as various as his character or his accomplishments, and the attempts that have been made to sketch this most protean of all such creations remind us of the equally futile attempts to discover his enchanted island. For example, he will dig pig-nuts, pluck berries, and snare the nimble marmoset, and yet some would discover him to be a kind of tortoise.9 Or, again, Miranda in one speech ranks him with man, in another she excludes him from that crowning species. And finally, and as an actual fact, if all the suggestions as to Caliban’s form and features and endowments that are thrown out in the play are collected, it will be found that the one half renders the other half impossible. Secondly, Caliban is a slave when the play opens, whatever he may have been before, or may become again: ‘We’ll visit Caliban my slave . . . He does make our fire, Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices That profit us’ (I.ii.313). This is for the benefit of the audience, as also the following: ‘He, that Caliban, Whom now I keep in service’ (I.ii.285, 286), where we must remember the stronger force then attaching at times to the word ‘service’. We have seen that Caliban is an African of some kind; as a slave, he hates his taskmaster, hates all ‘service’ and thus he further embodies one of the leading social topics dwelt upon in the play, namely, slavery, the revolt against labour, the ‘use of services’ (II.i.151; II​.ii​.1​75, 198–9). Thirdly, he is a dispossessed Indian, a more or less ‘noble’ savage; and here should be mentioned a fact that may have more than its surface significance; in the ‘Names of the Actors’ appended to the play in the First Folio, Caliban is admitted to represent all these characters, for he is described as a ‘savage and deformed slave.’ In other words, he will play the part of an Indian, a hag-born monstrosity, and a (negro)10 slave. As to the order of their importance, and the degree in which each is represented in the play, or affects the poet’s dramatic purpose, we may put the supernatural first, and the savage second. But in this latter character of the dispossessed Indian he appears frequently, and with striking effect: ‘This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,/ Which thou takest

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from me . . . .’ (I.ii.331–2), ‘For I am all the subjects that you have,/ Which first was mine own king’ (I.ii.341–2). Now, the function of a slave was not entirely out of keeping with Shakespeare’s first conception, this misshapen ‘hag-seed’ of a monster; but spite of the Elizabethan nearness of the natural to the supernatural, when we come to regard the ‘demi-devil’ in this his third character, we shall fully realise the force of my remark above, that Shakespeare tried to get too much into his Caliban. Incongruities will now appear on almost every page of The Tempest; how can we reconcile what follows with what has gone before, the poetry and nature-worship of the savage with the groveling of the ‘filth,’ the ‘tortoise,’ or even with the dull sufferance of the slave? We have three dissolving views, let us say; one of three figures ever fades, and fading forms one of the others. Yet we can watch intermittently the evolution of this new character, till we confess that it has been sketched admirably and for all time – the barbarian child of nature, whose language, like that of Longfellow’s Hiawatha, is half picture and half music: [Quotes 3.2.135–43: ‘Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, . . . .’] This is quite a transformation11 from the mediaeval monster or devil and his traditional ‘Oh ho! Oh ho!’; and next we notice how the new character deals with Nature, how he has observed her ways, and loved her; though certainly he must borrow for the occasion ‘monster’s ‘talons: [Quotes 2.2.167–72: ‘I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow; . . . .’] And we must take into account his superstitious temperament: ‘That’s a brave god, and bears celestial liquor.’ (I.ii.117). And still more his imaginative temperament: ‘Pray you, tread softly, that the blind mole may not/ Hear a footfall . . . .’ [4.1.194–5], ‘All’s hush’d as midnight yet’. [4.1.207]. The monster, the slave, the aboriginal Indian – these, therefore, are the three parts played by this triple character, who thus, with a very doubtful consistency, fulfils the poet’s threefold purpose, and serves as an embodiment of the supernatural, the social, and the political topics of the day. We have yet to notice the name Caliban, that is ‘Cannibal,’ which this character bears, and as we shall now understand, bears appropriately; for it belongs to him only so far as he is typical of the island savage, or Indian; and no name could have been more suggestive or more attractive to an audience of that day but we must remember that he takes this title only as being a type; we must not expect to see him devouring human flesh on the stage.12 Beyond the three already mentioned, little need be said or imagined in respect of the dramatic impersonations of Caliban; that he is the missing link, for example. Nor is there space for speculation as to his allegorical significance, that he may represent the ‘mindless mob,’ or the colony of Virginia, or the Understanding apart from the Imagination. It is perhaps as well that we have no space even to enumerate such conjectures; and some few words of the Introduction must now be allotted to Ariel . . . . First, like Caliban, Ariel is a complex character, but with a difference; his complexity falls chiefly under the one head of the supernatural; Shakespeare does not seek to make him, like Caliban, a type of social and political ideas or principles; this spirit of air can only be said to illustrate the notions of service and freedom, and that faintly. Hence, although he includes within himself many distinct types of the earlier or the

 Luce Morton, Commentary 161 mediaeval creations of demonology, these do not clash, and his ultimate development is both consistent and charming; indeed, the freedom assumed by Shakespeare with regard to Ariel in thus creating rather than recreating, is no less pleasing that the new life he infused into the lifeless product of the unities – the novel complexities that he adjusted to a nobler symmetry in his romantic drama. Besides, he could deal with the supernatural more at his will; no laws are more elastic than the laws which govern that region; and however much we may rebel against the jar of elements in Caliban, for Ariel we have nothing but wonder and delight. His name, like Caliban’s, has the significance of its type; he is first and foremost ‘an ayrie spirit’; but to analyse or to trace the development of this delightful creation is not essential to our purpose, although such an analysis was strictly essential in the case of Caliban. Here we need only recognize Ariel’s kinship13 on the one hand with the popular fairies14 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who plays their pranks on human mortals and with the more literary ‘demons’ on the other, who perform the bidding of a superior power. Yet, as we might expect at this period of Shakespeare’s authorship Ariel is a spirit much more than a fairy; he is a creature of both higher imagination and higher aspiration.15 As a Criticism of Life – Only in drama can poetry become a complete criticism of life; and such we may expect to find it in the drama of Shakespeare. But not even in Hamlet does this great critic review the facts of existence so fully and so truly as in The Tempest; a mere list of the subjects that are brought under the search-light of Shakespeare’s philosophy in this one play would be surprisingly long; here we can only touch upon some of the more important if the items. This we shall do best by taking the poet16 into our confidence, or by watching him as he sets about his new drama, The Tempest. Whilst turning over some translations from the Italian, or the leaves of some old play, or whilst conferring with a brother-playwright, he has chanced upon a plot that will do well for his next drama. It contains just the elements he is in search of; for it is a comedy, or at least a romance; it ends happily; it tells of repentance, reconcilement, forgiveness, of restoration after loss, of the bringing forth of good from evil. Only in such a story can he work out his mood of grave content and of kindly interest in all that concerns his fellow-men, especially the young. Hence, he will merely touch upon the problem of evil, and will give most of his attention to the topics of the day. He sees dimly, moreover, that the leading character will reflect himself, his career, and the approaching crisis of his life with whatever closeness his own mood or the demands of a drama may permit. Secondly, the story before him contains another element suited to his purpose, for it deals largely with the supernatural.17 This subject is dear to him now, and he brings it into all his later plays, into Pericles and Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale) in these, as in the masque of The Tempest the gods concern themselves with the destinies of mortals. He thinks, too, of that freak of his youth when he delighted both his own fancy and the hearts of his audience with fairy, forms and other beings of the popular wonderland, with Robin Goodfellow and the like; only his mood is graver now, and his supernatural agents must be creations of a higher order. Also he must bring into being some half-human creature who may body forth popular notions of the strange

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inhabitants of the world beyond the sea. For had not all the land just been listening with eager wonder to that thrilling account of the wreck of Sir George Somers on the shores of the Bermudas, which ‘were of all nations said and supposed to be enchanted and inhabited with witches and devils which grew by reason of accustomed monstrous thunderstorm and tempest near unto those islands’; and where ‘a sea- monster in shape like a man had been seen, who had been so called after the monstrous tempest’? At this point we again remember how, on a smaller scale but in just the same fashion, Shakespeare had incorporated a recent stormy season when writing his Midsummer Night’s Dream; and we note the recurring thunder in The Tempest suggested by these accounts, as almost certainly was the name of the play. Next, it was fresh in memory that the fleet of Sir George Somers had been sent out to support the colony of Virginia, which had been established the year before, and was now the talk of the whole country. Indeed, we may fairly say that nine-tenths of the subjects touched upon by Shakespeare in The Tempest are suggested by the new enterprise of colonization; and before everything else the nation was eager to hear and see any marvel of the newer world: ‘when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian’18 (II​.ii​​.34). With these marvels would be mingled political and social problems suggested by or actually arising out of the newly discovered and newly planted regions; for the colonists quarreled and mutinied, conspiracies were formed, labour was neglected; hence new theories of government were in the air, and new if crude inquiries into the constitution of society. And among the problems to be solved were such as these: how to deal with man discovered in a state of nature; what was his capacity for civilisation, his title to moral sense? There were problems as to the rights of savages, the doubtful evil of slavery, the doubtful blessing of civilisation; and as all these problems lay across the ocean, they would be bound up with narratives of travel, and with the wonders and perils of deep; nor was it in those days an incongruity that the scene of the drama should be the Mediterranean rather than the Atlantic. Apart, therefore, from any personal interest Shakespeare found in the story of The Tempest three leading artistic motives: a suitable main plot, a supernatural element, and a most excellent opportunity for introducing many topics of keen contemporary interest. But these topics he will review in their wider issues; for of the many true sayings about Shakespeare, this of Ben Jonson is one of the truest – ‘He was not of an age, but for all time – ’ a saying repeated with a slight difference by Coleridge; and in spite of some opinions to the contrary, I like to believe that the social philosophy and even the politics of Shakespeare are universal in their wisdom; the founding of Virginia is incidental, but the truths he has deduced from it are eternal; and this is why I have entitled the second division of my subject ‘The Tempest as a criticism of life’, rather than ‘The Tempest as a criticism of the times’. . . . . And therefore we have next to notice the marvelous foresight as well as insight with which Shakespeare exposes social and political fallacies, those wilder utopian notions that end in absurdities and contradictions, and that are not altogether unknown in our latest but not always wisest of the centuries. Some of these fallacies are delightfully laid bare as Gonzalo’s half-serious, halfwhimsical description of his island commonwealth, and in the critical remarks added

 Luce Morton, Commentary 163 by his hearers; such ideals of freedom the poet tells us will become real only when all are servants, when each shall find his own in all men’s good – in the words of Stephano, the realistic, the foil to Caliban, ‘Every man shift for all the rest, and let no man take care for himself for all is but fortune.’19 (V.i.256–7) We learn the same lesson not less thoroughly from the ludicrous parody which shows us Caliban exulting in a freedom that consisted in the change of King Log for King Stork: ‘has a new master; – get a new man Freedom, hey-day !’ (II​.ii​.​185–6). From these and yet other incidents in the play that illustrate the same fallacy, we return with regretful hope to the poet’s own conviction – ‘Reform? Reform thyself!’20 Until that individual reformation is effected all attempts to reform kingdoms or commonwealths will be more or less unsatisfactory, nor shall even thought itself be free ‘every man shift for all the rest’; how admirably the dramatic incidents of The Tempest lead to this great moral conclusion Ariel regains his freedom, but it is the freedom of a brook banked up one sullen hour to turn the wheel of the miller; the freedom of a wandering breeze caught for a moment in the meshes of a winnowing-fan; the freedom of a sunbeam imprisoned from noon till evening in some hermit’s cell – the freedom, that is, of things incapable of our ennobling limitations;21 and Caliban, who is as subterhuman as Ariel in some respects is superhuman, he, too, is left in brutish possession of his island. But the rest of the company, the nobler works of God, find true freedom in true service and as they leave the stage in the various bondage of happy and reconciled humanity, we hear the poet’s unconventional aside in the underthought of Prospero’s Epilogue – There’s nothing we can call our own but love.22 Nearer to Shakespeare’s own time were his view of slavery, and of the possibility of ‘converting’ the heathen. In regard to such questions his attitude is more neutral; if he does not approve of slavery, he does not expressly condemn it: ‘We’ll visit Caliban my slave. . . . We cannot miss him’ (I.ii.308, 311); and he makes the fact of slavery follow as a consequence on the failure of all attempts at conversion. And this belief that the heathen have no moral sense appears together with the recognition of slavery in numberless passages, as, for instance where Prospero exclaims, ‘Thou most lying slave/ Whom stripes may move, not kindness!’ (I.ii.344–5); or again, ‘Abhorred slave,/ Which any print of goodness wilt not take’ (I.ii.351–2). To do Shakespeare justice, however, we must remember his more partial discourse of slavery in The Merchant of Venice though even there he seems to follow the thought of Silvayn. Perhaps he is more outspoken when he dwells upon the rights of the savage: ‘This island’s mine . . . Which thou takest from me’ (I.ii.331–2); and we have already seen that when the play closes Caliban is left, however contemptuously, in undisturbed possession of his mother’s dominions. Yet Prospero takes it as a matter of course that he himself was designed as it were by providence to be owner and master of the new discovered land (see quotation from Bacon, p.173): ‘I am Prospero . . . . who most strangely/ Upon this shore, where you were wreck’d, was landed, / To be the lord on’t . . . .’ (V.i.159–62). On the other hand, Shakespeare is more than doubtful whether European civilisation is anything better than a curse to the savage; he is certainly severe where he points out that the vices of the old world, such as drunkenness, find their way into the new world far sooner than any of its virtues: ‘Drink, servant-monster, when I bid thee’ (III​.ii​.8).

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And even Caliban, as we have noticed, puts to shame the rapacity which was too common among colonists; he will have none of the paltry plunder; but, on the contrary, earth (I.ii.314) as he is, he can rebuke his more civilised masters for their greedily pilfering (IV.i); and if we apply Shakespeare’s criticism to our own day, we find that civilisation is too often ‘Knowledge of good, bought dear by knowing ill.’[23] This subject leads us on to Caliban’s famous rejoinder – the thought is Montaigne’s (p.173): ‘You taught me language;24and my profit on’t/ Is, I know how to curse’ (I.ii.362–3). The objection, as Shakespeare implies is that of the fallen angel in the poem, or of the child who upbraids his parents for giving him existence. Those who refuse life are condemned by all good society; and ‘education’ is only a longer way of spelling ‘life’. It may be ill-chosen, this education, ill-timed, it may be, and ill-given, but somehow it upbuilt that same good society and if we all do our part it will one day build up something better. Clearest of all, most far-reaching, and noblest is the poet’s criticism of our moral and mental life, of the use of art, knowledge, power, vengeance; in all of this he is astonishingly acute, suggestive, and elevating. He condemns the doctrine which would make knowledge an end rather than a means, the doctrine in another aspect of art for art’s sake (p.148). Whatever tends to sunder us from our human relationships and responsibilities must be wrong; a life ‘rapt in secret studies’ might ‘o’erprize a popular rate’ ‘but by being so retired’ and such selfish withdrawal Shakespeare will not sanction; indeed in this most philosophical of his plays he condemns selfishness in every form, the selfishness of art, of knowledge, of power, of vengeance – and, we may here add of self. Therefore he tells us that knowledge may be power, but a power that calls for a most careful discretion: ‘It is excellent/ To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous/ To use it like a giant’ Measure for Measure (II​.ii​.​107–9). Accordingly at the close of the play Prospero’s knowledge has become the wiser power that seeks ever to disclaim itself, is exercised only for the general good and will even be laid aside if it can subserve that good no longer: ‘My, Ariel, chick,/ That is thy charge: then to the elements/ Be free’ (V.i.317–18). For should it be exercised, should it so much as exist for its own sake, it must bear the harsher title of tyranny of the contemptible name of ambition. Linked with this is the yet more excellent moral lesson, perhaps the most important among so many in the play: ‘The rarer action is/ In virtue than in vengeance:25 they being penitent,/ The sole drift of my purpose doth extend/ Not a frown further’ (V.i.27–8). Never was the distinction put more admirably; eliminate selfishness, and you justice will be mercy; let selfishness enter ever so little, and your justice has become vulgar revenge. Where a play is so profoundly suggestive, it would be impossible to select or deal fully with all examples of the poet’s sagacity as a critic of human life; we must be content with taking a few of the more obvious, believing that many of the same lofty import remain to be considered. Nor have I thought it necessary to refer to those of slighter and conjectural interest, such as Shakespeare’s anticipations of modern science, and his prophetic utterances generally. And as to the field of allegorical and other symbolism, – subtle as it may be after the Elizabethan fashion, – into that wide and alluring field, as I have hinted already, I do not think it worthwhile to enter. My purpose ends with this brief notice of some of the absolutely definite and more abiding elements that make The Tempest such a marvelous criticism of the whole of human life. (x–xii, xxxii–xlix)

29

Ashley Thorndike, the influence of Beaumont and Fletcher 1901

From The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare (Worcester, MA, 1901). Ashley Thorndike (1871–1933) taught literature at Columbia University. An expert on Shakespeare, he wrote numerous books including The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare (1901), Facts About Shakespeare (1927), Tragedy (1908) and English Comedy (1957). He is often credited with the first use of the term ‘revenge tragedy’ to describe plays of that genre written in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Thorndike’s interest in genre and literary tradition is evident in this piece on The Tempest. In contrast to the nineteenth century’s emphasis on Shakespeare’s individuality and the play’s originality, Thorndike considers the play as Shakespeare’s experiment with and development of the kind of romance popularized by Beaumont and Fletcher.

A Winter’s Tale and The Tempest do not show so close a relation as Cymbeline to the Beaumont-Fletcher romantic type. Neither seems to have been suggested by any one play as Cymbeline by Philaster; they are both plays, however, which link themselves to Cymbeline in separation from the rest of Shakespeare’s work and which possess, as has already been indicated, many of the characteristics of the Beaumont-Fletcher romances. Which of the two was written first is hardly determinable, but there is general agreement that they both succeeded Cymbeline. If this order is the true one; there is no reason for expecting traces of anything like direct imitation to be longer prominent. We may rather expect to find Shakespeare transforming the experimental form of Cymbeline into something indisputably his own. We may, however, expect to find evidences of the Beaumont-Fletcher methods and fashions and of Shakespeare’s development of them. At the risk of repetition, we will consider some of the ways in which the two plays show Shakespeare’s development of the Beaumont-Fletcher romance, which he had first tried in Cymbeline. . . . The Tempest at first sight seems to differ much more than the Winter’s Tale from a romance like Cymbeline. This is perhaps mainly due to the fact that we always think of it as a poem and never as a play. More than any other of Shakespeare’s plays, it seems

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to embody a conscious effort at the expression of a definite artistic mood. The beauty of its idealized picture of life, the serenity of its philosophy, the charm of its verse make it a poem to be treasured and pondered over and loved. To understand, however, just what its effect must have been on the Elizabethan stage, we must minimize the effect of its poetry and recall some elements of the play which are no longer salient. We must analyze not the aesthetic mood which it creates in us but the structure of the play itself. . . . If we look, then, at the qualities which distinguish it as a stage play, we find many indications of current dramatic fashions and many points of resemblance to the general type of romances. For the plot there is, as usual, a story of sentimental love and a correlated plot of intrigue and murder.1 We have only to see the play on the stage to realize that the story of the bewildered courtiers (however uninteresting to modern taste) is the best acting part of the play. That story, probably from some Italian source, forms the basis of the plot. As Mr. Wendell has shown, Shakespeare has elaborated the denouement into five acts. The play is simply the expanded fifth act of a tragic comedy – a surprising, romantic denouement. This is the distinguishing feature of the construction, but there are many other evidences that Shakespeare was striving for stage effect. Perhaps for this reason he followed the unities of time and place, for whose observances Beaumont had praised Jonson. Moreover, he added to the tragic-idyllic story, incidents, characters, and scenes, almost surely suggested by tales of a voyage to the new world which were just then exciting general interest. The enchanted island, the magic of Prospero, the monster Caliban, and the fairy Ariel must certainly have been novel and interesting to Elizabethan audiences. As in the Winter’s Tale, he also gained stage-effectiveness and lessened the artificiality of the idyllic element by introducing comic personages after the style of those in his early comedies. He also used some of the stage devices which he had earlier used in the Midsummer Night’s Dream. Most notable, however, of all the devices for stage effect, was the pageantry borrowed from the court masques. We have already seen that The Tempest was in part a stage pageant, definitely constructed on the style of those popular entertainments. In this respect it resembles Beaumont and Fletcher’s Four Plays in One, which also combines romantic situations with masque-like pageants. In borrowing from the masques Shakespeare was making use of a very popular fashion. Most of the characters, as we have noted, are developments of the conventionalized types. Miranda says little or nothing which has a trace of direct individualized characterization. The speech which comes the nearest to this, her proposal to Ferdinand, sounds very much like one of Beaumont and Fletcher’s heroines. [Quotes 3.2.77–86 – Fer. ‘Wherefore weep you?’ . . . .] .... The style of The Tempest shows far more mastery than that of the two other romances; but, for all its greater beauty, it is structurally the same. From the nature of the play, something of a return to the old lyrical structure might be expected, but there are no indications of this. One or two examples will indicate that the disjointed, parenthetical structure of Cymbeline is retained but used with greater skill. For an example of its use in passages involving intense action, take the speeches of Antonio.

 Ashley Thorndike, the Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher 167 For its use in narrative take Prospero’s account of his misfortunes [1.2.37–168], or his account of Caliban’s plot. To see how far this structure had become a matter of habit even is set declamations, take Prospero’s speech at the beginning of the last act, or Ariel’s speech to the courtier [3.3.53ff]. In style, therefore, as well as in characters and plot, the Tempest resembles the other romances. In style, however, and in all other elements, the differences are not less notable than the resemblances. The characteristics of the romances of Beaumont and Fletcher which appear in Cymbeline, reappear in the Tempest, but altered and transformed. While Cymbeline seems an experiment suggested by Philaster, the Tempest is a development of the ‘romance’ type, which is the highest degree of masterly and original. .... Our analysis has shown that his transformation of the romantic type involves much besides a more masterly expression of the artistic impulses which seem to have dominated his latest period. He was dealing as in the other romances with an idyllic love story and a counterplot of tragic possibilities, and he was trying to treat both with ingenuity and novelty. He found suggestions for much new and sensational matter in the reports of a recent voyage. He undertook a constructive feat in handling the denouement such as he had experimented upon in Cymbeline, and for some reason he chose strictly to observe the unities. He borrowed many devices, conventions, and situations from earlier plays, and he constructed a stage pageant on the style of the court masques. In all these respects he was aiming to make his play effective on the stage, and in some particulars he was following methods and fashions used by Beaumont and Fletcher. Yet all his varied aims are perfectly harmonized in the final result. The Italian story finds its true home in the Bermudas, and marvelous adventures are told with strict adherence to Aristotle’s laws. The love of a maiden, the old plot of villainous intrigue, the superb wisdom of Prospero, all find one haven through ‘calm seas, auspicious gales’. The drunken clowns, the Italian courtiers, the strange monster, and the ‘zepher-like’ Ariel play their parts with antick dancer such as Shakespeare had seen in the court masques at Whitehall. Out of such varied driftwood rose Shakespeare’s enchanted island. (161–6)

30

Everett Edward Hale, commentary 1903

From ‘The Tempest’ by William Shakespeare, Riverside Edition, edited by Richard Grant White with an introduction and additional notes by Edward Everett Hale (Cambridge, MA: 1903). Edward Everett Hale (1822–1909) was an author, historian and Unitarian minister, who became chaplain of the United States Senate. He is best known for his writings supporting the Union during the American Civil War. Hale clearly considers certain questions that had preoccupied other scholars (notably the location of the island) as less important for the appreciation of the play than the fact that it might have been written later in Shakespeare’s career.

[From ‘Introduction’] It is not more stimulating to the imagination to know that Shakespeare wrote The Tempest in one year than in another. But whatever be the value of the investigation, there is some use in the result. There is a pleasure, it would seem, in knowing that we have here a work of Shakespeare’s matured genius, that the verse, the thought, the subject even, is of the later Shakespeare. If it be not a pleasure in itself, it leads us to an appreciation somewhat richer than that which, though otherwise the same, neglects it. We should hardly know the true Tempest if we read it so as to hold it a youthful work like Love’s Labour’s Lost. It is certainly not necessary to know who wrote a beautiful thing, but if we do know, and know something of him, we shall often do something worthwhile in getting closer to his idea. And that is what we want. We want to enjoy this play poetically, if possible much as Shakespeare enjoyed it himself. We shall be rather helped in such enjoyment by knowing that we have here the ripe work of the experienced man whose feeling in art and wisdom in life had grown and developed in the work of twenty years of the greatest writing ever done in England. .... There has also been discussion as to the geographical situation of the enchanted isle. Some students are sure that it is one of the Bermudas, on which Sir George Sommers had been shipwrecked a year or two before the play was written. It seems very probable

 Everett Edward Hale, Commentary 169 that Shakespeare had read an account of the matter and taken a hint or two from it. But if we are to try to give a real situation to the island, it would seem from Act I. sc. ii. L 229 as if it might be anywhere in the world except one of the Bermudas. Why should Prospero, if he lived in a cell on one of the Bermudas, call the swift Ariel from a deep nook, also in one of the Bermudas, to fetch dew from the Bermudas? The whole point of that line seems to be that the nook where the king’s ship was hidden, and whence Prospero once called Ariel to go an errand for him, was far from the Bermudas. Else why send Ariel? If the question were one of actual history or geography, we might further ask how ships bound from Tunis to Naples should be cast away on the Bermudas? But of course the whole matter is of the very slightest importance. One may believe that the enchanted isle was one of the Bermudas and enjoy the play quite as much as one may enjoy Robinson Crusoe with the idea (equally erroneous) that his delightful sojourn was upon the island of Juan Fernandez, which, as all the world knows, is (or is not) near the mouth of the great river Orinoco. And even if one have the correct idea – that the island was in the Mediterranean – what of it? Does it help us to know what scamels are? [From ‘On the Conditions of the Elizabethan Stage and their Effect on Shakespeare’] In writing of The Tempest, however, it is proper to make something of a qualification. Besides the drama of the public stage, the plays that were given at the playhouses, in Shakespeare’s day there was another kind of play more elaborate and more spectacular. This was the masque, an entertainment private rather than public, and full of an elaborate splendor which the public stage had not. The masque had something of story and character, more of poetry and declamation, and, most generally, of dance, song, costume, and scenery. The masque most familiar to us today is Comus, later than the time of Shakespeare, but not different in kind from those common in his day. There is a masque in Act IV. of The Tempest. It is short and slight, but it has all the characteristics of a true masque. The action is trifling and refers chiefly to the occasion, the characters are conventional, and the language is poetic. There is opportunity for music and dance; there is even the contrast between the beautiful and the homely (masque and anti-masque) in the nymphs and the reapers. The occurrence of this masque has led some scholars to believe that The Tempest was written for presentation at some private occasion, – a royal wedding is named, – not for the public stage. This may or may not be, so far as historic fact is concerned; there is no evidence for it outside of the play itself. What is here important is to note that The Tempest has none of the specific characteristics of a private entertainment and almost all those of a play written for public presentation. It is quite different from the masques that we have, and very like the plays. We need not, therefore, imagine that in The Tempest, as we have it, there is anything not in keeping with the traditions of the Elizabethan stage. (3–6, 22–3)

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W. W. Newell, The Tempest and folk-tale 1903

From ‘Sources of Shakespeare’s Tempest,’ Journal of American Folklore, 16 (1903), 234–57. William Well Newell (1839–1907) was an American scholar who taught briefly in the Philosophy Department at Harvard University and spent most of his career as a school teacher. Newell founded the American Folklore Society in 1888. The Journal of American Folklore was affiliated with the Society and edited by Newell. His best-known work is Games and Songs of American Children (1883, Mineola, N. Y.), the first collection of American children’s music. Like other folklorists, Newell draws on his knowledge of popular, oral narratives that circulated in ‘non-literary’ circles comprised of common ‘folk’. In the manner typical of folklore research, he tracks The Tempest’s motifs, structure and plots to literary texts such as the German author Jacob Ayer’s ‘The Fair Sidea,’ which Newell, in turn, connects to popular European folk narratives. In the full version of this essay, Newell looks for connections between European, Arabian, Buddhist and Sanskrit texts. Although the play’s connection to Jacob Ayer’s work had been pointed out earlier, the significance of Newell’s essay is that he moves beyond ‘source criticism’ and places the play in the context of conventions and motifs seen in popular narratives from around the world, so anticipating structuralist criticism of the play.

Among Shakespearian plays The Tempest is exceptional, in that no composition has been discovered which could have supplied the poet with the outline of his drama. . . . Concerning immediate origins, I have nothing to add; but the ultimate source of the story may receive further elucidation. . . . . Abandoning minor traits as furnishing no clue to the inquiry, I may confine myself to the outline of the history. This recites that a prince, who has been driven from his possessions by a rival, remains in a desert, where he dwells with his one daughter, devotes himself to magic arts, and takes in his employ familiar spirits. By the aid of such helpers he makes himself master of his enemy’s son, who chances to approach his solitary retreat; this youth is brought into contact with the exile’s daughter, and a love affair follows, with happy result; the banished prince is restored to his dominions. It happens that the same words may be used to summarize a contemporary German

 W. W. Newell, The Tempest and Folk-tale 171 drama, the ‘Fair Sidea’ (Die Schone Sidea) of Jacob Ayrer; the question is, what relation exists between the two works? The first point to be decided is the relative date of the pieces. Ayrer died at Nuremberg in 1605. The Tempest must have been later than 1603, inasmuch as Shakespeare, in making Gonzalo describe an ideal commonwealth, has utilized a passage of Florio’s Montaigne, published in that year. The dramatic literature of the period exhibits a gradual surrender of rhyme when intermingled with blank verse; such seems to have been Shakespeare’s own tendency; judged by this test, critics have been inclined to assign 1610 or 1611 as the date of the play. In theatrical matters, England was far in advance of Germany, where the drama remained in a very crude condition. From previous centuries between the two countries had existed an intellectual exchange. In 1585 the Earl of Leicester, sent by Elizabeth to the Netherlands, had taken with him a player named Will, who was at one time supposed to have been possibly Shakespeare himself. During Shakespeare’s career, English actors continued to perform in Germany, where they gave their pieces both in English and German. It might therefore be suggested that the report of returning Englishmen had given the English writer some idea of Ayrer’s comedy; so, thought A. Cohn,[1] who has excellently discussed the position of English actors in Germany. On the other hand, Furness is unable to see any connection between the dramas. While the themes of ‘Fair Sidea’ and The Tempest are so similar as to be expressible in the same words, the details of the action vary. In the German the scene is laid in the forest, in the English on an island. Ayrer brings only the prince into the hands of the enchanter, Shakespeare also the father with his retinue. In the story of the latter, Prospero is consentient to the amour; in the latter, Sidea, placed by her father in charge of the captive, elopes and is pursued. The comic interludes are totally divergent, while Ayrer continues the main narrative beyond the point at which Shakespeare leaves it. These divergencies exclude the supposition that the English poet borrowed from Ayrer, an opinion further contradicted by circumstances hereafter to be noted. [The author proceeds to give a list of scenes from Ayrer in which correspondences with The Tempest are discernable] . . . . These brief passages exhibit the entirety of the relation between the German comedy and farce and the beautiful comedy of Shakespeare. In both the hero is prevented by magic power from using his weapon; yet on this coincidence not much emphasis can be placed, inasmuch as such trait would be likely to appear in any account reciting the capture of a soldier by a magician. The case is different in the duty of handling wood, in both plays performed under the superintendence of the pitying heroine. This detail, taken together with the identity of plot, to my mind appears sufficient for the assumption of a common source. As regards Ayrer there can be no doubt; the ‘Fair Sidea’ is only a literary version of the most widely diffused and popular of all folk-tales, that in which an unfortunate youth makes in the wilderness the acquaintance of a fairy, over whom he obtains power by seizing the feather robe which enables her to soar, is guided to the house of her gigantic father, where she protects him from the cannibal, is required to perform

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difficult tasks accomplished through her magic, ultimately elopes with her and is pursued, but again saved by her advice. In the variant followed by Ayrer, the prince, on his way to the house of his parents, leaves the lady in the wood, on the pretext that he must seek for her a conveyance, arrives at the court of his father, but forgets his bride; the latter takes refuge with peasants, and in disguise resorts to the court, where she finds her betrothed about to marry another, but succeeds in recalling herself to his recollection, is restored to his affection, and accepted by his family. This story Ayrer has followed with no more deviation than is usual in a literary recast of a folk-tale; the chief originality consists in the introduction of a series of comic interludes unconnected with the central theme. In the play, the cannibal giant of the marchen becomes an enchanter who is a banished prince, the final escape is omitted, the tasks reduced to the single duty of wood-cutting; these alterations may already have taken place in Ayrer’s source; in such case, the history used by him must have been a reworking in which the plot had already been modernized. Among English versions of the nursery tale, one, collected by myself in Massachusetts, is entitled ‘Lady Featherflight’ this appellation corresponds to a trait once making the central feature, namely, that the heroine is a bird-maiden, a fairy possessing the power of flight in virtue of possessing a feather robe, who has come into the power of the hero by the appropriation of her garment. The youth, called Jack (there was time when in English folk-lore John and Jane were considered names especially appropriate to beautiful and distinguished personages), is sent by his poor mother to seek fortune, traverses the forest, arrives at the castle of a cannibal giant where he is protected by the giant’s daughter, is discovered and set to the performance of superhuman tasks (to thatch a barn with feathers, sort out a heap composed of various seeds, weave a rope of sand), flies with the maiden and is pursued by the father, magically creates obstacles which impede the pursuer (a forest, a lake in which the giant destroys himself), leaves his bride in the neighborhood of his father’s house, with intent to bring a priest who may marry the couple; the lady, thus abandoned, is in danger from peasants; . . . . . . . . Ayrer’s verse is a good example of the manner in which a traditional story may, without any great expenditure of imagination, be worked into a drama. As for Shakespeare, the connection is more remote. If we consider the universal currency of the marchen, it will be credible that the English writer used a version of literary character, in which the plot had been much decorated and abbreviated; that this may have been an Italian novel, in which the scenery and proper names had already been fitted to the country of Naples and Milan, is made likely by the existence of Italian tales in which the material has received literary treatment. Two such appear in the ‘Pentamerone’ of Basile (A. D. 1574). Of these one, entitled ‘La Palomma’ (the Dove) by the name exhibits identity with Lady Featherflight. The hero, a prince named Nardo Aniello, finds in a forest near Naples the beautiful Filadoro (Gold-thread, i.e. Fair One with the Golden Locks), daughter of an ogress by whom he is captured; the prince essays to draw and defend himself, but (like Ferdinand) is rooted to the spot. The ogress conveys the youth to her hut, where she imposes on him tasks ‘See that you work like a dog, if you had not rather die like a pig! And, for the first service, let this acre of ground be dug and sown as level as this chamber; and let it stick in your brain, that when I come back in this evening, if I do not find it done, I will eat you!’ She bids

 W. W. Newell, The Tempest and Folk-tale 173 her daughter attend to the house, and goes to a meeting of the ogresses; the prince (like Ferdinand) bewails his lot, but is consoled by Filadoro, who assures him that the labor shall be performed by her magic power. The ogress returns and is surprised to see the work accomplished; the second task is that ‘six cords of wood, which were in her cellar, shall be split each in four’ this also is done by the enchantments of the heroine. The third obligation is to drain a cistern; seeing the malice of her mother, the girl consents to fly, and the escape is accomplished without difficulty. The hero abandons his bride, the reason assigned being his desire to arrange for her appearance at the court of his father in proper state; he forgets his beloved, and is about to marry the lady of his mother’s selection, when La Palomma brings herself to his memory through the song of a dove, and all ends happily. The debt of Shakespeare to the presumed source is so slight as perhaps scarce to seem worth noting, even although the scaffolding of The Tempest was thus supplied; but from the point of view of a comparative student the relation is interesting the folktale, of great antiquity and world-wide diffusion, has flowered into a number of works which in their respective languages have attained celebrity, and are therefore only less important than the marvelous composition of the English poet. (234–5, 240–1, 244–5)

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Max Beerbohm, theatre review 1903

From The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, No. 2506, Vol. 96, (7 November 1903), 575–6. Sir Henry Maximillian (‘Max’) Beerbohm was an English caricaturist and writer. His best-known works are A Christmas Garland (1912), Seven Men (1919) and Zuleika Dobson (1911). Beerbohm was the drama critic for The Saturday Review between 1898 and 1910 and was connected to the English theatre world through his half-brother, Herbert Beerbohm Tree. His review of a 1903 production of The Tempest at the Royal Court Theatre is among the few that considers the possibility that the play could indeed be staged effectively. He argues that the play is ‘modern’ in its emotional restraint and deliberate artistry (a direct result of it being Shakespeare’s mature work) and so suitable for the modern stage. Beerbohm also brings literary criticism in conversation with theatre criticism.

Over certain of the plays of Shakespeare broods darkly the superstition that they don’t ‘act well.’ Whenever a manager dashes in, undaunted by his shadow, and produces one of these plays, we are startled to find that the play does act very well indeed. Julius Caesar, King John, Richard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, were all of them, written within recent years, regarded as forlorn hopes. The Tempest was in like case. More artistically compact, and therefore more modern, in form that any other Shakespearean play, it was yet scouted as apt only to ‘the study’. True, Mr. Benson[1] had it in his repertory (as, indeed, he had also two, at least, of those other plays which I have named). But somehow, admirable though they are in many ways, Mr. Benson’s productions do not make a sharp and durable impression. They are enjoyed but not cherished in recollection. Though Mr. Benson proved to London, two or three years ago, that The Tempest was apt to the stage, the lesson, conclusive at the moment, has been forgotten. Here comes Mr. J. H. Leigh, to teach it again. But do not run away with (or rather form) the idea that Mr. Leigh is a mere educationist. The unfamiliarity of his name, and the deviousness of his venue (the Court Theatre), and the report that his cast is recruited from an histrionic academy, might make you – probably have made you – a trifle shy and suspicious. Courage! Hold not back! Press boldly on to Sloane Square! For Mr. Leigh’s production is quite vivid and pretty, quite untainted by pedantry. Some

 Max Beerbohm, Theatre Review 175 of my colleagues have called it a compromise between the spectacular method and the method of the Elizabethan Stage Society. That fosters a false impression. To the method of Mr. Poel[2] (quem, I hasten to add, honoris causa nomino) there is not in Mr. Leigh’s method the faintest affinity. The play is treated here, not as a dead thing, at which in its shroud we may be permitted to peer, but as a live and kicking organism, as a thing visible form a modern standpoint, susceptible to a modern method – in fact, as a classic, in the true and full sense. The method is not the less spectacular because the spectacle has to be on a small scale. No vast sums of money could be forthcoming for a venture of this kind; but there has been no stint of taste and ingenuity. From so small a stage as the Court’s we cannot gain that illusion of airy distance which we need for a full sense of the mysterious island. But the scene-painter has done his best, and a very decent best it is. The fairies and nymphs and other spirits cannot swarm here, as ideally they would; but we behold very respectable samples of them. In one sense, the smallness of the stage is a positive gain for us. Against the advantages of a very big stage must be set always the defect: the characters become less than life-size, and thus shed much of their proper dignity and importance. To atone for their tininess, the mimes proceed to make terrific efforts, talking at a far higher pitch, forcing their feet to take longer strides, and their hands to make fare more comprehensive arabesques, than can be reconciled with the true expression of nature. They cease to be men and women impersonating men and women. They seem rather like a multiplied incarnation of the frog in the fable. Of course, there are mimes in whom the effort is not painfully apparent; but the effort is always there, a drag on the art of acting; and from the purely physical standpoint, there is not a single mime who can make the right effect, for giants find it more lucrative to be exhibited singly in side-shows than to take their chance on the legitimate stage. On a very big stage the fairies at Prospero’s command would be of exactly the right size. At the Court they are of the wrong, human, size. But Prospero himself is of the human, the right, size. And that is the more important point, surely. Sprites are nearer to humanity than is the gravely predominant Prospero to spritedom. It is mainly from Prospero that The Tempest draws for us its peculiar interest and fascination. Of course, its technical difference, to which I have alluded, is an interesting and fascinating point. Here, one might say, is the least Shakespearean of all Shakespeare’s plays. For what is the salient thing about Shakespeare? Surely, the careless exuberance, the headlong impatience, of his art. Like the age in which he wrote, he was essentially young. In the heat of his creative power, he cared not at all – could not pause to bother – how he expressed himself. Everything came out anyhow, shot by blind and irresistible impulse. Consider that debauch of uncontrolled fancy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With it The Tempest is often bracketed, by reason of the supernatural element in either play. But the two are at opposite poles. The one is a debauch, the other a work of art. True lovers of Shakespeare must needs prefer the debauch. The Tempest seems, by comparison, cold and calculating. One misses the headiness, the mad magic, of the youthful work. The divinely-overdone poetry has been chastened and straightened into something akin with prose. We have been transported from Thebes to Athens. Or say, we have passed from the rose of dawn into the twilight of evening. Yes, The Tempest is essentially the work of an elder. And for that

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very reason it seems, as I suggested, so modern. Art triumphs only over impoverished vitality. The reason why modern artists are so artistic is that they are not overwhelmed with a surplusage of emotions and ideas. They can practice restraint only because they have little to restrain. So it was with Shakespeare, when, before, letting fall the pen from his hand, he wrote The Tempest. Yet of all his plays The Tempest is not only the most artistic, but also the most original. I say ‘yet,’ for a paradox must be broken gently, that its truth be accepted. ‘Therefore’ were the right conjunction. Not in the heat of creativeness are artists ever original. Having so much to give forth, and being by that impulse so pressed for time, they snatch at the handiest means. Into ready-made moulds they can pour quicklier their genius. In fact, like other spendthrifts, they will beg, borrow, or steal. But their unscrupulousness comes of wealth, not poverty. That is the paradox, and the tragedy, at the root of all great literature. In some other planet there may be, but never will be in ours, a great writer expressing the full vigour of his greatness in his own way, and with exquisite care. An artistic conscience, and the desire for originality – a desire bred of self-consciousness and pride – will find entrance only when the breast shall have been eased of it tumultuous and surging contents. I have called The Tempest the least Shakespearean of Shakespeare’s plays. It is that because into it Shakespeare put more of himself than into any other. Generation after generation of German and other commentators has been groping dustily, fustily, mustily, for ‘the sources’ of this play. Every other play has been tracked down to the place it was filched from. The Tempest alone is unproven a theft. Mustily, fustily, dustily, the commentators are groping, everywhere, still, at this moment. But their labour is in vain, I think. I think the reason why this one story has not been tracked down to Italy or elsewhere is that Shakespeare invented this one story. Enchanting though it is, perhaps it is not in itself a great story. But as an allegory it is perfect. Obviously, Shakespeare, at the close of his career, wished to write an epilogue to his work, an autobiography, in allegorical form. That was a very natural wish. And what more natural than that he could not lay hands on any read-made story whereby to symbolize his meaning? And what more natural than that he should proceed to evolve from his own brain, now at leisure for the task, a story after his own less quickly-pulsing heart? The very difference in form, the neat unity, of The Tempest may be taken as internal evidence that here the poet was working untrammeled from without. Though age had checked his diffuseness in other plays, too, The Tempest is the only one that satisfies the modern standard of art. And age, alone, is not enough to account for the singularity. To impersonate Prospero is a solemn and difficult task for any actor. He has to impress us, not merely as a rightful Duke, endowed with supernatural powers, and now quitting his enchanted place of exile for his native duchy, but also as Shakespeare, retiring from dramatic authorship into privacy and leisure. By the way I ought to have qualified my assertion that the allegory is perfect. The island is a perfect symbol for the theatre. Ariel is a perfect symbol for the genius which had served Shakespeare to weave his spells and was now to be hard-worked no more. Caliban (beyond his merely topical symbolism for the Virginian as slave) is a perfect symbol for the ‘groundlings’ whom Shakespeare, having tried in vain to elevate them, was glad to leave in untroubled possession of the theatre. But one does not see why Shakespeare, a bourgeois, relapsing to obscurity from the sphere in which his genius had shone so

 Max Beerbohm, Theatre Review 177 lustrously, should sneer so persistently at his own ‘rough magic,’ and at theatrical art in general, and should imply that he is returning to a nobler and worthier sphere. Had he been, besides a dramatist, a master of scientific philosophy, believing, like Bacon, ‘that it is not good to stay long in the theatre,’ and had he, as had Bacon . . . but I am treading on a volcano, and I will not risk that eruption of fury which immediately overwhelms any definite refusal to treat a still open question as settled for ever. Enough that he who impersonates Prospero impersonates also the creator of Prospero, and that so we need of him a double dignity and weight. Mr. Acton Bond[3] acts in a scholarly and charming way and has enough authority to carry him well through the part of Prospero proper. But he does not quite satisfy our hunger for a realization of Prospero’s creator. Mr. Leigh himself plays Caliban, and is duly ‘savage,’ but ought surely to be more ‘deformed’. Miranda, that extremist among ingenues, loses nothing by Mrs. Leigh’s[4] interpretation of her, and Mr. Charles Lander5 speaks well the lines of Ferdinand. Ariel is less lucky. Better the suggestion of a mere human being, however helpless, than of a pantomime fairy, however capable. (575–6)

33

A. C. Bradley, the transitory nature of things 1904

From Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on ‘Hamlet’, ‘Othello’, ‘King Lear’, ‘Macbeth’ (London, 1905). A. C. Bradley (1851–1935) is perhaps the most important Shakespeare scholar of the early twentieth century. Indeed, Shakespeare and Bradley have been seen as mutually sustaining, with Bradley’s work contributing to the ‘improvement’ of public taste and to the understanding of Shakespeare among countless students and scholars. A professor at Oxford University, Bradley’s masterpiece is Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), a work in which he treats Shakespeare’s tragic plays with a moral seriousness largely reserved at Oxford for the classics. Bradley’s essays are based on the premise that the tragedies are philosophical works which provide an understanding of morality and human character. This section on The Tempest appears in Bradley’s chapter on King Lear. He sees both plays as alike in their philosophy and outlook. As in many of Bradley’s essays, this one too is interested in the ‘broad picture’ presented by the play rather than in language or style as such; he also makes inferences on the philosophy and emotions of the author based on what his characters say and do.

[From Lecture VIII, King Lear] Let us renounce the world, hate it, and lose it gladly. The only real thing in it is the soul, with its courage, patience, devotion. And nothing outward can touch that. This, if we like to use the word, is Shakespeare’s ‘pessimism’ in King Lear. As we have seen, it is not by any means the whole spirit of the tragedy, which presents the world as a place where heavenly good grows side by side with evil, where extreme evil cannot long endure, and where all that survives the storm is good, if not great. But still this strain of thought, to which the world appears as the kingdom of evil and therefore worthless, is in the tragedy, and may well be the record of many hours of exasperated feeling and troubled brooding. Pursued further and allowed to dominate, it would destroy the tragedy; for it is necessary to tragedy that we should feel that suffering and death do matter greatly, and that happiness and life are not to be renounced as worthless. Pursued further, again, it leads to the idea that the world, in that obvious appearance of it which tragedy cannot dissolve without dissolving itself, is illusive. And

 A. C. Bradley, the Transitory Nature of Things 179 its tendency towards this idea is traceable in King Lear, in the shape of the notion that this ‘great world’ is transitory, or ‘will wear out to nought’ like the little world called ‘man’ (4.6.137), or that humanity will destroy itself.1 In later days, in the drama that was probably Shakespeare’s last complete work, the Tempest, this notion of the transitoriness of things appears, side by side with the simpler feeling that man’s life is an illusion or dream, in some of the most famous lines he ever wrote: [Quotes 4.1.148– 58: ‘Our revels now are ended . . . .’]. These lines, detached from their context, are familiar to everyone; but, in the Tempest, they are dramatic as well as poetical. The sudden emergence of the thought expressed in them has a specific and most significant cause; and as I have not seen it remarked I will point it out. Prospero, by means of his spirits, has been exhibiting to Ferdinand and Miranda a masque in which goddesses appear, and which is so majestic and harmonious that to the young man, standing beside such a father and such a wife, the place seems Paradise, – as perhaps the world once seemed to Shakespeare. Then, at the bidding of Iris, there begins a dance of Nymphs with Reapers, sunburnt, weary of their August labour, but now in their holiday garb. But, as this is nearing its end, Prospero ‘starts suddenly, and speaks’; and the visions vanish. And what he ‘speaks’ is shown in these lines, which introduce the famous passage just quoted: [Quotes 4.1.139–47: ‘I had forgot that foul conspiracy . . . .’]. And then, after the famous lines, follow these: [Quotes 4.1.158–63: ‘Sir, I am vex’d: Bear with my weakness; . . . .’]. We seem to see here the whole mind of Shakespeare in his last years. That which provokes in Prospero first a ‘passion’ of anger, and, a moment later, that melancholy and mystical thought that the great world must perish utterly and that man is but a dream, is the sudden recollection of gross and apparently incurable evil in the ‘monster’ whom he had tried in vain to raise and soften, and in the monster’s human confederates. It is this, which is but the repetition of his earlier experience of treachery and ingratitude, that troubles his old brain, makes his mind ‘beat,’2 and forces on him the sense of unreality and evanescence in the world and the life that are haunted by such evil. Nor, though Prospero can spare and forgive, is there any sign to the end that he believes the evil curable either in the monster, the ‘born devil,’ or in the more monstrous villains, the ‘worse than devils,’ whom he so sternly dismisses. But he has learned patience, has come to regard his anger and loathing as a weakness or infirmity, and would not have it disturb the young and innocent. And so, in the days of King Lear, it was chiefly the power of ‘monstrous’ and apparently cureless evil in the ‘great world’ that filled Shakespeare’s soul with horror, and perhaps forced him sometimes to yield to the infirmity of misanthropy and despair, to cry ‘No, no, no life,’ and to take refuge in the thought that this fitful fever is a dream that must soon fade into a dreamless sleep; until, to free himself from the perilous stuff that weighed upon his heart, he summoned to his aid his ‘so potent art,’ and wrought this stuff into the stormy music of his greatest poem, which seems to cry, ‘You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need’, and, like the Tempest, seems to preach to us from end to end, ‘Thou must be patient’, ‘Bear free and patient thoughts’3 [King Lear 4.6.178, 83]. (327–30)

34

Stopford Brooke, commentary 1905

From On Ten Plays of Shakespeare (London, 1905). Stopford Brooke (1832–1916) was an Irish churchman and royal chaplain. Affiliated with the Church of England for much of his career, he later became disillusioned with what he saw as its conservative politics and withdrew from it. In addition to Stopford’s church career, he was a writer, lecturer and literary critic, authoring works such as Theology of the English Poets (1872) and English Literature (1877). His On Ten Plays of Shakespeare is a collection of essays on individual plays. His commentary on The Tempest is significant for its analysis of Miranda, whom he reads as innocent as well as independent. Besides, Stopford is among the few critics who rejects the ‘philosophical’ reading of Prospero’s revels speech – neither Shakespeare nor his character (nor the play as a whole) truly believe that life is a transitory illusion, maintains Stopford; joy and life are valuable and real, as the two young lovers know very well.

As to the island, it ought, of course, to be the Mediterranean, and commentators have wasted a great deal of time in conjecturing whether it was Malta, Lampedusa, Pantalaria, or Corcyra. It is in the Sea of the Imagination; and its rocks and dells, its nooks where the wave lies calm, nay, Prospero, Miranda, Caliban and Ariel, belong to that country which is seen only by the intellectual eye, which is bodied forth from things unknown, but which abides forever as it was first created, unsubject to the decay that winds and waters, frosts and fire work on the islands of the earth. This island is immortal, though no ship has cast anchor there; It is an isle ‘twixt Heaven, Air, Earth and Sea,/ Cradled, and hung in clear tranquility’. [Epipcychdion, P.B. Shelley] . . . . No one is free from this magic in the air but Ferdinand and Miranda. True, their ‘changing eyes’ at first sight is attributed by Prospero to the influence of Ariel), but that was an old man’s mistake. There was no necessity for Ariel’s help or interference. Love has its own magic, of a more potent spell than any in the book of Prospero. These lovers made their own enchantments, and earn, as Shakespeare wishes us to feel, the wonder of Prospero. The sweet encounter of their souls left far behind his wizardry. Even the life of Ariel, line spirit as he was, was not so fine as theirs. No lovers talk in

 Stopford Brooke, Commentary 181 Shakespeare’s dramas is more beautiful than theirs in the third act, where the innocent love of Miranda, who has never seen a man but her father, is in contrast with that of Ferdinand, who has seen many women and flitted through momentary love of them; but who, on touching Miranda, is lifted out of his atmosphere of light love, his halfcynical view of women, on to the level her frank and innocent passion, such as Eve might have felt when first she looked into Adam’s eyes. She would free him from his log-bearing service, herself would carry the wood, but the Prince accepts a toil which, under her pitiful eyes, is glorified by love into a delight. And his ravishment is answered by her pure, tender, and childlike admiration and passion, confessing that he is all she desires, all she can conceive of beauty, princeliness, and joy. It is the modest, natural meeting in ardent love of sex and sex, tempered by their duty to honour, morality, and the high traditions of their birth. We may well observe the exquisite temperance of Shakespeare in all these scenes where Ferdinand and Miranda meet. The delicacy of fine character is not once overstepped in a situation which, in the hands of a poet of less reverence for human nature, might have afforded from for sensational language or coarse innuendo. When Dryden took the subject he vilified it with high-flown talk and vile immodesty. But when Miranda first sees Ferdinand her surprise is absolutely natural and so is her language: [Quotes 1.2.410–13: ‘What is it? A spirit. . . . ?’ ‘and 1.2.418–19: ‘I might call him . . . .’] And when Prospero calls Ferdinand a spy and traitor, she replies, and with equal grace of feeling, intelligence, intuition, and imagination: [Quotes 1.2.457–9: ‘There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple: . . . .’] Temperate boldness, modest frankness, innocent admiration! Ferdinand speaks with less naturalness, but with the same temperance of words. It would have been a gross mistake in art if, after the loss of all his shipmates and while he believed his father drowned, he had broken into those hyperboles of love in which Romeo or Florizel indulged. Ferdinand is quiet; his passion moves through sorrow’s clouds. His modesty of language here is the result of one of those intuitive judgements of the fitting which make the characters in Shakespeare’s work like the work of nature herself. And the intuitive judgement is itself a child of high imagination. Were he not certain of his power to keep this golden measure, he would not have assumed so difficult a task as the representation of Miranda – a girl ready to love but not knowing it even through the experience of others; ignorant of what men were, save for her father; surprised in a moment into the passion of love and in wonder with it. Will the artist keep her natural? Will she be womanly without lowering the type of line womanhood? Will she also represent, in all her ways, the logical result of the circumstances which precede her meeting with Ferdinand? Will everything be taken into account, not by the labored analysis of the artist, but by his penetrating imagination? An affirmative answers all these questions. The delicacy of Shakespeare’s touch bears him with divine ease through this maze of difficulty. Miranda is at all points in harmony with herself and her situation. She is a princess in manner, yet has never known the court; she is ignorant of life, yet well educated by a scholar; she lives in a preternatural air, yet belongs heart and soul to common humanity; she loves with a complete selfsurrender, yet guards her modesty, the reserve (her sex, and her moral dignity).

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Prospero protects her, lost she should lose her natural womanhood in any way, from contact with his magic. She knows that he has power over the elements, but this does not influence, her soul. She is as natural as if she had never touched the supernatural Ariel, we observe, is never brought into contact with her. She does not seem to know of his existence. Caliban is natural to her; not a monster, but a base type of man whom she does not love to look upon, and her knowledge of him alone as human outside of her father makes her naïve surprise at seeing Ferdinand all the more natural. ‘Is it a spirit?’ she cries. We meet her first on the shore after the tempest, which, Coleridge says, ‘prepares and initiates the excitement required for the entire piece.’ She has seen the ship-wreck, and her pity and tenderness for the poor souls open her heart, to us . . . A most delightful outbreak of girlish ignorance and logic: she should overturn the earth and sea and all the world to save a few whom she saw die. This quick sympathy, this charming self-forgetfulness, keeps her free from any introspection, and gives the girl the attractiveness of childhood. All her life, as yet, is in love of her father. When he tells her the tale of his exile with her, her chief interest is in the thought of the trouble she must have given him . . . . When Ferdinand appears Love becomes her master in a moment, and the charming openness with which it becomes apparent, while yet unconfessed, shows how it has filled her life immediately from end to end. She does not believe, when her father accuses Ferdinand and is harsh to him, that ill can dwell in so fair a house. ‘I’ll be his surety,’ she declares. Under the sway of her swift love she sets herself, even in this first interview, against her father’s opinion. There is that in her heart now which is stronger than filial duty, which emancipates her from the dominance of the ancient ties. But this difference with Prospero is so sweetly spoken, so delicate of disposition, so reverential yet so pressing, that she loses nothing of the daughter in the lover. Even when she comforts Ferdinand for her father’s hardness she defends her father: ‘Be of comfort:/ My father’s of a better nature, sir,/ Than he appears by speech, this is unwonted./ Which now came from him’ [1.2.498–500]. Miranda has no self-introspection in this scene, but that comes, momentarily, with the fulness of love. In that, most charming and delicate love-conversings, when she and Ferdinand meet before Prospero’s cell, and he is carrying the logs in enforced service, she looks into herself for the first time and realises her separate life. Shakespeare just touches this. After she has professed her love she turns in upon herself. ‘Wherefore weep you?’ says Ferdinand. ‘At mine unworthiness, that dare not offer What I desire to give. and much less take what I shall die to want.’ But no sooner has she looked into her own heart, than she turns from its inspection to the love she feels for Ferdinand. There, she feels, she loses herself, and that is her greatest joy, the very essence of her nature. One touch more, at the end, brings the island maiden before our eyes, her natural love of beauty, her delicate wonder and joy, her ravishment with life; and these are all enhanced by the golden air of love in which she moves. We wonder, as we hear her, what she will be in the future, what Milan and Naples will finally say to her white soul, which believes only in good. ‘O wonder!’ she cries, when she sees Alonzo and the rest, of the lords crowded round her father, ‘How many goodly creatures are there here/ How beauteous mankind is!/ O brave new world, That has such people in it!’ [5.1.182–4].

 Stopford Brooke, Commentary 183 . . . . There is no trace of the existence of Christianity in the play, but its main drift is to teach forgiveness; not, of course, directly, but as art teaches, indirectly. This is the note also of Cymbeline and of Winter’s Tale. If Shakespeare in these plays, and especially in this play, was taking his leave, as some have conjectured, of the stage and the life of the city, it would seem that, having passed perhaps through great trouble or wrong, through anger, it may be through transient cynicism, (we can conjecture much from the temper of the tragedies), he now forgave the world and the gods his suffering; and felt that in the forgiveness he reached fresh life, new happiness, youth in his spirit, sympathy with love; such as we find in Florizel and Perdita, in Miranda and Ferdinand. It is a way forgiveness has of making us alive again, of lifting all sorrow away. It brings with it the restoration of romance. It is well that the greatest intellect, the finest imaginative soul that ever lived in England, should have left this legacy to us as the result of his experience –‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us’. And it is also well that he should have taken pains to say that when we forgive it should be absolute. The memory of the injury is to perish from the lips, from the heart of the forgiver, for ‘the quality of mercy is not strained’. Let us not burthen our remembrances with a heaviness that’s gone. That is the voice of Prospero. I would fain think it the most inmost feeling of Shakespeare’s heart when he returned to Stratford, and, in too brief a time. Departed to find the great Forgiver. . . . . Ariel, as I said, was with Prospero in this, and I turn to this imagined creature, who, though as embodied part of the Spirit of Nature, is yet not all apart from the human soul. For he knows he has no human soul, and the Ariel is ‘but air’, the free spirit of the air, subtle, changeful, in incessant motion, lively, all-penetrating like the ether, having power in the air and water, in fire, and to the depths of the earth. Today, we might call him electricity. But, though at many points the conception of Ariel is not apart from that which physical science has concerning the finest forms of matter, a scientific correlation does not fit his spiritual nature. For here, though he does wondrous work, he is a spirit of personal gaiety and self-enjoyment, and loves to play; ‘a quaint’ and ‘tricksy spirit’ like, when he is most himself, the light fluttering airs of summer. Nor is he only a spirit of the air but is also a spirit of fire; air and fire together, they have but one life in him, he impersonates them both. And as the ethereal forms of matter vibrate between the molecules of the earth and water, so Ariel can live in the seas, and the vapours of the clouds, and in the depths of the earth. It is thus he first appears: ‘All hail, great master! grave sir, I come/ To answer thy best pleasure; be’ t to fly, To swim, to dive into the fire, to rule / On the curl’d clouds; to thy strong bidding task Ariel and all his quality’ [1.2.189–91]. He flames amazement in the King’s ship, burns like lightning hero and there, sets the sea a-fire, is himself the fire, makes the tempest, disperses the fleet, binds and looses the winds, calms their rage, lives in the deep bays of the shore, can run upon the sharp wind of the north, and do business in the veins of the earth when it is baked with frost. He can be at will a nymph of the sea, a harpy, any shape he pleases. He, like the air, is always invisible, save to the scholar who has mastered him by knowledge. If I were a manager, and put The Tempest on the stage, Ariel should only be a voice, no one should represent him. It is terrible to see him done by a dancing girl in a boy’s dress. This pervasiveness of his, in and through all nature, extends to man; he knows and feels

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the thoughts of men as if he were the ethereal element in which the cells of the brain are floating; as if, being this. He would feel what, passions also moved and dwelt in the silences of the soul. He knows the plots of the conspirators before they are spoken, he clings to their conscience like a remorse. Prospero has no need to call him by speech, ‘come with a thought,’ he cries to Ariel, who is going on his messages. ‘Thy thoughts I cleave to’, answers Ariel. He has also the quickness of thought [4.1.164, 165]. Before the eye can close his is round the earth and back again; ‘I drink the air before me, and return/ Or e’er your pulse twice beat’ [5.1.101–2]. This relation of his to thought lifts him above the mere presentation of any natural power. He is not human, but he can relate himself to humanity. It seems as if something of Prospero’s soul during their comradeship had infiltrated into Ariel. And the relation, on account of this, between him and Prospero is almost a relation of affection. Prospero admires his charm and beauty, and his gracious ways. ‘Fine apparition!’ he calls out when he comes in as a nymph of the sea. My ‘quaint Ariel,’ ‘my dainty Ariel’ are the pleasant terms with which his master describes him. When he comes as a harpy, Prospero is delighted with the grace the harpy had, devouring. Prospero recognises something more spiritual in Ariel than his airy charm. He really sympathises with Ariel’s longing for liberty. Then also he recalls how, The Tempest when the witch Sycorax, having subdued Ariel, laid on him gross and shameful commands, the fine nature of Ariel refused to do them. . . . This exquisite refinement of nature is then, as it were, a kind of conscience in him. When their one quarrel is over, they are together like friend and friend, even with the love of friendship. Ariel wishes to be loved, ‘Ari. Do you love me, master?/ Pros. Dearly, my delicate Ariel’ [4.1.48–9]. And when Ariel sings his lively song of freedom, Prospero, charmed, cries out in admiration: ‘Why, that’s my dainty Ariel I shall miss thee;/ But yet thou shalt have thy freedom’ [5.1.95]. But far beyond any companionship of feeling with his master is Ariel’s longing for freedom, to have his own control. Of course, being a spirit of the uncharted air, he desires only to obey himself it is a desire harmless in him, whose limits are set by law. But Prospero is a foreign law, and however kindly it be exercised, it is against Ariel’s choice, independent, of the law of his being. Therefore this bird of the air must escape his cage. All he does in it is toil: ‘What is there more toil?’ Outside is joy, the soft life of the summer breeze, for beyond Prosperous commands, Ariel makes no tempests, no disturbance. He is delicate. Music is his expression; the tabor and pipe, thin sweet instruments, are his to play. He sings, like the light wind through the trees, and over the grass of the moor, and among the rocks, clear, ringing, elfin notes. All he sings is poetry, all his speech is song. The life he lives is the life of the elements, and his songs are of their doings. Lamb’s saying of his song, ‘Full fathom five thy father lies’ [1.2.397–405] is that it is of the water, and that its feeling seems to resolve itself into the element it contemplates, illustrates this nature in him, and itself is poised in the melody of the ocean. His other song – ‘come unto these yellow sands’ [1.2.375–87] – is so evanescent, so delicate, so rippling, that no criticism can touch it without hurting it. It is of the shore, the moving sand, and the sea, only when, in the calm of twilight, we see the longcurving edge of half-slumbering foam, when the wave is nothing but the lift of the tide, and hear the hushing murmur of it on the sand, as it leaves the fantastic outline

 Stopford Brooke, Commentary 185 of the height it reached before its retreat – do we understand the delicate playing of Ariel, the dance lie leads of sprites that, foot it featly here and there . . . . More delicate, dainty, and ethereal is Ariel as the soft summer wafts of air which come and go with fluttering pleasure They make the faint blossoms tremble where the bee can enter, they rock the cowslip’s bell, and stir the fur on the bat’s wing, when the owls call to the night ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I./In a cowslip’s hell I lie;/ There I couch when owls do cry./ On the bat’s back I do fly/ After summer merrily . . . .’ [5.1.88–92]: This is Ariel’s farewell to Prospero, this the life he hopes to live in freedom. That is his true being, aerial gentleness, the spirit of the faint swift winds. The metro helps the conception, the dactyls are like the pulse of wings. ‘Merrily, merrily shall I live now,/ Under the blossom that hangs on the bough’ [5.1.93–4]. Thus Ariel passes into the elements. But Shakespeare, mastered while he wrote by his shaping spirit of imagination, has made him more elemental, has given him a personality, touched with gleams of our humanity, as of old he did, but not so fully, to Oberon. Only Ariel is more elemental than Oberon, and, strange enough, also more human. Prospero has entered into him. Therefore round him collects the greater interest. Oberon we may meet in the woods by moonlight. Ariel is always with us, like the air. We breathe his spirit every day. . . . . It might be said that Shakespeare, looking back on the work he had now laid aside, and on life’s comedy and tragedy, expressed his judgement of it in what he said to Ferdinand and Miranda concerning the pageant he had shown them. All we think so vital, the glory, love, and suffering of the world, the cloud-capp’d philosophy and the solemn temples of law and religion, the earth itself, and all the human struggle on it, are illusion, the flitting in a dream of the Soul of the world, itself a dream, to and fro through empty space; an all its actors, like the spirits in the masque, phantoms in the dream, drawn out of the visionary imagination to make a show, and vanishing into the mist, to leave not a rack behind. It was thus, some theorist might say, that Shakespeare thought of all this world when he was near departure from it and quote these famous lines: [Quotes 4.1.148–58: ‘These our actors,/As I foretold you, were all spirits and. . . .’] This is a thought common to the race. It seems, so common is it, to belong to the original texture of humanity. In certain circumstances, varying as temperaments vary, it is sure to slip into the mind. Most often it slips out again: sometimes it stays; and it is one of the main thoughts of a religion held by millions of men. (Shakespeare was sure to have felt it moving in his mind, and to have known that it would move in the minds of his many of his characters, in forms varying with the various characters. It is expressed again and again in the plays. It is here expressed in lines of such uncommon force and beauty that it ceases to seem common, it is as if no one felt it before Prospero shaped it. And it exactly fits the temper of his mind at this instant of the play; naturally emerging from the scene and the circumstances. But Prospero – and, indeed, Shakespeare, if we mix him up with Prospero – was far too sane and too experienced a character to imagine that life was illusion, or that we were the stuff of dreams, or that sleep rounded our little life. No one should quote the passage as an explanation of Shakespeare’s theory of life, only as far as ‘rounded with a sleep’. The rest is Prospero’s (or Shakespeare’s) indication that his picture of the story of humanity

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arose from the passing weakness of a vexed and weary brain. The philosophy of illusion is the philosophy of tired people. [Quotes 4.1.158–63: ‘Sir, I am vex’d: Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled . . . .’] After all, he need not have taken the trouble to explain to Ferdinand and Miranda that they were only alive in a dream. The lovers knew better. (285–92, 295–301, 309–11)

35

Lytton Strachey, Shakespeare’s final period 1906

From ‘Shakespeare’s Final Period’, Independent Review, Vol. 3 (August 1904); reprinted in Books and Characters – French and English (London, 1922), 47–64. Lytton Strachey (188–1932) was an English biographer and literary critic. Best known for Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1928), Strachey believed that the task of the biographer is simply to describe a life rather than to explain it to the reader. Although he was a biographer, Strachey is cautious about the approach popularized by Edward Dowden (No. 21) that proposes connections between author’s state of mind and art. Following this, Strachey rejects Dowden’s thesis that Shakespeare in his final period was ‘serene’. Strachey’s argument is ultimately an aesthetic one: the mature Shakespeare was ‘bored’ with everything else, but the poetic and fantastic, as seen in the play’s setting, language, and lyrics. However, this is no slight poetry – instead the aesthetic of The Tempest is a complicated one.

The whole of the modern criticism of Shakespeare has been fundamentally affected by one important fact. The chronological order of the plays, for so long the object of the vaguest speculation, of random guesses, or at best of isolated ‘points,’ has been now discovered and reduced to a coherent law. It is no longer possible to suppose that The Tempest was written before Romeo and Juliet; that Henry VI was produced in succession to Henry V.; or that Antony and Cleopatra followed close upon the heels of Julius Caesar. Such theories were sent to limbo for ever, when a study of those plays of whose date we have external evidence revealed the fact that, as Shakespeare’s life advanced, a corresponding development took place in the metrical structure of his verse. The establishment of metrical tests, by which the approximate position and date of any play can be readily ascertained, at once followed; chaos gave way to order; and, for the first time, critics became able to judge, not only of the individual works, but of the whole succession of the works of Shakespeare. Upon this firm foundation modern writers have been only too eager to build. It was apparent that the Plays, arranged in chronological order, showed something more than a mere development in the technique of verse – a development, that is to say, in the general treatment of characters and subjects, and in the sort of feelings which those

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characters and subjects were intended to arouse; and from this it was easy to draw conclusions as to the development of the mind of Shakespeare itself. Such conclusions have, in fact, been constantly drawn. But it must be noted that they all rest upon the tacit assumption, that the character of any given drama is, in fact, a true index to the state of mind of the dramatist composing it. The validity of this assumption has never been proved; it has never been shown, for instance, why we should suppose a writer of farces to be habitually merry; or whether we are really justified in concluding, from the fact that Shakespeare wrote nothing but tragedies for six years, that, during that period, more than at any other, he was deeply absorbed in the awful problems of human existence. It is not, however, the purpose of this essay to consider the question of what are the relations between the artist and his art; for it will assume the truth of the generally accepted view, that the character of the one can be inferred from that of the other. What it will attempt to discuss is whether, upon this hypothesis, the most important part of the ordinary doctrine of Shakespeare’s mental development is justifiable. What, then, is the ordinary doctrine? Dr. Furnivall[1] states it as follows: Shakespeare’s course is thus shown to have run from the amorousness and fun of youth, through the strong patriotism of early manhood, to the wrestlings with the dark problems that beset the man of middle age, to the gloom which weighed on Shakespeare (as on so many men) in later life, when, though outwardly successful, the world seemed all against him, and his mind dwelt with sympathy on scenes of faithlessness of friends, treachery of relations and subjects, ingratitude of children, scorn of his kind; till at last, in his Stratford home again, peace came to him, Miranda and Perdita in their lovely freshness and charm greeted him, and he was laid by his quiet Avon side.

And the same writer goes on to quote with approval Professor Dowden’s likening of Shakespeare to a ship, beaten and storm-tossed, but yet entering harbour with sails full-set, to anchor in peace. Such, in fact, is the general opinion of modern writers upon Shakespeare; after a happy youth and a gloomy middle age he reached at last – it is the universal opinion – a state of quiet serenity in which he died. Professor Dowden’s book on ‘Shakespeare’s Mind and Art’ gives the most popular expression to this view, a view which is also held by Mr. Ten Brink[2], by Sir I. Gollancz[3], and, to a great extent, by Dr. Brandes[4]. Professor Dowden, indeed, has gone so far as to label this final period with the appellation of ‘On the Heights,’ in opposition to the preceding one, which, he says, was passed ‘In the Depths.’ Sir Sidney Lee, too, seems to find, in the Plays at least, if not in Shakespeare’s mind, the orthodox succession of gaiety, of tragedy, and of the serenity of meditative romance. Now it is clear that the most important part of this version of Shakespeare’s mental history is the end of it. That he did eventually attain to a state of calm content, that he did, in fact, die happy – it is this that gives colour and interest to the whole theory. For some reason or another, the end of a man’s life seems naturally to afford the light by which the rest of it should be read; last thoughts do appear in some strange way

 Lytton Strachey, Shakespeare’s Final Period 189 to be really best and truest; and this is particularly the case when they fit in nicely with the rest of the story, and are, perhaps, just what one likes to think oneself. If it be true that Shakespeare, to quote Professor Dowden, ‘did at last attain to the serene selfpossession which he had sought with such persistent effort’; that, in the words of Dr. Furnivall, ‘forgiven and forgiving, full of the highest wisdom and peace, at one with family and friends and foes, in harmony with Avon’s flow and Stratford’s level meads, Shakespeare closed his life on earth’– we have obtained a piece of knowledge which is both interesting and pleasant. But if it be not true, if, on the contrary, it can be shown that something very different was actually the case, then will it not follow that we must not only reverse our judgment as to this particular point, but also readjust our view of the whole drift and bearing of Shakespeare’s ‘inner life’? ... Thus strangely remote is the world of Shakespeare’s latest period; and it is peopled, this universe of his invention, with beings equally unreal, with creatures either more or less than human, with fortunate princes and wicked step-mothers, with goblins and spirits, with lost princesses and insufferable kings. And of course, in this sort of fairy land, it is an essential condition that everything shall end well; the prince and princess are bound to marry and live happily ever afterwards, or the whole story is unnecessary and absurd; and the villains and the goblins must naturally repent and be forgiven. But it is clear that such happy endings, such conventional closes to fantastic tales, cannot be taken as evidences of serene tranquility on the part of their maker; they merely show that he knew, as well as anyone else, how such stories ought to end. Yet there can be no doubt that it is this combination of charming heroines and happy endings which has blinded the eyes of modern critics to everything else. Iachimo, and Leontes, and even Caliban, are to be left out of account, as if, because in the end they repent or are forgiven, words need not be wasted on such reconciled and harmonious fiends. It is true they are grotesque; it is true that such personages never could have lived; but who, one would like to know, has ever met Miranda, or become acquainted with Prince Florizel of Bohemia? In this land of faery, is it right to neglect the goblins? In this world of dreams, are we justified in ignoring the nightmares? Is it fair to say that Shakespeare was in ‘a gentle, lofty spirit, a peaceful, tranquil mood,’ when he was creating the Queen in Cymbeline, or writing the first two acts of The Winter’s Tale? Attention has never been sufficiently drawn to one other characteristic of these plays, though it is touched upon both by Professor Dowden and Dr. Brandes – the singular carelessness with which great parts of them were obviously written. Could anything drag more wretchedly than the dénouement of Cymbeline? And with what perversity is the great pastoral scene in The Winter’s Tale interspersed with long-winded intrigues, and disguises, and homilies! For these blemishes are unlike the blemishes which enrich rather than lessen the beauty of the earlier plays; they are not, like them, interesting or delightful in themselves; they are usually merely necessary to explain the action, and they are sometimes purely irrelevant. One is, it cannot be denied, often

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bored, and occasionally irritated, by Polixenes and Camillo and Sebastian and Gonzalo and Belarius; these personages have not even the life of ghosts; they are hardly more than speaking names, that give patient utterance to involution upon involution. What a contrast to the minor characters of Shakespeare’s earlier works! It is difficult to resist the conclusion that he was getting bored himself. Bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama, bored, in fact, with everything except poetry and poetical dreams. He is no longer interested, one often feels, in what happens, or who says what, so long as he can find place for a faultless lyric, or a new, unimagined rhythmical effect, or a grand and mystic speech. In this mood he must have written his share in The Two Noble Kinsmen, leaving the plot and characters to Fletcher to deal with as he pleased, and reserving to himself only the opportunities for pompous verse. In this mood he must have broken off half-way through the tedious history of Henry VIII.; and in this mood he must have completed, with all the resources of his rhetoric, the miserable archaic fragment of Pericles. Is it not thus, then, that we should imagine him in the last years of his life? Half enchanted by visions of beauty and loveliness, and half bored to death; on the one side inspired by a soaring fancy to the singing of ethereal songs, and on the other urged by a general disgust to burst occasionally through his torpor into bitter and violent speech? If we are to learn anything of his mind from his last works, it is surely this. And such is the conclusion which is particularly forced upon us by a consideration of the play which is in many ways most typical of Shakespeare’s later work, and the one which critics most consistently point to as containing the very essence of his final benignity –The Tempest. There can be no doubt that the peculiar characteristics which distinguish Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale from the dramas of Shakespeare’s prime, are present here in a still greater degree. In The Tempest, unreality has reached its apotheosis. Two of the principal characters are frankly not human beings at all; and the whole action passes, through a series of impossible occurrences, in a place which can only by courtesy be said to exist. The Enchanted Island, indeed, peopled, for a timeless moment, by this strange fantastic medley of persons and of things, has been cut adrift forever from common sense, and floats, buoyed up by a sea, not of waters, but of poetry. Never did Shakespeare’s magnificence of diction reach more marvellous heights than in some of the speeches of Prospero, or his lyric art a purer beauty than in the songs of Ariel; nor is it only in these ethereal regions that the triumph of his language asserts itself. It finds as splendid a vent in the curses of Caliban: ‘All the infection that the sun sucks up/ From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him/ By inch-meal a disease!’ [2.2.1–3] and in the similes of Trinculo: ‘Yond’ same black cloud, yond’ huge one, looks like a foul bombard that would shed his liquor’ [2.2.23–4]. The dénouement itself, brought about by a preposterous piece of machinery, and lost in a whirl of rhetoric, is hardly more than a peg for fine writing. [Quotes 3.3.95–101: ‘O, it is monstrous, monstrous! . . . .’]. And this gorgeous phantasm of a repentance from the mouth of the pale phantom Alonzo is a fitting climax to the whole fantastic play. A comparison naturally suggests itself, between what was perhaps the last of Shakespeare’s completed works, and that early drama which first gave undoubted proof that his imagination had taken wings. The points of resemblance between The Tempest

 Lytton Strachey, Shakespeare’s Final Period 191 and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, their common atmosphere of romance and magic, the beautiful absurdities of their intrigues, their studied contrasts of the grotesque with the delicate, the ethereal with the earthly, the charm of their lyrics, the verve of their vulgar comedy – these, of course, are obvious enough; but it is the points of difference which really make the comparison striking. One thing, at any rate, is certain about the wood near Athens – it is full of life. The persons that haunt it – though most of them are hardly more than children, and some of them are fairies, and all of them are too agreeable to be true – are nevertheless substantial creatures, whose loves and jokes and quarrels receive our thorough sympathy; and the air they breathe – the lords and the ladies, no less than the mechanics and the elves – is instinct with an exquisite good-humour, which makes us as happy as the night is long. To turn from Theseus and Titania and Bottom to the Enchanted Island, is to step out of a country lane into a conservatory. The roses and the dandelions have vanished before preposterous cactuses, and fascinating orchids too delicate for the open air; and, in the artificial atmosphere, the gaiety of youth has been replaced by the disillusionment of middle age. Prospero is the central figure of The Tempest; and it has often been wildly asserted that he is a portrait of the author – an embodiment of that spirit of wise benevolence which is supposed to have thrown a halo over Shakespeare’s later life. But, on closer inspection, the portrait seems to be as imaginary as the original. To an irreverent eye, the ex-Duke of Milan would perhaps appear as an unpleasantly crusty personage, in whom a twelve years’ monopoly of the conversation had developed an inordinate propensity for talking. These may have been the sentiments of Ariel, safe at the Bermoothes; but to state them is to risk at least ten years in the knotty entrails of an oak, and it is sufficient to point out, that if Prospero is wise, he is also self-opinionated and sour, that his gravity is often another name for pedantic severity, and that there is no character in the play to whom, during some part of it, he is not studiously disagreeable. But his Milanese countrymen are not even disagreeable; they are simply dull. ‘This is the silliest stuff that e’er I heard,’ remarked Hippolyta of Bottom’s amateur theatricals; and one is tempted to wonder what she would have said to the dreary puns and interminable conspiracies of Alonzo, and Gonzalo, and Sebastian, and Antonio, and Adrian, and Francisco, and other shipwrecked noblemen. At all events, there can be little doubt that they would not have had the entrée at Athens. The depth of the gulf between the two plays is, however, best measured by a comparison of Caliban and his masters with Bottom and his companions. The guileless group of English mechanics, whose sports are interrupted by the mischief of Puck, offers a strange contrast to the hideous trio of the ‘jester,’ the ‘drunken butler,’ and the ‘savage and deformed slave,’ whose designs are thwarted by the magic of Ariel. Bottom was the first of Shakespeare’s masterpieces in characterisation, Caliban was the last: and what a world of bitterness and horror lies between them! The charming coxcomb it is easy to know and love; but the ‘freckled whelp hag-born’ moves us mysteriously to pity and to terror, eluding us forever in fearful allegories, and strange coils of disgusted laughter and phantasmagorical tears. The physical vigour of the presentment is often so remorseless as to shock us. ‘I left them,’ says Ariel, speaking of Caliban and his crew: ‘I the filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell,/ There dancing up to the chins, that the foul lake/ O’erstunk their feet’ [4.1.181–3].

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But at other times the great half-human shape seems to swell like the ‘Pan’ of Victor Hugo, into something unimaginably vast. ‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t/ Is, I know how to curse’ [1.2.363–364]. Is this Caliban addressing Prospero, or Job addressing God? It may be either; but it is not serene, nor benign, nor pastoral, nor ‘On the Heights’ (47–49; 50–64).

36

Henry James, commentary 1907

From The Complete Works of William Shakespeare With Annotations and a General Introduction by Sidney Lee (40 vols, Cambridge, MA, 1907). Henry James (1843–1916) was an American-British author who is considered among the greatest novelists in the English language. His fiction has an important place in the transition period between realism and modernism. Some novels include The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Wings of the Dove (1902). Apart from novels, James wrote biographies, travelogues, autobiographies, plays and literary criticism. He is regarded as an important commentator on the history of the novel, with his essay ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884) considered a classic in the field. When invited to write this essay on The Tempest, James declared that he’d take it on as a challenge: he had a long-standing interest in the workings of the creative mind, and he saw Shakespeare as the inscrutable author who could not be deciphered from his plays or characters. James’s project was to ‘challenge this artist, the master and magician of a thousand masks, and make him drop them, if only for an interval’.[1]

[From ‘Introduction’, Vol 16] If the effect of the Plays and Poems, taken in their mass, be most of all to appear often to mock our persistent ignorance of so many of the conditions of their birth, and thereby to place on the rack again our strained and aching wonder, this character has always struck me as more particularly kept up for the by The Tempest; the production, of the long series, in which the Questions, as the critical reader of Shakespeare must ever comprehensively and ruefully call them and more or less resignedly live with them, hover before us in their most tormenting form. It may seem no very philosophic state of mind, merely baffled and exasperated view of one of the supreme works of all literature, though I feel, for myself, that to confess to it now and then, by way of relief, is no unworthy tribute to the work. It is not, certainly, the tribute most frequently paid, for the large body of comment and criticism of which this play alone has been the theme abounds much rather in affirmed conclusions, complacencies of conviction, full apprehensions of the meaning and triumphant pointing of the moral. The Questions,

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in the light of all this wisdom, convert themselves with comparatively small difficulty, into smooth and definite answers; the innumerable dim ghosts that flit, like started game at eventide, through the deep dusk of our speculation, with just form enough to quicken it and no other charity for us at all, bench themselves along the vista as solidly as Falstaff and as vividly as Hotspur. Everything has thus been attributed to the piece before us, and every attribution so made has been in turn brushed away; merely to glance at such a monument to the interest inspired is to recognize a battleground of opposed factions, not a little enveloped in sound and smoke. Of these copious elements, produced for the most part of the best intention, we remain accordingly conscious; so that to approach the general bone of contention, as we can but familiarly name it, for whatever purpose, we have to cross the scene of action at a mortal risk, making the fewest steps of it and trusting to the probable calm at the centre of the storm. There in fact, though there only, we find the serenity; find the subject itself intact and unconscious, seated as unwinking and inscrutable as a divinity in a temple, save for that vague flicker of derision, the only response to our interpretative heat, which adds the last beauty to its face. The divinity never relents – never, like the image of life in The Winter’s Tale, steps down from its pedestal; it simply leaves us to stare on through the ages, with this fact indeed of having crossed the circle of fire, and so got into the real and right relation to it, for our one comfort. The position of privilege of The Tempest as the latest example, to all appearance, of the author’s rarer work, with its distance from us in time thereby shortened to the extent of the precious step or two, was certain to expose it, at whatever final cost, we easily see, to any amount of interpretative zeal. With it first recorded performance that of February 1613, when it was given in honour of the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth, its finished state cannot have preceded his death by more than three years, and we accordingly take it as the finest flower of his experience. Here indeed, as on so many of the Questions, judgements sharply differ, and this use if it as an ornament to the nuptials of the daughter of James I and the young Elector Palatine may have been but a repetition of previous performances; though it is not in such a case supposable that these can have been numerous. They would antedate the play, at the most, by a year or two, and so not throw it essentially further back from us. The Tempest speaks to us, somehow, convincingly, as a piece de circonstance, and the suggestion that it was addressed, in its brevity, its rich simplicity, and its free elegance, to court-production, and above all to providing, with a string of other dramas, for the ‘intellectual’ splendor of a wedding-feast, is, when once entertained, not easily dislodged. A few things fail to fit, but more fit strikingly. I like therefore to think of the piece as of 1613. To refer it, as it is referred by other reckonings, to 1611 is but to thicken that impenetrability of silence in which Shakespeare’s latest years enfolded him. Written as it must have been on the earlier calculation, before the age of forty seven, it has that rare value of the richly mature note of a genius who, by our present measure of growth and fulness, was still young enough to have had in him a world of life: we feel behind it the immense procession of its predecessors, while we yet stare wistfully at the plenitude and the majesty, the expression as of something broad-based and ultimate, there were not, in any but a strained sense, to borrow their warrant from the weight of years. Nothing so enlarges the wonder of the whole time-question in Shakespeare’s career as the fact of

 Henry James, Commentary 195 this date, in easy middle life, of his time-climax; which, if we knew less, otherwise, than we do about him, might affect us as an attempt, on the part of treacherous History, to pass him off as one of those monsters of precocity who, fortunately for their probable reputation, the too likely betrayal of short-windedness, are cut off in their comparative prime. The transmuted young rustic who, after a look over London, brief at the best, was ready at the age of thirty to produce The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer’s Night Dream (and this after the half-dozen splendid prelusive things that had included, at twenty-eight, Romeo and Juliet), had been indeed a monster of precocity which all geniuses of the first order are not; but the day of his paying for it had neither arrived nor, however faintly, announced itself, and the fathomless strangeness of his story, the abrupt stoppage of his pulse after The Tempest, is not, in charity lighted for us by a glimmer of explanation. The explanation by some interposing accident is as absent as any symptom of ‘declining powers’. His powers declined, that is – but declined merely to obey the spring we should have supposed inherent in them; and their possessor’s case derives from this, I think, half the secret of its so inestimably mystifying us. He died, for a nature so organized, too lamentably soon; but who knows where we should have been with him if he had not lived long enough so to affirm, with many other mysteries, the mystery of his abrupt and complete cessation? There is that in The Tempest, specifically, though, almost all indefinably, which seems to show us the artist consciously tasting of the first and rarest of his gifts, that of imagined creative Expression, the instant sense of some copious equivalent of thought for every grain of the grossness of reality; to show his as unresistingly aware, in the depths of his genius, that nothing like it had ever been known, or probably would ever be again known, on earth, and as so given up, more than on other occasions, to the joy of sovereign science. There are so many sides from which any page that shows his stamp may be looked at that a handful of reflections can hope for no coherency, in the chain of association immediately formed, unless they happen to bear upon some single truth. Such a truth then, for me, is this comparative – by which one can really but mean this superlative – artistic value of the play seen in the meagre circle of the items of our knowledge about it. Let me say that our knowledge, in the whole connection, is a quantity that shifts, surprisingly, with the measure of felt need; appearing to some of us, on some sides, adequate, various, large, and appearing to others, on whatever side, a scant beggar’s portion. We are concerned, it must be remembered, here that is for getting generally near our author – not only with the number of the mustered facts, but with the kind of fact that each may strike us as being: never unmindful that such matters, when they are few, may go far for us if they be individually but ample and significant; and when they are numerous, on the other hand, may easily fall short enough to break our hearts if they be at the same time but individually small and poor. Three or four stepping-stones across a stream will serve if they are broad slabs, but it will take more than may be counted if they are only pebbles. Beyond all gainsaying then, be many an estimate, is the penury in which even the most advantageous array of the Shakespeare facts still leaves us: strung together with whatever ingenuity the remain, for our discomfiture, as the pebbles across the stream. To balance, for our occasion, this light scale, however The Tempest affects us, taking its complexity and its perfection together, as the rarest of all examples of literary art.

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There may be other things as exquisite, other single exhalations of beauty reaching as high a mark and sustained there for a moment, just as there are other deep wells of poetry from which cupfuls as crystalline may, in repeated dips, be drawn; but nothing, surely, of equal length and variety lives so happily and radiantly as a whole: no poetic birth ever took place under a star appointed to blaze upon is so steadily. The felicity enjoyed is enjoyed longer and more intensely, and the art involved, completely revealed, as I suggest, to the, master, holds the securest revel. The man himself, in the Plays, we directly touch, to my consciousness, positively nowhere: we are dealing too perpetually with the artist, the monster and magician of a thousand masks, not one of which we feel him drop long enough to gratify with the breath of the interval that strained attention in us which would be yet, so quickened, ready to become deeper still. Here at last the artist is, comparatively speaking, so generalized, so consummate and typical, so frankly amused with himself, that is with his art, with his power, with his theme, that is as if he came to meet us more than his usual half-way, and as if thereby, in meeting him, and touching him, we were nearer to meeting and touching the man. The man everywhere, in Shakespeare’s work, is so effectually locked up and imprisoned in the artist that we but hover at the base of thick walls for sense of him; while, in addition, the artist is so steeped in the abysmal objectivity of his characters and situations that the great billows of the medium itself play with him, to our vision, very much as, over a ship’s side, in a certain waters, we catch, through transparent tides, the flash of strange sea-creatures. What we are present at in this fashion is a series of incalculable plunges – the series of those that have taken effect, I mean, after the great primary plunge, made once for all, of the man into the artist: the successive plunges of the artist himself into Romeo and into Juliet, into Shylock, Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Cleopatra Antony, Lear, Othello, Falstaff, Hotspur: immersions during which, though he always ultimately find his feet, the very violence of the movements involved troubles and distracts our sight. In The Tempest, by the supreme felicity I speak of, is no violence; he sinks as deep as we like, but what he sinks into, beyond all else, is the lucid stillness of his style. One can speak, in these matters, but from the impression determined by one’s own inevitable standpoint; again and again, at any rate, such a masterpiece puts before me the very act of the momentous conjunction taking place for the poet, at a given hour, between his charged inspiration and his clarified experience or, as I should better express it, between his human curiosity and his aesthetic passion. Then, if he happens to have been, all his career, with his equipment for it, more or less the victim and the slave of the former, he yields, by way of a change, to the impulse of allowing the latter, for a magnificent moment, the upper hand. The human curiosity, as I call it is always there – with no more need of making provision for it than use in taking precautions against it; the surrender to the luxury of expertness may therefore go forward on its own conditions. I can offer no better description of The Tempest as fresh re-perusal lights it for me than as such a surrender, sublimely enjoyed; and I may frankly say that, under this impression of it there is no refinement of the artistic consciousness that I do not see my way – or feel it, better, perhaps, since we but grope, at the best, in our darkness – to attribute to the author. It is a way that one follow to the end, because it is a road, I repeat, on which one least misses some glimpse of him face to face. If it be true that the thing was concocted to meet a particular demand, that of

 Henry James, Commentary 197 the master or the King’s revels, with his prescription of date, form, tone, and length, this, so fare from interfering with the Poet’s perception of a charming opportunity to taste for himself, for himself above all, and as he had almost never so tasted, not even in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of the quality of his mind and the virtue of his skill, would have exceedingly favoured the happy case. Innumerable one may always suppose these delicate debates and intimate understandings of an artist with himself. ‘How much taste, in the world, may I conceive that I have? – and what a charming idea to snatch a moment for finding out! What moment could be better that this – a bridal evening before the Court, with extra candles and the handsomest company – if I can but put my hand on the right ‘scenario’? We can catch, across the ages, the searching sigh and the look about; we receive the stirred breath of ripe, amused genius; and, stretching, as I admit I do at least, for a still closer conception of the beautiful crisis, I find it pictured for me in some presentment as that of a divine musician who, alone in his room, preludes or improvises at close of day. He sits at the harpsichord, by the open window, in the summer dusk; his hands wander over the keys. The stray far, for his motive, but at last he finds and holds it; the he lets himself go, embroidering and refining; it is the thing for the hour and his mood. The neighbours may gather in the garden, the nightingale be hushed on the bough; it is none the less a private occasion, a concert of one, both performer and auditor, who plays for his own ear, his own hand, his own innermost sense, and for the bliss and capacity of his instrument. Such are the only hours at which the artist may, be any measure of his own (too many things, at others, make heavily against it); and their challenge to him is irresistible if he has known, all along, too much compromise and too much sacrifice. The face that beyond any other, however, I seem to see The Tempest turn to us is the side on which it so superlatively speaks of that endowment for Expression, expression as a primary force, a consuming, an independent passion, which was the greatest ever laid upon man. It is for Shakespeare’s power of constitutive speech quite as if had swum into our ken with it from another planet, gathering it up there, in its wealth, as something antecedent to the occasion and the need, and if possible quite in excess of them; something that was to make of our poor world a great flat table for receiving the glitter and clink of outpoured treasure. The idea and the motive are more often than not so smothered in it that they scarce know themselves, and the resources of such style, the provision of images, emblems, energies of every sort, laid up in advance, affects us as the storehouse of a king before a famine or a siege – which not only, by it scale, braves depletion or exhaustion, but bursts, through mere excess of quantity or presence, out of all doors and windows. It renders the poverties and obscurities of our world, as I say, in the dazzling terms of a richer and better. It constitutes, by a miracle, more than half the author’s material; so much more usually does it happen, for the painter or the poet, that life itself, in its appealing, overwhelming crudity, offers itself as the paste to be kneaded. Such a personage works in general in the very elements of experience; whereas we see Shakespeare working predominantly in the terms of expression all in the terms of the artist’s specific vision and genius; with a thicker cloud of images to attest his approach, at any point that the comparatively meagre given the case ever has to attest its own identity. He points for us as no one else the relation of style to meaning and manner to motive; a matter on which, right and left, we hear such

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rank ineptitudes uttered. Unless it be true these things, on either hand, are inseparable unless it be true that the phrase, the cluster and order of terms, is the object and the sense, in as close a compression as that of body and soul, so that any consideration of them as distinct, from the moment style is an active, applied force, becomes a gross stupidity: unless we recognize this reality the author of The Tempest has no lesson for us. It is by his expression of it exactly as the expression stands that the particular thing is created, created as interesting, as beautiful, as strange, droll or terrible – as related, in sort, to our understanding or our sensibility in consequence of which we reduce it to naught when we begin to talk of either of its presented parts as matters by themselves. All of which considerations indeed take us too far; what it is important to note being simply our Poet’s high testimony to this independent, absolute value of Style, and to its need thoroughly to project and seat itself. It had been, as so seating itself, the very home of his mind, for his all too few twenty years; it had been the supreme source to him of the joy of his life. It had been in fine his material, his plastic clay; since the more subtly he applied it the more secrets it had to give him, and the more the secrets might appear to him, at every point, one with the lights and shades of the human picture, one with the myriad pulses of the spirit of man. Thus it was that, as he passed from one application of it to another, tone became, for all its suggestions, more and more sovereign to him, and the subtlety of its secrets as exquisite interest. If I see him, at the last, over The Tempest, as the composer, at the harpsichord or the violin, extemporising in the summer twilight, it is exactly that he is feeling there for tone and, by the same token, finding it – finding it as The Tempest, beyond any register of ours, immortally gives it. This surrender to the highest sincerity of virtuosity, as we nowadays call it, is to my perception all The Tempest with no possible depth or delicacy in it that such an imputed character does not cover and provide for. The subject to be treated was the simple fact (if one may call anything in the matter simple) that refinement, selection, economy, the economy not of poverty, but of wealth a little weary of congestion – the very air of the lone island and the very law of the Court celebration – were here implied and imperative things. Anything was a subject, always, that offered to sight an aperture of size enough for expression and it train to pass in and deploy themselves. If they filled up all the space, none the worse; they occupied it as nothing else could do. The subjects of the Comedies are, without exception, old wives’ tales – which we are not too insufferably aware of only because the iridescent veil so perverts their proportions. The subjects of the Histories are no subjects at all; each is but a row of pegs for the hanging of the cloth of gold that is to muffle them. Such a thing as The Merchant of Venice declines, for very shame, to be reduced to its elements of witless ‘story’; such things as the two parts of Henry the Fourth form no more than a straight convenient channel for the procession of evoked images that is to pour through it like a torrent. Each of these productions is none the less of incomparable splendor by which splendor we are bewildered till we see how it comes. Then we see that every inch of it is personal tone, or in other words brooding expression raised to the highest energy. Push such energy far enough – far enough if you can! – and, being what it is, then inevitably provides for Character. Thus we see character, in every form of which the ‘story’ gives the thinnest hint, marching through the pieces I have named in its habit as it lives, and so filling out the scene that nothing is missed. The ‘story’ in The Tempest is a thing

 Henry James, Commentary 199 of naught, for any story will provide a remote island, a shipwreck and a coincidence. Prospero and Miranda, awaiting their relatives, are in the present case, for the relatives, the coincidence – just as the relatives are the coincidence for them. Ariel and Caliban, and the island-airs and island-scents, and all the rest of the charm and magic and the ineffable delicacy (a delicacy positively at its highest in the conception and execution of Caliban) are the style handed over to its last disciplined passion of curiosity; a curiosity which flowers, at this pitch, into the freshness of each of the characters. There are judges for whom the piece is a tissue of symbols; symbols of the facts of State then apparent, of the lights of philosophic and political truth, of the ‘deeper meanings of life’, above all, of a high crisis in its author’s career. At this most relevant of its mystic values only we may glance; the consecrated estimate of Prospero’s surrender of his magic robe and staff as a figure for Shakespeare’s own self-despoilment, his considered purpose, at this date, of future silence. Dr. George Brandes2 works out in detail that analogy; the production becomes, on such a supposition, Shakespeare’s ‘farewell to the stage’ his retirement to Stratford, to end his days in the care of his property and in oblivion of the theatre, was a course for which his arrangements had already been made. The simplest way to put it, since I have likened him to the musician at the piano, is to say that he had decided upon the complete closing of this instrument, and that in fact he was to proceed to lock it with the sharp click that has reverberated through the ages, and to spend what remained to him of life in walking about the small, squalid country-town with his hands in his pockets and an ear for no music now but the chink of the coin the might turn over there. This is indeed in general accepted, the imposed view of the position he had gained: this freedom to ‘elect,’ as we say, to cease, intellectually, to exist: this ability, exercised at the zenith of his splendor, to shut down the lid, from one day to another, on the most potent aptitude for vivid reflection ever lodged in a human frame and to conduct himself thereafter, in all ease and comfort, not only as if it were not, but as if it had never been. I speak of our ‘accepting’ the prodigy, but by the established record we have no choice whatever which is why it is imposed, as I say, on our bewildered credulity. With the impossibility of proving that the author of The Tempest did, after the date of that production, ever again press the spring of his fountain, ever again reach for the sacred key or break his heart for an hour over his inconceivable act of sacrifice, we are reduced to behaving as if we understood the strange case; so that any rubbing of our eyes, as under the obsession of a wild dream, has been held a gesture that, for common decency, must mainly take place in private. If I state that my small contribution to any study of the matter can amount accordingly, but to little more than an irresistible need to rub mine in public, I shall have done the most that the condition of our knowledge admits of. We can ‘accept,’ but we can accept only in stupefaction – a stupefaction that, in presence of The Tempest, and of the intimate meaning so imputed to it, must despair of ever subsiding. These things leave us in darkness – in gross darkness about the Man; the case of which they are the warrant is so difficult to embrace. None ever appealed so sharply to some light of knowledge, and nothing could render our actual knowledge more contemptible. What manner of human being was it who could so, at a given moment, announce his intention of capping his divine flame with a twopenny extinguisher, and who then, the announcement made, could serenely succeed in carrying it out? Were it a question

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of a flame spent or burning thin, we might feel a little more possessed of matter for comprehension; the fact being, on the contrary, one can only repeat, that the value of The Tempest is, exquisitely, in its refinement of power, its renewed artistic freshness and roundness, its mark as of a distinction unequalled, on the whole (though I admit that we here must take subtle measures), in any predecessor. Prospero has simply waited, to cast his magic ring into the sea, till the jewel set in it shall have begun to burn as never before. So it is then; and it puts into a nutshell the eternal mystery, the most insoluble that ever was, the complete rupture, of our understanding, between the Poet and the Man. There are moments, I admit, in this age of sound and fury, of connections, in every sense, to maddeningly multiplied, when we are willing to let it pass as a mystery, the most soothing, cooling, consoling too perhaps, that ever was. But there are others when, speaking for myself, its power to torment us intellectually seems scarcely to be borne; and we know these moments best when we hear it proclaimed that a comfortable clearness reigns. I have been for instance reading over Mr. HalliwellPhillipps3, and I find him apparently of the opinion that it is all our fault if everything in our author’s story, and above all in this last chapter of it, be not of a primitive simplicity. The complexity arises from our suffering our imagination to meddle with the Man at all; who is quite sufficiently presented to us on the face of the record. For critics of this writer’s complexion the only facts we are urgently concerned with are the facts of the Poet, which are abundantly constituted by the Plays and the Sonnets. The Poet is there, and the Man is outside; the Man is for instance in such a perfectly definite circumstance as that he could never miss, after The Tempest, the key of his piano, as I have called it, since he could play so freely with the key of his cash-box. The supreme master of expression had made, before fifty, all the money he wanted; therefore what was there more to express? This view is admirable if you can get your mind to consent to it. It must ignore any impulse, in presence of Play or Sonnet (whatever vague stir behind either may momentarily act as provocation) to try for a lunge at the figured arras. In front of the tapestry sits the immitigably respectable person whom our little slateful of gathered and numbered items, heaven knows, does amply account for, since there is nothing in him to explain; while the undetermined figure, on the other hand – undetermined whether in the sense of respectability of anything else – the figure whom supremely interest us, remains as unseen of us as our Ariel, on the enchanted island, remains of the bewildered visitors. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps’s theory, as I understand it – and I refer to it but as an advertisement of a hundred others – is that we too are bewildered visitors, and that the state of mind of the Duke of Naples and his companions is our proper critical portion. If our knowledge of the greatest of men consists therefore but of the neat and ‘proved’ addition of two or three dozen common particulars, the rebuke to a morbid and monstrous curiosity is no more than just. We know enough, by such an implication, when we admire enough and as difficulties would appear to abound on our attempting to push further, this is an obvious lesson to us to stand as still as possible. Not difficulties – those of penetration, exploration, interpretation, those, in the word that says everything, of appreciation – are the approved field of criticism, but the very forefront of the obvious and palpable, where we may go round and round, like

 Henry James, Commentary 201 holiday-makers on hobby-horses, at the turning of a crank. Differences of estimate, in this relation, come back, too clearly, let us accordingly say, to differences of view of the character of genius in general – if not, in truth, more exactly stated, to that strangest of all fallacies, the idea of the separateness of a great man’s parts. His genius places itself, under this fallacy, on one side of the line and the rest of his identity on the other side; the line being that, for instance, which, Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps’s view, divides the author of Hamlet and The Tempest from the man of exemplary business method whom alone we may propose to approach at all intimately. The stumbling-block here is that the boundary exists only in the vision of those able to content themselves with arbitrary marks. A mark becomes arbitrary from the moment we have no authoritative sign of where to place it, no sign of higher warrant than that it smoothes and simplifies the ground. But though smoothing and simplifying, on such terms, may, by restricting our freedom of attention and speculation, make, on behalf of our treatment of the subject, for a livelier effect of business – that business as to a zealous care for which we seem taught that our author must above all serve as our model – it will see us little further on any longer road. The fullest appreciation possible is the high tribute we must offer to greatness, and to make it worthy of its office we must surely know where we are with it. In greatness as much as in mediocrity the man is, under examination, one, and the elements of character melt into each other. The genius is a part of the mind, and the mind, a part of the behaviour; so that, for the attitude of the inquiry, without which appreciation means nothing, where does one of these provinces end and the other begin? We may take the genius first or the behaviour first, but we inevitably proceed from the one to the other; we inevitably encamp, as it were, on the high central tableland that they have in common. How are we to arrive at a relation with the object to be penetrated if we are thus forever met by a locked door flanked with a sentinel who merely invites us to take it for edifying? We take it ourselves for attaching – which is the very essence of mysteries – and profess ourselves doomed forever to hang yearningly about it. An obscurity endured, in fine, one inch further, or in one hour longer, than our necessity truly holds us to, strikes us but as an artificial spectre, a muffled object with waving arms, set up to keep appreciation down. For it is never to be forgotten that we are here in presence of the human character the most magnificently endowed, in all time, with the sense of the life of man, and with the apparatus for recording it; so that of him, inevitably, it goes hardest of all with us to be told that we have nothing, or next to nothing, to do with the effect in him of this gift. If it does not satisfy us that the effect was to make him write King Lear, and Othello, we are verily difficult to please; so it is, meanwhile, that the case for the obscurity is argued. That is sovereign, we reply, so far as it goes; but it tells us nothing of the effect on him of being able to write Lear and Othello. No scrap of testimony of what this may have been is offered us; it is the quarter in which our blankness is most blank, and in which we are yet most officiously put off. It is true of the poet in general – in nine examples out of ten – that his life is mainly inward, that its events and revolutions are his great impressions and deep vibrations, and that his ‘personality’ is all pictured in the publication of his verse. Shakespeare, we essentially feel, is the tenth, is the millionth example not the sleek bachelor of music, the sensitive harp set once for all in the window to catch the air, but the spirit in hungry quest of every

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possible experience and adventure of the spirit, and which, betimes, with the boldest of all intellectual movements, was to leap from the window into the street. We are in the street, as it were, for admiration and wonder, when the incarnation alights, and it is of no edification to shrug shoulders at the felt impulse (when made manifest) to follow, to pursue, all breathlessly to track it on its quickly-taken way. Such a quest of imaginative experience, we can only feel, has itself constituted one of the greatest observed adventures of mankind; so that no point of the history of it, however fare back seized, is premature for our fond attention. Half our connection with it is our desire to ‘assist’ at it; so how can we fail of curiosity and sympathy? The answer to which is doubtless again that these impulses very well, but that as the case stands the can move but in one channel. We are free to assist in the Plays themselves – to assist at whatever we like so long, that is, as, after the fashion I have noted, we rigidly limit our inductions from them. It is put to us once more that we can make no bricks without straw, and that, rage as we may against our barrier, it none the less stubbornly exists. Granted on behalf of the vaulting spirit all that we claim of it, is still, in the street, as we say – and in spite of the effect we see it as acrobatically producing there – absolutely defies pursuit. Beyond recovery, beyond curiosity, it was to lose itself in the crowd. The crowd, for that matter, the witness we must take as astonished and dazzled, has though itself surviving but in a dozen or two dim, scarce articulate ghosts, been interrogated to the last man and the last distinguishable echo. This has practically elicited nothing – nothing, that is, of a nature to gratify the indiscreetly, the morbidly, inquisitive; since we find ourselves not rarely reminded that morbidity may easily become a vice. He was notoriously not morbid; he stuck to his business – save when he so strangely gave it up; wherefore his own common sense about things in general is a model for the tone he should properly inspire. ‘You speak of his career as a transcendent “adventure,” as the conspicuously transcendent adventure – even to the sight of his contemporaries – of the mind of man; but no glimmer of any such story, of any such figure or “presence,” to use your ambiguous word, as you desire to read into the situation, can be discerned in any quarter. So what is it you propose we should do? What evidence do you suggest that, with this absence of material, we should put together? We have what we have; we are not concerned with what we have not.’ In some such terms as that, one makes out, does the best attainable ‘appreciation’ appear to invite us to let our great personage, the mighty adventurer, slink past. He slunk past in life: that was good enough for him, the contention appears to be. Why therefore should he not slink past it in immortality? One’s reply can indeed only be that he evidently must; yes I profess that, even while saying so, our poor point, for which The Tempest once more gives occasion, strikes me as still, as always, in its desperate way, worth the making. The question, I hold, will eternally interest the student of letters and of the human understanding, and the envied privilege of our play in particular will be always to keep it before him. How did the faculty so radiant there contrive, in such perfection, the arrest of its divine flight? By what inscrutable process was the extinguisher applied and, when once applied, kept in its place to the end? What became of the checked torrent, as a latent, bewildered presence and energy, in the life across which the dam was constructed? What other mills did it set itself turning, or what contiguous country did it – rather indeed did

 Henry James, Commentary 203 it not, in default of these – inevitably ravage? We are referred, for an account of the matter, to recorded circumstances which are only not supremely vulgar because they are supremely dim and few; in which character they but mock, and as if all consciously, as I have said, at our unrest. The one at all large indication they give is that our hero may have died – since he died so soon – of his unnatural effort. Their quality, however, redeems them a little by having for its effect that they throw us back on the work itself with a rebellious renewal of appetite and yearning. The secret that baffles us being the secret of the Man, we know, as I have granted, that we shall never touch the Man directly in the Artist. We stake our hopes thus on indirectness, which may contain possibilities; we take that very truth for our counsel of despair, try to look at it as helpful for the Criticism of the future. That of the past has been too often infantile; one has asked one’s self how it could, on such lines, get at him. The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there, with its immensity of surface and its proportionate underside. May it not then be but a question, for the fulness of time, of the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge? (ix–xxxii)

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Sidney Lee, The Tempest and America 1907

From ‘The Call of the West: America and Elizabethan England’, Scribner’s Magazine, XLI (January–June 1907), 313–30. Sir Sidney Lee (1859–1926) was an English literary scholar and second editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. As a Shakespeare scholar, Lee’s work was largely historicist in nature – he was interested in recovering historical contexts and references that would illuminate the plays. His Life of William Shakespeare (1898) was among the most important twentieth-century studies of the author’s life and works. Along with several other works on Shakespeare, Lee edited a collection of Shakespeare’s complete works (1902) and also edited facsimiles of several of Shakespeare’s quartos, including a scholarly introduction with each edition. Lee had a long-standing interest in America and wrote several articles on the impact the knowledge of the New World had on Shakespeare as well as on French and Spanish Renaissance writers. He also ‘internationalized’ Shakespeare studies further by writing on the Italian influence on Shakespeare’s work. Lee is clear that The Tempest is influenced by voyages to the New World and argues that Caliban is a composite of various New World natives. He further maintains that Shakespeare makes an argument in the play on the status of the native: the dramatist rejects Montaigne’s idealized representation of New World natives and instead puts forward what he considers a more accurate portrait of a native who is human in many ways yet uncivilized.

Shakespeare alone of contemporary dramatists seems to have realized the serious significance of the native problem which America offered thinking men. In the character of Caliban, he brought to its consideration an insight which richly atones for the frivolous treatment which it received at other hands. Shakespeare had his own limitations, and of the general potentialities of the New World he showed little more consciousness than the other playwrights of his day. In the majority of his direct allusions to America he confines himself like Marlowe, to vague hints of the continent’s harvest of gold, which Spain was reaping. From the New World came ‘the Aramadoes of Spanish caracks ballasted with rubies, carbuncles, and sapphires,’ of which mention is made in The Comedy of Errors [3.2.133–6]. In the same vein Sir John Falstaff compares Mistress Ford to ‘a region in Guiana, all gold and Bounty’ [Merry Wives, 1.3.68–9]).

 Sidney Lee, The Tempest and America 205 Very rarely does Shakespeare suggest other aspects of the Western hemisphere – of the great expanse of land and sea, which Spain primarily brought within European vision. There is in As You Like It a slight allusion to the opportunity of maritime adventure, of which Spain, throughout the dramatist’s career, was availing herself in the South Pacific Ocean. The dramatist knew something too, of the ‘new map’, which embodied the recent ‘augmentation’ of the world’s surface and surprised unscientific observers by it endless series of rhumb-lines; to these features of the ‘new map’ of the New World Shakespeare likened the wrinkles on Malvolio’s smiling countenance. But there is no indication in Shakespeare’s plays that he was deeply stirred either by the geographical revelations, or by the colonial aspirations of his fellow-countrymen which belatedly reflected Spanish example. His alert intellect, as far as it touched the New World, was mainly absorbed by the fascination of aboriginal man. The dramatist squarely faced the mysterious topics at the end of his career, but he shyly betrayed an interest in it at earlier periods. Four times in the course of his early work Shakespeare alludes to the dominant trait of the American-Indian religion – the worship of the sun – and his allusions are nonetheless recognizable because he followed the common habit of designating the Far West, like the Far East, by the one word ‘Ind’. In almost his earliest play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, he describes in gorgeous language how ‘A rude and savage man of Ind/ At the first opening of the gorgeous East/ Bows low his vassal head, and strucken blind/ Kisses the base ground with obedient breast’ [4.3.218–21]. Some years later in All’s Well That Ends Well, Helena was made to remark ‘Indian-like./ Religious in mine error, I adore/ The sun’ [1.3.204–6]. Sun-worship was widely distributed among uncivilized peoples. But Elizabethans knew it almost exclusively as the distinguished cult of the American Indian, who had invested its ritual with most elaborate ceremonies. Almost every hill in Mexico, Peru, and neighbouring countries was crowned by Temples of the Sun of varying solidity – from cyclopean edifices of stone to lightly jointed wooden scaffolds or platforms. The earliest histories of America include pictorial illustrations of these slighter structures. In many parts of America the native sun-worshippers could only account for the apparently miraculous advent of invaders from Europe, whom they credited with super-human attributes, by identifying them with children of the sun. Shakespeare’s words about sun-worship echo with much literalness descriptions which Elizabethan travellers repeatedly gave of the American Indian’s daily obeisances to their solar deity. The same descriptions were more prosaically reproduced in scenic action by the lawyer-masquers of 1613. At the end of his working life, when his mental power had reached its highest stage of development, Shakespeare at length offered the world his final conception of the place of the aboriginal American filled in human economy. In Caliban he propounded an answer to the greatest of American enigmas. When it is traced to its sources the play of The Tempest is seen to form a veritable document of early Anglo-American history. The general scheme of the piece in which Caliban plays his part is an imaginative commentary on an episode of the foundation of the first lasting settlement in Virginia. There is no reasonable ground for disputing that the catastrophe on which the plot of the play hinges was suggested by the casting away, in a terrific storm, on the rocky coast of Bermuda, of a ship bound for the new

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settlement of Jamestown. Prospero’s uninhabited island reflects most of the features which the shipwrecked sailors on this Virginian voyage assigned to their involuntary asylum in the Atlantic. Mysterious noises led the frightened men to the conviction that spirits, and devils had made ‘the still-vexed Bermoothes’ their home, and that they were face to face with nature’s elementary forces in energetic activity. Such a scene easily stirred in the dramatist’s fertile imagination the ambition to portray aboriginal man in his own home, and to define his form and faculty. From the philosophic point of view the native problem had received the most suggestive treatment that had yet been given it in Europe from the French essayist, Montaigne, whose work had spread far and wide among Englishmen in the classical translation of Florio. The Frenchman had supported with fine irony the paradoxical thesis that the Indians of America realized in their native paradises the ‘simple life’, and that the Utopian conditions of their being put to shame the conditions of European civilization. Parenthetically, in his romance of The Tempest, Shakespeare liberally and literally borrows, through Florio, Montaigne’s naïve picture of the charming innocence of aboriginal America. The interpolation, although relevant to the main argument, has no bearing on the slender plot of the drama. Montaigne’s conception of aboriginal society is set by Shakespeare on the lips of Gonzalo, the one honest counsellor of the King of Naples. The sanguine veteran lightly plays with the fancy that, had he the government of the desert isle in the Western ocean on which he and his companion were wrecked, he would prove loyal to the alleged ideals of primitive man; he would found his state on a communistic basis; he would exclude sovereignty, learning, labour, wealth, and war; he would rely solely for sustenance on the unimpeded operations of nature. Gonzalo repeats without variation the words of Montaigne, but Shakespeare makes brief comments of his own on the specious theory in the speeches which follow Gonzalo’s borrowed deliverance. ‘Thou dost talk nothing to me,’ ejaculates one of his hearers, and Gonzalo finally admits that he has been indulging in ‘merry fooling’. Shakespeare cherished none of Montaigne’s amiable dreams of the primitive state of man in America. He merely introduces the Frenchman’s fancies in order to clear the ground. Their flimsiness serves to bring into bolder relief the satisfying substance of his own conception. Caliban is no precise presentation of any identifiable native American. He is an imaginary composite portrait, an attempt to reduce the aboriginal types of whom the dramatist and his contemporaries knew anything to one common denominator. The higher standards of civilization, which were discovered on the American continent in Peru and Mexico, were excluded from Shakespeare’s survey. Few English travelers had been suffered by Spain to come to close quarters with Incas or Aztecs, and in Caliban’s personality there are only fused the characteristics of the aboriginal tribes with whom Elizabethans came face to face. Yet Elizabethan experience enabled Shakespeare to cast his net over a wide field. The part that his patron, Lord Southampton, had played in bringing natives to London in the early days of the seventeenth century may well justify the belief that the dramatist enjoyed some personal intercourse with the strangers. Such opportunities were readily supplemented by talk with travelers, or by perusal of their published information.

 Sidney Lee, The Tempest and America 207 Sufficiently varied for his main purpose were the phases of uncivilized humanity in America, over which Shakespeare threw his luminous intelligence. Traits of the normal tractable type of Indian to which the Virginian and Caribbean belonged freely mingled in the crucible of his mind with those of the irredeemable savages of Patagonia. At the same time it is obvious that Shakespeare was eclectic in garnering his evidence, omitting some testimonies which one would have expected him to include, and falling elsewhere into error. But finally, from his imaginative study of the ‘idea’ of aboriginal life, there emerges a moving sentient figure which, in spite of some misrepresentations, presents with convincing realism the psychological import of the American Indian temperament. Shakespeare’s American is not the Arcadian innocent with whom Montaigne identifies him. He is a human being, endowed with live senses and appetites, with aptitudes for mechanical labour, with some knowledge and some control of the resources of inanimate nature and of the animal world. But his life is passed in that stage of evolutionary development which precedes the birth of moral sentiment, of intellectual perception, and social culture. He is a creature stumbling over the first stepping-stones which lead from savagery to civilization. Though Shakespeare in Caliban makes a large generalization from the data of aboriginal habit which lay at his disposal, he at many points reproduces with literalness the common experience of Europeans in their first encounters with aboriginal inhabitants of newly discovered lands. Caliban’s relations with the invaders of his isle are facts of history. The savage’s insistent recognition in the brutish Trinculo of divine attributes is a vivid and somewhat ironical picture of the welcome accorded to Spanish, French, and English explorers on their landing in the New World. Thus did Pizarro present himself to the native imagination in Peru, Cortes in Mexico, Cartier in Canada, and Sir Francis Drake on the western coast of California. It is fully in accord with recorded practice of European pioneers in America that Prospero should seek at the outset to win Caliban’s love in the guise of a patient teacher. Prospero warns him against his crude conceptions of sun, moon, and stars, and explains to him their true functions. Every explorer shared Prospero’s pity for the aborigines’ inability to make themselves intelligible in their crabbed, agglutinative dialects, and offered them instructions in civilized speech. On many a native Indian’s ear there had fallen Prospero’s words: ‘When thou didst not, savage/ Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like/ A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes/ With words that made them known’ [1.2.355–8]. At the same time there was much instruction that the native could offer his uninvited guest. Like every colonist, Prospero depended on his savage host for his knowledge of ‘all the qualities’ of the undiscovered country. From the aboriginal inhabitant alone could come, as in the play, indications of fresh-water springs or of the places where edible berries grew and good fish could be caught. There is an historic echo in the promise ‘I’ll show thee every fertile inch o’ th’ island’, with which Caliban seeks the favour of the stranger Trinculo [2.2.148]. The menial services which Caliban renders his civilized master, the cutting and stacking of firewood, the scraping of trenchers, the washing of dishes, specifically associate Prospero and his servant with early settlements of Englishmen in Virginia. The native Virginians rendered to the Elizabethan invaders indispensable aid as hewers

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of wood and drawers of water. But Shakespeare’s very precise mention of Caliban’s labours as fisherman is the most literal of all transcriptions in the play from records of Virginian native life. ‘I’ll fish for thee,’ Caliban tells Trinculo, and as soon as he believes that he has shaken off Prospero’s tyrannical yoke, he sings with exultant emphasis, ‘No more dams I’ll make for fish’ [2.2.180]. This line from the play has not hitherto received comment from any of the thousand and one editors of The Tempest, and it may be questioned whether any student has yet appreciated its significance. Caliban’s apparently careless declaration that he will make his harsh master’s behoof ‘no more dams . . . for fish’ is a vivid and penetrating illustration of a peculiar English experience in Virginia. The Virginian natives had bought to rare perfection a method of catching fish which was almost exclusively known to America, although some trace of it has been found in Burmah and other regions of the Far East. In their wide rivers the Virginians were wont to construct dams or weirs, which were contrived with singular ingenuity. It was on the fish which was thus procured by the Virginian natives that the first English settlers mainly depended for their sustenance. The reports of Raleigh’s early agents in Virginia are at one with those of the later founders of Jamestown in their expression of amazement at the mechanical skill which the natives brought to the construction of their fish-dams, whereby they secured an uninterrupted supply of fresh fish. A series of fences made of willow poles and bound to one another by intricate wicker-work, ran in a series of circular compartments from the bank into the river-bed, and a clever arrangement of baskets within the fenced enclosures placed great masses of fish every day at the disposal of the makers and owners of the dams. The secret of construction was will kept by the natives, and European visitors, to their embarrassment, never learned it. The system was widely spread over the continent and is still occasionally practiced by the natives in remote places in both North and South America. In Shakespeare’s day Englishmen only knew of the India art of weir fishing from the accounts that were given by travelers in Florida and Virginia. One of the chief anxieties of the early English settlers in Virginia was lest the natives should fail them in keeping the dams in good order. When Raleigh’s first governor of Virginia, Ralph Lane, detected, in 1586, signs of hostility among the natives of his camp, his thoughts at once turned to the weirs. If they were once broken by the revolting aborigines, and none were willing to repair them, starvation was a certain fate of the colonists. For no Englishmen knew how to construct and work these fishdams, on which the settlement relied for its chief food. The gloomy anticipation of the failure of the dams through native disaffection came true in those early days and was a chief cause of the disastrous termination of the sixteenth-century efforts to found and English colony in Virginia. The narratives of the later Virginian explorers, Captain John Smith and William Strachey, whose energies were engaged in the foundation of Jamestown, bear similar testimony to the indispensable service rendered by the natives’ fish-dams to English colonists. Caliban’s threat to make ‘no more dams for fish’ consequently exposed Prospero to a very real and familiar peril. Definite as are the touches which link Caliban with Virginians or Floridans, there are plain indications also that Shakespeare, in sketching the outline of the portrait, had

 Sidney Lee, The Tempest and America 209 flung his gaze on Raleigh’s visitors from Guiana. Caliban’s name comes philologically from that of the wide spread race of Caribbeans, who were the first American aborigines to see the face of Europeans. It was on their homesteads in the West Indies that Columbus descended, and when the Spanish invaders drove them from their island abodes, they took refuge on the northern coast of the southern continent, where Raleigh met them. Their generic name is very variously given in the early reports of American exploration. The first syllable appears not only as Car-, but as Cal-. In one of its more or less corrupt shapes it is indistinguishable from Caliban, while in another it gave birth to the more familiar form of Cannibal. Some rapid study of the Carib race was clearly an ingredient in Shakespeare’s composite conception of aboriginal America. But Shakespeare also incorporated traits of other American races, who ranked far lower than Virginian or Caribbean in the scale of human development. The dramatist’s mention of the god Setebos, the chief object of Caliban’s worship, echoes accounts of the wild people of Patagonia, who lived in a state of unqualified savagery. Patagonia is bounded on the south by the Magellan Straits, and the mighty exploits of Magellan in first threading that tortuous waterway first brought the Patagonians within the cognizance of Europe. An Italian mariner who sailed in Magellan’s fleet first put into writing an account of their barbarous modes of life and their uncouth superstitions. His tract circulated widely in Shakespeare’s day in English translations. During the dramatist’s lifetime the mysterious people was more than once visited by adventurous English seamen, and curiosity about them spread. Sir Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, in their circumnavigations of the globe, both paused on Patagonian territory, and held intercourse with its strange inhabitants. One of Drake’s companions was left behind on Patagonian shores, and lived among the savages for eight years, ultimately reaching England in safety, as if by a miracle, to narrate his startling experiences. Controversy arose among sixteenth-century visitors to Patagonia as to whether the wild dwellers there were giants or no. Drake denied them any excessive stature. It is certain that they belonged to the most rudimentary type of humanity with which Europeans had yet to come into contact, and that in ‘their great devil Setebos’ centered the most primitive conceptions of religion which had come to the knowledge of civilized man. When Caliban acknowledges himself to be a votary of ‘the Patagonian devil’ he declares his affinity with an Indian type, which was very abhorrent to European sentiment. In one respect Shakespeare departs from his authorities. Although untrustworthy rumours spread abroad that aboriginal tribes in unexplored forests about the river Amazon were hideously distorted dwarfs, the evidence is conclusive that the average Indian of America – even the Patagonian – was physically as well formed and of much the same stature as Englishmen. Yet Caliban is described as of ‘disproportioned’ body; he is likened to ‘a tortoise’ and is denounced as a ‘freckled whelp’, or a ‘poor, credulous monster’. Such misrepresentations on Shakespeare’s part is no doubt conscious and deliberate. Caliban’s distorted form brings into bolder relief his moral short-comings, and more clearly his psychological significance. It is an involuntary homage to the Platonic idea, which Elizabethan poetry completely assimilated, that the soul determines the form of the body. Shakespeare’s seeing eye invested his ‘rude and savage man of Ind’ with a shape akin to his stunted intelligence and sentiment.

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The creation of Caliban is a plea, however fantastically phrased, for common sense interpretation of the native problem. In Caliban’s personality Shakespeare refutes the amiable delusion that the aborigines conserved Utopian ideals which civilization hand abandoned and would do well to recover. At the same time Shakespeare tacitly offers the more hopeful and the more fruitful suggestion that human development marches forward, and never backward, and that creatures like Caliban embody an embryonic manhood which European civilization had outgrown, and to which it could not revert. Shakespeare cherished no delusions about the imperfections of current civilization. He knew all the ‘instruments of darkness’ which threatened civilized human nature. Nevertheless, he could hold out no hope of salvation to Prospero’s servant-monster unless he were ready in due time, without undue coercion, loyally to follow in civilized man’s footsteps. This was the only substantial moral which the visits of American Indians to Elizabethan England helped to point for Shakespeare. (325–30)

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Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare’s last phase 1907

From Shakespeare (London, 1907). Walter Raleigh (1861–1922) was a literary scholar and historian who taught at Oxford University. He was a man of wide-ranging academic interests and wrote on a number of authors and topics. This excerpt from his 1907 book-length study of Shakespeare repeats some of the arguments previously made on the last phase of Shakespeare’s writing career being characterized by plays that are marked by happiness, serenity and tolerance. However, Raleigh also extends his consideration of the ‘last phase’ to a discussion of style and genre. The very fact that the play was written in Shakespeare’s ‘mature phase’ led to a willingness to experiment with convention.

In the plays of Shakespeare’s closing years there is a pervading sense of quiet and happiness which seems to bear witness to a change in the mind of their author. In these latest plays – Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest – the subjects chosen are tragic in their nature, but they are shaped to a fortunate result. Imogen and Hermione are deeply wronged, like Desdemona; Prospero, like Lear, is driven from his inheritance; yet the forces of destruction do not prevail, and the end brings forgiveness and reunion. There is no reversion to the manner of the Comedies; this new-found happiness is a happiness wrung from experience, and, unlike the old high-spirited gaiety, it does not exult over the evil-doer. An all-embracing tolerance and kindliness inspires these last plays. The amiable rascal, for whom there was no place in the Tragedies, reappears. The outlook on life is widened; and the children – Perdita and Plorizel, Miranda and Ferdinand, Guiderius and Arviragus are permitted to make amends for the faults and misfortunes of their parents. There is still tragic material in plenty, and there are some high-wrought tragic scenes; but the tension is soon relaxed; in two of the plays the construction is loose and rambling; in all three there is a free rein given to humour and fantasy. It is as if Shakespeare were weary of the business of the drama, and cared only to indulge his whim. He was at the top of his profession, and was no longer forced to adapt himself to the narrower conventions of the stage. He might write what he liked, and he made full use of his hard-earned liberty.

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The sense of relief which comes with these last plays, after the prolonged and heightened anguish of the Tragedies, seems to suggest the state of convalescence, when the mind wanders among happy memories, and is restored to a delight in the simplest pleasures. The scene is shifted, for escape from the old jealousies of the Court, to an enchanted island, or to the mountains of Wales, or to the sheep-walks of Bohemia, where the life of the inhabitants is a peaceful round of daily duties and rural pieties. The very structure of the plays has the inconsequence of reverie: even The Tempest, while it observes the mechanical unities, escapes from their tyranny by an appeal to supernatural agencies, which in a single day can do the work of years. All these characteristics of matter and form point to the same conclusion, that the darkness and burden of tragic suffering gave place, in the latest works that Shakespeare wrote for the stage, to daylight and ease. .... The brave new world of his latest invention is rich in picture and memory-shipwreck, battle, the simple funeral of Fidele, the strange adventures of Autolycus, the dances of shepherdesses on the rustic lawn, and of fairies on the yellow sands--but the boldest stroke of his mature power is seen in his creation of a new mythology. In place of the witches and good people of the popular belief, who had already played a part in his drama, he creates spirits of the earth and of the air, the freckled hag-born whelp Caliban, the beautiful and petulant Ariel, both of them subdued to the purposes of man, who is thus made master of his fate and of the world. The brain that devised The Tempest was not unstrung by fatigue. The style of these last plays is a further development of the style of the Tragedies. The thought is often more packed and hurried, the expression more various and fluent, at the expense of full logical ordering. The change which came over Shakespeare’s later work is that which Dryden, at an advanced age, perceived in himself. ‘What judgment I had?’ he says, in the Preface to the Fables, ‘increases rather than diminishes; and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject, to run them into verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose’. The bombasted magniloquence of the early rhetorical style has now disappeared. The very syntax is the syntax of thought rather than of language; constructions are mixed, grammatical links are dropped, the meaning of many sentences is compressed into one, hints and impressions count for as much as full-blown propositions. An illustration of this late style may be taken from the scene in The Tempest, where Antonio, the usurping Duke of Milan, tries to persuade Sebastian to murder his brother Alonso, and to seize upon the kingdom of Naples. Ferdinand, the heir to the kingdom, is believed to have perished in the shipwreck, and Antonio points to the sleeping king: [Quotes 2.1.244–54: ‘Who’s the next heir of Naples? . . . .’]. Here is a very huddle of thoughts, tumbled out as they present themselves, eagerly and fast. This crowded utterance is not proper to any one character; Leontes in his jealous speculations, Imogen in her questions addressed to Pisanio, Prospero in his narrative to Miranda, all speak in the same fashion, prompted by the same scurry of thought. It would be right to conclude from the mere reading, that there was no blot in the papers to which these speeches were committed.

 Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare’s Last Phase 213 This later style of Shakespeare, as it is seen in the Tragedies and Romances, is perhaps the most wonderful thing in English literature. From the first he was a lover of language, bandying words like tennis-balls, adorning his theme ‘with many holiday and lady terms,’ proving that a sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit, so quickly the wrong side may be turned outward. He had a mint of phrases in his brain, an exchequer of words; he had fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; his speech was a very fantastical .... The Tempest was probably his last play – in this sense, at least, that he designed it for his farewell to the stage. The thought which occurs at once to almost every reader of the play, that Prospero resembles Shakespeare himself, can hardly have been absent from the mind of the author. By his most potent art he had bedimmed the noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, and plucked up the giant trees of the forest. Graves at his command had waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth. When at last he resolved to break the wand of his incantations and to bury his magic book, he was shaken, as all men in sight of the end are shaken, by the passion of mortality. But there was no bitterness in the leave-taking. He looked into the future, and there was given to him a last vision; not the futile panorama of industrial progress, but a view of the whole world, shifting like a dream, and melting into vapour like a cloud. His own fate and the fate of his book were as nothing against that wide expanse. What was it to him that for a certain term of years men should read what he had written? The old braggart promises of the days of his vanity could not console him now. ‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme’. So he had written in the Sonnets. When the end drew near, his care was only to forgive his enemies, and to comfort the young, who are awed and disquieted by the show of grief in their elders. Miranda and Ferdinand watch Prospero, as he struggles in the throes of imagination. Then he comes to himself and speaks: [Quotes 4.1.145–58: ‘You do look, my son, in a mov’d sort . . . .’]. In all the work of Shakespeare there is nothing more like himself than those quiet words of parting – ‘Be cheerful, sir; our revels now are ended’. Yet they are not ended; and the generations who have come after him, and have read his book, and have loved him with an inalterable personal affection, must each, as they pass the way that he went, pay him their tribute of praise. His living brood have survived him, to be the companions and friends of men and women as yet unborn. His monument is still a feasting presence, full of light. When he was alive he may sometimes have smiled to think that the phantoms dancing in his brain were as real to him as the sights and sounds of the outer world. The population of that delicate shadowland seemed to have but a frail hold on existence. The one was taken, and the other left; this character served for a play, that phrase or sentence fitted a speech; the others died in their cradles, or lived a moment upon the air, and were dissolved. Those that found acceptance were made over to the tender mercies of the players, for a week’s entertainment of the populace. But now three centuries have passed since King Lear was written; and we begin to rub our eyes, and wonder. ‘Change places, and, handydandy, which is the ghost, which is the man?’ Is the real man to be sought in that fragmentary story of Stratford and London, which, do what we will to revive it, has long ago grown faint as the memory of a last year’s carouse? That short and troubled

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time of his passage, during which he was hurried onward at an ever-increasing pace, blown upon by hopes and fears, cast down and uplifted, has gone like a dream, and has taken him bodily along with it. But his work remains. He wove upon the roaring loom of Time the garment that we see him by; and the earth at Stratford closed over the broken shuttle. (209–10; 214–15; 224–7)

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John Churton Collins, Christian symbolism 1908

From ‘Poetry and Symbolism: A Study of The Tempest’, Contemporary Review, Vol. XCIII (January 1908), 65–83. John Churton Collins (1848–1908) was professor of English at Birmingham University. A passionate advocate for the study of literature at schools and universities, his critical works include The Study of English Literature (1891), a study of Dean Swift (1893), Essays and Studies (1895), Ephemera Critica (1901) and Essays in Poetry and Criticism (1905). Churton considers The Tempest as an example of symbolism. Moving the discussion beyond the oft-repeated one of Prospero’s magic as symbolic of artistic endeavor, Churton argues that the play’s plot and characters are symbolic of the Christian conception of life and divinity. While Caliban is a kind of man-in-the-making and Miranda is a symbol of perfect womanhood, it is Prospero who is central to the symbolic scheme – he is a Divine Power who is noble and forgiving, Ultimately, Churton maintains, the play’s Christian view is characterized by hope and optimism.

In dealing with the symbolism of this divine drama it may be well first to take our stand on what seems simple and obvious. In the picture of Prospero the three things which at once strike us are the distinction made between the magician and the man, the relation of Prospero to Ariel, and of Ariel to Prospero, and the mood and temper with which Prospero, freeing Ariel, abandons his art to bury himself in privacy, ‘where every third thought shall be his grave.’ In the wand, in the magic robe, and in his books alone consists his power, alone lies all that distinguishes him from other men. Thus, in talking to Miranda as father to child, he lays down his mantle, ‘lie there my art’. With them he could make Ariel his minister, and bow to his will the spirit powers of mature – [Quotes 5.1.40–50: ‘By whose aid/ (Weak masters though ye be) I have bedimm’d . . . .’]. Ariel in his unwillingness to work, in his pining for freedom, in his tricksy caprices and in his uselessness except when under the control of a firm and wise will, is only too symbolic of genius, that perilous possession so potent under such control so futile without it. ‘I shall miss thee, but yet thou shalt have freedom’ [5.1.95–6] are Prospero’s words when he exacts from Ariel his last service, and servant and master are about

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to part for ever. And now, as the mighty magician prepares in accordance with his promise the farewell, ‘vanity of his art,’ he prepares also to take us into his confidence. [Quotes 4.1.147–63: ‘Be cheerful, Sir,/ Our revels now are ended: . . . .’]. What remained when the wand, the mantle, the books and Ariel and the spirit-powers and all such solemn toys had been dismissed? the man alone and this vision, infinite sadness, wisdom tempered with humility, submission, and, perhaps, hope. Quotes Epilogue 1–20: ‘Now my charms are all o’erthrown, . . . .’]. So in farewell, spoke Prospero, just after he had broken his ‘staff,’ and ‘deeper than ever plummet sounded’ drowned his book, and just before he passed into the silent life ‘where every third thought’ would ‘be his grave’ [5.1.56, 57, 312]. But does the symbolism of The Tempest go beyond this, is it yet more elaborate? Is the island world, the dramatis personae mankind, the government and central purpose of Prospero symbolic of the Christian conception of life and of life’s control by Heaven? Rigid definition would of course instantly reduce such a theory to absurdity. But if we remember that allegory, still less symbolism, is not like a closelyfitting vesture which takes the mould of the whole form, and through which the contour of every limb is discernible, but lies lightly like some loose-flowing gauzy robe on its wearer, we can at least state a plausible case. Before Prospero arrives on the island pure nature reigns; the inhabitants Sycorax and Caliban are mere beasts; intelligence and genius, or at least the potentialities of each as symbolized in Ariel, pegged up by brute force in a pine, have mere vegetable life. With Prospero comes order and the dawn of civilisation. It is a place full of beauty and mystery, spirit powers float about, weird snatches of music are heard everywhere, it is ‘full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not’. Then it becomes peopled. What is this but the world? It would not be possible for a poet within the limits feasible for the number of dramatis personae to include an assembly more essentially and comprehensively typical of mankind. In Prospero, for Prospero must take his place here, too, we have the highest type of humanity, intellectually and morally, the incarnation of wisdom, benevolence and humility, tempered with infinite sadness; in Stephano the mere gross brute; in Trinculo the brute with a gleam of intelligence and a touch of humour. Between these how many grades and varieties typical of human temper, character and experiences; youth – ardent, noble and chivalrous in Ferdinand; the world-battered veteran – shrewd, humorous and kindly in old Gonzalo; ambition’s hard, cold, unscrupulous devotee in Antonio; and in Sebastian the weaker and more plastic worldling who take the ply, the evil ply, from firmer natures; what are Adrian and Francisco and the rabble under battened hatches but the common herd who make and leave no mark either for good or for evil, passing: Qual fummo in aere, o in acqua la schiuma.[1] And of how many in life’s poor game is Alonzo the symbol, so weary of it all, so listless, so hopeless, his past a wretched record of error and crime, his present a grievous burden of remorse and sorrow. Only one woman in the throng, but that women the embodiment of the very essence of womanhood. In the first words she utters we have the expression of passionately intense sympathy with distress and suffering, and a plea for pity. [Quotes 1.2.5–13: ‘O, I have suffer’d . . . .’]. When her father unfolds his story to her, her comment is: ‘O my heartbleeds/ To think of the teen that I have turn’d you

 John Churton Collins, Christian Symbolism 217 to’. [1.2.63–4]. Again, as the narrative proceeds and what concerned herself might have been expected to appeal to her, the note is the same, the same utter selflessness, – ‘Alack! What trouble/ was I then to you!’ [1.2.151–2]. As soon as her curiosity is roused it becomes importunate, and her father has to say apparently with some impatience: ‘Here cease more questions’. The moment she sees Ferdinand the woman’s natural instinct, in all innocence and purity, is instantly awakened, fancy and imagination as instantly kindling with it. He is ‘a spirit,’ a ‘divine thing, for nothing natural I ever saw so noble.’ ‘Have pity, I’ll be his surety!’ she cries, when her father affects to wave him aside, calling him a spy and a traitor. And then as soon as love has awakened in her and fully returned [Quotes 3.1.81–6: ‘Hence bashful cunning! . . . .’]. And with love come perfect trust, implicit submission – ‘I would not play you false,’ says Ferdinand: ‘no, not for the world’. ‘Yes.’ She instantly replies, ‘for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, and I would call it fair play’ [5.1.173–4]. When she sees the very mixed company on that island thronging in – Alonzo, Gonzalo, Sebastian, Antonio and their attendants – amazed and spellbound as they are before Prospero’s absolution frees them, she exclaims: ‘O! Wonder!/ How many goodly creatures are there here!/ How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world/ That has such people in’t’. [5.1.181–4]. Though Prospero reveals the all-reconciling, all-harmonising secret to none but his minister Ariel before the time comes to reveal it fully, he yet grants some glimpses of it to those who are worthy, that faith may give them comfort. So he says to Gonzalo, who is doubting his identity with the island’s ruler, – ‘You do yet taste/ Some subtilities o’ the isle, that will not let you/ Believe things certain’ [5.1.123–5]. And so again when Alonzo says – ‘This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod,/ And there is in this business more than Nature/ Was ever conduct of some oracle/ Must rectify our knowledge’. [5.1.241–5]. He replies – [Quotes 5.1.245–51: ‘Sir, my liege . . . .’]. If we compare this with what Stephano says, ‘every man shift for all the rest, and let no man take care for himself for all is but fortune’ [5.1.256–8]. We shall measure the difference between life as it is read by the ‘initiated’ and as it is read by the ignorant. It is said that just before Conington[2] passed away he was heard to murmur the words, ‘now the vision is complete – this is the way they see in Heaven’. When we compare the way in which life is read and interpreted in those two divine last dramas, Cymbeline and The Tempest, with its presentment and interpretation in the long and somber series of dramas which preceded them, the words have, we feel, a strange propriety in their application to Shakespeare. Assuredly it was in the light of such a vision that Cymbeline and The Tempest were composed, and the most comprehensive survey of life ever given by man to man found its culmination. Let me repeat that all allegorical interpretation will not only defeat its own ends, but be in danger of becoming simply ridiculous the moment it assumes the form of rigid or even of too precise definition; for it is with the symbolism of such work as The Tempest what it is with the symbolism of which Goethe has said – ‘Gefuhl ist alles;/ Name ist Schall und Rauch/ Umnebelnd himmelsgluth’.[3] That there is an inexpressible fascination about The Tempest, a fascination quite independent of its dramatic and aesthetic interest no one, I think, can deny. A mellow light as of a setting sun broods over it: it has strange spiritual charm. Such a note as

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we have in – ‘All thy vexations/ Were but my trials of thy love, and thou/ Has strangely stood the test’ [5.1.5–7] – will partly, perhaps, indicate what is meant. For this spiritual charm I have tried to account, believing that it comes in a large measure from a suffusion of purely Christian sentiment. There is nothing to indicate that Shakespeare accepted Christianity on its dogmatic and metaphysical sides as a creed, but as a philosopher it must have appealed to him, indeed it did appeal to him in its ethics, and as a poet and artist he could scarcely fail to realise the beauty and sublimity of the solution it afforded of the problems of life. Had his last legacy to the world been the gospel deducible from the tragedies, that gospel would indeed have been a cheerless one. But on the Shakespeare of The Tempest and Cymbeline fell at last the light that had fallen on the Milton of Samson Agonistes, and the two mightiest geniuses who have glorified our poetry left the world with the same optimistic message on their lips, with this difference only, that pious submission, touched, perhaps, with hope, was the note of the one, and faith, absolute and uncompromising, the note of the other. (76–83)

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F. H. Ristine, tragicomedy 1910

From English Tragicomedy: Its Origin and History (New York, 1910). F. H Ristine (1884–1958) was professor of English and Dean at Hamilton College, New York. English Tragicomedy, his best-known work, is a full-length comprehensive study of the rise and development of the genre in English literature. Ristine considers the years between 1610 and 1642 as the heyday of English tragicomedy and attributes much of the success of the genre to the popularity of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays. Shakespeare’s last plays are examples of the genre.

Shakespeare’s third and last romance, on the other hand, The Tempest, departs completely from the loose structure of its predecessors, admits no actual tragedy, and is even further removed from the world of fact and reality. Again there is a story of sentimental love, framed in a background of intrigue and murderous design; but the action never reaches a really threatening crisis, though the tone of the play is distinctly exalted above the pitch of romantic comedy. Whether Shakespeare was led to adopt the tragicomic method in his last plays by the example of Beaumont and Fletcher, who probably at this time surpassed him in popular favor, or by his own initiative, is a question of no especial importance here. The fact remains that Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, whatever the inspiration, are closely identified with the new drama of tragicomic romance, which at least testifies to the success that the new form was winning by the time Shakespeare and Beaumont were quitting the stage about 1612. (114)

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Sidney Lee, Caliban as a Native American 1913 From ‘Caliban’s Visits to England’, Cornhill Magazine, New Series Vol 34 (1913), 333–45. For biographical notes on Sidney Lee, see No. 37. As in his previous work, Lee draws attention to The Tempest’s American connections. This time he focuses on the New World natives (mainly Eskimos and Native Virginians) who visited England. Lee argues that Caliban is a composite portrait of these peoples.

Caliban was in a practical sense known in England not on the stage alone. If in his own unique, dramatic shape he had not passed beyond the boards of the theatre, near kindred of his had figured on the highways of English life, and had excited much wild surmise among Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Caliban’s creation may readily be traced to opportunities which Shakespeare and his countrymen enjoyed in London of studying at first hand the aboriginal temperament. Verbal and written narratives of travel were rich in sketches of strange human or semihuman inhabitants of distant lands. But ‘wild’ visitors were often in England to supplement the teaching of books. It was a composite portrait which issued in Caliban from Shakespeare’s pen. There, detail, which was drawn from very varied quarters, was fused together, at times somewhat capriciously, by his imagination. The occasional presence in person of Caliban or his kindred on English soil clearly whetted Shakespeare’s interest in the riddle of uncivilised humanity. ‘The Tempest’ enshrines, within its vast bounds of life and poetry, memories of Englishmen’s strange encounters at their own doors with wild men from the unmeasured territories of the West. . . . . Eskimos, Brazilians, and African negroes headed the native march into England, but the file is thin until Queen Elizabeth’s reign was well advanced and English exploring and colonizing enterprise began in earnest. Martin Frobisher inaugurates the great era with his persistent search for the north-west passage in Labrador. Amid the many motives which he alleged for his experiments one was the bringing of inhabitants from unknown lands to England. . . . . Frobisher, in the frozen north, left no stone unturned to conciliate the North Indians and Eskimos. He tried to learn their language. He constructed native vocabularies and wrote reports on native habits. But they fought shy of his invitations

 Sidney Lee, Caliban as a Native American 221 to accompany him home. On his first expedition he managed however to entice one onto his ship, and when the Indian arrived with him at Harwich, all England was in an ecstasy. ‘The like of this strange infidel was never seen, read, nor heard of before’. Wrote one pamphleteer. ‘His arrival was a wonder never known to city or realm. Never like great matter happened to any man’s knowledge’. The strangers of Henry VII’s time were forgotten. The fellow was described as broad of face and fat of body, with little eyes and scanty beard. His long coal-black hair was tied in a knot above his forehead, and his dark sallow skin, of which the natural colour was hidden beneath dirt and paint, was likened to that of tawny Moors or Tartars. His expression was ‘sullen and churlish, but sharp withal’. A great national reception was designed for him; but his sudden death from cold disappointed expectation. . . . . In the autumn of 1584, when the first English ship sailed back to Virginia, two natives of that country came on a prolonged sojourn. They proved to be men of very opposite dispositions. One resented the attentions paid him by his English hosts; the other accepted the hospitality cordially. They both returned with the second Virginian expedition, which went out under Sri Walter Ralegh’s auspices, and while the ill-tempered visitor stirred up enmity among his kindred against the English settlers, the other amiably preached friendship, and did all he could to facilitate the progress of the settlement. The native ally of the English was one of those whom Sir Francis Drake rescued when the English colony in Virginia was in dire straits. The Indian, on his second visit to England, enjoyed friendly intercourse with Sir Walter Ralegh, the apostle of Empire who loved recondite knowledge about men and things. Soon a third Virginian faced the perils of the Atlantic passage, but he, less fortunate than his fellowcountrymen, found a grave in English soil at Bideford. The native Virginians left on the whole a favourable impression on the Elizabethan mind. Ralegh was partly moved by their presence in England to widen the scope of his study of American races. When he first set foot on the American continent in Guiana, he scanned the native life with eager eyes. The comeliness, the courtesy and the intelligence of the people of Guiana fascinated him. Of the wife of one of the chiefs he writes: ‘In all my life I have seldom seen a better favoured woman’. ‘Her countenance,’ he continues, ‘was excellent; her hair almost as long as herself was tied up in pretty knots, while her discourse was very pleasant’. ‘I have seen a lady in England,’ Ralegh concludes, so like to her, as but for the difference of colour, I would have sworn it might have been the same’. Another chief was induced to permit his son with some native attendants to come back with Ralegh. A man and a boy of the explorer’s English contingent were left behind as hostages. The boy was ultimately ‘eaten by a tiger,’ but the man, after startling adventure in Mexico, finally reached England in safety. Some of Ralegh’s native companions entered domestic service in London, and one waited on him during the early years of his imprisonment in the Tower. Ralegh’s affection for these men never waned, and the sentiment was mutual. After they had recrossed the sea, they never ceased to recall the kindness of their English master. . . . . Shakespeare cast his net over a wide field of aboriginal life. He may well have spoken to Ralegh’s tractable friends of Guiana (of the race known as Caribbean), to the more or less amiable Virginian visitors in London, and to the New Englanders

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who found a patron in Lord Southampton. But he also had heard vague rumours of monsters ‘whose heads stood in their breasts,’ and had read of the irredeemable savages, whether of the banks of the River Amazon, or of Patagonia to the extreme south of the Southern Continent. He sought the psychological import of the native temperament by welding together his varied pieces of observation and information. Montaigne, with whose philosophic point of view Shakespeare had much in common, had already been drawn by his visits of American natives to France to pronounce on the quiddity of uncivilised humanity. But Shakespeare declined to acquiesce in Montaigne’s complacent conclusion that American Indians were living witnesses to the Utopian life of which a decadent Europe had lost the key. European civilisation had in Shakespeare’s view advanced beyond the stage of American Indian experience and was not likely to revert to it. To Shakespeare the western native was a human being endowed with live senses and appetites, with aptitudes for mechanical labour, with some veneration, knowledge and command of the resources of nature, but lacking moral sense, moral control, and ratiocination. Caliban’s name is clearly a modification of Cariban or Caribbean . . . . Caliban’s nature at times echoes the impressions of gentleness and truthfulness which Ralegh’s Caribbean servants left on Elizabethan minds. Caliban almost always speaks in blank verse, and though his utterance is often of rough fiber, it rises now and again to levels of pathetic and tender eloquence. With fine imaginative serenity the savage seeks to quiet the fears which the mysterious noises of the island excite in the civilized ruffians, Trinculo and Stephano: [Quotes 3.2.135–43: ‘Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises . . . .’]. All the relations of Caliban with the invaders of his island-home graphically embody, perhaps with a spice of irony, the experience of explorers among the natives of the new continent. When the wild man insists on detecting divine attributes in the brutish Trinculo, he recalls the reception of Sri Francis Drake as an emissary from heaven on the west coast of California. Pizarro had already faced the same ordeal in Peru, Cortes in Mexico and Cartier in Canada. Often would a degraded explorer, after the manner of Trinculo, tempt the native with strong drink and find amusement in the creature’s first experience of drunkenness. Numberless pioneers of higher principles had also anticipated Prospero in seeking at an early meeting to win the savage’s love by teaching him the true functions of sun, moon, and stars, and by warning him against his crude conception of nature’s workings. On many a native Indian’s ears there had fallen Prospero’s words: ‘When thou didst not, savage,/ Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like/ A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes/ With words that made them known’ (1.2.355–8). The crabbed agglutinative dialects of the Indian moved many an Englishmen to despair, and patient were the endeavours to familiarize the strange being with speech which might prove intelligible to the English settler. At the same time every would-be colonist sought much instruction from his aboriginal host. On him alone could the newcomer depend as Prospero relies on Caliban for knowledge of ‘all the qualities’ of the country, for guidance to the freshwater springs and to the places where edible berries grew, and where good fish could be caught. The voice of history speaks in Caliban’s promise, ‘I’ll show thee every fertile inch o’ th’ island,’ with which the savage seeks to ingratiate himself with the stranger

 Sidney Lee, Caliban as a Native American 223 Trinculo. Caliban’s menial services of cutting and stacking firewood, of scraping trenchers and of washing dishes, were those of all natives in the early American settlements. The Indians were the hewers of wood and drawers of water wherever Europeans set foot in America. . . . . In his comprehensive generalisation Shakespeare ascribes to Caliban some vague affinities with the most barbarous of all the American races, the Patagonians. These savages lived on the shores of the Magellan Straits, and strange rumours spread about them. Visits to their country were rare. The two Elizabethan circumnavigators of the globe, Drake and Cavendish, both touched Patagonian shores, but the native declined intercourse with the English mariners. Drake echoes reports by earlier Spanish travellers of the savage worship, which the Patagonians offered their ‘great devil Setebos’. Of this Patagonian deity Caliban twice makes mention, calling him ‘my dam’s god, Setebos’ (1.2.373; 5.1.261). Despite his dissimilarity from the Patagonians in all other respects, he avows himself a votary of their ‘great devil’. In ascribing to Caliban, a ‘disproportioned’ body and in likening him to ‘a tortoise’ or ‘a freckled whelp,’ Shakespeare departs from the strict letter of his authorities. There was nothing ‘disproportioned’ about any of the America-Indians whom Englishmen had seen. Their Stature was invariably normal. Even a common allegation that the Patagonian was an ungainly giant, seven or eight feet high, was refuted by observers. Travellers brought back tales of monstrous distortions of the human shape lurking in the distant recesses of the New World, but the evidence usually proved shadowy. Yet the misrepresentation on Shakespeare’s part was no doubt deliberate and served both his dramatic and philosophic purpose. It was an act of involuntary homage to the Platonic idea, which Elizabethan thought assimilated, that the soul determines the form of the body. Shakespeare’s seeing eye invested his ‘rude and savage man of Ind’ with a bearing and gait akin to his stunted intelligence and rudimentary sentiment. But the Elizabethan playgoer had followed strange Indians about London streets or had paid his doits to inspect their persons at close quarters in showmen’s booths. The actor who created the part of Caliban was under no inducement to lay in his make-up any undue stress on the creature’s physical deformities. (333–45)

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Rachel Kelsey, New World influences 1914 From ‘Indian Dances in The Tempest’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 13 (1914), 98–103. No biographical information is available on Rachel Kelsey. The only major essay on the play by an early-twentieth-century female scholar, ‘Indian Dances . . .’ is a piece of historicist criticism, which, once again, traces New World influences on the play. Kelsey makes a very specific connection between descriptions of Indian dance in English travel narratives and certain elements of the play, notably Ariel’s song in Act 2 and the magical show accompanying the enchanted banquet in Act 3. Unlike the masques in Act 4, which seem to be indebted to European tradition, these songs and spectacles contribute to the island as exotic foreign space.

Mr. Luce, however, in his very thorough summary of the pamphlets related to The Tempest, does not consider Shakespeare’s possible indebtedness to these pamphlets for descriptions of the Indian dances, which may have furnished suggestive material for portions of the masque element of the play. In enumerating the various publications, Mr. Luce begins with those of 1608, thereby omitting the account of the Weymouth expedition fitted out by the Earl of Southampton and Lord Arundel, published in 1605. To this Shakespeare, on account of his friendship for Southampton, would naturally be attracted and from it the practical craftsman may have gleaned a bare suggestion for the strange burden of Ariel’s Song, Act I, Sc.2, which in the 1623 Folio reads: [Quotes 1.2.375–88: ‘Come unto these yellow sands, . . . .’]. The pamphlet thus describes an Indian dance on the shore: ‘Griffin which lay on Shoare, reported unto me their manner, and (as I may tearme them) the ceremonies of their Idolatry, which they perform thus. One among them (the eldest of the company as he judged) riseth right up, the rest sitting still, and so sodainely cryed, Bowh, waugh: then the women fall downe, and lye upon the ground, and the men altogether answering the same, fall a stamping round about with both feet as hard as they can, making the ground shake, with sundry loud outcries and change of voice and sound’. Indian music and dances are among the features of Indian life most enthusiastically described in the accounts and may easily have caught Shakespeare’s attention.

 Rachel Kelsey, New World Influences 225 . . . . the description of the dance mentioned is in ‘The Proceedings’ and reprinted in Purchas, his Pilgrims and reads as follows: ‘In a faire plaine field they made a fire, before which he sitting upon a mat suddenly amongst the woods heard such a hideous noise and shriking that they betooke them to their arms, supposing Powhatan with all his power came to surprise them; but the beholders which were many, men, women, and children, satisfied the captaine there was no such matter, being presently presented with this anticke, thirty young women came naked out of the woods (only covered behinde and before with a few green leaves) their bodies all painted, some white, some red, some blacke, some party colour, but every one different, their leader had a faire paire of Stagges hornes on her head and another Skinne at her girdle, another at her arme, a quiver of Arrowes in her hand, the next in her hand a Sword, another a Clubbe, another a Pot-sticke, all horned alike, the rest every one with their several devices. These fiends with most hellish cries and shouts rushing from amongst the trees cast themselves in a ring about the fire, singing and dancing with excellent ill variety, oft falling into their infernall passions and then solemnly againe to sing and dance. Having spent neere an hour in this Maskarado, as they entered, in like manner they departed. Having reaccommodated themselves, they solemnly invited Smith to their lodging, but no sooner was hee within the house, but these Nimphes more tormented him than ever most tediously crying, Love you not mee?. This salutation ended, the feast was set, consisting of Fruitein Baskets, Fish and Flesh in wooden Platters, Beans and Pease there wanted not (for twenty Hogges) nor any savage daintie which their invention could devise some attending , others singing and dancing about them; this mirth and banquet being ended with Firebrands (instead of Torches) they conducted him to his lodging’. This strange and grotesque dance, which the author calls ‘this Anticke,’ ‘this maskarado’ would have delighted an Elizabethan audience and might well have been one of the features of The Tempest which called forth the well-known censure of Ben Jonson in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair, 1614. The elements of the masque (Act III, Sc.3) which makes one suspect a relationship between it and the pamphlet are: the strange musicke, the several strange shapes, the Banquet, the gentle actions of salutation inviting the King to eat. The fact that Shapes enter, dance, depart and re-enter as they did in the Indian dance also seems significant. The conversation following the dumb show seems further to suggest that Shakespeare thought of the masque as a phenomenon of beyond sea. [Quotes 3.3.19–34: Alonso. Give us kind keepers; what were these? . . . .] The two following masques in Act IV are much more conventional, introducing the classic and pastoral elements found in Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale. This one is quite different and on the whole far more congruous with the wonders of the Inchanted Isle beyond the seas. (100–3)

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Arthur Quiller-Couch, the first performance 1917 From Notes on Shakespeare’s Workmanship (New York, 1917). Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (pseudonym ‘Q’) (1863–1944), writer and anthologist, was professor of English literature at Cambridge University. His published collections of lectures were very popular. He edited The Oxford Book of English Verse (1900) and authored the introductions to Shakespeare’s fourteen comedies for the New Shakespeare Series (Cambridge, 1921–31), although he eventually withdrew from the project and left the series to his co-editor, John Dover Wilson. Quiller-Couch was a life-long advocate for liberal education and a firm believer in the humanist tradition. The following excerpt from his chapter-length study of The Tempest focuses on the occasion for the play’s writing and performance (which Quiller-Couch argues is the royal wedding at the court). Quiller-Couch draws on theater history and formal aspects of the play to arrive at conclusions regarding its early performance.

Although . . . The Tempest was pretty certainly presented at Court, in some form or another, on Hallowmas Night, 1611, it was quite certainly represented there early in 1613 to grace the nuptials of Prince Palatine and the Princess Elizabeth, and almost as certainly played as we now have it, whether there has been a previous form or not. For while it seems we must reject Dr. Garnett’s main thesis that Shakespeare wrote it for that great occasion, I hold this much proved all but unanswerably. As it now stands, it was written for Court, and to celebrate a wedding. I am inclined to add ‘a royal wedding’. Its brevity (for a monarch and his guests must not be unduly tired, nor a bridal couple either) is one small indication. Its economy of scene-shifting, unique among Shakespeare’s plays, is another and stronger one: and by a paradox, the stationery splendor of its setting, a third. For it is observable that while a Royal Banqueting House, such as that of Whitehall, allows a more sumptuous frame than an ordinary theatre; and while for a royal performance it encourages rich dress in the players, with refinement of bodily motion and the speaking voice; and while again it lends itself, as we know, to all the apparatus of a Masque; it cannot – it could not then, as Windsor cannot today – compete with a professional theatre in what we may call the tricks of the trade. When at Whitehall or at Windsor we come to these, we come, if not to ‘two trestles and a board,’ at furthest to something like a glorified Assembly-Room.

 Arthur Quiller-Couch, the First Performance 227 Now, as Dr. Garnett[1] has pointed out, ‘after the first brief representation of the deck of the storm-tossed vessel with which the play opens, there is practically but one scene. For though the action occasionally shifts from the space before Prospero’s cell to some other part of the island, everything is avoided which might necessitate a change of decoration. Neither is there any change of costume except Prospero’s assumption of his ducal robes in the last Act: and this takes place on the stage’. But of course, Dr. Garnett’s argument rests mainly on the two masques, and specially on the masque of Iris, Ceres, and Juno: which, if the real purpose of the play – or as I should prefer to put it, the occasional purpose – be overlooked, appears so merely an excrescence that some have hastily supposed it an interpolation. But this cannot be. If we remove the masque, Act iv (already, as it stands, much shorter than ordinary) simply crumbles to pieces; while further, as we saw in our first paper, the finest passage in the drama goes with it. For the text runs – not as so often misquoted – ‘And like the baseless fabric of a vision,’ [4.1.151], but ‘And like the baseless fabric of this vision;’ and again: ‘And like this unsubstantial pageant, faded,/ Leave not a wreck behind’ [4.1.155–6]. On the other hand, if we save the masque (and Act 4 along with it), we cannot deny it to be a nuptial one. It explicitly says that it is. Thus far I have been following Dr. Garnett: and will but add two small points which seem to me to strengthen his contention. – (1) The resemblance, subtler for its differences but not less assured, between The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream – a play undoubtedly written for a Court and a wedding. With this I will deal by-and-by, when we come to Ariel and fairyland. (2) The place of The Tempest in the First Folio. Heminge and Condell knew, of course, that it was not his first play, but almost his last, if not (as I maintain) his very last. Then why did they lead off with it? Putting aside the hypothesis that by divination they set it there as the play of all others calculated to allure every child for a hundred generations to come into his Shakespeare, to be entrapped by its magic, I suggest that, being cunning men, they started off upon the public with their revered dead master’s most notorious triumph; that this triumph had owed no little of its notoriety on the one hand to having fulfilled a great occasion – the Lady Elizabeth’s spousals – that set all England afire; on the other to Court approbation; which, even in our days, the ‘profession’ (and Heminge and Condell were actors) has been known to appreciate. The date is an early night of 1613, when the days are felt to be lengthening. At Whitehall the Great Banqueting House is alight, and, for the mirrors to multiply, the tall candles shine on a company of men and women whose rivalry, to the soul’s neglect, in every trapping that will give the body splendor, as in every luxury that can minister to its inward appetite, has already made the Court of James I a byword in Europe for prodigality; for the moment to be envied or foreboded on as a sensual or as a spiritual man will choose. They have their hour, at any rate; and we may, if we will, amuse ourselves by essaying to reconstruct the scene in detail after the fashion of Macaulay.

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– Here the King himself seated, there Cecil, now Earl of Salisbury, grave, sedate; there, made heir-apparent but a few weeks ago by the death of his brother Henry, the boy Charles who in time must step out from a window of this same banqueting-room and lay his head on the block to pay for it all . . . . . . . . And there young George Villiers, and there young Edward Herbert (later of Cherbury), gay as flies; and there my Lady Harrington and Lady Grace Dudley there Francis Bacon, knight and Solicitor General; knowing most things but little guessing that in course of time he would be accused of having come to witness his own play . . . . We all remember the trick of it, and can refresh our memories by turning to the famous passage in which Macaulay arrays Westminister hall for the trial of Warren Hastings. But, seriously, I suggest that in visualizing a play which so tenderly yet imperatively dismisses this transitory life of ours as such stuff as dreams are made on – a tale rounded by a sleep – we may profitably see it at the double remove; conjuring up, between us and the stage, all that brilliant company in the auditorium, – now, with all the players dead and gone almost as if they had never been: and especially that one girl in whose honour all is devised, Elizabeth, bride and ‘Queen of Hearts’. . . . . So, for me, two curtains rise on The Tempest. First, between me and the stage I see that company gathered: and, pre-eminent, in the front row, the figure of this girl, this paragon, ‘`th’ eclipse and glory of her kind,’ for whose sake so many gallant gentlemen were to lose this world and count it gain . . . . Tonight she is a bride; as the histories attest, in love with her husband; and if we can hereafter, between whiles, steal an instant from Miranda and Ferdinand, let it be for her face, with lips parted as she leans forward and her heart goes out to follow the lovers’ story. But for the moment I see her, a little reclined, her young jeweled wrists, like Cassiopeia’s, laid along the arms of her chair; and, before, that other curtain. . . . Now for Miranda. – Every critic wants to write about her; but when we are all in love, what is the use? Specially and rightly they have noticed the chosen distance at which she is poised between the brute Caliban and the rarefied Ariel with his fellowspirits haunting that isle of voices: she so straight, forthright, speaking out all her knowledge, though it be bluntly, laying her heart bare to the first summons of love – so confidently, being clean. I will but add this. Through these later plays we cannot but note that Shakespeare, choosing a maiden for the central figure of each successive work, successively sublimates his conception of maidenhood until towards the end no one is fit to act Marina, Perdita, Miranda, unless she be actually a princess or fit to be a princess. I daresay that I love Beatrice or Rosalind as whole-heartedly as nay one who may happen to read this page. But they are different. One can imagine Beatrice or Rosalind enacted with just a touch of vulgarity and yet without offence. But in Perdita or in Miranda that touch were inconceivable. Et vera incessu patuit des.[2] And (wonder of all!) this man, suborned to the stage of his time, making himself ‘a motely to the view,’ had to write the parts of Perdita and Miranda to be acted by boys! There – just there – his genius, which has lured me since childhood on the quest, adventurous though vain, to track its secret down – just there that wonder, which is the voice and harp of Ariel, vanishes and leaves me hopelessly foundered; even as this sort of thing drives us to go hackneying beyond the hackneyed encomium, the full meaning of which, when he wrote it, Ben Jonson

 Arthur Quiller-Couch, the First Performance 229 never guessed. ‘He was not of an age, but for all time –’ This should keep us wary, when we deal with Shakespeare, of testing the workman too narrowly by the conditions of his craft. I may be accused of being proner than most to fall into this very sin. So let me admit that, while it seems to me constantly useful, and sometimes illuminating, to have those conditions in mind, it is a folly to think of Shakespeare as limited by them. He invented Lady Macbeth and Miranda, and both to be acted by boys! I shall say little more of Miranda: because in two immortal pages Coleridge has condensed all, or almost all, that can be said. I believe that before reading him, and therefore without his help, I had felt the exquisite touches (there are two) when Miranda in the first dawn of love lets slip from memory first her father’s behest and anon his precepts – ‘Thou shalt leave father and mother and cleave,’ etc. But it was Coleridge taught me the beauty of – ‘At the first sight/ The have chang’d eyes’. [1.2.441–2] – which does not mean ‘they have exchanged glances’ but with literal truth indicates the decisive moment that happens in true love between man and woman. But specially I would refer to words in which, specially of Miranda, Coleridge expresses just this that we all feel of her. – ‘In Shakespeare all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the sweet yet dignified feeling of all that continuates society, a sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, because it rests not in the analytical processes but in that sane equipoise of the faculties during which the feelings are representative of all past experience – not of the individual only, but of all those by whom she had been educated, and their predecessors even up to the first mother that lived.’[3] I will add but this concerning her – yet I think it her last secret and the last secret of the play: — She is good. It has been pointed out that, of all the courtiers wrecked on the island, Gonzalo is the only good man, and he alone of them keeps his cheerfulness, his happy old courage. So, and more eminently, Miranda is good: she means nothing but good to the world and in return will credit it only with good – ‘O brave new world!/ That has such people in it!’ [5.1.183–4]. And so we behold her – a being good absolutely and by breeding set above commerce and fear – how fearlessly she gives herself in that incomparable love-scene with which Act iii opens! (306–11, 318–21)

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Charles Gayley, political ideas 1917 From Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America (New York, 1917). Charles Gayley (1858–1932) was professor of English and the Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. He authored several books including The Principles and Progress of English Poetry (1904), Classical Myths in English Literature and in Art (1911), Beaumont the Dramatist (1914) and Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America (1917). In the latter, Gayley contends that not only is Shakespeare part of the cultural inheritance of both England and the United States of America, but he also was in sympathy with the principles that the United States was founded on. The Tempest not only draws inspiration from a number of Virginia narratives, but it is also influenced by these documents’ representation of the improvidence, sloth and chaos that overtook Virginia without proper governance.

Three pamphlets may be mentioned as summing up any printed information concerning the Virginia ventures and miscarriages that may seem to have found its way into The Tempest. Of these the first was ‘A true and Sincere declaration of the purpose and ends of the Plantation begun in Virginia,’ etc. This was entered at Stationers’ Hall, December 14, 1609, ‘under the hands of the Treasurer and other officers of the Virginia Company’. It is dated London, 1610, and is ‘the first tract bearing the endorsement: Set forth by the authority of the Governors and councillers established for that plantation’. It was issued in order to ally the apprehensions of the public concerning the disasters of the year preceding. The next was ‘A Discovery of the Barmudas, Otherwise called the Ile of Divels, by Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Sommers and Captayne Newport, with divers others’. This was written by one of the survivors of the wreck, Silvester Jourdan, who had returned with Gates. It is dated by the author October 13, 1610, and was published in London the same year. But it does not appear in the Stationers’ Registers and was not authorized by the Virginia Council. The third was ‘A true Declaration of the estate of the Colony of Virginia, with a confutacon of such scandalous reports as have tended to the disgrace of so worthy an enterprise.’ It was entered at Stationers’ Hall on November 8, 1610, and published the same year ‘by order and direction of the Councell of Virginia.’ The material for this declaration are drawn partly form Sir Thomas Gates’s ‘Report upon Oath of Virginia’ as delivered on his return to the

 Charles Gayley, Political Ideas 231 Council, but not separately published, and principally from information contained in letters received from Virginia, not published till after Shakespeare’s death. From the True and Sincere Declaration of December, 1609, mentioned above, and from a Broadside which serves as an appendix, and intending dramatist might, if he had stopped his ears to the subjects of public conversation, have gathered for the first time that one of the reasons for the failure in Virginia had been ‘the misgovernment’ – under the presidency of Captain John Smith – ‘of the Commanders by dissention and ambition among themselves’ and ‘the Idlenesse and bestiall slouth of the common sort, who were active in nothing but adhering to factions and parts even to their owne ruine;’ that to remedy these and similar abuses, an expedition had been sent out under the conduct of Sir Thomas Gates as ‘one able and absolute governor;’ that ‘a terrible tempest’ had overtaken and ‘scattered the whole fleet;’ that four of the fleet had ‘met in consort’ and made their way without ‘their Admiral’ to Virginia; that later three other vessels had reached harbor, but that still the Admiral-ship was missing, with the Governor and ‘all the Commissioners and principal persons aboard’. He would also learn that the rest ‘being put ashore . . . . no man would acknowledge a superior nor could from this headlesse and unbridled multitude by anything expected but disorder and riot’. The council, however, ‘doubts not but by the mercy of God’, the Governor ‘is safe, with the Pinnace which attended him, and shall both, or are by this time, arrived at our colony’. And from the Broadside the enquirer would learn that the ‘most vile and scandalous reports, both of the Country itself, and of the Cariage of the businesse there,’ circulated at home, were attributable to ‘some few of those unruly youths sent thither,’ who ‘are come for England againe,’ and to ‘men that seeme of the better sort, being such as lie at home, and do gladly take all occasions to cheere themselves with the prevention of happy successe in any action of publike good’. That ‘it therefore resolved that no . . . unnecessary person shall now be accepted, but onely . . . . sufficient, honest and good artificers . . . surgeons, physitions, and learned divines’. . . . . Touching Stephano, I blush to say that as it is he who on Prospero’s island comes singing: ‘I shall no more to sea, to sea,/ Here shall I die ashore,’ [2.2.42–3] as it is he to whom, ringleader of the baser sort, occurs the thought: ‘the King and all our company else being drowned, we will inherit here’ – as it is Stephano who would be ‘king of the isle’ with Trinculo and Caliban as viceroys, and who warns Trinculo: ‘if you prove a mutineer, the next tree’; so in Bermuda it was Stephen who headed the first dangerous mutiny. Strachey has already told how ‘the major part of the common sort’ were willing ‘to settle a foundation of ever inhabiting there,’ how secret discontents beginning ‘in the Seamen . . . had like to have been the parents of bloudy issues and mischiefes,’ how the seamen joined landsmen to them, and how this first conspiracy was crushed. Now he proceeds: ‘Yet could not this be any warning to others, who more subtilly began to shake the foundation of our quiet safety, and therein did one Stephen Hopkins commence the first act of overture: A fellow who had much knowledge of the Scriptures, and could reason well therein, whom our minister therefore chose to be his Clarke, to reade the Pslames, and Chapters upon Sondayes.’ This same Stephen in January ‘brake’ with two others ‘and alleaged substantiall arguments, both civill and divine (the Scripture falsely

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quoted) that it was no breach of honesty, conscience , nor Religion, to decline from the obedience of the Governour, or refuse to goe any further, led by his authoritie (except it so please themselves) since the authoritie ceased when the wracke was committed, and with it they were all freed from the government of any man; and for a matter of conscience’ they were ‘bound each one to provide for himself,’ and ‘to stay in this place,’ there being ‘abundance of God’s providence of all manner of goode foode,’ etc. This Stephano of real life, brought forth in manacles and faced by two accusers with whom he had conversed, made ‘answere, which was onely full of sorrow and teares, pleading simplicity and denial. But hee being . . . generally held worthy to satisfie the punishment of his offence, with the sacrifice of his life, our Governour passed the sentence of a Martiall Court upon him, such as belongs to Mutinie and Rebellion. But so penitent hee was, and made so much moane, alleadging the ruine of his wife and children in this his trespasse, as it wrought in the hearts of all the better sort of the company, who therefore [Captain Newport and Strachey among the rest] went unto our Governor . . . and never left him until we had got his pardon’. Whether this puritan proponent of freedom from authority and of ‘inheriting here’ was the contributory evocation of Shakespeare’s ‘drunken butler, Stephano,’ I dare not say. Shakespeare had an ever ready ridicule for the anarch, and a tolerant smile for the extravagances of the Puritan. Stephen was both and sectary; Stephano but the former, and by no means knowledged in the scriptures. It may engage descendants of the Mayflower to know that having returned to England, the Brownist Hopkins, with his second wife and two children of his first, joined himself in 1620 to the Bradford and Brewster expedition and, in more congenial company this time, settled permanently in the Plymouth Colony. As one of the twenty-two passengers on that immemorial craft from whom descent in America has been proved, he has, of his progeny alone, commemorators today more numerous by far than were the colonists whose hearts he softened that day towards the end of January, 1610. This, however, is desipere in [or ex] loco. Whether Shakespeare borrowed names from Strachey or not, to make an argument out of it would be precious and inconsequential. We have already sufficient evidence that he knew his Strachey from first page to last. If the coincidences between The Tempest and Strachey’s letter were confined to details of romantic adventure Shakespeare’s interest would not appear to be out of the common. His acquaintance with the document would be proved, but we should have no indication of his political opinion. Does he, like the hungry generation of contemporary dramatists seize upon the plum-duff and forget the rum and blue fire? The sequence may provide the answer. No sooner has Strachey recounted the safe arrival of Sir Thomas Gates in Virginia than he proceeds to describe the disordered state of the Colony – ‘not excusing likewise the form of government of some errour, which was not powerful among so headie a multitude – the miserable effects in sloath, riot and vanity; continual wasting, no husbandry, the old store still spent on, . . . . And with this Idlenesse . . . the headlesse multitude (some neither of qualitie nor Religion) not imployed to the end for which they were sent hither; no, not compelled (since in themselves unwilling) to sowe corne for their owne bellies, nor to put a Roote, Herbe, etc. for their owne particular good in their Gardens or Elsewhere.’ . . . And this in ‘one of the goodliest Countries under

 Charles Gayley, Political Ideas 233 the sunne’; for ‘no country yeeldeth goodlier Corne, nor more manifold increase . . . thousands of goodly Vines in every hedge and Boske, running along the ground which yielded a plentiful Grape in their kinde,’ abundance of all things richly bestowed by nature, if but manured and dressed by the hand of husbandry, all ‘suffered to lie sicke and languishe. Only let me truly acknowledge, they are not an hundred or two of debosit hands . . . ill provided for before they came, and worse to be governed when they are here . . . that must be the carpenters and workemen in this so glorious a building’. With the usual result in abuse where no provision for legitimate profit had been made, there was no systematized truck with the Indians. ‘And for this misgovernment, chiefly our Colony is much bound to the Mariners’ who dishonestly forestall the market with them by night; and to the usury of the Masters, and the frauds of the Pursers. The natural outcome of communism and divided rule, to be cured only by ‘the better authoritie and government now changed into an absolute command’. Something of this ‘tempest and dissention’ had already been conceded in the True and Sincere Declaration of December, 1609. And still more had been embodied from Strachey’s Letter to and Excellent Lady in the True Declaration, which as we know had been published in November, 1610: — the ‘Every man overvaluing his owne worth, would be a Commander; every man underprizing another’s value denied to be commanded;’ the ‘Every man sharked his owne booty, but was altogether carelesse of succeeding penuire’; the ‘idlenesse,’ the ‘treasons,’ the ‘want of government’. But the account of natural abundance, the corn and vines and chance for tilth and profit, and of the wasteful sloth, the ‘headless multitude’ and ‘privie faction’ of Virginia, in the unpublished letter is more minute and vivid; and if Shakespeare has so far been drawing upon the materials of the letter, it is but natural that he should continue to do so. It is also natural that as his enchanted island is a composite of Bermuda and of islands ‘by wandering sailors never seen,’ so also his animadversions upon colonial communism should be a transmutation– neither of Bermudan fact nor of Virginian alone, but of both. The shafts of Strachey’s reality, Shakespeare points with irony. No sooner has the poet brought to shore the shipwrecked king and court of Naples than, out of a clear sky, his wise and loyal Gonzalo with a sort of ‘merry fooling’ animadverts upon the Virginia plantation, and propounds Utopia. ‘Had I a plantation of this isle, my lord . . . . And were the king on’t, what would I do?’ Then, adapting Montaigne’s embellishment of the golden age: [Quotes 2.1.148–57: ‘I’ the commonwealth I would by contraries . . . .’]. Upon which the rascally Sebastian, ‘Yet he would be king on’t;’ and Antonio, ‘The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning’. But Gonzalo, still playing with Montaigne and communism – may we not say in the light of the Virginian fiasco? [Quotes 2.1.160–5: ‘All things in common Nature should produce . . . .’]. These, ‘all idle’ and ‘knaves,’ Gonzalo ‘would with such perfection govern, Sir, To excel the golden age’. So the subacid Gonzalo, of the kingless commonwealth of which he should be king. So with exemplification by contraries, Shakespeare in the sequel of his play – the speedy treasons of Sebastian and Antonio ‘where no name of magistrate is known,’ the inheriting ambitions and ‘bloody thoughts’ of the ‘deboshed’ and idle poor. And so, Strachey and Sandy drawings upon him, of the plantation where ‘every man would be a Commander’.

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The improvidence resulting from the original common stock system in the plantation of Virginia, and the anarchy where none was ‘sole and absolute governor,’ were precisely the curses which, when Shakespeare’s whimsical ‘plantation of this isle’ was put upon the stage, the friends of Shakespeare in the Virginia Council were striving to lift from the shoulders of their colony. (45–7, 63–9)

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John Rea, Erasmus’ influence on the storm scene 1919

From ‘The Source for the Storm in The Tempest.’ Modern Philology, 17.5 (1919), 279–86. John Rea (dates unknown) authored a number of articles on a variety of topics in English literature. Apart from The Tempest, he wrote on Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar. Rea’s article indicates that the source of the storm continued to fascinate. In spite of the ‘American wave’ in The Tempest criticism, Rea dismisses the Virginia voyage documents as possible sources and instead claims that a text by Erasmus inspired Shakespeare’s storm scene.

Since the time of Malone it has been customary to assume that the account of the storm is based on the wreck of a vessel of Sir George Somers in the Bermudas in July 1609. A report of this by Sylvester Jourdan was published in October of the next year, and is generally considered the direct source, though other narratives of the same event also appeared. That by William Strachey, often quoted and referred to, apparently did not appear until too late for Shakespeare’s use. But none of the accounts contain any striking points of similarity to Shakespeare’s storm, except such as are natural in any description of a shipwreck. It is doubtful if anyone would have connected this wreck in the Bermudas with The Tempest had in not been for Ariel’s reference to the ‘still-ved’d Beermoothes’; but this of course, far from supporting the belief that the Bermudas are the scene of the play, merely indicates the contrary; the point of the speech is that the Bermudas are at a considerable distance rather than near at hand . . . . A closer parallel is desirable before it can be said definitely that the source is known. That there is a source to be found seems reasonably certain from Shakespeare’s method of work in his other plays, and the detachment of the whole incident from the rest of the comedy suggests that this source deals only with the storm, not with the other incidents of the drama. I believe the source is to be found in one of the Colloquia of Erasmus, called ‘naufragium’. Below I give a large part of this colloquy in an English translation by William Burton which appeared in 1606 as part of his book of translations from

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the Colloquia entitled Seven Dialogues both Pithie and profitable. ‘Naufragium’ is the second of these, disguised on the title-page as ‘Sheweth what comfort Poperie affordeth in time of daunger’. Burton was a strong Protestant, and was doing his best in choosing his titles to capitalize the excitement against the Catholics which had been aroused by the recent Gunpowder Plot. I think that it will appear to any reader who will examine both this dialogue and the accounts of the storm in the Bermudas that the former is much closer to Shakespeare’s account in substance, in form, and in tone. The matter of the colloquy and of the play is very similar; the form is that of dialogue; and both, though narratives of events that are in themselves apparently tragic, treat these events in the vein of comedy. Burton in his translation rightly describes the colloquy as ‘A pitiful yet pleasant Dialogue of a Shipwracke,’ and this would describe Shakespeare’s wreck exactly. It is very striking that both the storms are largely timeless and placeless. There is no indication in the first scene of The Tempest, aside from the Italian names, who the characters are, whither they are bound, where they come from, or where the storm occurs. This may be compared with the similar lack if definiteness as to time and place in King Lear; and it might be conjectured that the reason is the same in both cases – the source used was itself indefinite as to these matters. This exactly fits the ‘Naufragium’; here, as in the play, we merely find ourselves at the beginning on board a storm-tossed vessel, and see the sailors at work, the passengers in a panic, and the master going about among them. The action in the two cases starts at the same time, when the storm is at its height; we are dramatically introduced in medias res. Without any preliminary explanations. As a Latin note in some of the editions of ‘Naufragium’ remarks, the colloquy ‘starts abruptly, like a comedy’. It is a singular fact that in Shakespeare St. Elmo’s fire appears, in spite of the fact that it is early afternoon and apparently light enough for Prospero and Miranda to see the struggles of the vessel from the shore. The explanation of this discrepancy, which I do not remember to have seen commented on, is to be found in Erasmus’ narrative. He tells briefly of the night and the appearance of the ball of fire, and the skips suddenly to midday. Shakespeare, accordingly, introduces the picturesque description of the fire without noticing that he has put it at the wrong time of day. The appearance of this fire is the most striking feature of Ariel’s report of the storm to Prospero, and it is to be especially noted that in none of the other accounts from which Shakespeare is sometimes said to have drawn is the fire described as descending from the mast and running about the lower parts of the ship. (279–81)

46

Ernest Law, the Blackfriars Theatre 1920

From Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’ as Originally Produced at Court (London, 1920). Ernest Law (1854–1930) was an English historian and barrister, who was appointed official historian at Hampton Court Palace. He was especially interested in Tudor history and Shakespeare. Among his works on Shakespeare are Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries (1911), More about Shakespeare Forgeries (1913), ‘The Tempest’ as Originally Produced at Court (1920) and Shakespeare’s Garden (1922). Law writes that The Tempest was probably intended for the upscale Blackfriars Theatre, though the story – with its reference to royal lovers and voyages to the Americas – was topical enough to be appealing to both the general public and to a royal audience.

[I]t is exceedingly probable that when Shakespeare wrote The Tempest he did so with the view of its being acted before the higher class of playgoers who frequented the ‘Blackfriars’– the first of the closed, roofed-in houses, called ‘Private Theatres’, of which the prototypes in structure and general conditions were the Great Halls of Greenwich, Hampton court and Whitehall. Already, in fact, it would seem, ‘The Globe’ on the Surrey side was beginning to be looked upon as the home of transpontine, rather than of high-class drama. It is likely enough, indeed, that The Tempest – with the Winter’s Tale– was Shakespeare’s contribution towards the Burbages’ new venture, and the consideration for the ‘Founders’ Shares – as they were in effect– allotted to the dramatist by his fellow shareholders– the ‘adventurers’ as they were called, the ‘promoters,’ as we should call them now– if, indeed, he was not himself the chief promoter and chairman of the syndicate – in the ‘Blackfriars sub-company,’ an off-shoot of the ‘Parent’ Company of the King’s Comedians. Put in this way, it will be seen that Shakespeare was up to, if he was not the original inventor of, the most modern and astute of the devices of our financial experts in the City of London. Also, it may be noticed – though this is a mere piece of negative evidence – that Dr. Simon Forman, the astrologist and quack doctor, who described in his note-book performances of four of Shakespeare’s plays witnessed by him at ‘The Globe’ in April and May 1611, makes no mention of The Tempest at all. More convincing, however,

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if not conclusively so, is the statement of Dryden, writing in 1669, in the preface to his own mangled version of the play, that Shakespeare’s original composition ‘had formerly been acted with success at the Black Fryers’. It seems possible, therefore, almost to the point of certainty, that it was on the very spot where now stand the offices of ‘The Times’ newspaper that those immortal beings, Prospero and Antonio, Miranda, Ferdinand, Ariel and Caliban, were first introduced to the people of London by their creator, just about six months earlier than they made their appearance at Whitehall before the Kind and Queen. Apart from all its matchless qualities as a superb piece of dramatic invention, sublimated by poetic imagery, the play doubtless owed much of its immediate success and popularity, not only to the musical and scenic effects with which it was mounted, but also, and perhaps as much, to the topical nature of many of its incidents and allusions – in which were reflected the thoughts and feelings then uppermost in the mind of the public, equally with the Court. For although, as has been already shown, its composition can have had nothing to do with the wooing of the Princess Elizabeth by the Prince Palatine, Royal marriages were in the air. Already suitors were numerous for the hand of the little Princess, and many alliances were being offered also for the young Prince of Wales. This appears from the despatches of the foreign Ambassadors in England, which are full of the subject, especially in the few weeks previous to the play’s being acted at court. They are likewise full, as are also the private letters of the time, of the wrecking of Sir George Somers’ flagship, bound for the plantation of Virginia, on the Bermudas – ‘the still-vexed Bermoothes’. The ideas and phrases adopted by Shakespeare from several of the pamphlets about the event, which appeared in the autumn of 1610, prove that he shared the popular excitement, or at least made use of it for giving a topical flavour to his new play. . . . . The great interest aroused in London by all this ‘Newes from Virginia,’ and ‘Newes from the Bermudas,’ can have moved no one more that the young Prince Henry, who, with his imagination already fired by the narratives of maritime adventure and stories of desert islands and the mysterious dangers of the Western seas, was himself planning a project for a new expedition to the colony – a project mentioned by the Venetian Ambassador in a letter to the Doge and Seignory on the very day the play was produced at Whitehall. No one, therefore, was more likely than him to desire to see The Tempest aced; and the Lord Chamberlain would have had this in mind when consulting about a suitable play for Hallowmas Night with the Master of the Revels and Burbage or Shakespeare. Between them, with the assistance of Inigo James and his men from the office of Works, they would have made all the necessary arrangements in the Banqueting House, which, from its large size and regular stage and fittings – as already described – was just the sort of theatre required for a spectacular piece like this. The general theatric conditions of the performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays before the Court, and the particular circumstance of the staging of The Tempest, now required to be noticed. To begin with, it may hereby remarked that the fact of all representations of plays at court taking place at night, is one of the chief and most pregnant of several differences, distinguishing them from performances in the public theatres; strongly

 Ernest Law, the Blackfriars Theatre 239 influencing the subsequent development of the arts both of playwright and players; aiding, in fact, that gradual transformation of the ‘drama of rhetoric’ into the more detached, emotional and pictorial presentations of modern times. In this process, the effect of the use of artificial lighting on the stage, resulting – as it surely must – in stimulating the senses and exalting the imagination of the spectator, while heightening the theatrical illusion, was the most obvious, if not one of the most potent of all. Moreover, there is the fact that the Banqueting House was – owing to its solid walls and reverberant roof – an admirable place for hearing; and, therefore, certain to modify the players’ method of delivery, substituting for that loud, declamatory, blatant style of histrionics, so common on the public open theatres, that ‘tearing a passion to pieces,’ which so greatly distressed the Lord Hamlet, and which would have been as much out of place as ineffective in the refined atmosphere of a performance before the Court – a restrained and quieter style, wherewith the more delicate gradations of thought, and the subtler shades of feeling, could be more intimately suggested. Finally, the oblong shape of the Banqueting House, with the stage at one end, and the audience in front of it, tended towards that shrinking of the platform towards the proscenium or inner stage, which thenceforth proceeded unremittingly until our day. Already, even in the time of Queen Elizabeth, as well as in the earlier years of James I, before the full influence of the elaborate spectacular Court Masques had made itself felt, the mise-en-scene at the Palace was the very antithesis of that mere platform, entirely bare of any scenery or accessories, and devoid of all mechanism, imagined for us by some critics as the invariable condition under which all Shakespearian representations took place, until the suppression of the theatres in 1624. Disregarding other evidence, how should we otherwise explain the explicit statements of successive Masters of the Revels (R O Audit Office Accounts – Various Bundles 1213, etc) that among their chief duties was the: ‘furnishing, fitting and setting foorthe of sundry Tragedies, Playes, etc., with their apte howses of paynted canvas and properties incident suche as mighte most lyvely express the effect of the histories plaied’. And also the providing of: ‘apt howses made of canvasse, fframed ffashioned and paynted accordingly as mighte beste serve their several purposes’. Can we suppose that among the ‘painted cloths for the Musick House and stage at Court,’ specially made and provided by the Master of the Revels in this particular year, there were not some that ‘might most lively’ express the effect of ‘The Tempest? Or that the vast collection of such “painted cloths” and “framed canvasses,” as were stored in the Office-House of the Revels– including such things as trees, clouds, mountains, woods, forests, caves, rocks, etc., – were not requisitioned, as they might serve the purpose’ of exhibiting Prospero’s enchanted island? When we find that in a play acted before Queen Elizabeth in the Great Hall of Hampton Court ‘a wilderness’ was represented by three dozen forest trees, are we to believe that Shakespeare’s Tempest put on the great stage of the Banqueting House at Whitehall 30 years later was not mounted with an equal for realism? The truth, indeed, seems to be not so much that there was no scenery as that there was little, if any, change of scene – the various localities of the whole play being all shown simultaneously– known as ‘multiple setting’ or ‘Décor simultane’ – so that the

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utmost adaptation that could be attempted was the occasional drawing of a ‘painted cloth,’ illustrative of a different place, in front of such portions of the setting as were not then applicable. In this respect, however, The Tempest – all its action going on in the open air on an island – can have offered but few difficulties to Shakespeare’s or Sir George Buc’s scene-shifters. Turning now to describe the particular scenery set up for this play that night, we may say for certain that at the back of the main part of the stage was the usual ‘inner stage,’ which would have served for Prospero’s cell; while overhead was probably the place where Prospero appeared in person more than once ‘above invisible’ – as the stage direction puts it – perhaps through a transparency. Not far from it must have been the rock from which Caliban comes forth, and which was evidently a visible tangible thing; for it is referred to distinctly by Prospero – ‘wherefore thou art deservedly confined in this rock.’ and, pointedly, also by Caliban; – ‘Here you sty me in this hard rock, while you do keep from me the rest of the island’ [1.2.342–3]. On another side may have been represented ‘the lime-grove that weather fended his cell’ – by practical trees. And the efforts of the Revels men may not have ended there; for they perhaps even showed a distant landscape, and ‘the rocky marge’ and ‘yellow sands’ of ‘the never surfeiting sea’. In this play, therefore, there would had been little need for those ‘locality boards’ which frequently were put up for the information of the audience; and of which Mr. W. J Lawrence has given us an account in his two exceedingly interesting volumes on ‘The Elizabethan Stage’, – one of the valuable publications, by the way, of the Shakespeare Head Press. Scenes in ‘another part of the island’ would have been quite sufficiently notified by drawing across the mouth of the cell or cave a ‘traverse,’ painted or plain. Such devices and ‘locality boards’ were resorted to, as much owing to the absence of programmes as to the inadequacy of the scenery. To the King and Queen, however, were usually presented a fine illuminated ‘table,’ or synopsis of the characters and plot; and occasionally, also, a copy of the words of the songs. Across the top of the stage – ‘highest and aloft’ – to use a phrase of the Revels men – would have been fixed a large title-board with the name of the play – The Tempest – decoratively painted on it. Here again, I can claim the authority of Mr. Lawrence’s admirable works in confirmation and amplification of my own researches. Now, the suggestions just made as to the scenic conditions under which Shakespeare’s last play was presented at Court are so far rather presumptions than ascertained facts. But it is possible, I think, to arrive at a more precise and definite idea of the general setting of the stage on that night. . . . . Considering next the lighting of the auditorium and the stage: these were alike brilliantly illuminated with candelabra, candle-rings and ‘fairy lights,’ ‘pendant by subtle magic’ from invisible wires, stretched overhead, from rafter to rafter, of the roof; and shedding a soft glow, ‘as from a sky’; though, at the same time, we know that occasionally the whole house was darkened to heighten the tragic effect. As it happened in this particular year, in view, perhaps, of this very production, and of that of The Winter’s Tale four days after, there was a complete renovation of all

 Ernest Law, the Blackfriars Theatre 241 the lighting arrangements of the theatre at a cost equivalent to about L 400 at the present day. Another important element in this first performance of The Tempest at Whitehall was the ‘Musick-Howse’ by the stage, in which were stationed the King’s band of some thirty or forty musicians. Here they played not only during, but also between, the acts. For whatever may have been the custom in the public theatres, the evidence bearing on the acting of plays at Court gives as little countenance to the theory of invariable ‘continuous action’ as it does to that of a scene-less stage. Sometimes this ‘inter-act music’ was accompanied by the handing round of refreshments to the audience – especially when there were foreign guests present some of whom, understanding little of the dialogue, probably enjoyed these interludes a good deal more than the play. It may be observed, moreover, of The Tempest, that its divisions into acts, even scenes, are very far from being arbitrary or fortuitous: but that, on the contrary, they correspond with definite stage in the action and progress of the drama. A more important function of the King’s musicians in their ‘Musicke Howse’ was to play all that incidental ‘solemn and strange music,’ ‘marvelous sweet music,’ ‘heavenly music,’ of which so much is interspersed in The Tempest. During most of the action of the play the musicians in their gallery were evidently curtained off and unseen, breathing low, murmuring music from ‘flutes and soft recorders’ and lutes and ‘sagbuttes,’ thus enhancing the mysteriousness. In the Revels’ Accounts, indeed, for this year (1611) in which The Tempest was produced at Court, there happens to be noted a special provision of ‘a curtain of silk for the Musick House at Whitehall’ – silk because, while effectively screening the musicians and singer from view, it would have offered but little obstruction to those strains of magic melody, heard by Ferdinand as it crept by him ‘upon the waters,’ [1.2.392] and afterwards above him: ‘those sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not’, those ‘thousand twangling instruments’ that, humming about the slumbering ears of Caliban, made him – when waking – but ‘cry to dream again.’ [3.2.136, 137, 143]. All this music was doubtless composed by some of the King’s musicians, among whom were several excellent composers, such as Ferrabosco and Nicholas Laniere, whose works are still delighted in by the lovers of old-time melodies. An equally, if not more, important task of theirs was playing the accompaniment to the most exquisite lyrics, the very quintessence of poetry – Ariel’s songs . . . . . . . . The first Ariel to sing those enchanting songs was no doubt ‘the principal boy’ at the new ‘Blackfriars,’ probably one of the ‘Children of the Queen’s Majesty’s Revels,’ taken over into Shakespeare’s Company when they resumed possession of that theatre. This part, indeed, ought never to be played at all except by a boy in his early teens. Shakespeare and his fellow-actors, could they revisit the London stage, would probably have much more difficulty in understanding our modern ineptness of setting a grown-up young woman to personate that ‘spirit of air’ than we can have in understanding their practice of entrusting Miranda’s part to ‘a squeaking boy,’ for which could, at any rate, be pleaded the inexorable prejudices of the times – first broken down, be it remembered, at Court by the ladies performing the Masques. Of the ‘dressing’ of the play that night we can form a very fair impression. Prospero’s costume we get hints of from the text and stage directions – ‘Pluck my magic garment

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from me,’ ‘Resumes his mantle,’ ‘Enter Prospero in his magic robes,’ – probably with cabalistic signs embroidered on it. That Trinculo’s dress was the fools’ conventional motley we likewise gather from the text: ‘What a pied ninny’s this!’ ‘Thou scurvey patch!’ [3.2.63] cries Caliban to the ‘jesting monkey.’ [3.2.44] Stephano’s too, offers no great difficulty; nor the mariner’s either; Caliban’s clothing seems to have been traditionally a ‘bear’s skin,’ and over it the ‘gabardine,’ which Trinculo creeps under to shelter himself from the storm, and which Cotgrave defines as ‘a Cloake of Felt for rainie weather’. As for the ‘garments . . . . fresher than before’ [1.2.22] worn by Alonso and his followers, they would certainly have been of the Italian fashion, and not of the English of James’s Court. Here again the records of the Revels come to prove that, contrary to the too generally accepted opinion, a great deal of care was devoted in all dramatic representations, to accuracy in costume, so as to make it accord with the nationality, as well as with the rank, profession or station, of each character, appearing in the piece. Not only were the ancients dressed in classical or ‘antick’ attire – as it was called – but Venetians in their ‘venetian weed,’ and senators and councilors in the robes appropriate to their offices; while ‘Almains,’ ‘Turks,’ ‘Moors,’ Patriarchs and such-like, appeared in distinctive ‘garmentes, vestures and apparel’. Not, of course, that Shakespeare and his fellow actormanagers, or the Master of the Revels – ‘The Producers’ of the Court Performances – were as scrupulously archaeological in ‘dressing’ a play as are our present-day stage artists; but they strove after the greatest correctness possible, with such knowledge and means as the found at their disposal. For this purpose there was available, in fact, an enormous assortment of ‘stuff ’ in the charge and custody of the Master of the Revels – ‘sundry garments of the store of the office’ – as he phrased it – which were constantly being altered and translated, and which were always at the disposal of Shakespeare’s company to supplement their own scarcely less rich and ample wardrobe. From one or the other of these ‘fripperies’ would have been brought out some ‘glistering apparel’ for Ariel. What his dress was on the night in question we may gather in a general way from Inigo Jones’s sketch, now preserved at Chatsworth, of a costume for and ‘Aery Spirit’ in some play or masque, and from Ben Jonson’s description of a very similar costume for ‘Jophiel, an Airy Spirit,’ in his masque of ‘The Fortunate Isles’ acted in 1626. These two authorities taken together suggest a close-fitting tunic of silk in rainbow colours, wings tinctured in harmony with it, a scarf over his shoulders, buskins or blue silk stockings, and on his head a chaplet of flowers – not unlike the costume worn by Charles I when as Duke of York, and only eleven years old, he acted the character of Zephirus in Daniel’s ‘Tethy’s Festival’ – the great Masque of Britain’s Sea-Power – presented the year before The Tempest on the same spot in the Banqueting House – to wit, green satin, embroidered with golden flowers, with silver wings and a garland of flowers on his head. . . . . Indeed, there is every ground for suspecting that the masque in the fourth act as we have it now, ostensibly as an integral, though really a subsidiary part of the play, was an addition interpolated into the original text of 1611, for the performance at Court in 1613 – interpolated, in fact, in honour of the nuptials of the young Princess and her affianced husband the Count Palatine. (7–13, 16–20, 24)

47

Collin Still, as allegory 1921

From Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: A Study of The Tempest (London, 1921). Colin Still (1888–?) was author of Shakespeare’s Mystery Play (1921) and its companion book, A Timeless Theme published fifteen years later. Shakespeare’s Mystery Play reads The Tempest as an allegory of a universal myth of initiation and the redemption of man. It was regarded as an unscholarly work by some critics, while others, notably Wilson Knight (see Nos 52 and 57), saw it as a profound and significant study. Still moves between pagan legend, archetypal symbolism and Christian theology and myth to explain the play’s characters. He maintains that these narratives reflect permanent and universal realities. Still’s work on The Tempest might have influenced Northrop Frye, who had similar ideas about the universally symbolic (‘archetypal’) nature of literary narrative.

Now, I contend that there are abundant grounds for the opinion that The Tempest is not a pure fantasy, but a deliberate allegory – not a work in which the Poet gives free rein to the caprice of imagination, but a work in which a clear and dominant idea transcends the nominal story and determines the action, the dialogue, and the characterisation. The Play is certainly not so self-sufficient that it does not need to be explained or interpreted. On the contrary, shrewd analysis of the text reveals numerous peculiarities which would be defects in the province of fantasy, but which are of the kind that is practically inevitable in the construction of an allegory. Furthermore, as I shall show, there are many important features which, on a purely literal reading, are strained and unconvincing, ridiculous, or wholly inexplicable. What is wanted is some conception of the Play that will enable us to explain all the peculiarities; to ‘resolve every the happened accidents’ in such a manner that (as Prospero says) each of them will ‘seem probable’; to define accurately the nature of the various characters and their relation to the action and to each other; to perceive an underlying unity of idea in much that is to outward appearance inconsequent and disconnected. Nothing but an allegorical interpretation can achieve all this; and I claim that the thesis formulated in the present study carries us considerably farther in these several respects than any that has yet been put forward. The Tempest has, of course, often been treated as an allegory. For example, Prospero has been held to be a personification

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of Aristocracy, Caliban of Democracy, Ariel of the Religious Principle, and so on; and this conception is clearly presupposed in Ernest Renan’s sequel to the Play. But commentaries which proceed on such lines as these are open to many fatal objections. They are arbitrary; they solve none of the difficulties; they have neither an initial presumption in their favour nor any circumstantial textual evidence to support them they are based upon resemblances which are far too broad and vague to be significant, and which are not apparent at all unless the critic’s own philosophical standpoint be accepted. In short, such commentaries are entirely worthless as expositions of the Poet’s conscious purpose. The interpretation I have to offer is of a very different kind. It does not, as these others do, ascribe to the Play a narrow arbitrary meaning that is quite unlikely on a priori grounds to have been intended by the Poet; nor is it precariously established by selecting a few convenient passages and construing them without regard for the context in which they occur. On the contrary, the present interpretation imputes to the Play the widest and greatest of all epic themes; and it rests upon a mass of internal evidence which practically exhausts the whole of the text and renders the charge of special pleading inadmissible. Indeed, the evidence is of such a nature, and is so well sustained through every phase of the Play, that to reject the theory of deliberate intention on the part of the Poet implies the occurrence of a long series of amazing and quite incredible coincidences. In other words, if my view of the Play be a mistaken view, every canon of probability is violated by the circumstances from which it is derived. What, then, is the substance of my argument? Until a number of points have been explained and developed, it is somewhat difficult to state the full scope of this study in a few comprehensive sentences; but the key to the mystery of The Tempest may be said, broadly and paradoxically, to lie in the fact that The Tempest is a Mystery. What I shall seek to prove by textual evidence is – (a) That the Play belongs to the same class of religious drama as the mediaeval Mysteries, Miracles, and Moralities; (b) That it is an allegorical account of those psychological experiences which constitute what mystics call Initiation; (c) That its main features must, therefore, of necessity resemble those of every ritual or ceremonial initiation which is based upon the authentic mystical tradition; and (d) That actually the resemblance to initiatory rites, and more especially to those of the pagan world, is so consistent and exact that, if we do not accept the foregoing three propositions in explanation of it, we must assume either the occurrence of an incredible series of coincidences or the perpetration by the Poet of an equally incredible literary freak. As to the ultimate purpose and value of the Play I make no comment at the moment, because a true estimate in this respect depends very largely upon considerations which cannot be intelligibly summarized until the major portion of my case has been stated. . . .

 Collin Still, as Allegory 245

I. Caliban Much has been written on the subject of Caliban. He may be said, in fact, to present one of the most difficult problems of the Play. The proposition which I now submit is that in Caliban we have a personification on mythological lines of the Tempter who is Desire. I have already dealt at some great length with the aspect of the Tempter as Desire, and also with the various forms in which he is represented. In the Genesis story the Tempter is described simply as a Serpent. But the typical form which he assumes in myth and legend is that of a monstrous Serpent or Dragon, as in the myths of Cadmus, of Perseus, and of St. George. This creature is native to water, whence he emerges to assail his victim. And since the conception of the Tempter, as Desire, is entirely subjective in significance, the water whence the monster emerges must be understood to be the emotional WATER in the human composition1. It is with the Tempter in his traditional form as a water-monster, more particularly as the Dragon, that I identify Caliban, basing the case upon a mass of textual evidence in the Play. Now Caliban, like the mythical Dragon, is explicitly a monster and implicitly amphibious; for although he lives upon the Island, he has the appearance of a fish; [Quotes 2.2.24–36: ‘What have we here? A man or a fish? . . . .’]. There is no mistaking Trinculo’s first impression, which is strongly emphasized. Caliban certainly has a fish-like appearance; and, notwithstanding Trinculo’s considered opinion that ‘this is no fish, but an islander,’ he subsequently makes the only compromise which he finds possible in the circumstances, for we find him exclaiming to Caliban: ‘Why, thou deboshed fish thou . . . Wilt thou tell a monstrous lie, being but half fish and half a monster?’ [3.2.26–9]. We may also note the odd suggestion of Trinculo that Caliban has a tail [3.211]. The obvious implication of all this is that Caliban, like the Dragon, is a watermonster. And it is noteworthy that Antonio, when he has reached a state of clear reason at the end of the Play, has no doubts whatever as to the element to which Caliban properly belongs, for he remarks: ‘One of them Caliban/ Is a plain fish’ [5.1.265–6]. Antonio, of course, is right. But Trinculo, being incapable of clear reason, is wrong when he ‘lets loose’ his considered opinion. That Trinculo is right in his first impression of Caliban will hardly surprise the psycho-analyst. Now, although Caliban is a water- monster, he does not reside in the water. Moreover, he is seemingly a hybrid, for he is ‘legged like a man, and his fins like arms,’ and he is described throughout the Play as a ‘monster’. Furthermore, as I shall make abundantly clear, he plays inaccurate detail the part of the Tempter. Caliban has, therefore, four important points of resemblance to the Monsters of mythological tradition and initiation ritual; for – (a) he is native to water, (b) he resides, or is encountered, out of water (c) he is of mixed species, and (d) he figures the Tempter. True to the tradition, he is met with by Stephano and Trinculo, when, emerging from the water, they have wandered on the shore – that is to say, he is met with when in the course of the Reascent they have passed through WATER into MIST. This MIST is the Purgatorial Wilderness, the place of temptation and expiation. It is also, as we have

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seen, a place or state of darkness; so that Caliban is quite truly described by Prospero as – ‘This thing of darkness . . . .’ [5.1.275]. This may be no more than a verbal coincidence. It is, perhaps, a remark that is conventionally moral rather than deliberately symbolical. In any case, the Tempter is pre-eminently a ‘thing of darkness’. Indeed, he is the Prince of Darkness. But, although Caliban has four important points of contact with all the mythical monsters, it is to the Tempter as the mythical Dragon that he conforms more particularly. We find him complaining to Prospero that – ‘Here you sty me/ In this hard rock . . . .’ [1.2.342–3]. To which Prospero answers: ‘I have used thee,/ Filth as thou art, with human care; lodged thee/ In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate/ The honour of my child’ [1.2.344–8]. These allusions have no bearing whatever upon the general action of the Play. Are they, like other side-strokes in the dialogue introduced simply as clues for the sharpwitted reader? Let us see. Now, until the very close of the Play, when the allegory has been completely set forth, no one is allowed to enter the Cell except Ferdinand after the Masque. The Court Party is invited only to ‘look in’ when Prospero throws open the entrance. Moreover, the Cell is the abode of Prospero and of Miranda (the Celestial Bride). It therefore appears to be the ‘sanctum sanctorum’; in which case its archetype is Heaven. The expulsion of Caliban from the Cell is thus a version of the Fall of Satan from Heaven. In Revelation we are told that the great Dragon (‘which is the Devil, and Satan’) was cast out of Heaven for persecuting a woman there, and that he was shut up in the bottomless pit and a seal set upon him (xii. and xx.). In like manner was Caliban cast out of the Cell and shut up into the rock. And when he complains of this to Prospero, he is reminded of his persecution of Miranda and is told – ‘Therefore was thou/ Deservedly confined into this rock . . . .’ [1.2.361–2]. According to Revelation xii., the Dragon (‘which is the Devil, and Satan’) was cast out of Heaven because he stood before a pregnant woman to devour her child when it was born. This offence attributed to Caliban (though different) is well adapted to the occasion, and accords with the traditional character of Satan, viz., presumptuous irreverence. Of Satan it is generally declared that he fell from Heaven through ambition. In Talmudic legend it is said that he attempted to learn the ultimate secrets behind the veil.2 Compare this with the cause of Caliban’s expulsion from the Cell. Miranda is an allegorical figure. She is the Veiled Lady who is Wisdom, the Lady who unveils herself and ‘reveals her secrets’ only to her tried and proved lover (the initiate). I have already dealt with the sexual allegory according to which wisdom is the Bride of the initiate, to whom she unveils her ‘secrets’ after the mystical marriage, the idea thus expressed being that of a Revelation, as distinct from Inspiration. Caliban’s attempt against Miranda represents the sin of Satan expressed in terms of this same sexual allegory. It is an attempt to rape the Veiled Lady – that is, to acquire the secrets that are veiled from all save the highest initiate. And it is doubtless in this sense that Dante describes Satan as ‘the first adulterer’.3 Let any critic who demurs to this interpretation, deeming it extravagant or fantastic, ask what conceivable reason germane to the ostensible purpose of the Play can be assigned for Caliban’s attempt upon Miranda. It has no bearing whatever upon the immediate action of the Play; nor can Prospero’s reference to it be defended as an

 Collin Still, as Allegory 247 explanatory ‘aside,’ for it explains nothing, save on my hypothesis that The Tempest is an allegory constructed on the lines of ancient mythology and ritual. Many commentators make excuses for Caliban and contend that he is not without a certain crude nobility. One might with equal reason argue that the Devil of the Gospel myth is an amiable and generous fellow, and that Bunyan’s Apollyon is a kindly patron. A lenient view of Caliban can be based only upon some of the speeches he addresses to Stephano and Trinculo; and, as I shall show in the succeeding section, throughout his association with these two men he plays the traditional part of the Tempter. No fair words he utters to them can, therefore, be held to his credit. Nor need we be surprised that it is Caliban, the water-monster, who make the most of the sensuous speech to be found in the entire Play: [Quotes 3.3.135–43: ‘The isle is full of noises, . . . .’]. It would be symbolically correct to say, in the common idiom, that at this moment Caliban is ‘in his native element’. The speech seems out of place in the mouth of Caliban, until we realise (what my subsequent argument will confirm) that he is deliberately using the sweet seductive tones of the Tempter whose ‘native element’ is the sensuous of passional WATER.4 Such speeches as this one are precisely what must be ignored in forming a judgement as to his real nature, which is wholly evil. And so long as commentators allow themselves to be beguiled in his favour by anything Caliban says while he is acting the part of the Tempter, they cannot lay claim to any greater measure of discretion and discernment than those two credulous fools whom he brings to disaster. It is not strictly true that Caliban’s more pleasing aspects are revealed only during his association with Stephano and Trinculo. There are two exceptions. Speaking to Prospero . . . he protests that there was a time – before his attempt upon Miranda – when he loved his master. It is equally true that Satan was not always evil. He was among the Sons of God,5 being Lucifer the Light-Bringer; and he became maleficent only after his Fall from Heaven. And again, Caliban exclaims, when he is told that he may yet win Prospero’s pardon: ‘I’ll be wise hereafter,/ And seek for grace . . . .’ [5.1.295–6]. Well, there is a cynical saying that ‘when the Devil is sick, the Devil a monk would be’. But the words of Caliban are, I think, intended in a better sense. Taken with Prospero’s hint that pardon may yet be won, they seem to embody an important intimation. They convey that even for the monstrous Caliban, who represents the fallen Satan, there is (as he himself is aware) always the hope of salvation. They are a negation of the doctrine of eternal damnation. They reflect the teaching of the Kabbalah that even the agent of evil can and will one day be redeemed.6 Caliban, it should be noticed, is met neither by the Court Party nor by Ferdinand until the end of the Play, when the initiation scheme has been wholly set forth. This is as the nature of the case imperatively requires. The temptation of the Court Party is figured by their encounter with Strange Shapes. It is designed according to the Siren model, and the encounter with the Dragon is therefore unnecessary in the case of these men. Had the members of the Court Party met Caliban during their wanderings, they would have been obliged to fight with and vanquish him in order to achieve the Lesser Initiation. Such an incident would, perhaps have made the purpose of the Play selfevident. As for Ferdinand, the phases of psychological experience represented by his

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adventures on the Island do not include the phase to which the traditional temptation belongs; hence he meets neither Caliban nor the Strange Shapes. Thus far I have given only such part of the evidence in support of my view of Caliban as can be detached from the general scheme; and throughout the ensuing two sections a mass of further testimony will be forthcoming. . . .

Prospero In so far as the Play corresponds to the pagan rites, Prospero may be regarded as the counterpart of the hierophant, or initiating priest. But in the wider scheme I have latterly been treating the figure is the prototypical Supreme Being, whom, indeed, the pagan hierophant was deemed to represent. We have seen that the expulsion of the dragon Caliban from the Cell of Prospero is a version of the Fall of Satan from Heaven; which must imply that Prospero is equivalent to God. We have seen, too, that he stands in relation to Stephano and Trinculo precisely as the Lord God stood to Adam and Eve. Consider now the seemingly limitless range or Prospero’s power: [Quotes 5.1.41–50: ‘I have bedimmed/ The noontide sun, . . .’]. These are superhuman works. In fact, Prospero claims quite definitely that he possesses the power of mighty Zeus himself, for not only does he say that he can make lightning, but he declares that he has actually employed the god’s own thunderbolt: ‘To the dread rattling thunder/ Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak/ With his own bolt’ ([5.1.44–6]. For what purpose, save that of allegory, does the Poet thus exalt him to the very topmost pinnacle of superhuman power? Furthermore, although the storm which beset the ‘men of sin’ is repeatedly stated in quite unequivocal terms to have been decreed and created by Prospero, his minister Ariel expressly attributes it to Destiny and the power of retribution: [Quotes 3.3.53–82: ‘You are three men of sin, whom Destiny . . . .’]. Here it seems to be plainly intimated that Prospero himself is that Omnipotent Judge whom sinners cannot evade, who can pass sentence of ‘lingering perdition,’ but whose mercy can be won by repentance. For Ariel, who declares himself to be the mouthpiece of the Judge, owns no other master than Prospero and knows full well that by him the shipwreck of the travelers was contrived. With the case of Ariel, I deal fully in the ensuing section. But here we may note that this messenger and minister of Prospero, who is as capricious in character as the ‘mutinous winds’ of which his master speaks, is explicitly stated to belong to the element of air; yet he assumes during the wreck the form of a flaming fire: [Quotes 1.2.196–201: ‘I boarded the king’s ship; now on the beak, . . . .’]. So, likewise, it is said in Psalms that the messengers (angels) of God are winds (spirits), and His ministers are flaming fire.7 In the larger design of the Play, therefore, the relative status of Prospero is evident enough. He represents the Supreme Being whose benign influence governs the lives of men. Sorrow and misfortunes he does, indeed. Ordain; yet his sole purpose is thereby to bring sinners to repentance, ‘They being penitent/ The sole drift of my purpose doth extend/ Not a frown further’ [5.1.28–30].

 Collin Still, as Allegory 249 His very name is suggestive of that Beneficent Power which works for the true happiness of mankind (Prospero = ‘I make happy’) .Against him the dragon Caliban conspires with Stephano and Trinculo, as the fallen Satan conspires among men against the God he hates. Cast out by those whose thoughts are set on their own temporal ends, Prospero does not at once restore himself and maintain (as he could do) his sovereignty by a pitiless use of his superhuman power; but (‘delaying, not forgetting’) he patiently achieves his own reinstatement by leading them through tribulation to penitence and amendment. This done, he is all forgiving, and gently bids them ‘Please you, draw near’. I have argued that The Tempest is an account of Initiation, conceived as a reversal of the Fall of Man. And what, in essence, is the Fall but the dethroning of the Most High from the human heart? In the Play we have a Ruler of supernatural power who has been exiled and forgotten by ‘men of sin’; and, with Prospero as with God Himself, the means whereby he regains his rightful kingdom are precisely the means whereby those who had dethroned him achieve Initiation. There is one passage to which I desire to call particular attention, because it strongly confirms my view of Prospero while seeming to exclude it. I refer to the passage wherein he narrates to Miranda how they were driven from Milan and came to the Island. At this point Prospero speaks as an actual man, the exiled ruler of a temporal kingdom. Neither the manner nor the matter of his utterance is here consistent with the allegorical character I have imputed to him. And yet, if we study the text more closely, we find that by one deft stroke the Poet has almost openly declared his purpose at the very moment when he most conceals it. Let us consider all the circumstances. In the first place, is there any need to assume that some measure of concealment was desirable? I suppose it is unnecessary at this stage of the case to point out that The Tempest is a theological heresy, judged by the standards of Shakespeare’s day. It deals, like the allegories of Dante and Bunyan, with the pilgrimage of perfection; but it carries implications which these others do not. It is a synthesis of the main features of all mythology and ritual, whether Christian or nonChristian. It tells the story of a man’s upward struggle partly in Biblical terms and partly in terms of pagan myth and ritual. It not only presupposes, but actually demonstrates, that there is one universal tradition underlying all religious and semi-religious concepts. In short, having regard to the manner in which its theme is handled. The Tempest is an almost perfect essay in what we should call today Comparative Religion. The Play therefore anticipates by at least two hundred years the evolution of theological criticism and reveals in its author a degree of philosophic emancipation to which he might well have hesitate to give full and free expression in his own age. If (as is not improbable) Shakespeare were conscious of the general implications of The Tempest, he could not be wholly insensible of the charges to which it might expose him. He would certainly be aware that to proclaim (as the Play does in effect) the existence of a close affinity between the pagan myths and ritual on the one hand, and the mysteries of the Christian religion on the other, would be to ‘use strange fire at the altar of the Lord’. We have good grounds for believing that Francis Bacon perceived this affinity and, what is more, he admits that he deliberately refrained from dealing freely with the subject. What, then, were the seemingly imperative considerations that induced him to ‘interdict his pen all liberty in this kind?’8 if (as his own guarded

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language suggests) Bacon deemed it advisable to avoid as far as possible the frank and gratuitous discussion of questions involving anything in the nature of theological heterodoxy, would Shakespeare be altogether heedless of such considerations? No doubt they would operate less forcibly in his case than in the case of Bacon, who, as a prominent statesman, would be under additional obligations of prudence; but the fact remains that what Bacon did not think it ‘good to observe’ Shakespeare would hardly find it wise to assert. There was, however, this distinction between the case of the philosopher-statesman and that of the dramatist: that the latter could (and, I think, did) set forth in a veiled allegory what the former would not present in open argument. On the assumption, therefore, that Shakespeare was aware of the more important implications, if not of all the implications, of the comprehensive allegory presented in The Tempest, we may reasonably suppose that he took some pains to conceal its inner meaning, leaving the Play to be interpreted by those in his own or a later age who could see behind its outward forms and appreciate the breadth and significance of its theme. And this conclusion is not only suggested by all the circumstances of the case, but is also strongly supported by direct textual evidence within the Play. How, then, does the Poet dissemble his real purpose? His method is simple and effective. Putting his spiritual theme in a secular framework, he describes Prospero as the exiled Duke of Milan. Thus Prospero plays a double role. In the inner design of the Play He figures the Supreme Being; but in its outer design he is the human ruler of a temporal kingdom. When he narrates to Miranda how they came from Milan to the Islands, he speaks in his nominal – as distinct from his allegorical – role. And it is certainly very significant that, before making this speech (and at no other point in the Play), Prospero, with a most marked gesture, takes off his magic garment: ‘Tis time/ I should inform thee farther. Lend thy hand,/ And pluck my magic garment from me. And so: ‘Lie there, my art’. [1.2.22–4]. This magic garment, which invests him with supernatural powers, is the badge of Prospero’s allegorical character. Laying it aside, he ceases for the moment to represent the Supreme Being and descend to ordinary human rank. In other words, the allegory is temporarily suspended while Prospero, in his nominal role as the exiled Duke of Milan, deals with the circumstances which form the ostensible basis of the Play. Is there a better reason, is there indeed any other reason at all, why Prospero should so ostentatiously remove the mantle at this particular moment, and at no other in the Play? If not, even my severest critic must admit that in respect of this point, as of so many others, I might fairly claim judgement by default.

Ariel As the chief messenger and minister of Prospero, Ariel plays in the cosmic allegory the part which is assigned in the Old Testament to the Angel of the Lord, in the New Testament to ‘the Spirit,’ and in the pagan mythology to Hermes. The exact status of these three powers – and particularly that of ‘the Spirit’ in the New Testament – has always been somewhat difficult to determine; but that they all represent very much the same idea is evident from the general resemblance between

 Collin Still, as Allegory 251 them. They all belong, like Ariel, to the element of air; and, further, they all perform the same function. The ‘Angel of the Lord’ is certainly one, and seemingly the chief, of those messengers (angels) of God which, according to the passage already citied from Psalms, are winds. The winged Hermes, chief messenger of Zeus, is likewise associated very closely with the wind.9 And ‘the Spirit,’ not only by its name but also by the manner in which it is said to appear, is practically identified with the wind.10 Broadly speaking, the difference between the ordinary messengers and the typical chief messenger seems to be that, whereas the former are simply the agents of inspiration, the latter has a more comprehensive function. It can and does descend lower than the plane of AIR, to which the ordinary messengers are confined. In the pagan myth it was Hermes (reputed the patron of travellers) who descend from on high, and gave to Perseus the wings which enabled him to mount up into the air. When the Children of Israel had crossed the Red Sea, the Angel of the Lord was sent down to lead them through the Wilderness to the Promised Land. 11 In the Gospel myth it was ‘the Spirit’ which descends upon Christ after He had come up out of the baptismal water, and which led Him up to wander in the Wilderness. And, similarly, it is Ariel who brings the travelers up out of the sea to wander in the maze of the ‘desolate isle’. No personal qualities are ascribed in the Bible either to ‘the Angel’ or to ‘the Spirit,’ both of which seem to be conceived rather as and emanation of God. But Hermes, like all the figures in the pagan mythology, is distinctly personalized. Of the three, therefore, Hermes would furnish the Poet with the most clearly defined model for Ariel – in fact, with the only model that could serve. And what does comparison reveal? Ariel, although his native element is the air, can traverse the other elements [Quotes 1.2.189–93: ‘Grave sir, hail! I come/ To answer thy best pleasure; be’t to fly, . . .’]. Hermes likewise, being sent by Zeus to command the release of Odysseus by the nymph Calypso, passes through all the elements (Odys. V.). But such tasks he performs reluctantly and at the ‘strong bidding’ of Zeus; for, having crossed the sea and descended into the grotto of Calypso, he declares to her: ‘Twas Zeus that bade me come hither, by no will of mine; nay, who would of his free will make his way through such unutterably vast salt water?’ (Od. v) The same unwillingness and need for compulsion is shown by Ariel, to him Prospero, enforcing him, exclaims: [Quotes 1.2.252–5: ‘Thou think’st it much to read the ooze . . . .’]. It is one of the chief features of Hermes that he can translate himself in a flash from place to place. So with Ariel: ‘I drink the air before me, and return/ Or e’er your pulse twice beat’ [5.1.102–3]. Furthermore, like Hermes, Ariel can render himself invisible and assume any form he pleases. Like Hermes, he is of a restlessly active, prankish, fickle, and capricious disposition. In a word, Ariel is essentially mercurial. But, while he is thus personalized according to the model of the mythical Hermes, Ariel must be understood (like Caliban) in a purely subjective sense. This much is obvious from the psychological view I have presented of the Play and of the universal myth upon which it is based. How, then shall we designate in this sense the spirit which drives man up from passional things to wander in the lonely wilderness of atoning effort, seeking the lost Word of God; which upholds him against the siren memories (or desire) that beset him in his weariness and discouragement; which, if

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its admonishing voice be faithfully obeyed, keeps him in the straight and narrow way of repentance and renunciation, and so brings him at last to the promised land of selfmastery and redemption?12 In the widest sense of the term, this immanent spirit may be called Conscience, the impelling, guiding, and accusing messenger of God, which urges and sustains mankind in the long pilgrimage of religious endeavour. Such is the part performed by Ariel in the Play. He is the antithesis of Caliban, as a Conscience is the antithesis of Desire. It is Ariel (invisible) who unavailingly gives the lie direct to Caliban when the latter successfully tempts Stephano and Trinculo. It is Ariel who leads up the members of the Court Party to wander in the maze of the desolate isle, seeking ‘the lost Son’; who deprives them of the tempting banquet proffered by the sire shapes; and whose accusing speech (‘You are three men of sin, etc.’) causes them to renew their quest in a frenzy of remorse. Nor can we mistake his character when he says: [Quotes 3.3.68–82: ‘But remember,/ For that’s my business to you . . . .’]. Here is the authentic voice of Conscience, the divine agent against whom, as always Ariel says, the swords of the Court Party can avail them nothing. There remains to be noted that, in the case of Ferdinand, it is Ariel who leads him up into the Elysium where happy spirits dance upon the yellow sands, and that it is Ariel, as Prospero says, who brings about his union with Miranda (Celestial Bride). Now, as the guide and sustainer of man in the upward struggle, Conscience is a friendly messenger. It corresponds to the Angel of the Lord, which guides and sustains the pilgrim in the wilderness. But to wrong-doers and backsliders Conscience assumes an opposite character. To them it is Satan, resisting them as the Adversary and tormenting them as the Accuser. A clear instance of this same inversion in the case of the Angel of the Lord is furnished in the Old Testament myth of Balaam, where it is said: ‘And the Angel of the Lord placed himself in the way for an adversary (Hebrew, Satan) against him’ (num. xxii. 22).13 Moreover, it might quite will be contended that the inversion by which Conscience becomes Satan is implied by Shakespeare when he makes Benedick say, ‘If Don worm, his conscience, find no impediment. . . .’ (Much Ado . . . [5.2.84]).14 Why ‘Don worm’? Satan, as the Serpent or Tempter, is sometimes called the Worm – for example, by Milton in Paradise Lost (ix. 1068). Furthermore, hell is described in St. Mark (ix.48) as the place ‘where he worm dieth not.’ In the subjective interpretation of hell what is this ‘worm’ that does not die? It is the Adversary (Satan), whether as Conscience which the sinner fails to overcome, or as Desire which the aspirant fails to vanquish. And the torment of the psychological state which is hell consists in the very fact that this Worm – whether as Conscience or as Desire – does not die. In short, it is true in the universal psychology that the Accuser, no less than the Tempter, can be the tormenting Adversary (Satan). The case of Ariel in the Play is treated by the Poet quite in accordance with the foregoing principle. Ariel represents Conscience; and, as such, he corresponds to the Angel of the Lord, to ‘the Spirit,’ and to Hermes. But when he acts the part of the Accuser to the ‘men of sin,’ he becomes Satan the Adversary; and at this point he very appropriately assumes the form of one of the traditional monsters or devils of Purgatory – namely, a harpy.

 Collin Still, as Allegory 253 This latter aspect of Ariel explains his relations with Sycorax, of which Prospero tells us something in a considerable digression. I have already dealt in detail with the case of Sycorax, and shown that she occupies a definite place in the scheme which underlies the Play. I pointed out that she has nothing whatever to do with the action and that she need not have been mentioned at all for the purposes of the ostensible story and the same is true of her relations with Ariel. Why, then, are they so carefully explained, if not to throw light on the allegory? Is there any significance in Prospero’s digression? Now, as Conscience Ariel resisted the will of the wanton Sycorax. To her he is Satan, and the Adversary who ‘goes out to withstand her, because her ways are perverse before him’,15 and what did Sycorax do? Prospero, reminding Ariel says: [Quotes 1.2.272–7: ‘And for thou wast a spirit too delicate . . . .’]. Whence comes this curious fancy of the cloven pine? I suggest that the Poet here makes a carefully studied allusion to the proverbial notion of putting ‘the devil in a cleft stick.’ We have already seen that the term ‘the devil’ is used with several different meanings in the Play; in fact, it is always somewhat elastic. And certainly, the proverbial character of ‘the devil,’ as a hostile and tormenting power, is as appropriate in one sense to Conscience (the Accuser) as it is in the contrary sense to Desire (the Tempter). The notion of putting ‘the devil in a cleft stick’ no doubt expresses the idea of the mastering of vexatious Desire by the seeker after God; but it express equally well the idea of the mastering of vexatious Conscience by the hardened evil-doer. And it is in the latter sense as the inhibition of Conscience, that the notion occurs in the story of Ariel and Sycorax. And what are those ‘more potent ministers’ who are said to have assisted Sycorax to imprison Ariel? On this point we are given no specific guidance in the text; but an answer to the question is suggested by the fact that all the main features of The Tempest have been found to have their counterparts in mythology. And, indeed, the allusion to these ‘more potent ministers’ suffices to make this part of the Play correspond in form – as I think it clearly corresponds in significance – to the myth of the Sin of Angels. Quite simply in Genesis vi. 1–4, and with a mass of illuminating detail in the Book of Enoch vi. ff., it is related that the angels of God, descending from on high, lusted after the ‘daughters of men,’ by whom the begat giants and monsters.16 The full myth contains many subtle and profound intimations, with which it is impossible to deal exhaustively within the compass of this present volume; but briefly it may be said to describe that thwarting of the divine will which occurs when the dynamic impulses, in the course of their descent from God into the world of action, become perverted in the sensuous medium symbolized by the ‘daughters of men’ and so begat the evil desires symbolized by the monsters. In other word, the myth of the Sin of the Angels may be said to deal with the genesis of evil desire as it occurs in universal experience. That all this is implied, consciously or otherwise, in the story of Ariel and Sycorax seems to follow a corollary to what has already been written. I have shown by means of textual evidence that Sycorax personifies the evil aspect of that sensuous element which is represented in the myth by the ‘daughters of men’;17 that Caliban her son is the mythical monster which represents the grosser desire; and that Ariel corresponds to the holy Spirit which is the will of God, striving in the heart of man as Conscience.18

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What, then, are the ‘more potent ministers’ who aided Sycorax to thwart and inhibit Ariel? Obviously they correspond to the sinning angels of the myth just recited; for it is expressly implied in Genesis (vi. 2) that when the angels had become allied with the ‘daughters of men’ the Spirit ceased awhile to strive. Moreover, the ‘more potent ministers’ are said to have assisted Sycorax, the sorceress, to confine Ariel into a cloven tree; and, according to Enoch, the sinning angels taught the ‘daughters of men’ sorcery, incantations, and the dividing of trees.19 Whether Shakespeare deliberately intended to reproduce the myth of the Sin of the Angels is not a question of ultimate importance. But I may perhaps emphasis the fact that, if my general view of The Tempest as an account of the spiritual redemption of man be correct, their interpolated story of the inhibition of Conscience (Ariel) and the birth of evil desire (Caliban) out of sensuous imagination (Sycorax) forms a fitting prologue to the main action of the Play. (6–9; 170–7; 202–17)

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José Enrique Rodó, Ariel and Caliban as symbols 1922 From Ariel. Translated by S. J. Stimpson (Cambridge, 1922). José Enrique Rodó (1872–1917) was a Uruguayan intellectual, professor of literature and essayist. His vision of a unified South America was a source of inspiration to many people of that continent. The 1900 essay ‘Ariel’ (translated into English in 1922) is among his best-known works and among the most influential South American works of philosophy. Here he sets out his credo that individual self-scrutiny is the most important step towards an enlightened society and that South American idealism should be used as a weapon to fight against the challenges of North American materialism. While Rodó invokes the figure of Shakespeare’s Ariel to describe man at his loftiest, the kind of human his fellow-South Americans should aspire to in their quest for political freedom (for Ariel fully realizes himself in freedom), the uses to which he puts Ariel also serves as a reading of the Shakespearean character. Rodó’s work is important in the history of The Tempest criticism – he is not only the first thinker from the colonized work to engage with the play, ‘Ariel’ also inspired postcolonial critics writing decades after Rodó who both borrowed from and challenged his ideas.

Ariel, genius of the Air, represents, in the symbolism of Shakespeare, the noble part – the spirit with wings. . . . For Ariel embodies the mastery of reason and of sentiment over the baser impulses of unreason. He is the generous zeal, the lofty and disinterested motive in action, the spirituality of civilization, and the vivacity and grace of the intelligence – the ideal end to which human selection aspires; that superman in whom has disappeared, under the persistent chisel of life, the last stubborn trace of the Caliban, symbol of sensuality and stupidity. . . . I ask of you portion of your soul for the labour of the future; and it is to ask this of you that I have sought inspiration in the gentle and lovely image of my Ariel. The bountiful spirit whom Shakespeare hit upon to clothe with so high a symbolism, perhaps with that divine unconsciousness of all it meant which is common to great geniuses . . . . Ariel is reason, and the higher truth. Ariel is the sublime sentiment in the perfectability of man through whose virtue human clay is magnified and transformed

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in the realm of things for each one who lives by his light . . . Ariel, is to nature, that crowning of its work which ends the ascending process of organic life with the call of the spirit. Ariel triumphant signifies ideality and order in life, noble inspiration in thought, unselfishness in conduct, high taste in art, heroism of action, delicacy and refinement in manners and usages . . . . Though overcome a thousand and one times by the untamable rebellion of Caliban, proscribed by the victorious barbarian, smothered in the clouds of battle, his bright wings spotted by trailing in ‘the eternal dunghill of Job,’ Ariel ever rises again, immortally renews his beauty and his youth. Ariel runs nimbly as at the call of Prospero to all who really care for him and seek to find him. His kindly power goes even, out at times to those who would deny him. He guides the blind forces of evil and ignorance often to aid, and unwittingly, in works of good. He crosses human history with a song, as in The Tempest, to inspire those who labour and those who fight until he brings about the fulfilment of that divine plan to them unknown – and he is permitted, as in Shakespeare’s play, to snap his bonds in twain and soar forever into his circle of diviner light . . . ._ I see the bright spirit smiling back upon you in future times, even though your own still works in shadow. I have faith in your will and in your strength, even more in those to whom you shall transfer your life, transmit your work. I dream in rapture of that day when realities shall convince the world that the cordillera which soars above the continent of the Americas has been carved to be the pedestal of this statue, the altar of the cult of Ariel. (4.143–8)

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Richard Noble, songs 1932

From Shakespeare’s Use of Song With the Text of the Principal Songs (Oxford, 1932). Richard Noble (date of birth unknown–1940) is author of Shakespeare’s Use of Song (Oxford, 1932) and Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge (1935). Noble is among the few scholars to devote a book-length study to songs in Shakespeare. He believed that the songs cannot be dismissed as incidental diversions, nor can they be regarded as uncultivated little lyrics. On the other hand, ‘the most painstaking labour [had been] bestowed on them’ and they served to forward dramatic action.[1] Noble’s work on the songs is based on his interest in reading Shakespeare’s plays as dramas meant to be acted on stage for a popular audience rather than books to be read. Noble maintains that The Tempest is a type of musical drama and that its songs capture and serve to enhance character.

Music is the very life of The Tempest, without its aid the play would be impossible of presentation. Caliban says of the scene of its action: ‘The isle is full of noises. Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not’ [3.2.135–6]. Stephano is glad that it ‘will prove a brave kingdom to me where I shall have my music for nothing’ [3.2.144–5]. There are frequent opportunities not only for vocal music but also for orchestral as well. When we think of the musical instruments of Shakespeare’s day, we, whose ears have been spoiled by the richness of harmony and the great variety of the orchestra, envy the simple pleasures of our forefathers. While the purely vocal music of that age had attained its most elaborate development, it was far otherwise with its instrumental music, and theatrical music as such had hardly as yet begun to exist.2 We, in these days, can perceive the effect from dramatic music which Shakespeare was aiming at, but judging from what we know of the orchestral instruments employed, it cannot be said that the means at his disposal were at all adequate. The Tempest is a dream, though a wonderfully prophetic dream, on his part of the effect which music drama was to achieve. Even as it is, he came nearest in this play, that ever dramatic artist did, to making a musical play natural and free from absurdity. In The Tempest, with the exception of the characters in the Masque, which Prospero discloses, Ariel, Stephano, and Caliban do all the singing. The singing is every time in character – Ariel’s is

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distinctly ethereal, Stephano’s has a very human, work-a-day note, and Caliban’s has all the intensity of a primitive in giving vent to his hatred of drudgery. Of Ariel’s songs, Hazlitt observed that ‘without conveying any distinct images (they) seem to recall all the feeling connected with them, like snatches of halfforgotten music heard indistinctly and at intervals’. This is just the effect in Act. 1, Sc.2 of the first two songs – Come unto these yellow sand and Full fathom five. The laughing invitation of the former has drawn Ferdinand hither from the sea, and the illusion is given of terra firma by the noise of dogs barking and cocks crowing. An echo all round the stage is almost suggested. The singing has hardly ceased when it recommences, but now in another strain and from the waters beyond the sands. Ferdinand is mocked into the belief that his father is drowned and the nymphs no more than formally grieve. The impression is given that Ariel has translated into song Ferdinand’s imaginings and fears: one does not know whether the singing is real or a mere delusion of the senses. Ariel, as an unsubstantial creature of the air, can hardly talk otherwise than in song. Where music in any form is, he is there too. In the catch, in Act III, Sc.2 which Stephano and Trinculo are endeavouring to sing, Ariel intervenes and corrects them with tabor and pipe much to their terror. When in Act II, Sc.i Gonzalo is to be warned of the assassination Sebastian and Antonio are devising, it is by singing in Gonzalo’s ear that the sleeper is awakened as by a bird. Finally in Act V, while he is attiring Prospero and just as he is about to be freed, he sings of himself and as if to himself. Where the bee sucks, there Ariel derives the nectar which sustains him; he reposes in the cowslip safe from the owls; he rides on the bat after sunset in pursuit of summer and he lives under cover of the blossom that hangs on the bough. Such an ideal life in such a few words! It is the brevity and speed of development which distinguish Shakespeare’s songs from all others. There is motion, also, suggested: one can almost see him pirouetting with ecstasy as he sings: ‘Merrily, merrily, shall I live now’,3 ‘there lurk I’ and ‘after sunset’ instead of ‘there ‘suck I’ and ‘after summer’, and Arne4 has popularized both these emendations. The second change was made because the bat hibernates, a fact of natural history of which the dramatist was supposed to be unaware. Davenant substituted ‘swallow’ for ‘bat’ in the adaptation of The Tempest, which Dryden staged in the names of himself and Davenant, but of course swallows are not nocturnal as are bats. The mention of the bat indicates, as Theobald said, that Ariel rode after sunset, but it also is meant to imply, as Davenant perceived clearly enough, that he rode in pursuit of summer, for summer was his season of activity, just as it is the bat’s. We may waive the fact that the bat is not a migratory creature; drama does not pretend to expound natural history with scientific exactitude, and moreover the island on which Ariel lived was not one where nature existed in its usual order. Both ‘Full fathom five’ and ‘Where the bee sucks’ were set by Johnson[5], who was a musician attached to James’s Court. Some are of opinion that his are the original settings, but for reasons which I shall advance in the Textual Notes, this is improbable; his settings may date from 1613, when the play was in all likelihood in part rewritten for the Princess Elizabeth’s wedding. Humfrey and Bannister[6] set the songs or Dryden and Davenant’s adaptation, in which Trinculo sings Stephano’s song. In Shadwell’s operatized version of this adaptation,[7] Lock set the songs in 1674 and Purcell in 1693.[8] On the revival of

 Richard Noble, Songs 259 Shakespeare’s play in the eighteenth century, Arne set the songs, and his ‘Where the bee sucks’ is probably the best of all his Shakespearian settings. In contrast to Ariel are Stephano and Caliban, and a song is made to be the means of Stephano’s introduction to the audience (Act II, Sc.2). The song, while hardly appropriate in a drawing-room, is in the thorough character of a good forecastle song, and it has the rough humour by which sailors, like soldiers, love their ditties to be pervaded. Stephano, be it noted, is not a sailor but a butler, and presumable would act as a kind of steward on board a ship. This class, as we know, is looked down upon by the navigating element, but its members frequently compensate themselves on shore by their swagger and by an exaggerated contempt for land-lubbers, and in this song the tailor, who is no sort of a man in a sailor’s eyes, is made to illustrate the contemptibility of Kate’s depraved preference. A modern dramatist would have put into Stephano’s mouth a landsman’s song of the sea, but Shakespeare, with his usual artistic truth, provides us with the genuine article – a song which a sailor might sing and his fellows would relish. There are only two sea songs extant in our language older than this one – The Mermaid’s Song (1576) and The Mariner’s Glee (1609). Our third singer, Caliban, stands in a class by himself. It is not the least beauty in Shakespeare’s art that he refrains from making his own comments, each of his creations speaks for himself, each is allowed the very best counsel in setting forth his case and the spectator is free to draw his own conclusion without any other revelation than that afforded by the action and the dialogue. It is not all improbable that Shakespeare had in mind the aboriginals, whom the Spaniards and other colonists were not only dispossessing of their ancestral lands, but whom in addition they were compelling to labour in their service. This aspect of his situation, Caliban was allowed to enforce quite freely. He was permitted to tell the audience that his hatred for his dispossessor was accentuated by the loss of his liberty and his being forced to uncongenial toil, and the spectators could or withhold their sympathy as they were disposed. To Caliban, with all his wrongs rankling in his mind, Stephano, in the guise of the Man in the Moon, appeared to be a god – capable of delivering him. Intoxicated by strong drink, his hopes were magnified, and having received Stephano’s promise of help, he burst into the ‘down tools’ song – ‘No more dams I’ll make for fish’ (Act II, Sc.2) [2.2.180]. An interesting feature of the song is the ‘Ban Ban Caliban’ [2.2.184], which, as we know, is a characteristic of the triumphal chorus among aboriginal savages in its emphasis and repetition of parts of a name. If it does not indicate, on Shakespeare’s part, a study of music more searching that he has hitherto been credited with, it does at any rate illustrate the minute care he bestowed on his characters at crucial dramatic moments. It is highly improbable that Shakespeare had knowledge of the music of man in a primitive state, but it is evident he observed the impromptu musical efforts of young untrained boys, who like savages make a chorus by emphasizing and repeating parts of a name, and with an instinct unerring in its judgement he thought fit to invest Caliban’s ebullition of defiance with the same peculiarity. (99–103)

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Enid Welsford, the court masque 1927

From The Court Masque – A Study in the Relationship between Poetry and the Revels (Cambridge, 1927). Enid Welsford (1892–1981) was a lecturer at Cambridge University. She was particularly interested in the genre of the court masque as is apparent in her article ‘Italian influence on the English Court Masque’ (1923) and her erudite book, The Court Masque, in which she describes the masque as ‘strangely like those pantomimic ritual dances of which we hear so much from the students of comparative religion’.[1] Her other book, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (1935) is also considered a very influential study. Welsford argues that the court masque, changing in the hands of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, had a tremendous influence on The Tempest.

. . . . By the time Shakespeare came to write The Tempest very great changes had taken place in the Court revels: on the one hand, Ben Jonson had dramatised the masque and used it as a vehicle for serious criticism of life; on the other hand, Inigo Jones had increased its sensuous attraction. This difference between early and late revels is reflected in a difference of style and content between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, a difference particularly obvious in the treatment of the background, which in both plays is of great importance. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the action takes place in a domestic wood close to the town, which is reminiscent both of the pleasant Warwickshire countryside and of the pleasure grounds of great noblemen. In The Tempest the landscape has expanded. Prospero’s Isle is a remote mysterious place. Never is it exactly described: only from Ariel and Caliban and the Duke himself we get allusions that give us a feeling of sea and wood, odd nooks, stagnant pools, and tall pines, vast stretches of shining sands. A sudden word from Ariel as to the ‘still vexed Bermoothes,’ a mention of Tunis ‘ten leagues beyond man’s life,’ and new vistas open. The only thing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at all like this is the Fairy Queen’s description of herself and her votaress, sitting by night on the shore, breathing the spiced Indian air, and watching the traders with their big-bellied sails. But this sense of spaciousness and mystery is exceptional in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whereas in The Tempest it pervades the play. This

 Enid Welsford, the Court Masque 261 difference of background is due partly to difference of subject, but also, perhaps, to the influence of the developed masque. The gardens of Kenilworth and Eltham suggested an ordinary world, transformed and begetting fairies; but, in Whitehall, Inigo and Ben set imagination to work and suggested worlds, remote from reality, ‘ten leagues beyond man’s life’. Again, it may be due to the influence of the developed masque, that in The Tempest both nature and the fairies are controlled by Prospero, whereas in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the mortals are at the mercy of Oberon and Puck. The entertainments that influenced A Midsummer Night’s Dream were the productions of many collaborators, and did not as a rule give an irresistible impression of a controlling mind. But to an artist the court masques at Whitehall must always have brought the thought of the designing mind behind them. Of course I do not mean that Shakespeare meant Prospero to stand for the poet or architect, and the fairies and the background for his poetic achievement; but merely that the prominence of design and creative thought in the court masque made an impression, and led him, perhaps unconsciously, to write a play in which the action was dominated by one purposeful spirit. The Tempest was influenced not only by the masque in general, but by certain masques in particular. The resemblances between the inserted masque and Jonson’s Hymenaei have often been pointed out, and it has been suggested that Shakespeare, when he conceived Ariel, had in his mind those musicians who in Ben Jonson’s masque Hymenaei were seated upon the rainbow ‘figuring airy spirits, their habits various, and resembling the several colours caused in that part of the air by reflection,’ chief among whom was the famous Alphonso Ferrabosco, ‘a man planted by himself in that divine sphere, and mastering all the spirits of music.’ The setting of the play also bears some resemblance to the scenery of Jonson’s masques of Blackness and Beauty. The wonderful sea-scape and sea-pageant of the former masque have already been described. The Masque of Beauty is a sequel to The Masque of Blackness, and tells us how the black daughters of Niger journeyed by sea to Britania to be cured of their blackness and so excited the envy of Night who tossed them at sea ‘Till on an island they by chance arrived, That floated in the main’ The scene, which showed ‘an island floating on a calm water . . . in the midst thereof . . . the Throne of Beauty . . . shot itself to the land,’ and ‘the musicians, which were placed in the arbors, came forth through the mazes to the other land; singing this full song, iterated in the closes by two Echoes, rising out of the fountains.’ It is easy to see how these or similar masques, sinking down into the mind of the poet, might produce the fairy isle haunted by monstrous shapes, by spirits, by dancing and singing elves. The Tempest, far more than A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is pervaded by music. It is by music that the evil-doers are first convinced of their guilt and spell-bound, and then released from enchantment. It is by music that Ariel lures on Ferdinand, and decoys Caliban and his fellow-conspirators. . . In The Tempest, as in the masque, music and dancing are closely associated. The mock banquet is accompanied by dancing and pantomime. The first song by which Ariel lures Ferdinand into Prospero’s power is written on a dance pattern. With Ariel’s first words, ‘Come unto these yellow sands,’ [1.2.375] we imagine the fairies running in from all sides, they take hands in a ring, then turn to one another, curtseying and kissing, or, in the timehonoured phrase of the country-dance, they honour their partners. At this act of elfin

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grace and courtesy there is a momentary pause in the dance, a momentary lull in the accompaniment of sea music, ‘the wild waves whist’. Then the music and dancing break out afresh with renewed vigour, and those familiar with country dancing will recognise the to-and-fro movement, the setting to partners, which separates the different dance figures: ‘foot it featly here and there, and, sweet sprites, the burden bear’ [1.2.379–80]. This is a perfect instance of the poetical transmutation of revelling. From innumerable intermixed dances of town and country, but chiefly from the figured ballet of the Court, rises up this ethereal, ghostly dance which is danced (for Ariel is invisible) solely in the mind, and yet transforms the mind into a spacious, lonely, mystic place, where elves may play by ‘perilous seas in faery lands forlorn’. Although dances and masque-like episodes penetrate into The Tempest and are occasionally transmuted into exquisite poetry, the action is not founded upon a dance movement but upon an idea. For instance, the principle of the antimasque is embodied in both this play and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; but the contrast between Titania and Bottom is a picturesque contrast, the contrast between Ariel and Caliban appeals both to eye and mind, and seems in some way to embody the contrast between flesh and spirit, earth and air, good and evil. Not that the play is an allegory. It would seem that at the end of his working life Shakespeare liked to set down his thoughts without troubling to embody them in a story adjusted to ordinary probabilities; so he followed the example of the masque writers and adopted that convenient hypothesis of the omnipotence of magic, which has rescued many an inexpert story-teller in the nursery. Jonson’s Masque of Blackness is not an allegory but a mythological fairy-tale, and it seems to have influenced not only the setting but also the content and structure of The Tempest. In The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest Shakespeare shows the sins of the fathers absolved in the happiness of the children. It is an attractive, but slow-moving theme, and its dramatisation presents grave difficulties as regards the treatment of character, almost insuperable difficulties as regards the treatment of time. In The Tempest the latter difficulty is met by observance of the rules and by dramatising only the final phase of the story. Nevertheless, in spite of this superficial conformity, The Tempest is not a classical play; and if Shakespeare is following Ben Jonson, he is following, not his theories as a classicist, but his practice as a writer of masques; he is, indeed, overcoming a difficult dramatic problem by making skilful use of a typical masque construction. We have seen how the masque libretto grew out of the need to explain the arrival of masquers at Court, and how this was generally done by giving a lengthy account of their past wanderings, and by inventing some ingenious and fantastic motive for their anxiety to see the sovereign. This is the principle which underlies the literary portions of Blackness and Beauty. In the journey of the nymphs across the sea, their final arrival at the Island of Albion and the long explanatory speeches of Niger and Boreas, these masques have points in common with the arrangement of The Tempest. After the introduction of the Italian picture stage, the masquers were usually ‘discovered,’ instead of entering in procession, so that it became the duty of the masque poet to explain how and why the masquers had been released from their concealment. The usual explanation was that the masquers had been hidden as a result of adverse spells, and had been freed from enchantment by the beneficent power of the sovereign. In the Masque of Beauty Jonson

 Enid Welsford, the Court Masque 263 combines the wandering motif with the disenchantment motif, and Shakespeare in The Tempest follows his example. Only in Shakespeare’s play the power who works the magic is no longer a royal spectator, but a character within the drama; and the story that lies behind his action is a story of human deeds and passions, not a mere, fantastic mythological invention, such as the visionary appearance of the Ethiopian Moon goddess. Nevertheless, it is the story behind the play, rather than the play itself, which is dramatic; and the second scene of The Tempest has affinities with the masque induction rather than with the Greek prologue. For classical drama, whether Greek or French, is concerned with the final phase of a conflict, and the interest is concentrated upon the last few hours of uncertainty which must soon be terminated by irrevocable choice and decisive action: but the masque deals, not with the last phase of a conflict, but with a moment transformation; it expresses, not uncertainty, ended by final success or failure, but expectancy, crowned by sudden revelation; and even when the opposition of good and evil is symbolised by masque and antimasque, this opposition is shown as a contrast rather than as a conflict. It is in this respect that The Tempest is more masque-like than dramatic, for Prospero addresses Miranda in the tone of a masque presenter and, throughout the play, he manipulates he human characters as surely as he manipulates the spirit masquers: ‘Now does my project gather to a head:/ My charms crack not; my spirits obey; and time/ Goes upright with his carriage’ [5.1.1–3]. As the masque induction leads up to that moment of transformation, when the solution of difficulty, the conquest of adverse powers, is marked by the sudden appearance of the masquers; so the plot of The Tempest leads up, without hesitation or uncertainty, to that moment when Prospero gathers his forgiven enemies around him, draws back the curtain from before the inner stage, and ‘discovers Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess’. The part played by Prospero makes The Tempest more masque-like than Comus, although both plays are founded on an idea rather than on a dance movement. Though Comus as a whole is undramatic, there is at the centre of it a dramatic clash of wills, a dramatic moment of uncertainty, as to whether or no Comus will overcome the resistance of the Lady; but there is never in The Tempest any serious fear that Caliban’s conspiracy may succeed, and the only potent will is the will of Prospero. So far from being founded upon a conflict, the play does not even contain a debate. The whole plot of The Tempest is not very much more dramatic than that loud trumpet blast at whose sound the witches vanish and the House of Fame appears; nevertheless, it is just a little more dramatic than Jonson’s Masque of Queens, because the miracles wrought by Prospero are only outward signs of an inward self-conquest, and behind The Tempest lie that conflict between two opposing parties and that conflict within the soul of the hero which was always the subject of Shakespearian tragedy. Only Shakespeare is now hymning the victory instead of describing the battle, the lyrical element has almost usurped the place of drama, time has almost disappeared into eternity. Again, the spirit of The Tempest is far nearer to the spirit of the masque than is Comus. All through his life Milton used his poetic gift to deliver two quite different, and even contradictory messages. He spoke of the golden world, but he also spoke of a terrific, eternal conflict between the spirit and the flesh, and demanded an inhuman, arrogant detachment

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from pleasure, which was completely incompatible with the ideal expressed in the Court masque. What is it that Shakespeare is saying to us through his fairy tales? In A Midsummer Night’s Dream he spoke, like Spenser and Milton, and many another Renaissance poet, of a delightful world of harmony and external beauty; but in The Tempest he seems to be saying something darker, and more profound. The literary masque offered a criticism of life which was very simple and definite, it presented society as a harmony of unequal parts, a living organism. This ideal of harmony can be regarded as embodied in the person of Hymen, for in the Court masque marriage was treated as an event of social significance. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as we have seen, Hymen’s part is played by the fairies, but Hymen in the larger sense, Hymen as the spirit of order and unity, only makes himself felt in the blending of plots, in the technique of the play. There is no suggestion of allegory and very little criticism of life. In The Tempest the part of Hymen is played by Prospero. The feeling that Prospero’s words have a mystical meaning becomes particularly strong during his meditation on the masque, which occurs immediately after the betrothal, and immediately before the defeat of Caliban. It is interesting that, in both The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there is a moment when the influence of pageantry is felt with peculiar strength, and that this same moment marks a turningpoint in the action. Oberon relates his vision to Puck immediately before dispatching him on that errand which sets in motion all the complications of the plot .. . . The vision is divided into two parts. First of all, there is the description of what both Oberon and Puck saw, and that is simply an idealised account of a typical Court entertainment, possibly reminiscent of the shows at Kenilworth or Eltham. Then there is the account of what Oberon alone could see, and that is the allegorical meaning of the performance, a meaning which is expressed in clear-cut pictorial imagery, which has a complimentary reference to Queen Elizabeth, and is possibly connected with a definite piece of Court intrigue. Oberon’s vision is no mere isolated compliment, but an ingenious device for turning the main theme of the play into a piece of subtle flattery, and connecting the potency of Cupid’s flower as well as of Dian’s bud with the charm and chastity of the Virgin Queen. Prospero’s meditation has a deeper and more universal meaning than Oberon’s vision, and in it the influence of the revels is felt in a more subtle way, and has sunk down into the very texture of the language. It has long been recognised that some of the imagery of this passage is reminiscent of the coronation festivities of James I. In order to grace the King’s solemn progress through London, seven gates or arches were erected; over the first was represented the true likeness of all the notable houses, towers, steeples, within the city of London; on the sixth the globe of the world was seen to move; at Temple Bar a seventh arch or gate was erected, the forefront being proportioned in every respect like a temple2. But Prospero appears to have been thinking of the theatrical staging as well as of the pageantry of the streets. The word ‘rack’ has caused considerable trouble to the commentators. Whiter and Staunton connect the word with the stage-craft of the time. Whiter applies it to ‘a body of clouds in motion’ when considered as a constituent part in the machinery of a Pageant, and cites Jonson’s Masque of Hymen: ‘Here the upper part of the scene, which was all of clouds, and made artificially to swell, and ride like the rack, began to open;

 Enid Welsford, the Court Masque 265 and the air clearing, from the top thereof was discovered Juno . . . .’ Staunton follows Whiter and remarks: ‘While it is evident that by ‘rack’ was understood the drifting vapour or scud, as it is now termed, it would appear that Shakespeare . . . was thinking not more of the actual clouds than of those gauzy semblances, which, in the pageants of his day, as in the stage spectacles of ours, were often used, partly or totally, to obscure the scene behind. Ben Jonson, in the description of his masques, very frequently mentions this scenic contrivance . . . The evanishing of the actors, then, in Prospero’s pageant . . . was doubtless effected by the agency of filmy curtains, which, being drawn one over another to resemble the flying mists, gave to the scene an appearance of gradual dissolution; when the objects were totally hidden, the drapery was withdrawn in the same manner, veil by veil, till at length even that had disappeared, and there was left, then, not even a rack behind.’3

Does this connection with theatrical trappings and street decorations drag the poetry down to earth? Surely not. Shakespeare has been thinking of the evanescence of art and of our human life, of which art is but a reflection. The masque suggests to his mind the most thin and perishable part of the machinery by means of which art finds expression. These things seem trivial and temporary – are they much more so than art itself? But the poet’s thought travels swiftly from the mock scenic vapours to the scudding clouds of heaven, real and lovely, but even less permanent than their feeble imitations; and these same clouds, most fleeting of fleeting things, are but fitting images of the life of man. The revels are ended, the spirits are melted into air – a pause of pondering thought at the queerness of it – into thin air; and then the verse surges up in sudden illumination: ‘and like the baseless fabric of this vision’. The word baseless lifts us gently from the earth; fabric goes back to the thin air, the unsubstantial stuff of which the solid seeming world is made; the cloud-capp’d towers carry us up to a soaring height; the gorgeous palaces display a spreading splendour of pinnacles; the solemn temples suggest the appearance of majesty, linked to all that we hope to be enduring in the hearts of men; and then, finally, the great globe itself offers a comprehensive vision of the world and all that is upon it. For one moment the vision stands, for one moment it hangs before us, rounded, definite, complete, then it wavers, it becomes unreal as a theatre scene, then light and filmy as a cloud, and then it vanishes. The underlying impression is of great masses of cloud, piled up in the sky, which seems to have generated them, which encompasses and will again absorb them. Lit up by the sunlight, they look like great snow mountains, yet as we look they change, they become a moving scud, they dissolve and finally disappear, vanishing clean away, even down to the last light film of flying vapour. Then, with the picture of the unfathomed depth of the sky round the clouds still in the mind, the thought moves from the outer world to the inner life of man, that life which is encompassed by the mystery of silence, rises out of it, and returns to it as a dream rises out of, and vanishes into, a dreamless sleep.

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Our thoughts return again to the thin gauzy substance of the theatre – more shadowy still – ‘we are such stuff as dreams are made on’. The sense of encompassing mystery does not exclude the idea of sleep coming as a completion and crown to life. The philosophy of this passage has been very variously judged, it has been taken as a proof that Shakespeare was an atheist a materialist, an idealist, and so on. If it is taken at its face value it certainly seems an utterance of pessimism, but it should be borne in mind that Prospero’s utterance is not only dramatic,4 it is incomplete and cannot be fully interpreted apart from later passages, and, in particular, it should be connected with the speech in the first scene of the fifth act. Prospero has mastered the forces arrayed against him; at a hint from Ariel he has decided that ‘the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance’. He summons all the powers and arts at his command, to execute this, his final and noblest purpose, and then the solemn moment of forgiveness comes. His enemies enter as madmen into his harmed circle and remain there spell-bound, until Prospero calls for a heavenly air, and solemn music is played to restore their senses. At the breath of evil, the beauteous forms of art vanished away, and left behind a vision of the fading of the whole earth into its original nothingness. Now there is a gradual restoration of reason to maddened creatures; Prospero attacks unreason, and at each step of the ground gained the goodness of Gonzalo seems something to hold fast by: ‘A solemn air and the best comforter/ To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains,/ Now useless, boil’d within thy skull! . . . ..’ [5.1.58–61]. Though the poetry is far less lovely than in the more famous lines, this speech also must be remembered if we are to understand the latest mood of Shakespeare. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream as in other romantic comedies, Hymen comes into his kingdom easily, because the characters are easily malleable, and because our eyes are averted from the serious side of life. But in these later plays Shakespeare has shown sorrow and joy, good and ill, mingled together as in real life they are mingled, so if Hymen is to reign at all it must be through conquests, through reconciliations and absolutions. The lovers win our sympathy, but our chief interest is focused on the healing of ancient troubles, by which alone the wedding can be brought about. In The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest peace and harmony are achieved by long and far-sighted suffering, but they are only consummated when out of them there suddenly springs a new birth of joy. It is significant that whereas in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the part of Hymen is played by the fairies, in The Tempest it is played by Prospero, the man who hopes, who looks forward. But if The Tempest is not a proof of Shakespeare’s pessimism, still less is it an outburst of facile optimism, and those critics are right who call attention to the harsher side of Shakespeare’s outlook, his recognition of apparently insoluble problems, hopeless disasters, incurable evils. Shakespeare, like Milton, perceived that there was much in life which could not be included in the glibly harmonious scheme of the masquers; which, even in its most idealised form, could not be made part of the dance of the Hours and Graces. But Shakespeare dealt with these anomalies in a very different spirit from that of the great Puritan. For Milton there was an imaginative world, clear cut, harmonious, entirely free from ugliness or darkness; there was also a perfectly straight fight between the utterly opposed forces of good and evil, and these two conceptions co-existed in his mind, but had apparently very little connection with one another.

 Enid Welsford, the Court Masque 267 But increasing years brought to Shakespeare an ever-increasing profundity, and a decreasing clarity of thought. Good and evil are infinitely unlike each other and yet, paradoxically enough, they are not always completely separable; even Fairyland is composed of vice and virtue, beauty and ugliness. And always the hard edges of things are softened by changing shadows. For Milton viewed the world from the classical standpoint, but Shakespeare was a romantic, and his romanticism was greatest at the end of his working life. The difference between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest may be partly due to the development of the masque, but it is also due to a change from the classical to the romantic method of creation. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare moulds his vague memories of revels into the precise, clear-cut images of Oberon and Puck sitting on the promontory, the mermaid on the dolphin’s back, the flying Cupid. In The Tempest Shakespeare meditates upon the masque and dissolves it. ‘These our actors,/ As I foretold you, were all spirits and/Are melted into air, into thin air’ [4.1.148–50]. Omnia exeunt in mysterium. Prospero’s great speech is an utterance neither of pessimism nor of ennui but of awe, and his ponderings are perhaps not so much the meditations of a philosopher as the expression of a mood, a mood which was often produced by the influence of the masque. One of the strongest feelings evoked by the masque was a sense of transitoriness and illusion. This feeling is perfectly understandable, for it arises naturally at theatres, balls, solemn processions, gay social functions, which are always apt to arouse thoughts of the swift and irrecoverable flight of time. This sense of illusion and transience is (I can only speak of course from my own experience) very far from being depressing. It has nothing to do with the dull philosophy of the Preacher, and his tiresome reiteration that all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Rather it arouses a sense of dilation, of opening vistas, of life regarded sub specie aeternitatis. For a moment the world becomes thin as a theatre curtain, a cloudy veil about to be withdrawn. This surely is the dominant mood of The Tempest. I have compared its plot with the masque induction, and suggested that it is founded upon an idea rather than upon an action. But the word is not quite the right one; The Tempest, like the masque, presents a moment of revelation, but the revelation is made by way of the emotions rather than the understanding, and our play is founded, not upon a concept, but upon an intuition. A study of sources and influences is chiefly valuable in so far as it illuminates the process of poetic creation. The masque supplied Shakespeare with much of his material for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, but in return he immortalized in those masterpieces much of the grace and beauty of a Court function. The Renaissance differed from our own age not so much in that it was a time of great artistic fecundity, but in that it was a time when social life was itself aesthetically beautiful, so beautiful indeed that it seemed unbearable that it should be doomed to die. Through A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest the loveliness of the masque is still accessible to us. How did Shakespeare bring this about? Not by imitating any one masque, not by indulging in vague rhapsodies on the beauties of the revels, but by taking his floating recollections of Court festivities and moulding them into a new, definite, concrete form. We have already seen this shaping process at work in the case of Oberon’s vision, and it is particularly obvious also in the case of the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s

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Dream. There they stand, clearly outlined in the moonlight, shapely, attractive, positive little creatures, but behind them, stretching back and back into the darkness, are innumerable forms, ill-defined, shirting, transitory, northern elves, haunters of burial mounds, Greek nymphs of standing lakes and groves, witches, fates, norns, gnomes, and hobgoblins of the folk, mediaeval fairy kings and queens, all the thoughts and fancies of the generations, crossing and re-crossing, branching off, combining, coalescing – no wonder that in this play Shakespeare cannot refrain from speaking of the arduous process of creation: ‘The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And, as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name’. This shaping process is most obviously at work in poetry written in the classical spirit, but it is part of all poetic creation. In poems which are pervaded by the sense of mystery, this sense of mystery is still expressed by the definite story or image or rhythm. In The Tempest, for instance, free play is given to all those mystical feelings which were so often evoked by the masque, but these feelings are expressed by means of one particular story, one particular background. Many travellers’ tales, and many scenic splendours, have gone to the making of the Fairy Isle, vague mediaeval theories as to elemental spirits, half-memories of disguised musicians, seated in stage clouds, have taken individual shape in Ariel, many rumours and inaccurate yarns of Elizabethan sailors have become concrete in Caliban with his ancient and fish-like smell. The poet’s pen turns them to shape. Creation, then, is a higher kind of definition. The poet, like the theologian, is a dogmatist, for he puts into words, and so limits and preserves, the thoughts of himself and his generation and of all those whose minds are akin to his own. And by so doing he not only immortalises the life of his time, he makes it dynamic. It is not unusual to draw a contrast between the living spirit and the dead form. But in art certainly the dynamic quality of a masterpiece is usually in direct proportion to its concreteness and comely outline. Shakespeare, by making his fairies definite, also made them fruitful, and ever since he created them, they have never ceased to influence literature and the nursery. As soon as the vague idea, or fluid revel, has been moulded into definite form, it is re-absorbed into the general consciousness, which is raised to a higher level. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the product of many earlier masques and entertainments, it was afterwards used to enrich the libretti of Ben Jonson. Spenser embodied a whole era of social life in his poem; his poem then proceeded to colour, not only the social life of his time, but a very great deal of the literature of his own and subsequent ages, and if his Faerie Queene does not quite rank with the greatest poems of the world, it is chiefly because it is too fluid. For the poet’s definition is not merely conservative, it is also creative. Through A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest we experience not only what the masque was, but what it might have been. (335–49)

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E. K. Chambers, sources 1930–1 From William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford, 1930–1). E. K. Chambers (1866–1934) was a theatre historian and civil servant. His chief publications were The Medieval Stage (2 vols, 1903), The Elizabethan Stage (4 vols, 1923) and Shakespeare (2 vols, 1930). In these books, he put to work his philosophy that the history of drama must start with a study of the social and economic facts on which the drama rested, and these facts must be presented fully and accurately. He also authored Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Studies (1933) and Shakespearean Gleanings,(1944), and edited Early English Lyrics (1907), chosen by him and Frank Sidgwick, and The Oxford Book of SixteenthCentury Verse (1932). Chambers’ notes on The Tempest focus largely on the play’s date of composition and on the possible sources of the play. Unlike other literary historians, Chambers does not identify a single source. Instead, he sees the play as deriving from the Bermuda documents as well as a number of English and European sources, notably the Italian commedia dell’arte, so placing the play in the midst of rich and varied textual traditions.

F is a very fair text, with careful punctuation. The stage directions, especially for the spectacular episodes, are more elaborate than in any other play. They may be, in the main, the author’s. The play was given at court . . . . on 1 November 1611 and again during the winter of 1612–13. Malone’s statement that it ‘had a being and a name in the autumn of 1611’ probably rests only on a knowledge of the November date.1 His promise to show in a revision of his Chronological Order that it was performed before the middle of 1611 was never carried out.2 That it cannot have been written much earlier that 1611 is clear from the use made of the narratives describing the wreck of Sir George Somers at the Bermudas during a voyage to Virginia on 25 July 1609. With Somers were, among others, Sir Thomas Gates, William Strachey, Sylvester Jourdan, and Richard Rich. They escaped from the island and reached James Town in Virginia on 23 May 1610. On July 15 Gates, Jourdan, and Rich started for England with a dispatch of July 7 from the Governor of Virginia, Lord Delawarr, and a narrative dated July 15 by Strachey. A ballad on News from Virginia (1610) by Rich was registered on October 1. But the first full description of the island life to be issued seems to have been Jourdan’s A Discovery

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of the Barmudas (1610). The dedication of this is dated October 13. It was followed by an official publication of the London Council of Virginia, A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia (1610), registered on November 8. Strachey’s narrative was circulated to the Council, but is not known to have been printed before 1625, when it appeared as A True Reportory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight in Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, iv.1734. Strachey himself returned to England late in 1611 and was in the Blackfriars on December 13. Shakespeare doubtless used the prints of 1610, but numerous verbal parallels make it clear that his main authority was the True Reportory, and this it seems that he can only have seen in manuscript. Malone’s date of 1611 for Tempest remains reasonable. It has been suggested that the play was revised in 1612–13 and the mask in iv .i inserted, to make it more appropriate to the celebrations attending the wedding of the Elector Palatine and the Princess Elizabeth on 14 February 1613; and the mask has been claimed by Fleay[3] for Beaumont and by Robertson[4] for Chapman and Heywood. . . . The play is short, but the songs and dumb-shows would eke it out. The long passages of exposition, which Wilson regards as replacing matter originally shown in action, are due to an attempt, unusual with Shakespeare, to secure unity of time. The rest of the supported evidence for recasting and abridgement consists mainly of very small points, such as incoherencies and obscurities, the presence of mutes, broken lines, misdivided lines, accidental rhymes, a scrap of doggerel, transitions between verse and prose, for most of which alternative explanations seem to me more plausible. At two places, however, i.2.298–304, 317 and ii. i.297–305, it is just possible that there may have been some theatrical expansion of the spectacular and musical elements. Conceivably the song of Juno and Ceres (iv.i.106–17) in the mask may be another example; the rest of the mask is, I think, fully Shakespearean. The notion of an early date for Tempest in some form has been encouraged by its analogies to the play of Die Schone Sidea, which forms part of the Opus Theatricum (1618) of Jacob Ayrer of Nurembers, who died in 1605. Here, too, are a prince and magician, with a familiar spirit, a fair daughter, and an enemy’s son, whose sword is held in thrall by the magician’s art, who must bear logs for the lady, and who wins release through her love. Use of a common source is a more plausible explanation than borrowing on either hand. But it has not been found. A play of Celinde and Sedea was given in 1604 and 1613 by English actors in Germany, but Ayrer has no Celinde.5 William Collins, the poet, told Thomas Warton that he had found the Tempest story in the Aurelio and Isabella of Juan de Flores, of which there is an English translation (1556), but it is not there.6 Die Schione Sidea has no storm and no enchanted island. Some analogues to these have been found in various novels of Spanish and Italian origin, but in no case does a direct relation to Tempest seem likely. Probably we get nearer in the scenari for commedie dell’arte printed by Neri from Casanatense MS. 1212 at Rome. Of these there are four; La Pazzia di Filandra, Gran Mago, La Nave, Li Tre Satiri. In all of these shipwrecked crews land upon an island, and there are loveintrigues between nobles and the native girls, and comic business in the hunger and greed of the sailors. These are complicated by the action of a Mago who controls the island. The resemblances to Tempest are closest in Li Tre Satiri, where the foreigners are taken for gods, as Trinculo is by Caliban, and the Pantalone and Zanni steal the

 E. K. Chambers, Sources 271 Mago’s book, as Trinculo and Stephano plot to steal Prospero’s. The Mago appears also in other scenari not printed, and in one of these, Pantaloncino, he abandons his arts at the end, as Prospero does. The scenari are from the second of two manuscripts volumes dated in 1618 and 1622 respectively. They were prepared for the press and for acting by Basilio Locatelli, but it is clear from the preface that his is merely a rifacimento. How old the scenari themes may be, one can hardly say, but Neri points to a very similar plot of a shipwreck and a Mago in Bartolomomeo Rossi’s fully written pastoral comedy of Fiammella (1584). Rossi performed in Paris during the same year. He is not known to have come to England. And of course, we cannot assume that the scenari were used for performances there, although, since writing Eliz. Stage, ii. 261–5, I have found a trace of the presence of an Italian comedian, possibly Daniell by name, in 1610. An historical basis for Prospero’s political fortunes has been suggested in those of a fourteenth century Lithuanian Witold, which got into English chronicles, and with those of a fifteenth-century Prospero Adorno, whose deposition from his duchy of Genoa is told of in William Thomas’s Historie of Italie (1549, 1561). But neither parallel is at all close. A Ferdinand II succeeded his father Alfonso as King of Naples in 1495. Whatever Shakespeare’s romantic source, if any, was, he worked into it the details of the Bermudas adventure, and he has probably used earlier travel-books, particularly Richard Eden’s History of Travayle (1577), which would have given him Setebos, as the name of a Patagonian god. Caliban appears to be derived from the gipsy cauliban, ‘blackness’. Ariel is a Hebrew name, variously used in magical writings for one of the spirits who control the elements or the planets. Gonzalo’s Utopian disquisition (2.1.148–65) is borrowed from the essay of the Canibales in Florio’s Montaigne, ch​.xx​x. A ballad of The Inchanted Island (App F, no xi, d) is one of Collier’s forgeries. (491–4)

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Wilson Knight, tempests and music 1932

From The Shakespearean Tempest (London, 1932). Wilson Knight (1897–1985) was among the best-known Shakespeare scholars of his generation. He taught at Toronto University and then became Reader in English Literature at the University of Leeds. He was author of several influential books, including Myth and Miracle: An Essay on the Mystic Symbolism of Shakespeare (1929), The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy (1930), The Imperial Theme (1931), The Shakespearian Tempest (1932), The Christian Renaissance, with Interpretations of Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, and a Note on T. S. Eliot (1933), The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays (1947) and numerous other works. Knight rejected the approach propounded by A. C. Bradley that focused on character. Character, while important, argued Knight, was only part of the design to which metaphor, imagery and symbols contributed. Shakespeare’s plays were, above all, poetry and every play was an ‘expanded metaphor’. Knight’s work had an enduring influence on Shakespeare criticism. In the introduction to The Shakespearean Tempest, Knight writes that the ‘principle of unity’ has been lacking in much Shakespeare criticism which tends to focus on parts of the text and neglect the whole. His purpose is to ‘to give attention to poetic colour and suggestion first, thinking primarily in terms of symbolism, not character. Only through such reading will a play reveal ‘its richer significance, its harmony, its unity’.[1] In the following excerpt, Knight tracks important patterns in the play: sea-love antagonism, tempest-animal association and, most importantly, the music-tempest correlation. The play’s themes are realized through of its imagery and can only be experienced as such.

The Tempest is probably Shakespeare’s last play but one. In it the poet presents a reflection of his whole work. Necessarily, now, tempests and music are of overpowering importance: indeed, the play is throughout compacted mainly of this tempest-music opposition. In addition, numerous other fleeting and delicate poetic suggestions that recur throughout Shakespeare are present now in dramatic personification or incident. The process of poetic actualization, so striking in the other Final Plays, is here the ruling principle throughout. Moreover, the human story, as I have shown elsewhere, repeats, as it were, in miniature, the separate themes of Shakespeare’s greater Plays. The Tempest is an amazing work. One of the shortest of the plays, it yet distils the

 Wilson Knight, Tempests and Music 273 poetic essence of the whole Shakespearian universe. Here I can only note shortly those themes which bear directly on my present purpose, without attempting anything like a final interpretation. We start with a wreck vividly and strikingly actualized: [Quotes 1.1.1–14: ‘On a Ship at Sea. A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard.’]. The wreck performs the usual task of dividing father and family brother and brother: ‘A confused noise within: “Mercy on us!” “we split, we split” – Farewell, my wife and children!’ ‘Farewell, brother! We split, we split, we split!’ (1.1.61–2) Miranda describes the tempest: [Quotes 1.2.1– 13: ‘If by your art, my dearest father. . . . ’]. We are familiar with such descriptions. This direful tempest is, however, like the tempests in Pericles or the thunder of Jupiter in Cymbeline but a provisional: [Quotes 1.2.24–32: ‘Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort . . . .’]. This tempest is, in part, a means or redressing an old wrong. Prospero describes the old treachery of his brother: [Quotes 1.2.144–51: ‘In few, they hurried us aboard a bark, . . . .’]. A speech whose mournful rhythms of sea-tragedy echo the long story of the Shakespearian tempest. Such was Prospero’s and Miranda’s ‘sea sorrow’ (i.ii.170). Then we have the vivid narration by Ariel, how he has performed Prospero’s bidding and ‘dispersed’ the word- occurs twice the ship’s crew: [Quotes: 1.2.189–237: ‘Ariel. All hail, great master! Grave sir, hail! . . . .’]. Again, the thought of ‘Jove’s lightnings’. And this is closely followed by that of Neptune. Throughout we must observe how Jove and Neptune are twin personifications of the two main aspects of the Shakespearian tempest. A passage I have observed in Coriolanus points this vividly. We might, too, observe here the fiery quality of Ariel’s ‘tempest’, recalling Julius Caesar, its ‘devils’ recalling Macbeth and the ‘sight-outrunning’ lightning, which reminds us of Lear’s ‘thought-executing fires’. We have, too, as elsewhere, the ‘besiege’ metaphor. The whole description adds something of agile violence even to our former passages. And, as in the other Final Plays, we see the tempest here to be utterly harmless. Now in this play the themes of sea tempest are interlinked as in Twelfth Night, with music. The melodies of disguised as ‘a nymph o’the sea’ (i.ii. 301), yet invisible to all save Prospero and himself, lead Ferdinand on to his meeting with Miranda: [Quotes 1.2.375–408: Re-enter Ariel, invisible, playing and singing: Ferdinand following. . . . ‘That the earth owes . . . .’]. Observe how the music allays’ both grief and the ‘fury’ of the waters: which two are in reality not two, but one. Ariel’s first song reveals a richer and richer beauty and a more exact meaning, if we remember our earlier imagery of dances on magic shores beyond turbulent seas. Now we may understand why the ‘wild waves’, love’s antagonists, may be ‘whist’ with ‘kisses’. And if we remember a passage I have quoted from The Merchant of Venice wherein a bridal dawn is associated with music, we may find a new precision in the reference to the cock’s crowing. And, in the other song, we may recall our other suggestion of the sea’s vast bed of treasures torn from life as in Clarence’s dream: yet here that pellucid death only turns life itself into new strangeness, newer beauty. Here all Shakespeare’s sea and music thought springs into a new and vivid life, creating its own world as a theatre for a profoundest vision. But tragedy is stern, too. Ferdinand’s eyes ‘never since at ebb’, saw the king his father ‘wreck’d’ (i.ii.435). Yet, meeting Miranda, he finds a sudden joy: ‘My father’s loss, the weakness which I feel,/The wreck of all my friends . . .’ (i.ii.488, 489) these he says, and

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all his present hardships are light burdens in Miranda’s presence. Sea grief and final love and union or reunion are throughout blended here in a richer, more musical, and more comprehensive design. A characteristic speech outlines the dangers and tragedies of the sea: [Quotes 2.1.1– 9: ‘Gonzalo. Beseech you, sir, be merry; you have cause, . . . .’]. ‘Merchants’ again. We remember Antonio’s ‘theme of woe’ in The Merchant of Venice. Here such tragedies are, as in the Final Plays, magically averted: But the rarity of it is, which is indeed almost beyond credit . . . that our garments, being, as they were, drenched in the sea, hold notwithstanding their freshness and glosses, being rather new-dyed than stained with salt water. . . . [2.1.62–5]. They seem ‘as fresh as when we were at Tunis at the marriage of your daughter who is now queen (ii.1.97–8). But Alonso is comfortless. All that he loves is now divided or stolen from him by the love-opposing seas: [Quotes 2.1.108–26: ‘Alonso. Would I had never . . . .’]. This description of Ferdinand is a close replica of that given of Sebastian to Viola by the Sea Captain in Twelfth Night. Now in Shakespeare’s earliest love passages we have found two varieties of the sea-love antagonism: severance by the sea and loss in the sea, with the respective symbols ‘merchandise’ and ‘jewel’. Both are present here in Alonso’s words. He is separated from his daughter by infinite distances of sea; from his son, drowned ‘deeper than e’er plummet sounded’ (v.i.56), by infinite depths. And we may further observe that Alonso’s giving his daughter to an ‘African’ suggests our numerous other perilous Eastern voyages and the many passages where Siren dangers are associated with oriental shores, where Indian ‘beauties’ lure man to his peril. Here, too, we may aptly observe the talk about ‘widow Dido’ and ‘widower Aeneas’, and the equating of Tunis with Carthage (ii.i). The great distance (ii.i.111) of Tunis from Italy is stressed by Alonso; and later on, its distance from Prospero’s island is further emphasized by Antonio, The new queen of Tunis dwells ‘ten leagues beyond man’s life’ (ii.i.247). She is, in fact, infinitely far; and Alonso and his fleet have undertaken an infinite voyage. In that voyage they were ‘sea-swallow’d’ (ii.i.251). And Alonso and his company are mazed now in infinite perplexities on the island. Ariel enters, ‘invisible, playing solemn music’ (ii.i), ‘solemn music’ again, as in Cymbeline . . . all but Antonio and Sebastian sleep: ‘They fell together all, as by consent;/ They dropp’d, as by a thunderstroke’. (ii.i.204] Throughout the play we have minor ‘tempest’ suggestion It is ‘foul weather’ for all when the King is ‘çloudy’ is ‘çloudy ’ says Gonzalo [2.1.143]. In Sebastian’s dialogue with Antonio we have more: ‘Sebastian. Well, I am standing water./ Antonio. I’ll teach you how to flow./Sebastian, do so: to ebb Hereditary sloth instructs me’. (ii.i.221–3) The drama of temptation, treason and murder of kingly sleep that Macbeth vision repeated – is here controlled and overwatched by Ariel’s music. Also Alonso, with his lost children, recalls Lear, enduring Lear’s grief and remorse. Here, however, it is ever a sea sorrow: ‘he is drown’d/ Whom thus we stray to find, and the sea mocks/ Our frustrate search on land’. (iii​.iii​.8–10) Lear and Macbeth are both suggested. That I cannot prove here. I merely note it the better to observe the effect of Prosperous and Ariel’s actions. We must be prepared to observe the essences of guilt and grief, tragedy in a wide sense, in Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio. Now Prospero and Ariel appear in turn. There is ‘solemn and strange

 Wilson Knight, Tempests and Music 275 music’: ‘Alonso. What harmony is this? – My good friends, hark!/Gonzalo. Marvelous sweet music!’ (iii​.iii​.​18, 19). Enter Prospero above, invisible. Enter several strange Shapes bringing in a banquet; they dance about it with gentle actions of salutation; and inviting the King etc. to eat, they depart. (iii.3). But, as they make toward the feast, Ariel interrupts: [Quotes 3.3.53–82: ‘Ariel. You are three men of sin, whom Destiny, . . . .’]. Notice the ‘thunder and lightning’, reminiscent of Jupiter in Cymbeline. Both Jupiter there and Ariel here represent exactly Destiny. Here we have the thunder of divine wrath, roused and conditioned. Human sin; there innocent humanity suffering from a tempestuous fare. And all this thunder and lightning includes the thunder and lightning which accompanies the Weird Sisters in Macbeth. Tempestuous evils suggested by all: which evil may variously be considered the responsibility of man, or the devil. In each instance the tragedy-tempest association is implicit. Observe here the fine sea and air imagery; and the suggestion that one sea tragedy is to requite another. Finally we should note that human sin has incensed ‘the seas and shores’ and ‘all the creatures’ against man’s peace: wherein we find our tempest-beast association again. Of that I shall say more shortly. Here we may next observe Alonso’s words after these ‘strange’ occurrences: [Quotes 3.3.95–102: ‘O, it is monstrous, monstrous! . . . .’]. In Cymbeline we found a blending of the ‘music’ of human love (at the entrance of Posthumus’s relations) with the ‘thunder’ of Destiny at the entrance of Jupiter. Here we have ‘solemn music’ accompanying the feast, thunder accompanying those accusations which forbid the sinners to partake of it; and, again, ‘soft music’ after. Thunder is enclosed in music. And, in Alonso’s words, the tempests of guilt themselves become music: the winds ‘sing’, and the ‘thunder’ is an ‘organ-pipe’. The whole incident may be directly related to the Banquet scene in Macbeth wherein a similar guilt is pitted against a feast, and the whole dissolved in the music of tragedy; since, in a final judgement, all Shakespeare’s tempests of passion are also a passionate music. Here in Alonso’s lines such a thought is poetically explicit. Moreover, Ariel’s tempest-stilling music may be directly, on one lane of allegorical reference, considered to suggest the Shakespearian poetry itself. This is our process of poetic actualization carried to its extreme limit. The poetic faculty itself is personified, takes action in a drama whose events are abut expanded poetic imagery. Our tempest-beast association, too, is clearly present in this play. Fierce beasts are powerfully suggested when Sebastian and Antonio try to cover up their guilt: [Quotes 2.1.310–16: ‘Sebastian. Whiles we stood here securing your repose . . . .’ (ii.i.315– 16)].These animals are associated both with the murder they replace and the other tempestuous dangers endured by Alonso. We may note that the word ‘bellowing’ found earlier in The Merchant of Venice in Lorenzo’s speech, where animals are tamed by music, but treasonous men have no music’ in themselves, so that beasts and treasons are associated, as they are here; the ‘lions’ so often present in tempest passages; the ‘monster’, a usual word; and the ‘earthquake’, as in the Macbeth tempest. ‘Heavens keep him from these beasts!’ says Gonzalo, referring to Ferdinand (ii.i.324). And this incident leads on directly to more such ideas. Throughout Shakespeare the tempestbeasts are to be clearly related to Shakespeare’s animal-symbolism as a whole. Animals often suggest the inhuman and bestial qualities in man by association or contrast, just

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as tempests may suggest either direct natural cruelty or the more cruel behaviour of mankind. All Shakespeare’s intuition of the untamed beast in man is here crystallized in the person of Caliban. Now sea monsters are especially abhorrent in Shakespeare, clearly partaking of the tragic violence of both the sea and fierce animals. And it is suggested that Caliban is, in some sense, a sea-monster. [Quotes 2.2.18–41: ‘Trinculo. Here’s neither bush nor shrub . . . . ’]. More ‘tempests. We might correlate the ‘painted’ show monster here, with the picture of a tyrant ‘painted upon a pole’ as ‘our rarer monsters are’ in Macbeth (v.vii.54, 56). Also Macbeth compares himself to a ‘bear’ fighting ‘the course’ at the ‘stake’ (v.vii.1). That is, the tragic protagonist at bay is, through the violence of his rage, imaged as a monster, just as Antony is compared to an old lion dying (Antony and Cleopatra). Of course, this bear-lion contrast exactly points the different colour and pitch of the two tragedies. Here, however, the animal-suggestion is rather different. The CalibanTrinculo-Stephano plot suggests greed and drunkenness and all essences bestial, trivial, and vulgar; the flesh unrefined by spirit. And yet, as so often in Shakespeare the beast near to nature shows more spirituality than the beast that masquerade as man. Witness the poetry of Caliban’s speech, compared with Stephano’s: [Quotes 3.2.135–45: ‘Caliban. Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, . . . .’]. We may remember again Lorenzo’s words on the power of music to charm even beasts from their nature, and its clear opposition to ‘treasons, stratagems, and spoils’. Here it temporarily charms Caliban into a fine softening and is, thus, to be opposed to his bestial and treacherous intents. For these three now proceed to their ‘treasons, stratagems, and soils’. They have many typical Shakespearian vices of the lowest kind: lust (Caliban), greed for spoils (Trinculo and Stephano), and treason against the island’s king. They are also drunk. They are representative of all bestiality. Ariel lures them on, repeating exactly the substance of Lorenzo’s speech on ‘colts’: [Quotes 4.1.175–84: ‘That I beat my tabor; . . . .’]. We remember Falstaff in The Merry Wives. Drunkenness (Ariel notes that his victims were ‘red-hot with drinking’), lust, greed, and coarse materiality: all are in Falstaff, and also here. Finally, Caliban and the rest are routed by spirits in the shape of hounds (iv.i.) which recall the gnomes in the final Act of the Merry Wives. The hounds are really ‘spirit’ creatures, and we may recall also that hounds are usually musical, beautiful, and aesthetic beasts in Shakespeare. In both plays, the punishment is the same: a mock-drowning, a drenching in liquid filth; undignified punishments given by the spiritual elements Ariel and the hounds they so sorely lack. So precisely are certain important aspects of the beast-image vividly actualized in The Tempest. Caliban is the perfect personification of their significance. And there is more to observe here. I have noticed that pines, and cedars, and oaks occur often in tempest passages. They may either be bent by thunder-bolts, or show their strength by standing firm. They suggest strength, especially material strength in or in face of nature, and the cedar may often suggest the strength of the tragic tempestbattered protagonist in a wide sense. A stately tree battered by tempests, or stripped of its leaves in winter, is a usual image for the tragic fortunes of mortality. The tree-image, then may be, in some sense, considered a symbol suggesting strength and hardness. And its recurrent presence in tempest passages suggests the cruelty and bitter bleak

 Wilson Knight, Tempests and Music 277 winds of nature. It is in this sense that we must read the confinement of Ariel by Sycorax in a pine: [Quotes 1.2.272–96. ‘Prospero. And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate . . . .’]. Notice the usual tempest-word ‘rage’; the ‘pine’ and ‘oak’; the association of this tree-agony with the tempest: beasts, wolves and ‘ever-angry bears’; and the thought of winter. Ariel, himself compact of music and soft airs and warm summery delight, is shown as suffering agonies in the tempestuous world of nature’s evil, of wolves and bears, of those hardened tempest-battlers, pine and oak. Ariel’s pure music of air and spirits suffers under Nature’s hard cruelty. ‘Till thou has howl’d away ten winters’. An eternity of freezing pain. But at the play’s end, he sings of summer, ever-living summer, under the blossom that hangs on the bough’ (v .i.94). Winter and summer. Another aspect of our tempest-music opposition, recalling Shakespeare’s early play, Love’s Labour Lost and its concluding song; and also The Winter’s Tale. The Tempest thus contains many of our main elements of imagery: a sea-tempest and a wrecked ship; another land-storm later; supernatural appearances in thunder and lightning, this blending with music; suggestion of fierce beasts, bulls ‘bellowing’ and lions; a whole series of incidents revolving round Caliban, half fish-monster, half man; and the pine and oak, prisons to Ariel, associated with wolves and bears. Ariel himself is disgusted as a ‘nymph of the sea’, thus forming a contrast with the sea-beast, Caliban: it is the contrast of depths still and trans lucent (as in Antony and Cleopatra) with the mudded turbulence of tragic and tempestuous sea, we have, too, our passage quoted above about merchants and their losses. Alonso and his court have been on an eastern voyage trading in love’s merchandise. Moreover, the lay is full of names oriental, places mysterious and distant: Argier (i.ii.265), the ‘dead Indian’ mentioned by Trinculo, ‘men of Ind’ (ii​.ii​​.58), the Arabian Phoenix (iii​.iii​​.22–3), Tunis, and Carthage. We have also much talk about strange tales told by travelers returned from romantic adventures: [Quotes 3.3.43–9: ‘When we were boys . . . .’]. This recalls Othello’s romantic stories about ‘men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders’. We have Ariel’s mention of the ‘still-vexed Bermoothes’ (i.ii.229). Clearly, The Tempest is saturated in thought of sea adventure. Far coasts, amazing discovery. And there is a sea-beauty as well as a sea-terror. Drowned Alonso’s eyes are ‘peaks’, his bones ‘çoral’ all suffers a ‘sea-change’, all is ‘rich and strange’ here in spite of apparent wreck and disaster. Even Caliban speaks delight in heavenly riches, ‘ready to drop upon him’, as he listens to Ariel’s music. And ‘voices’, too, he hears; and Ariel’s voice here sings to ‘yellow sands’, interweaving the sea sorrow and the loss with siren, yet not deceitful, music, we may recall Venus’s promise to ‘dance on the sands’ for Adonis, and Titania’s description of how she and the Indian votaress sat and played on ‘Neptune’s yellow sands’. Thus, all our sea and music thought is alive here, miraculously and strangely beautiful. The Tempest is Shakespeare’s instinctive imaginative genius mapped into a universal pattern; not neglecting, but enclosing and transcending, all his past themes of loss and restoration, tempest and music. Tempest and music are indeed our main themes images here: Loss and ‘dispersion’ in tempest, revival and restoration of the island of music. Moreover, tempest winds and tragedy are set against summer, as in Ariel’s song, soft airs and delicate: ‘the air breathes upon us here most sweetly’ (ii.i.46). The divine visions such as Prospero show Ferdinand recall the divine appearances in Pericles, The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline

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and Hymen in As You Like it. Iris, Ceres and Juno appear to bring a bridal blessing. And they speak of country delight, earth’s increase, spring, all that is fruitful, beautiful, and kind in nature. And then there is dance of ‘nymphs and reapers’: [Quotes 4.1.128– 38. ‘Iris. You nymphs, call’d Naiads, of the winding brooks, . . . .’]. At long last, a union of sea and earth in gentleness, blessing the bridal union of Ferdinand and Miranda. Nature’s sweetness succeeds tempest. And all is here finally restored and forgiven. The ship is ‘tempest-tossed’ but all not lost: [Quotes 5.1.221–40: ‘Boatswain. The best new is, that we have safely found . . . .’]. So sea sorrow, roaring, and howling are blended with miraculous survival. Music sounds as mankind find repentance and recognition. To Prosperous music Alonso and his companions awake: ‘A solemn air and the best comforter/ To an unsettled fancy cure thy brains . . . .’ (v.i.58–9) Their clearer reason’ emerges again: Their understanding Begins to swell, and the approaching tide Will shortly fill the reasonable shore That now lies foul and muddy, (v.i.79–82) so, to the last, sea-imagery is used to varied effect. Here the sea is the wide sea of understanding and recognition. A still sea, calm, prosperous, like the winds and seas that take these travelers home: ‘Prospero. I’ll deliver all;/And promise you calm seas, auspicious gales/ And sail so expeditious that shall catch Your royal fleet far off ’ (v.i.315–17). This last vision encircles all former visions like and arching rainbow, vaporous and liquid, diaphanous, yet strangely assured and indestructible. And it contains a description of magic art necessarily apt to Shakespeare’s work as a whole. The Tempest reflects Shakespeare’s work as a whole. The Tempest reflects Shakespeare’s universe. Its lord, Prospero, thus automatically speaks as might one whose magic art had set down the plays of Shakespeare: [Quotes 5.1.33–57: ‘Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves . . . .’]. Note here, again, the imagery of sea shores, and fairy dances ‘on the sands’; and the fine tempest-description of winds, sea, sky, thunder; and the ‘oak’, ‘pine’, and ‘cedar’. Observe the references to Jove and Neptune, the thunderbolt, the ‘roaring war’ of ‘green sea’ (green when calm as in Antony and Cleopatra) and the azure vault, blackened in tempest. This tempest shuts out the ‘noontide sun’, as in Macbeth its turbulence is like ‘war’, its winds ‘mutinous’. Then again, emerging from tempests, we have the thought of miraculous resurrection, the theme of all our Final Plays; and then ‘heavenly music’. Such, in short spacers the Shakespearian description of the Shakespearian universe; for on such tempests and music is based the ‘rough magic’ of Shakespeare’s art. At the end Prospero speaks an epilogue. And here the tempest metaphor is deliberately transposed, given a new, and very personal, sense: ‘Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please . . .’ (Epilogue, 11–13) From the beginning to the end of Shakespeare’s work all ‘projects’ are associated with seaadventures; adverse fortune with tempests, but happiness with calm seas and the ‘gentle breath’ of loving winds. So the poet prays that his work, too, may have a prosperous voyage. (247–66)

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E. M. W. Tillyard, commentary on The Tempest 1936

From Shakespeare’s Last Plays (London, 2014). E. M. W. Tillyard (1889–1962) was a Master of Jesus College, Cambridge. He is best known for his book The Elizabethan World Picture (1942), in which he argued that the Elizabethan idea of universal beings linked in a particular order informed all of Elizabethan literature. His other equally well-known books on Shakespeare include Shakespeare’s Last Plays, (1938), Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944), Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (1944) and Shakespeare’s Early Comedies (1965). Tillyard’s approach in his book on the last plays is formalist in that it treats the plays as unified artifacts, unified around the themes of tragic suffering, contemplation and regeneration or restoration.

It is a common notion that Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale are experiments leading to the final success of The Tempest. I think it quite untrue of The Winter’s Tale, which in some ways though not in others deals with the tragic pattern more adequately than the later play. Certainly it deals with the destructive portion more directly and fully. On the other hand, The Tempest, by keeping this destructive portion largely in the background and dealing mainly with regeneration, avoids the juxtaposition of the two themes, which some people (of whom I am not one) find awkward in The Winter’s Tale. The simple truth is, that if you cram a trilogy into a single play something has to be sacrificed. Shakespeare chose to make a different sacrifice in each of his two successful renderings of the complete tragic pattern: unity in The Winter’s Tale, present rendering of the destructive part of the tragic pattern in The Tempest. Many readers, drugged by the heavy enchantments of Prospero’s island, may demur at my admitting the tragic element to the play at all. I can cite in support one of the latest studies of the play, Dover Wilson’s1 (although I differ somewhat in the way I think the tragic element is worked out), of the storm scene he writes: ‘It is as if Shakespeare had packed his whole tragic vision of life into one brief scene before bestowing his new vision upon us’. But one has only to look at the total plot to see that in its main lines it closely follows those of Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, and that tragedy is an organic part of it. Prospero, when one first hears of him, was the ruler of and independent state and

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beloved of his subjects. But all is not well, because the King of Naples is his enemy. Like Basilius in Sidney’s Arcadia, he commits the error of not attending carefully enough to affairs of state. The reason for this error, his Aristotelian auapria, is his love of study. He hands over the government to his brother Antonio, who proceeds to call in the King of Naples to turn Prospero out of his kingdom. Fearing the people, Antonio refrains from murdering Prospero and his infant daughter, but sets them adrift in a boat. Now, except for this last item, the plot is entirely typical of Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Allow Prospero to be put to death, give him a son instead of a daughter to live and to avenge him, and your tragic plot is complete. Such are the affinities of the actual plot of The Tempest. And in the abstract it is more typically tragic in the fashion of its age than The Winter’s Tale, with its debt to the Greek romances. In handling the theme of regeneration, Shakespeare in one way alters his method. Although a royal person had previously been the protagonist, it had been only in name. Cymbeline had indeed resembled Prospero in having his enemies at his mercy and in forgiving them, but he owed his power not to himself, but to fortune and the efforts of others. As for Leontes, he has little to do with his own regeneration; for it would be perverse to make too much of his generosity in sheltering Florizel and Perdita from the anger of Polixenes. But Prospero is the agent of his own regeneration, the parent and tutor of Miranda; and through her and through his own works he changes the minds of his enemies. It was by this centring of motives in Prospero as well as by subordinating the theme of destruction that Shakespeare gave The Tempest its unified structure. In executing his work, Shakespeare chose a method new to himself but repeated by Milton in Samson Agonistes. He began his action at a point in the story so late that the story was virtually over; and he included the total story either by narrating the past or by re-enacting samples of it: a complete reaction from the method of frontal attack used in The Winter’s Tale. For the re-enactment of tragedy it is possible to think with Dover Wilson that the storm scene does this. But it does nothing to re-enact the specific tragic plot in the play, the fall of Prospero; and one of its aims is to sketch (as it does with incomparable swiftness) the characters of the ship’s company. The true re-enactment is in the long first scene of the second act where Antonio, in persuading Sebastian to murder Alonso, personates his own earlier action in plotting against Prospero, thus drawing it out of the past and placing it before us in the present. This long scene, showing the shipwrecked King and courtiers and the conspiracy, has not had sufficient praise nor sufficient attention. Antonio’s transformation from the cynical and lazy badgerer of Gonzalo’s loquacity to the brilliantly swift and unscrupulous man of action is a thrilling affair. Just as Iago awakes from his churlish ‘honesty’ to his brilliant machinations. Antonio is indeed one of Shakespeare’s major villains: [Quotes 2.1.243–68 – Ant. Will you grant with me/ That Ferdinand is drown’d? . . . .]. We should do wrong to take the conspiracy very seriously in itself. We know Prospero’s power, and when Ariel enters and wakes the intended victims we have no fears for their future safety. But all the more weight should the scene assume as recalling the past. Dover Wilson2 greatly contributes to a right understanding of the play by stressing the first lines of the fifth act, when Prospero declares to Ariel that he will pardon his enemies, now quite at his mercy: [Quotes 5.1.17–30: Ariel: Your charm so strongly

 E. M. W. Tillyard, Commentary on The Tempest 281 works ‘em . . . .]. But when Dover Wilson would have this to represent Prospero’s sudden conversion from a previously intended vengeance, I cannot follow him. It is true that Prospero shows a certain haste of temper up to that point of the play, and that he punishes Caliban and the two other conspirators against his life with some asperity; but his comments on them, after his supposed conversion, have for me the old ring: [Quotes 5.1.267–76: ‘Mark but the badges of these men, my lords, . . . .’]. The last words express all Prospero’s old bitterness that Caliban has resisted him and refused to respond to his nurture.3 Indeed, Prospero does not change fundamentally during the play, though, like Samson’s, his own accomplished regeneration is put to the test. If he had seriously intended vengeance, why should he have stopped Sebastian and Antonio murdering Alonso? That he did stop them is proof of his already achieved regeneration from vengeance to mercy. This act, and his talk to Ariel of taking part with his reason against his fury, are once again a re-enactment of a process now past, perhaps extending over a period of many years. I do not wish to imply that the re-enactment is weak or that the temptation to vengeance was not there all the time. Prospero’s fury at the thought of Caliban’s conspiracy, which interrupts the masque, must be allowed full weight. It is not for nothing that Miranda says that – ‘Never till this day/ Saw I him touch’d with anger so distemper’d’ [4.1.144–5]. We must believe that Prospero felt thus, partly because Caliban’s conspiracy typifies all the evil of the world which has so perplexed him, and partly because he is still tempted to be revenged on Alonso and Antonio. He means to pardon them, and he will pardon them. But beneath his reason’s sway is this anger against them, which, like Satan’s before the sun in Paradise Lost, disfigures his face. When Dover Wilson calls Prospero a terrible old man, almost as tyrannical and irascible as Lear at the opening of his play, he makes a valuable comparison, but it should concern Prospero as he once was, not the character who meets us in the play, in whom these traits are mere survivals. The advantage of this technique of re-enactment was economy, its drawback an inevitable blurring of the sharp outline. The theme of destruction, though exquisitely blended in the whole, is less vivid that it is in The Winter’s Tale. Having made it so vivid in that play, Shakespeare was probably well content to put the stress on the theme of re-creation. And here he did not work solely by re-enactment. He strengthened Prospero’s re-enacted regeneration by the figures of Ferdinand and Miranda. I argued above that, in view of his background of Elizabethan chivalrous convention, Ferdinand need not have been as insignificant as he is usually supposed. Similarly, Miranda’s character has been unduly diminished in recent years. To-day, under the stress of the new psychology, men have become nervous lest they should be caught illicitly attaching their daydreams of the perfect woman to a character in fiction. They laugh at the Victorians for falling unawares into this error, and Miranda may have been one of the most popular victims. Hence the anxiety not to admire her too much. E.K. Chambers has written: ‘Unless you are sentimentalist inveterate, your emotions will not be more than faintly stirred by the blameless loves at first sight of Ferdinand and Miranda’. Schucking4 goes further and considers Miranda a poor imitation of Beaumont and Fletcher’s idea of the chaste female, an idea that could be dwelt on so lovingly and emphatically only in a lascivious age. In depicting her with her talk of ‘modesty, the jewel in my dower’ [3.1.53–4] and her protests that if Ferdinand will

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not marry her, ‘I’ll die your maid,’ [3.1.53–4] and in making Prospero so insistent that she should not lose her maidenhead before marriage, Shakespeare according to Schucking, is yielding to the demands of his age against his own better judgement. But Miranda is sufficiently successful a symbolic figure for it to matter little if she makes conventional and, in her, unnatural remarks. And even this defence may be superfluous. Since Miranda had never seen a young man, it might be doubted whether she would behave herself with entire propriety when she did. Prospero, too, had made enough mistakes in his life to be very careful to make no more. Further, Miranda was the heiress to the Duchy of Milan and her father hoped she would be Queen of Naples. What most strikingly emerged from the abdication of our late King was the strong ‘anthropological’ feeling of the masses of the people concerning the importance of virginity in a King’s consort. The Elizabethan were not less superstitious than ourselves and would have sympathized with Prospero’s anxiety that the future Queen of Naples should keep her maidenhead till marriage: otherwise ill luck would be sure to follow. To revert to Miranda’s character, like Perdita she is both symbol and human being, yet in both capacities somewhat weaker. She is the symbol of ‘original virtue,’ like Perdita, and should be set against the devilish figure of Antonio. She is the complete embodiment of sympathy with the men she thinks have been drowned: and her instincts are to create, to mend the work of destruction she has witnessed. She is – again like Perdita, though less clearly –a symbol of fertility. Stephano asks of Caliban, ‘Is it so brave a lass?’ and Caliban answers, ‘Ay, lord; she will become thy bed, I warrant,/ And bring thee forth brave brood’ [3.2.104–5]. Even if The Tempest was written for some great wedding, it need not be assumed that the masque was inserted merely to fit the occasion. Like the goddesses in Perdita’s speeches about the flowers, Juno and Ceres and the song they sing may be taken to reinforce the fertility symbolism embodied in Miranda: [Quotes 4.1.106–18 Juno. Honour, riches, marriage-blessing . . . .]. The touches of ordinary humanity in Miranda – her siding with Ferdinand against a supposedly hostile father, for instance – are too well known to need recalling. They do not amount to a very great deal and leave her vaguer as a human being than as a symbol. Middleton Murry is not at his happiest when he says that ‘they are so terribly, so agonizingly real, these women of Shakespeare’s last imagination’. As far as Miranda is concerned, any agonizing sense of her reality derives from the critic and not from the play. But this does not mean, that, judged by the play’s requirements (which are not those of brilliant realism), Miranda is not perfection. Had she been more weakly drawn, she would have been insignificant, had she been more strongly, she would have interfered with the unifying dominance of Prospero. Not only do Ferdinand and Miranda sustain Prospero in representing a new order of things that has evolved out of destruction; they also vouch for its continuation. At the end of the play Alonso and Prospero are old and worn men. A younger and happier generation is needed to secure the new state to which Prospero has so painfully brought himself, his friends, and all his enemies save Caliban. (48–58)

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John Middleton Murry, nurture and change 1936

From Shakespeare (London, 1936). John Middleton Murry (1889–1957) was a prolific writer, an influential thinker and a literary critic. His books and essays (over sixty in all) include works on literature, politics, religion and social issues. He is perhaps best known for his work on Shakespeare and John Keats. His two books on Shakespeare are Keats and Shakespeare (1925) and Shakespeare (1936). In this chapter on The Tempest from the latter work, Murry’s romantic humanist beliefs come into play. The island becomes a space where humans (except Caliban) are recast in better moral and spiritual form through Art/Nurture (which, for Murry, is not opposed to Nature in the play). However, the end of the play is touched by doubt regarding the vision of a perfected human society.

In The Tempest this ‘sensation’ of the final Shakespeare achieves its perfect dramatic form. The relation between it and its predecessors is made sensible by Alonso’s question to Prospero: ‘When did you lose your daughter?/ Pros​.​in this last tempest’ (v.i.152–3). Marina was lost in an actual tempest; Perdita, first, in the tempest of her father’s jealousy, and then exposed in an actual tempest: but Miranda is not involved in a tempest at all. Her tempest is one in which others are overwhelmed, wherein she is engulfed by her imagination alone: [Quotes 1.2.5–9: ‘O, I have suffered . . . .’]. And, when the noble creature emerges, it is in love of him that she is lost. Miranda sees Ferdinand first, by Prospero’s art. It was indeed to safeguard her; for when at last she sees the others of the company before her, she cries: [Quotes 5.1.181–4: ‘O wonder! . . . .’]. And Prospero’s wise-sad answer to her ecstasy is simply: ‘Tis new to thee’. Of the four chief actors who are before her eyes, three are evil; or, more truly, were evil. The one untainted is Gonzalo, whose loving-kindness has saved Prospero from death, and steaded him with the means of life, and more: ‘Knowing I loved my books, he furnish’d me/ From mine own library with volumes that/ I prize above my dukedom’ (i.ii.166–8). From Prospero’s study of these volumes comes his power. He is the votary of wisdom. Because he had been so ‘transported and rapt in secret studies’, he had fallen a victim to the machinations of his brother and lost his dukedom.

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Because I am by temperament averse to reading Shakespeare as allegory I am struck by my own impression that The Tempest is more nearly symbolical that any of his plays. I find it impossible to deny that Prospero is, to some extent, an imaginative paradigm of Shakespeare himself in his function as poet; and that he does in part embody Shakespeare’s self-awareness at the conclusion of his poetic career. To this conclusion I am forced by many considerations. The simplest and weightiest of the all is this. That there is a final period in Shakespeare’s work, which exists in reality and is as subtly homogeneous as a living thing, is to me indubitable. It is equally certain that The Tempest is, artistically, imaginatively and ‘sensationally’, the culmination of that period. And finally, it is certain that Prospero’s function in the drama of The Tempest is altogether peculiar. He is its prime mover; he governs and directs it from the beginning to the end; he stands clean apart from all Shakespeare’s characters in this, or any other period of his work. He is the quintessence of a quintessence of a quintessence. To what extent Prospero is Shakespeare, I do not seek to determine. I have no faith in allegorical interpretation, because I am certain that allegory was alien to Shakespeare’s mind. I can conceive innumerable interpretations of Prospero beginning thus: ‘It is through his dedication to the pursuit of secret wisdom the he loses his dukedom; so Shakespeare, through his dedication to the mystery of Poetry, forwent the worldly eminence which his genius could have achieved’. That kind of thing means nothing to me, and I find no trace of it in the length and breadth of Shakespeare’s work. When I reach the conclusion that Prospero is, in some sense, Shakespeare, I mean no more than that, being what he is, fulfilling his unique function in a Shakespeare play, and that in all probability Shakespeare’s last, it was inevitable that Prospero should be, as it were, uniquely ‘shot with’ Shakespeare. I mean no more than that it is remarkable and impressive that Shakespeare should have given his last play this particular form, which carried with it this particular necessity: which is no other than that of coming as near to projecting the last phase of his own creative imagination into the figure of a single character as Shakespeare could do without shattering his own dramatic method. But, in saying this, I do not mean that Shakespeare deliberately contrived The Tempest to this end. He wanted, simply, to write a play that would satisfy himself, by expressing something, or many things, that still were unexpressed. For this purpose, a Prospero was necessary. He was necessary to make accident into design. The Winter’s Tale is a lovely story, but it is in substance (though not in essence) a simple tale, a sequence of chances. There is no chance in The Tempest; everything is foreordained. Of course, this is appearance only. The events of The Winter’s Tale are no less foreordained than those of The Tempest; both are foreordained by Shakespeare. But in The Tempest, Shakespeare employs a visible agent to do the work. That is the point. For it follows, first, that the visible agent of Shakespeare’s poetic mind must be one endowed with supernatural powers, a ‘magician’; and, second, that what he foreordains must be, in some quintessential way, human and humane. Once grant a character such powers, their use must satisfy us wholly. Chance may be responsible for the loss and saving of Perdita, and the long severance of Hermione and Leontes, but not humane omnipotence. It may be said that this is to put the cart before the horse, and that Shakespeare was concerned primarily with the solution of a ‘technical’ problem. It may be that

 John Middleton Murry, Nurture and Change 285 his central ‘idea’ was the obliteration of the evil done and suffered by one generation through the love of the next, and that his problem was to represent that ‘idea’ with the same perfection as he had in the past represented the tragedy of the evil done and suffered. (Though to call this a merely technical problem is fantastic: a whole religion is implicit in it). In The Winter’s Tale he had pretty completely humanized the crude story of Pericles: but Leontes’ jealousy was extravagant, Antigonus’ dispatch a joke, the oracle clumsy, and Hermione’s disguise as statue a theatrical trick. The machinery was unworthy of the theme. It stood in the way of the theme’s significance. We are driven back to the same conclusion. In order to precipitate the significance of the theme out of a condition of solution, a palpable directing intelligence was required. What seemed to be accident must now be felt as design. There is but one accident in The Tempest, the accident which brings the ship to the island. And Shakespeare is emphatic that this is accident: [Quotes 1.2175–83: Mir. And now, I pray you, sir, . . . .]. Initial accident there must be. If Prospero’s power extended to the world beyond the Island, so that he could compel the voyage tither, the drama would be gone. Prospero would be omnipotent indeed; and the presence of evil and wrong in the world he controlled would be evidence of devilishness in his nature. The Tempest implies a tremendous criticism of vulgar religion. I do not think that Shakespeare intended this deliberately; it was the spontaneous outcome of the working of his imagination. But I think there was a moment in the writing of his drama when he was deeply disturbed by the implications of the method to which he had been brought by the natural effort towards complete utterance of his ‘sensation’. The Island is a realm where God is Good, where true Reason rules; it is what would be if Humanity – the best in man – controlled the life of man. And Prospero is a man in whom the best in man has won the victory: not without a struggle, of which we witness the reverberation: [Quotes 5.1.17–32: Ari. Your charm so strongly works them . . . .]. ‘Themselves’ – not what they were, but what they should be. This is no stretch of interpretation. Gonzalo drives it home afterwards. ‘All of us found ourselves, when no man was his own’. The Island is a realm, then; controlled by a man who has become himself, and has the desire, the will and the power to make other men themselves. Miranda is what she is because she has been his pupil: ‘Here/ Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit/ Than other princess’ can that have more time/ For vainer hours; and tutors not so careful’ (i.ii.171–4). Here is a difference between Miranda and Perdita; and an important one, for it belongs, as we shall see, to the essence of Shakespeare’s thinking. It is not a difference in the imaginative substance of those lovely creatures. We must not say that Perdita is the child of nature, and Miranda the child of art. They are creature of the same kind. The difference is only that in The Tempest Shakespeare wants to make clear what he means: that men and women do not become their true selves by Nature merely, but by Nurture. So it is that, for all his power, Prospero cannot transmute Caliban, for he is one ‘On whose nature/ Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains/ Humanely taken, all, all lost, quiet lost . . . .’ (iv.I.188–91). The thought is vital to The Tempest the Island is a realm where by Art or Nurture Prospero transforms man’s Nature to true Human Nature. The process, in the case of the evil-doers, must by dramatic necessity

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be sudden, and as it were magical; but we must understand its import. For this process is the meaning of Prospero. We can approach Prospero by way of Gonzalo, who was, to the limit of his power, Prospero’s loyal and understanding friend in the evil past. Gonzalo has his own dream. After the shipwreck, he looks upon the beauty and richness of the enchanted island. ‘Had I plantation of this isle, my lord’ – if it were his to colonize and rule – ‘what would I do?’ and he answers; or rather Shakespeare answers for him. It is significant that Shakespeare takes his words from Montaigne. We have a choice: either the passage from Montaigne’s essay ‘Of the Caniballes’ was so familiar to Shakespeare that he knew it by heart, or he wrote Gonzalo’s word with the passage from Florio’s Montaigne before his eyes. Other solution there is none. This is not a reminiscence, but direct copying. I am sorry, says Montaigne, that the ‘cannibals’ were not discovered long ago, when there were living men who could have appreciated their significance: I am sorie, Lycurgus and Plato had it not: for me seemeth that what in those nations we see by experience, doth not only exceed all the pictures wherewith licentious Poesie hath profoundly imbellished the golden age, and all her quaint inventions to faine a happy condition of man, but also the conception and desire of Philosophy. They could not imagine a genuitie so pure and simple, as we see it by experience; nor ever believe our societie might be maintained with so little art and human combination.

The words are worth the scrutiny. We know that Shakespeare read and studied them while he was writing The Tempest. There are very few passages, outside North’s Plutarch, of which we can certainly say so much: and assuredly no passage of the few we know that Shakespeare studied bears so nearly upon the heart of his final theme as this one. Montaigne says that he regrets the Plato and Lycurgius did not know of the ‘cannibals’. Those great lawmakers – one the legislator of an actual, the other of an ideal society – would have seen in the society of the South American savages something that exceeded ‘the conception and desire of philosophy.’ They could never have believed that a society of men might be maintained with so little art and human combination – that is to say, with so little artifice and contrivance. Montaigne is saying that the life of the South American Indians proves that mankind is capable of living peacefully, happily and humanely without the constraint of law, or the institution of private property: It is a nation, would I answer Plato, that hath no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie no use of service, of riches or of povertie; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle: no respect of kindred, but common, no apparel but natural, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corne, or mettle. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulations, covetousness, envie, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them. How dissonant would hee finde his imaginarie commonwealth from this perfection! Gonzalo imagines that he has the empty island to colonize. What would I do? He says: [Quotes 2.1.147–65 ‘I’ the commonwealth I would by contraries . . . .’]. What Shakespeare has done is singular, and revealing. Montaigne, true sceptic that he was,

 John Middleton Murry, Nurture and Change 287 had pitted the savage against the civilized. Shakespeare omits from Montaigne’s picture the incessant fighting, the plurality of wives, the cannibalism itself, and puts his words in Gonzalo’s mouth as a description of the ideal; and at the same time he sets before us, in Caliban, his own imagination of the savage, in which brutality and beauty are astonishingly one nature. So Shakespeare makes clear his conviction that it is not by a return to the primitive that mankind must advance. Yet he is as critical as Montaigne himself of the world of men. The wise Gonzalo when he looks upon the ‘strange shapes’ who bring in the unsubstantial banquet and ‘dance about it with gentle actions of salutation, inviting the king to eat’, says: [Quotes 3.3.27–34: ‘If in Naples . . . .’]. But these are not savages; they are Prospero’s spirits. This reaction to Montaigne, this subtle change of Montaigne, might be put down to a purely instinctive notion in Shakespeare, were it not for the fact that Shakespeare had used this essay of Montaigne before. He had been reading it at the time he was writing The Winter’s Tale, for Polixenes’ memorable defence of the Art which mend Nature, and is therefore itself Nature, is a reply to the passage in Montaigne’s essay which immediately precedes those we have quoted. Montaigne begins by declaring that there is nothing in the Indians – head-hunting, cannibalism, incessant warfare, and community of wives, included – that is either barbarous or savage ‘unless men call that barbarism which is not common to them’. He, is, of course, turning it all to the account of his ethical skepticism: truth this side of the Alps, falsehood the other. He goes on: They are even savage, as we call those fruits wilde, which nature of her selfe, and of her ordinarie progresse hath produced: whereas indeed they are those which our selves have altered by our artificiall devices, and diverted from their common order, we should rather terme savage. In those are the true and most profitable vertues, and natural properties most lively and vigorous, which in these we have bastardized, applying them to the pleasure of our corrupted taste. And if notwithstanding, in divers fruits of those countries that were never tilled, we shall finde, that in respect of ours they are most excellent, and as delicate into our taste; there is no reason, art should gaine the point of honour or our great and puissant mother Nature. . . . Those nations seem therefore so barbarous to me because they have received very little fashion form humane wit and are yet neere their originall naturalitie. The lawes of nature do yet commande them, which are but little bastardized by ours . . . .

Precisely so did Perdita exclude ‘carnations and streaked gillyvors’ from her garden, because they are called ‘nature’s bastards’, because ‘There is an art which in their piedness shares/With great creating nature’ [The Winter’s Tale 4.1.87–8]. Shakespeare will have nothing to do with that false antithesis between Art and Nature. Says Polixenes: ‘Nature is made better by no mean but Nature makes that mean’. The Art that makes Nature better is Nature’s Art. That is the true distinction, between Nature’s art and man’s, and it has perhaps never been more simply or subtly formulated. Where man’s art improves nature, it is nature’s art in man; where it makes nature worse, it is man’s art alone. In The Winter’s Tale, we have first, Shakespeare’s casual, in The Tempest his deliberate reply to the skepticism of Montaigne.

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And thus it is that Shakespeare, in Gonzalo’s words, with splendid irony changes Montaigne’s report of the Indians, from mere nature, to a picture of nature’s art in man, working on man. He discards the savagery, and retains only what belongs to the ideal and human. It is the innocence not of the primitive, but of the ultimate, which he sees to embody. And that is manifest from the very structure of The Tempest. Caliban is the primitive; but Miranda and Ferdinand are the ultimate. There is no confusion possible between them, and the sophistry of Montaigne is exorcised by a wave of the wand. Nature and Nurture alone can make human Nature. But the nurturer that is Nature’s own is hard to find. In The Tempest there is Prospero to govern the process, and to work the miracle of a new creation. Poised between Caliban, the creature of the baser elements – earth and water – and Ariel, the creature of the finer – fire and air – is the work of Prospero’s alchemy: the loving humanity of Ferdinand and Miranda. Miranda is a new creature, but Ferdinand must be made new. He is made new by the spell of Ariel’s music. [Quotes 1.2.390–405: ‘Ferd: Sitting on a bank, . . . .’]. From the ecstasy of that transforming music, Ferdinand awakes to behold Miranda, and Miranda beholds him. Iam nova progenies1. . . . Beneath a like transforming spell, eventually all the company pass – Alonzo, the false brother, Sebastian and Antonio, the traitors. In the men of sin it works madness, or what seems like madness, but is a desperation wrought by the dreadful echoing of the voice of conscience by the elements: [Quotes 3.3.94–106: ‘Gon. I’ the name of something holy, sir, why stand you . . . .’]. That which Christian theology imposes on evil men at the Judgement-Day – ‘The tortures of the damned’ – by Prospero’s art they experience in life. They are rapt out of time by his spells. To Gonzalo, whose life is clear, it brings only such change as that which Ariel’s music works upon Ferdinand. But by these different paths, the condition which Gonzalo describes: ‘All of us found ourselves, when no man was his own’. So that when Miranda looks upon them, and cries for joy at ‘the brave new world that has such creatures in it’, they really are new creatures that she sees. They have suffered a sea-change. And Prospero’s wise-sad word: ‘Tis new to thee’, if we were to take it precisely, applies only to the world beyond the island, not to those of its creatures he has transformed. But it is not the word of Prospero; it is of Prospero ‘shot by’ Shakespeare, who knows it is not so easy to transform men, still less a world. And it is a sudden pang of the awareness which works in the strange conclusion of the lovely masque which Prospero sets before Ferdinand and Miranda, to celebrate their betrothal. He has promised to bestow on them ‘some vanity of mine art’. It is the kind of lovely thing that Shakespeare found it natural to write: a vision of Nature’s beauty, ministering to the natural beauty of Ferdinand’s and Miranda’s love. Ferdinand, enchanted, cries: ‘Let me live here ever:/ So rare a wonder’d father and a wise/ Make this place Paradise’ (iv.i.122–4). Suddenly, towards the end of the concluding dance, Prospero remembers the clumsy plot of Caliban and Stephano against his life. He is in no danger, nor could he be conceived to be in danger. Yet he is profoundly disturbed, strangely disturbed, and the strangeness of the disturbance is strangely insisted on. [Quotes 4.1.143–63 Fer. This is strange: your father’s in some passion . . . .]. It is not the plot against his life which has produced this disturbance. It is the thought of what

 John Middleton Murry, Nurture and Change 289 the plot means: the Nature on which Nurture will never stick. The disturbance and the thought come from beyond the visible action of the drama itself. What Prospero seems to be thinking concerning the vanity of his art, has been disturbed and magnified by what Shakespeare is thinking concerning the vanity of his. He has imagined a mankind redeemed, transformed, re-born; the jewel of the wood becomes the jewel of the world. As the recollection of Caliban’s evil purpose seems to wake Prospero, so does the recollection of the world of reality wake Shakespeare: and these two awakings are mingled with one another. In The Tempest Shakespeare had embodied his final dream – of a world created anew, a new race of men and women. Was it only a dream? (327–34)

55

F. R. Leavis, reality 1942

From ‘The Criticism of Shakespeare’s Last Plays – a Caveat,’ Scrutiny 10.4 (1942), 339–45. F. R. Leavis (1895–1978) was among the foremost critics of his generation. He was founder and senior editor of the prestigious literary review, Scrutiny, and wrote a number of influential books including Reevaluation (1936), Education and the University (1943) and The Great Tradition (1936). Leavis was particularly interested in the relation between form or composition and moral interest.

The Tempest is by more general agreement a masterpiece than The Winter’s Tale, but it is a very different kind of thing (to complete briefly the hint of comparison I threw out above). Lytton Strachey, in his essay on Shakespeare’s Final Period (see Books and Characters), gives us an opening: ‘There can be no doubt that the peculiar characteristics which distinguish Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale from the dramas of Shakespeare’s prime are present here in still greater degree. In The Tempest, unreality has reached its apotheosis’. Lytton Strachey’s ‘unreality,’ strongly derogatory in intention, has to be understood, of course, in relation to the Bradley-Archer assumptions of his approach. Actually, it seems to me that The Tempest differs from The Winter’s Tale in being much closer to the novelist’s ‘reality’. The ‘unreality,’ instead of penetrating and transmuting everything as in The Winter’s Tale, is in The Tempest confined to Prospero’s imagery and its agents. Prospero, himself, the Neapolitan and Milanese nobility and gentry, Stephano and Trinculo, the ship’s crew – all these belong as much to the ‘reality’ of the realistic novelist as the play of Othello does. Prospero manages the wreck, lands the parties and directs their footsteps about the island to the final convergence, but they strike us. In their behaviour and conversation, as people of the ordinary everyday world. The courtiers are Elizabethan toffs, and Gonzalo’s attempt to distract the king and raise the tone of the conversation with a piece of advanced thought from Montaigne is all in keeping. Even Caliban (though sired by the devil on a witch) leads the modern commentator, quite appropriately, to discuss Shakespeare’s interest in the world of new discovery and in the impact of civilization on the native.

 F. R. Leavis, Reality 291 The ‘unreality’ functions in Ariel and in the power (as it were a daydream actualized) that enables Prospero to stage the scene of repentance and restitution. But the nature of this power as a license of imagination stands proclaimed in the essential symbolism of the paly; and not only does Prospero finally renounce magic, break his staff and drown his book, but the day-dream has never been allowed to falsify human and moral realities. That Alonso should, without the assistance of magic, suffer pangs of conscience is not in the least incredible; on the other hand, we note that the sinister pair, Sebastian and Antonio, remain what they were. They may be fairly set over against Ferdinand and Miranda, and they represent a potent element in that world to which lovers are returning, and in which, unprotected by magic; they are to spend their lives. ‘O brave new world,/ That has such people in’t!’ [5.1.183–4] – that is both unironical and ironical. Shakespeare’s power to present acceptably and movingly the unironical vision (for us given in Miranda and Ferdinand) goes with his power to contemplate the irony at the same time. (344–5)

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Theodore Spencer, ordering of characters 1942

From Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York, 1942). Theodore Spencer (1902–49) was a poet and academic affiliated with Harvard University and Cambridge University. His scholarly works include Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, which was a compilation of the Lowell Lectures on Shakespeare that he delivered in 1942, and A Garland for John Donne (1958). Spencer writes that The Tempest’s characterization is loosely based on the hierarchical ordering of nature’s categories into the sensible (Caliban), the rational (all of the human characters, except Prospero) and the intellectual (Prospero). However, ultimately, the play defies any such neat schematization and is informed by paradox.

. . . . it is tempting to see in this last of Shakespeare’s complete plays both his final treatment of the difference between appearance and reality and his final presentation, transformed by a new imaginative vision, of the three levels in Nature’s hierarchy – the sensible, the rational and the intellectual – which formed the common psychological assumption of his time. If we succumbed to that temptation, we would claim that the play shows a temporary, apparent, evil dispelled by a lasting, real, good, and that Caliban represents the level of sense, the various noblemen the untrustworthy level of reason, and Prospero with his servant Ariel, the level of uncontaminated intellect. The Tempest might thus be made the final piece in an ordered pattern of fully developed insight, a dramatization based on a new interpretation of Nature’s distinctions, of a final vision of redemption and the triumph of goodness. But the play itself, like all Shakespeare’s work, like human life, defies any scheme so neat and so mechanical. The common assumptions are no doubt present, a part of the texture, but the play is very far from being a mere illustration of them. The characters and the action have a more individual value, hence a more universal significance, than could be given them as mere illustrations of a scheme. Nor can we say, as Prospero returns to his kingdom and Miranda is united to Ferdinand, that there is any universal triumph of goodness. Evil beings incorrigibly still exist, though they are no longer in control nor at the center; the center is edged with darkness, though our eyes may be

 Theodore Spencer, Ordering of Characters 293 directed at the central light of transfiguration and restoration. In a world of re-created and newly fashioned relationships there is still a silent Antonio who scowls alone. Yet, though there is nothing mechanical about their presentation, the familiar levels of value do exist in the play, and to be aware of them may help us to understand it. Caliban, complicated character that he is, does primarily represent the animal level; the ‘beast Caliban,’ as Prospero calls him, is a thing ‘not honor’d with human shape’ (ii.2.283); he is set apart – as it were abstracted – from human nature. We are no longer in the climate of tragedy, where human beings themselves are seen as animals, like the Spartan dog Iago or the wolfish daughters of Lear. Though he gives a hint of reformation at the end, Caliban, in Prospero’s eyes, is unimprovable; he cannot be tamed by reason; he is ‘A devil, a born devil, on whose nature/ Nurture will never stick; on whom my pains/ Humanely taken, are all lost, quite lost’ (iv.1.188–90). And it is characteristic of him that he should take Stephano, the lowest available specimen of human nature, for a god. The human beings on Prospero’s island are a various crew, perhaps deliberately chosen to present as wide a range as possible. Stephano and Trinculo are Shakespeare’s last clowns, representing the laughable, amorally lovable, and quite unchangeable level of human nature; they are appropriately associated with Caliban. Antonio is the rigid, selfish schemer, an egotistic isolationist, cut off from all concerns but his own; Alonzo and Sebastian are also schemers, equally selfish but not as coldly self-centered as Antonio. There is Gonzalo, the testy and amiable official servant of goodness and order, the last of Shakespeare’s old men, and there is Ferdinand, the ideal son and prince, the appropriate mate for Miranda, the ‘wonder’ of the island who, like the heroines of the other last plays, is a symbol of unspoilt humanity. Most of these people, with the important and significant exception of the worst and the best, go through some kind of punishment or purgation. The low characters, Stephano and Trinculo, are merely punished, physically: they get befouled and belabored, as is appropriate – the stuff they are made of must be beaten into shape, it lacks the deeper awareness necessary for purgation. But the courtly figures, Alonzo, Antonio and Sebastian are subjected to purgation. They lose their human faculties for a time, their brains are useless, ‘boiled’ within their skulls; ‘ignorant fumes . . . . mantle their clearer reason,’ until finally ‘Their understanding/ Begins to swell, and the approaching tide/ Will shortly fill the reasonable shores/ That now lie foul and muddy’ (v.1.79–82). And Alonzo, if not Antonio, is cured by the process. His reason having returned, he resigns the dukedom, entreating Prospero to pardon his wrongs. It is at this point that Miranda and Ferdinand are discovered, and we forget that not all of mankind is regenerate as we hear Miranda’s ‘How beauteous mankind is ! O brave new world,/ That has such people in’t!’ (v.1.183–4). Prospero, until he drowns his book, is clearly on a level above that of ordinary human nature, and though it would be an error to think of him as a representative of purely intellectual capacity, his use of magic is a way of making his superiority dramatically effective; the elves and demi-puppets that have been his agents were considered in certain contemporary circles of thought to be creatures above man in the hierarchy of Nature, between men and angels.1 Prospero’s command of them obviously involves a more than human power and returns to the human level again. He is purged, but his

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purgation is exactly opposite to the purgation of Alonzo: Alonzo sinks below reason before returning to it; before Prospero returns to the rational human level he has lived for a time above it. The important thing to notice is his return. I cannot agree with those critics who say that Prospero at the end of the play, ‘finds himself immeasurably nearer than before to the impassivity of the gods.’ ‘His theurgical operations,’ says Mr. Curry, ‘have accomplished their purpose. He wishes now to take the final step and to consummate the assimilation of his soul to the gods. And this step is to be accomplished through prayer’.2 But this is clearly a misinterpretation of Shakespeare’s meaning. Prospero abjures his magic not to become like the gods, but to return to humanity: ‘I will discase me, and myself present,/ As I was sometime Milan’ (v.1.85–6). He compares (v.1.170) Alonzo’s ‘content’ at his rediscovery of Ferdinand to his own content at being restored to his dukedom, and in fact much of the point of the play is lost if we do not see Prospero returning to worldly responsibility. He must be restored to his position in the state, as he must be restored to his position as a human being; he has come to the conclusion that, though he can wreak supernatural havoc on his enemies, The conclusion that, though he can wreak supernatural havoc on his enemies, ‘the rarer action is/ In virtue than in vengeance’ (v.1.27–8). And, his domination of the spirits having been outside the limits of human nature, his wisdom makes him return to his rightful place as a governor of himself, and as a governor, through his dukedom, of other human beings as well. Prospero, on his enchanted island, has been like a god, controlling the world of nature and elements: [ Quotes 5.1. 41-50: ‘I have bedimm’d/ The noontide sun, . . . .’]. But he abjures his magic, and having ‘required Some heavenly music’ so that the courtiers may be restored to their senses – in Shakespeare’s theatre the music would have come from above, from the musicians’ gallery under the ‘heavens’, which were painted with the stars – he breaks his staff and plans to drown his book of magic ‘deeper that did ever plummet sound’. In the company of his fellow men, Prospero returns to Milan. This is Shakespeare’s conclusion, the conclusion of the dramatist, some of whose most normal and likeable characters – Berowne, Hotspur, Mercutio – had been, from the beginning, men with a strong sense of everyday reality. There is something of these men in Prospero, though Prospero is of course infinitely wiser than they are, since he has surveyed everything, and has risen to a control of the supernatural before returning to the normal human life which they exemplified so much more naively than he. But in one way they are closer to Prospero, to Shakespeare’s final vision of man’s nature, than the wracked and tortured heroes of the great tragedies. For those heroes were split by an internal conflict, a conflict that was expressed in terms of the conflict about man’s nature that was so deeply embedded in the consciousness of the age: whereas is Prospero there is no conflict; in his control of his world, internal conflict has no place. And yet the view of man’s nature that is so profoundly and movingly illustrated in the great tragic heroes has, after all, a relation to the view of life that is illustrated by The Tempest. Evil does exist – in the plotting of the courtiers, in the unredeemable Antonio, in the tameable animal nature of Caliban. And it may not be too far-fetched to see, in the very different ways by which Hamlet, Othello, Lear and Macbeth become, at the end

 Theodore Spencer, Ordering of Characters 295 of the action, resigned to the situations in which they find themselves, some relation to the theme of acceptance and reconciliation which is dominant in The Tempest. Theirs, however, was a tragic reconciliation, and though it enlarges our conception of their characters, the evil in man’s nature has done its work. In The Tempest whatever evil remains is impotent, and goodness returns to action. Here, as in all the last plays, there is a re-birth, a return to life, a heightened, almost symbolic, awareness of the beauty of normal humanity after it has been purged of evil – a blessed reality under the evil appearance. It is not merely a literal reality; the mountains and waters, the human beings, have changed since Shakespeare first looked at them in the early 1590s. The tragic period has intervened; the conflict has given the assurance a richer and deeper meaning. But the literal reality is there just the same, in a garland of flowers, in a harmony of music, as a basis for the acceptance and the vision. (195–201)

57

Wilson Knight, commentary on The Tempest 1947

From The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays (London, 1961). For a biographical note on G. Wilson Knight, see No. 52. Wilson Knight’s book The Crown of Life is based on the thesis that Shakespeare’s final plays are ‘the culmination of a series which starts about the middle of Shakespeare’s writing career and exposes to a careful analysis a remarkable coherence and significance . . . .’ They are in fact an ‘inevitable development’ of the earlier plays and, together, all the plays constitute a unified body of work. The Tempest is a work into which Shakespeare projects his own artistic and spiritual progress (and indeed Knight links the two): ‘He is now the object of his own search and no other theme but that of his visionary self is now of power to call forth the riches of his imagination.’[1]

As Zarathustra thus discoursed he stood nigh unto the entrance of his cave; but with the final words he slipped away from his guests and fled for a brief while into the open air. O clean odours around me! he cried. O blessed, stillness around me! But where are my beasts? Draw nigh, mine Eagle and my Serpent! Tell me, my beasts – all these Higher men, smell they, perchance, not sweet? O clean odours around me! Now only do I know and feel how I love you my beasts! Thus Spake Zarthustra, The Song of Melancholy We have seen how these final plays tend to refashion old imagery into some surprising dramatic incident; of which the most striking examples are the jewel-throwninto-the-sea, Thaisa in her casket-coffin; Pericles on board his storm-tossed ship; the co-presence of actual storm and bear, and old poetic association, in The Winter’s Tale; the appearance of Jupiter the Thunderer in Cymbeline. In these we find a variation of a normal Shakespearian process; for Shakespeare is continually at work and splitting up and recombining already used plots, person, and themes, weaving something ‘new and strange’ from old material. Much of his later tragedy and history is contained in Titus Andronicus and Henry VI; much of later comedy in Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The opposition of cynic and romantic in Romeo and Juliet gives us Mercutio and Romeo; the same opposition – with what a difference! – becomes Iago and Othello; and again; Enobarbus and Antony. Prince Hal and Hotspur together

 Wilson Knight, Commentary on The Tempest 297 Henry V; and as for Falstaff, his massive bulk contains in embryo much of the later tragedies in their nihilistic, king-shattering, impact; though, as a comedian, he stands between Sri Toby and Autolycus. One could go on, and on. The last plays are peculiar in their seizing on poetry itself, as it were, for their dominating effects; and in doing this also find themselves often reversing the logic of life as we know it, redeveloping the discoveries and recognitions of old comedy into more purposeful conclusions, impregnated with a far higher order of dramatic belief. The finding of Aemilia as an abbess in The Comedy of Errors forecasts the finding of Thaisa as priestess of Diana in Pericles; the recovery of Hero, supposed dead, in Much Ado about Nothing that of Hermione; Juliet and Imogen endure each a living death after use of similar potions. What is first subsidiary, or hinted by the poetry itself, as when Romeo or Cleopatra dream of reunion beyond, or within, death (Romeo and Juliet V.i.109; Antony and Cleopatra V.ii.75–100), is rendered convincing later. This tendency The Tempest drives to the limit, for once, Shakespeare has no objective story before him from which to create. He spins his plot from his own poetic world entirely, simplifying the main issues of his total work – plot, poetry, persons; whittling off the non-essential and leaving the naked truth exposed. The Tempest, patterned of storm and music, is thus an interpretation of Shakespeare’s world. Its originating action is constructed, roughly, on the pattern of The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, wherein wreck in tempest leads to separation of certain persons and their reunion on a strange shore; the plots being entwined with magic and amazement, as in Antipholus of Syracuse’s comment on Ephesus as a land of ‘Lapland sorcerers’ (The Comedy of Errors IV​.iii​​.II), and Sebastian’s amazement at Olivia’s welcome (Twelfth Night IV​.iii​.1–21; see also Viola’s pun on Illyria and Elysium at I.ii.2–3). There is an obvious further relation of The Tempest to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both plays showing a fairy texture, with Puck and Ariel, on first acquaintance, appearing as bloodbrethren, though the differences are great. The balance of tempests and music, not only in imagery but in plot too, throughout the Comedies (including A Midsummers Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice) here reaches its consummation; but the Tragedies, wherein tempests and music are yet more profoundly important, are also at work within our new pattern of shipwreck and survival. Prospero is a composite of many Shakespearian heroes; not in ‘character’, since, there is no one quite like him elsewhere, but rather in his fortunes and the part he plays as a sovereign wrongfully dethroned he carries the overtones of tragic royalty enjoyed by Richard II. Ejected from his dukedom by a wicked brother – ‘That a brother should be so perfidious’ (I.ii.67) – he is placed, too, like the unfortunate Duke in As You Like It and as Don Pedro might have been placed had Don John’s rebellion succeeded in Much Ado about Nothing. Clarence, Orlando and Edgar suffer from similar betrayals Now Prospero’s reaction is one of horror at such betrayal of a ‘trust’ and a ‘confidence sans bound’ (I.ii. 95–6) by ‘one whom’, as he tells Miranda, ‘next thyself of all the world I lov’d’ (I.ii.68–9). So Valentine suffers from Proteus’ betrayal in The Two Gentleman of Verona and Antonio, as he thinks, from Sebastian’s in Twelfth Night. King Henry treats the faithless lords in Henry V to a long tirade of withering blank-verse on ingratitude and betrayal comparable with Richard II’s scathing denunciation of his betrayers ingratitude generally is basic to the emotions, speeches, and songs of As You Like It;

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and in King Lear we have a ‘filial ingratitude’ (III.Iv.14), corresponding to Prospero’s viewing of himself as ‘a good parent’, too kindly begetting in his child (meaning his brother) a corresponding ‘falsehood’ (I.ii.95; cp King Lear, ‘Your old kind father whose frank heart gave all’ at III.Iv.20). Loyalty to king, master, friend, wife, husband, is a continued theme. It is basic in Julius Caesar, in Brutus’ relation to Caesar, in Portia to Brutus, in the friendship of Brutus and Cassius: it vitalizes the whole of Antony and Cleopatra, with the subtly defined, personal, tragedy of Enobarbus – ‘a master leaver and a fugitive’ (IV.Ix.22). There are the loyal friends: Antonio to Sebastian; Horatio to Hamlet; or servants – the Bastard in King John, Adam, Kent; Gonzalo here winning a corresponding honour. The extensions into sexual jealousy are equally, or more, important; as in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet (felt on the father’s behalf by the son), Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline. There is a recurring sense of desertion, of betrayal, very strong in Troilus and Cressida; and also in King Lear, the old man’s age underlining his helplessness. In King Lear, and often elsewhere, the result is a general nausea at human falsity; the poet continually driving home a distinction of falsehood, and especially flattery, and true, unspectacular, devotion (as in Theseus’s words to Hippolyta, A Midsummer Night’s Dream V.i.89–105). This disgust tends to project the action into wild nature, conceived, as in The Two Gentleman of Verona, As You Like It, and King Lear, as an improvement on the falsities of civilization. In King Lear the return to nature is acted by Edgar and endured, for his purgation, by Lear on the tempest-torn heath; while many variations are played throughout on the comparison and contrast of human evil with the beasts and elemental forces. The pattern of The Winter’s Tale shows a similar movement from falsehood through rugged nature to an idealized rusticity. Of all this the great prototype, or archetype, is Timon of Athens, where the princely hero, conceived as a sublime patron and lover of humanity, is so thunder-struck by discovery of falsehood and ingratitude that he rejects man and all his works and in uncompromising bitterness retires in nakedness to a cave by the seashore, where he denounces to all who visit him the vices of civilization and communes, in savage solitude, with all of nature that is vast and eternal; his story finally fading into the ocean surge. The Tempest shows a similar movement. Prospero, like Timon and Belarius – for Belarius is another, driven to the mountains by the ingratitude of Cymbeline – lives (presumably) in a cave; like Timon, by the sea. He is akin, too, to all princes whose depth of understanding accompanies or succeeds political failure: to Hamlet, Brutus, Richard II, Henry VI. Hamlet, like Timon, is an archetypal figure, being a complex of many heroes. He is out of joint with a society of which he clearly sees the decadence and evil. Through his ghostly converse and consequent profundity of spiritual disturbance, he is unfitted for direct action, while nevertheless doing much to control the other persons, indeed dominating them, half magically, from within. Hamlet is a student and scholar; and in this too, as in his surface (though not actual) ineffectuality and his revulsion from an evil society, he forecasts the learned Prospero, whose dukedom was ‘reputed/ In dignity, and for the liberal arts,/ Without a parallel (I.ii.72–3). Such enlightenment was bought at a cost: ‘these being all my study,/ The government I cast upon my brother,/ And to my state grew stranger, being transported/ And rapt in secret studies’(I.ii.74–7).

 Wilson Knight, Commentary on The Tempest 299 Prospero is in straight descent from those other impractical governors, Agamemnon in Troilus and Cressida, whose philosophic attitude to his army’s disaster (I.iii.1–30) calls forth Ulysses’ famous speech in order; and Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, in Measure for Measure, whose depth of study and psychological insight make execution of justice impossible. All these are in Prospero; while the surrounding action, both serious and comic, condenses the whole of Shakespeare’s political wisdom. He is also a recreation of Cerimon in Pericles. Listen to Cerimon: [Quotes from Pericles 3.2.26–31: ‘I hold it ever . . . .’]. And to Prospero: ‘I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated/ To closeness and the bettering of my mind/ With that which, but by being so retir’d,/ O’erpriz’d all popular rate . . . .’ (I.ii.89–92). The lines set the disadvantage of the monastic life against the supreme end it pursues. Duke Prospero was, like Lord Cerimon (also a nobleman), a religious recluse on the brink of magical power; and may be compared with those earlier religious persons, Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet, whose magic arts control the action (and who speaks like Prospero, of his ‘cell’), and Friar Francis in Much Ado About, who negotiates hero’s death and reappearance. These are people of spiritual rather than practical efficiency; like Duke Vincentio and Hamlet (who so mysteriously dominates his society, by play-production and otherwise), they are plot-controllers; Duke Vincentio, disguised as a Friar, organizing the whole action, and being directly suggestive of ‘power divine’ (Measure for Measure V.i.370). So, too, Prospero manipulates his own plot like a god he is a blend of Theseus and Oberon. Prospero is a matured and fully self-conscious embodiment of those moments of fifth-act transcendental speculation to which earlier tragic heroes, including Macbeth, were unwillingly forced. He cannot be expected to do more than typify; there is not time; and, as a person, he is, no doubt, less warm, less richly human, than most of his poetic ancestors. But only if we recognize his inclusiveness, his summing of nearly all Shakespeare’s more eminent persons, shall we understand clearly what he is about. He, like others, Vincentio and Oberon pre-eminently, is controlling our plot, composing it before our eyes; but, since the plot is, as we shall see, so inclusive an interpretation of Shakespeare’s life-work, Prospero is controlling, not merely a Shakespearian play, but the Shakespearian world. He is thus automatically in the position of Shakespeare himself, and it is accordingly inevitable that he should often speak as with Shakespeare’s voice. Ariel incorporates all those strong picturizations of angels aerially riding observed in our recent analysis of the Vision in Cymbeline. To these we may add the Dauphin’s humorous but poetically revealing comparison of his horse to a Pegasus in Henry V: When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots in the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes. . . . It is a beast for Perseus; he is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him but only in patient stillness while his rider mounts him; he is indeed a horse. . . . It is a theme as fluent as the sea. (III.Vii.11–44)

Precisely from this complex of air, fire, music and lightly apprehended sea in contrast to the duller Caliban-elements of earth and water Ariel is compounded. He personifies all Shakespeare’s more volatile and aerial impressionism (he is called a ‘bird’ at IV.i.184,

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‘chick’ at V.i.316, and ‘an airy spirit’ in the dramatis personae), especially those images or phrases involving ‘swift’ (i.e. either intuitional or emotional) thought . . . . A good example occurs in the association of thought’s swiftness and ‘feathered Mercury’ at King John IV​.ii​.1​74. Ariel is mercurial and implicit in both the agile wit and Queen Mab fantasies of the aptly named Mercutio; compare his definition of dreams, ‘as thin of substance as the air’ (Romeo and Juliet I.iv.100), with Prospero’s ‘thou, which are but air’ (V.i.21), addressed to Ariel. Ariel is implicit often in Shakespeare’s love-poetry: though he is not an Eros personification, yet, wherever we find emphasis on love’s lightning passage, as at Romeo and Juliet II.Ii.118–20 or A Midsummer Night’s Dream I.i.141–9; on its uncapturable perfection as throughout Troilus and Cressida (with strong emphasis on volatility and speed at III.Ii.8–15 and IV.Ii.14); on its spiritual powers, as in the aerial imagery and energy of Antony and Cleopatra, with Cleopatra at death as ‘fire and air’ (V.ii.291); or on its delicate and tender sweetness, as in the ‘piece of tender air’, Imogen (Cymbeline V.v.436– 53); wherever such elusive and intangible excellences are our matter, there Ariel is forecast. He is the spirit of love’s aspirations ‘all compact of fire’ in Venus and Adonis I 49. He is made of Biron’s speech of elaborate love-psychology with its contrast of ‘slow arts’ and quicksilver swiftness of love’s heightened consciousness, its new delicacy of perception and increased power, all entwined with fire, thoughts of mythology, poetry and music, and the ability (shown by Ariel’s music in The Tempest at III.Ii.124–50 and IV.i.175–8) to ‘ravish savage ears/ And plant in tyrant’s mild humility;’ [Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV.Iii.345–6] While at the limit touching, as does Ariel (at II.i.19), ‘charity’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost 4.3.320–65). Closely similar is Falstaff ’s speech on sherris-sack, which makes the brain ‘apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable shapes which, deliverer’d o’er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit’ (2 Henry I v IV ii 107). Ariel is also forecast by other passages on wit (in the modern sense), so often, as is Mercutio’s levelled against love; as when the shafts of feminine mockery are compared to the swiftness of ‘arrows, bullets, wind, thought’ at Love’s Labour’s Lost V.ii.262. Ariel exists in a dimension overlooking normal categories of both reason and emotion: he is the ‘mutual flame’ in which the winged partners of The Phoenix and the Turtle transcend their won duality. Since, moreover, he personifies these subtle and overruling powers of the imagination, he becomes automatically a personification of poetry itself. His sudden appearance depends, precisely, on Prospero’s ‘thought’ (IV.i.164–5; cp. ‘the quick forge and working - house of thought’, Henry V (chor. 23). He is the poetic medium, whatever the subject handled, his powers ranging over the earthy and the ethereal, tragic and lyric, with equal ease. As a dramatic person, he certainly descends from Puck and also, in view of his songs and trickery, he is a ‘tricksy spirit’ (V.i.226; a word associated with Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice III.v.75) – from the jesters Feste, Touchstone, even Lear’s Fool; all of whom enjoy a share of the poets own critical, awareness, as in certain of Puck’s generalized speeches and his final epilogue, the philosophic detachment of Feste’s and Touchstone’s wit, and the Fool’s perceptual clarity. Ariel likewise is apart: he is emotionally detached, though actively engaged, everyone and everything, except Prospero and Miranda, being the rough material of

 Wilson Knight, Commentary on The Tempest 301 creation on which Ariel-spirit of poetry works; an opposition seen most starkly in his piping to Caliban. Ariel is accordingly shown as the agent of Prospero’s purpose. He is Prospero’s instrument in controlling and developing the action. Through him Prospero raises the tempest, Ariel (like mad Tom in Lear) being part of it, acting it (I.ii.195–215). He puts people to sleep, so tempting the murderers, but wakes them just in time (II.i), thunderously interrupts the beast, pronouncing judgement and drawing the moral (III​.i​ii). He plays tricks on the drunkards (III​.​ii), hears their plot and leads them to disaster (III​.i​i; IV.i.171–84). His music leads Ferdinand to Miranda (I.ii), he puts the ship safely in harbour (I.ii.226) and later releases and conducts the mariners (V.i). He is Prospero’s stage-manager; more, he is the enactor of Prospero’s conception: Prospero is the artist, Ariel the art. He is a spirit of ‘air’ (V.i.21) corresponding to the definition of poetry as ‘airy nothing’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (V.i.16). His powers range freely over and between the thunderous and the musical, tragic and lyric, extremes of Shakespearian drama. Caliban condenses Shakespeare’s concern, comical or satiric, with the animal aspect of man; as seen in Christopher Sly and the aptly-named Bottom (whose union with Titania drives fantasy to an extreme), Dogberry, writ down ‘an ass’ (Much Ado about Nothing IV.Ii.75–93), Sir Toby Belch; and Falstaff, especially in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where his animality is punished by fairies (that Falstaff should show contacts with both Ariel and Caliban exactly defines the universal nature of his complexity). Caliban also symbolizes all brainless revolution, such as Jack Cade’s in 2 Henry VI, and the absurdities of mob mentality in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. So much is fairly obvious; but there is more. Caliban derives from other ill-graced cursers, a ‘misshapen knave’ and ‘bastard’ (V.i.268–73) like the deformed Thersites (‘bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valour, in everything illegitimate’, Troilus and Cressida V.vii.17) and bitter as Apemantus; from the ‘indigest deformed lump’, ‘abortive rooting hog’, ‘poisonous bunch-back’d toad’ and ‘cacodemon’, Richard III (3 Henry VI VI.Vi.51; Richard III I.iii.228, 246, 144; cp. Caliban as ‘demi-devil’ at V.ii.272); and from all Shakespeare’s imagery of nausea and evil expressed through reptiles or, since we must not forget Sycorax (who may be allowed to sum all Shakespeare’s evil women), creatures of black magic, as in Macbeth. He derives from all bad passion, as when Lear and Coriolanus are called dragons (King Lear II.i.24; Coriolanus V.iv.14). He combines the infra-natural evil of Macbeth with the bestial evil of King Lear, where man’s suicidal voracity is compared to ‘monsters of the deep’ (King Lear IV ii 50). He is himself a water-beast, growing from the ooze and slime of those stagnant pools elsewhere associated with vice, being exactly defined by Thersites’ description of Ajax as ‘a very land-fish, languageless, a monster’ (Troilus and Cressida III​.iii​.​266). But he has a beast’s innocence and pathos too, and is moved by music as are the ‘race of youthful and unhandled colts’ of The Merchant of Venice (V.i.71–9; cp. The comparison of the musiccharmed Caliban to ‘un-back’d colts’ at IV.i.176–8). He sums up the ravenous animals that accompany tempest-passages, the boar, bull, bear; especially the much-loathed boar of Venus and Adonis. In him is the ugliness of sexual appetite from Lucrece onwards, and also the ugliness vice raises in those who too much detest it, the ugliness

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of hatred itself and loathing, the ugliness of Leontes. Man, savage, ape, water-beast, dragon, semi-devil – Caliban is all of them; and because he so condenses masses of great poetry, is himself beautiful. He is the physical as opposed to the spiritual; earth and water as opposed to air and fire. That he may, like Ariel, be considered in closest relation to Prospero himself is witnessed by Prospero’s admission. ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’ (V.i.275). These three main persons present aspects of Timon. Besides Prospero’s resemblance already observed, Ariel’s thunderous denunciation (III​.iii​​.53–60) recalls Timon’s prophetic fury, both addressed to a society that has rejected true nobility for a sham, while Caliban reproduces his naked savagery and the more ugly, Apemantuslike, affinities of his general hatred. This especial inclusiveness marks Timon’s archetypal importance. To turn to the subsidiary persons. Alonso and his party present a varied assortment of more or less guilty people. We have, first, a striking recapitulation of Macbeth, Antonio persuading Sebastian to murder the sleeping king in phrases redolent of Duncan’s murder: [Quotes 2.1.204–9: ‘What might/ Worthy Sebastian? . . . .’]. We remember ‘Your face, great thane, is as a book. . . .’; ‘Nor time, nor place, did then adhere and yet you would make both; they have made themselves . . . .’, and ‘all that impedes thee from the golden round . . . .’ (Macbeth V.i.63; I.vii.51; I.v. 29). Antonio’s ‘O!/ If you but knew how you the purpose cherish/; Whiles thus you mock it . . . .’ (II​.ii​.​223–5) is a crisp capitulation of Lady’s Macbeth’s soliloquy on her husband’s divided will (I.v.17–30). Macbeth is resurrected in both phrase and verse-texture: ‘And by that destiny to perform an act/ Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come’ (I.i.252–4). Compare Macbeth’s ‘happy prologues to the swelling act of the imperial theme’ and Lady Macbeth’s ‘Leave all the rest to me’ (Macbeth I.iii.128; 1.5.74). Death and sleep are all but identified in both (II.i.255–7; Macbeth 2.2.54). Antonio’s attitude to conscience (‘Ay, sir, where lies that?’ At II.i.271) [2.1.276] parallels Lady Macbeth’s, while her ‘who dares receive it other?’ (Macbeth I.vii.77) is expanded into Antonio’s scornful certainty that ‘all the rest’ will ‘Take suggestion as a cat alps milk; They’ll tell the clock to any business that/ We say befits the hour. . . .’ (II.i.288–90) where even the cat, a comparatively rare Shakespearian animal, harks back to ‘the poor cat i’ the adage’ (Macbeth I.vii.45). In both plays the victim’s weariness is brutally advanced as an assurance of sleep: compare Duncan’s ‘day’s hard labour’, which shall ‘invite’ him to sound sleep (Macbeth I.vii.62) with ‘now they are oppressed with travel’ (III.i.15). That Macbeth should be singled out for so elaborate a re-enactment is not strange, since, standing alone in point of absolute and abysmal evil, it shares only slightly (via Sycorax) in the general recapitulation covered by Caliban, whom Prospero specifically acknowledges. Thus poetic honesty leaves Antonio’s final reformation doubtful. Alonso is less guilty, nor is there here any so vivid correspondence to be observed. Sebastian blames him for insisting on marrying his daughter Claribel against her and his subjects’ will to an African (II​.ii​.​125–36); and, since Gonzalo partly sanctions the criticism, we must, it would seem, perhaps with some faint reference to Desdemona’s ill-starred marriage, regard Alonso’s action as a fault. He was also a silent accomplice to Antonio’s original treachery, and Ariel later asserts the he is being punished for it by

 Wilson Knight, Commentary on The Tempest 303 his son’s loss (III​.iii​​.75). As one of Shakespeare’s many autocratic fathers and also as a king rather pathetically searching for his child, he is a distant relative of Lear. Both are purgatorial figures: he realizes his ‘trespass’ (III​.iii​​.99). The faithful and garrulous old lord Gonzalo is a blend of Polonius, Adan and Kent. The courtiers Adrian and Francisco are not particularized. The wit of Antonio and Sebastian on their first entry needs, however, a remark. It is cynical and cruel. The points made are of slight importance except for the extraordinary reiteration of ‘widow Dido’ (II.i.77–102). There is presumably a sneer at an unmarried woman who has been deserted by her lover being given the status of ‘widow’; and this we may tentatively relate to Antony and Cleopatra, wherein ‘Dido and her Aeneas’ are once compared to the protagonists (II.Xii.53) and which in Cleopatra’s phrase ‘Husband, I come!’ (V.ii.289) reaches a compact self-interpretation in direct answer to such cynicism as Antonio’s. The whole dialogue, starting with criticism of Gonzalo’s and Adrian’s insistence on the isle’s fertility (the island varies mysteriously according to the nature of the spectator) and leading through ridicule of Gonzalo’s phrase ‘widow Dido’ and his identification of Tunis and Carthage, to a final flowering in his Utopian dream, serves very precisely to define an opposition of cynic and romantic. The points at issue are less important that the points of view: ‘Antonio. He misses not much./ Sebastian. No. he doth but mistake the truth totally’ (II.i.54) [2.1.57–8]. That is cynical keenness in good form; and our dialogue takes us accordingly to the threshold at least of Antony and Cleopatra, the supreme answer of romanticism, wherein human love, though criticized as filth, wins through to glory. There is further corroboration: not only do the phrases ‘such a paragon to their queen’, ‘miraculous harp’ and ‘impossible matter’ (II.i.71, 83, 85) raise, ironically or otherwise, suggestion of the marvelous harking back to Antony and Cleopatra, but we have one direct reminder: ‘Sebastian. I think he will carry this island home in his pocket and give it his son for an apple./ Antonio. And, sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands’ (II.i.91–3). Compare Cleopatra’s dream, with its ‘realms and islands were as plates dropt from his pocket’ (Antony and Cleopatra V.ii.91) we find the romantic extreme, whether in jocular cynicism or in visionary earnest, reaching definition in similar terms. Certainly one expects some trace of the earlier play, some honest facing in this austere work of its golden sexuality; and perhaps the easiest way to honour it was through the self-negating cynicism of an Antonio. To return to the marriage of Claribel to King of Tunis. Any further correspondences (outside Othello) may again be sought in Antony and Cleopatra, where a west-east conflict in relation to marriage is strongly developed; and again in the Prince of Morocco, in The Merchant of Venice (see also the Winter’s Tale V.i.156–67). Criticism of the marriage originates from Sebastian, the cynic being naturally hostile, as in Othello, to the eastern glamour; while Gonzalo changes his view later, regarding it as part of the general happiness (V.i.205–13). To Shakespeare Africa and the Orient are at once glamorous and dangerous (Sycorax came from Algier), with something of the disturbing magic wielded by the Indian fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: perhaps that is why Antonio seems to regard Tunis as an infinite distance from Milan. The central experience of this group is the offering and sudden withdrawal of the mysterious banquet, with Ariel’s appearance as a harpy and speech of denunciation.

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Feasts are regularly important throughout Shakespeare but are so obvious that one accepts them without thought. It is the mark of greatest literature to play on such fundamentals of human existence and we must remember their importance in Homer and the New Testament; in the one direct, in the other, in event, miracle and parable, carrying symbolic overtones. Shakespeare ends his two morality farces, The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor, with feasts, acted or announced, to convey a sense of general good-will succeeding horse-play. In Romeo and Juliet a feast and dance relate neatly to the family feud, raising questions of daring, adventure and hospitality. There is a rough feasting in Arden and Belarius’ cave, both characterized by hospitality. Eating and drinking are continually given dramatic emphasis, with various ethical implications: they are important throughout Antony and Cleopatra, with one gorgeous feast-scene celebrating union after hostility, though nearly ruined by treachery. An elaborate banquet occurs in Pericles, with Thaisa as ‘queen of the feast’ (III​.iii​​.17) pointing on, as we have seen, to Perdita as ‘mistress of the feast’ (IV​.iii​​.68) in The Winter’s Tale. Important examples occur in Timon of Athens and Macbeth. In Timon there are two; the first (I.ii) conceived as a sacrament of love and friendship (with New Testament reminiscence at line 51), crowned by Timon’s speech and negatively underlined by Apemantus’s cynicism; the second planned as a deadly serious practical joke, in which Timon, after raising his false friends’ hopes speaks an ironic grace, overturns (probably) their tables, and douses them with luke-warm water. In Macbeth, we have first the irony of the feasting of Duncan (I.vii), and later on (IV.i) the inverted good of the ‘hell-broth’ brewed by the Weird Women: and, in between (III​.​iv), the feast to which Banquo has been carefully invited and which he attends as a ghost, smashing up the conviviality and social health so vividly emphasized in the text, and thus denying to Macbeth’s tyrannous and blood-stained rule all such sacraments of brotherhood. These two broken feasts in Timon of Athens and Macbeth, related to that two main Shakespearian evils of unfaithfulness and crime, are key-scenes; and their shattering stage power derives precisely from the simplicity of the effects used, planted squarely as they are on fundamentals. The meaning of the feast offered but denied to Alonso, Sebastian and Antonio will now be clear; and also its relevance to the Shakespearian world. The ‘solemn and strange music’ (III​.i​ii) of the feasts is followed by Ariel’s appearance as a Harpy to ‘thunder and lightning’ (III​.i​ii) The sequence recalls the Vision in Cymbeline, and Ariel’s harpy appearance drives home the similarity. Like Jupiter, he enters as a figure of overruling judgement, speaking scornfully of the lesser beings who think to dispute the ordinances of ‘fate’ (III​.ii​i. cp. ‘How dare you ghosts . . .’Cymbeline V.iv.94). Both epitomize the Shakespearian emphasis on thunder as the voice of the gods, or God. So Ariel acts the more awe-inspiring attributes of Shakespeare’s tempestpoetry before our eyes, and in a long speech drives home its purgatorial purpose. Besides Alonso and his party, we have the comic group of Stephano and Trinculo, in association with Caliban. The comedy is delightful, but scarcely subtle. Stephano the butler is an unqualified, almost professional, drunkard, with nothing of the philosophic quality of Falstaff or the open if unprincipled bonhomie of Sir Toby. Both those are, in their way, gentleman, and yet their new representative (as drunkard) is of a low type socially; as are Dogberry, Bottom and the Gravediggers, though Stephano

 Wilson Knight, Commentary on The Tempest 305 is a poor equivalent, lacking natural dignity. Trinculo is an equally poor successor to touchstone, Feste, Yorick and Lear’s Fool. Note that their representative quality is nevertheless emphasized by their joint embodiment of the two main sorts of clown: the natural and the artificial. The Tempest is an austere work. The poet, while giving his clowns full rein in comic appeal, allows them no dignity. In writing of Autolycus we have observed Shakespeare’s tendency there, as with Falstaff, earlier, to show his humorist as disintegrating; both as losing dignity and revealing ugly tendencies. So, too, with Sir Toby: in spite of his admirable ‘cakes and ale’ (Twelfth Night II​.iii​.​125) he is carefully made to lose dignity towards the play’s conclusion, the balance of conviviality and reproof being carefully held. Both Falstaff and Autolycus, as their glow of humour pales, show themselves as rather cheaply ambitious: whilst bearers of the comic spirit, they are, for a while, the superiors of kings; but when they, in their turn ape the courtier, join in the vulgar scramble for show, they fall lower than their meanest dupes. Falstaff in 2 Henry IV is enjoying his advance, ordering new clothes, being the grand man. Here the distinction is subtle; but the way is open for his final disintegration in The Merry Wives of Windsor. So, too, with Autolycus: he dresses as a courtier, apes a courtier’s grandiosity and trades sadistically on the Shepherd’s and Clown’s anguish. He is finally shown as cringing to his former dupe. Now, remembering, too, Hamlet’s disgust at the heavy drinking of Claudius’ court, observe what happens to our comic trio, especially Stephano. First, he drinks and sings maudlin songs. Next, he becomes a petty tyrant and engages in a bloody plot, aiming to make himself lord of the island. He is a burlesque of the power-quest, with all the absurdity of a barbaric despotism, having his foot licked by Caliban and posing as king, resembling Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and the Macbeth of ‘Now does he feel his title/ Hang loose upon him, like a giant’s robe/ Upon a dwarfish thief ’ (Macbeth V.ii.20–22). Stephano parodies the essential absurdity of tyrannic ambition. Now he and his companions are lured by Ariel to a filthy pool: ‘at last I left them/ I’ the filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell/ There dancing up to the chins, that the foul lake/ O’erstunk their feet’ (IV.i.181–5). Stagnant water occurs regularly to suggest filth and indignity. Poor Tom in King Lear has been led by the foul fiend ‘through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, o’er bog and quagmire’; and an utmost degradation is suggested by his eating ‘the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water’ and drinking ‘the green mantle of the standing pool’ (King Lear III.Iv.50; 132, 137). The lascivious Falstaff is ducked in The Merry Wives of Windsor; in flowing water, certainly, but the dirty-linen basket supplies the rest. There is also the final entry of the absurd braggart, Parolles, in All’s Well That Ends Well, bedraggled, with filthy clothes, and admitting that he is ‘muddied in Fortune’s mood’ and smelling ‘somewhat strong of her strong displeasure’; with a developed dialogue on bad smells, an ‘unclean fish-pond’, ‘carp’ etc. (V.ii.1–27). Notice that (i) lust – there is a direct association of pools to sexual vice at The Winter’s Tale I.ii.195 and Cymbeline I.iv.103 – and (ii) braggadocio are involved. Stephano, the would-be tyrant, meant to possess Miranda after murdering Prospero; Caliban has already tried to rape her; and all three are accordingly left in the ‘filthymantled pool’.

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Our buffoons are next tempted, like Autolycus, by an array of ‘trumpery’ (IV.i.186), of ‘glistering apparel’ (IV.i.193). Rich clothes were a more pressing masculine temptation in Shakespeare’s day than in ours. One of Faustus’s ambitions was to clothe Wittenberg’s students in silk, and Macbeth’s power-quest is characterized in terms of ‘a giant robe’ (Macbeth 5.2.21; cp. The Tempest II.i.167). Shakespeare reiterates his scorn for the latest (usually foreign) fashion, for all tinsel of clothes, speech, or manners, in play after play; as with Claudio, Sir Andrew and his ‘flame-colour’d stock’ (Twelfth Night I1.3.146), Kent’s ‘a tailor made thee’ (King Lear II.Ii.59), Osric, and many others. The prim Malvolio is fooled in his yellow stockings; Christopher Sly dressed absurdly in a nobleman’s robes; Katharina the Shrew tormented with finery. This vein of satire beats in our present symbolic incident: the two fools are ensnared by tinsel glitter, though Caliban, being closer to nature, has more sense (the temptation is perhaps slightly out of character for the others too, whose job here is, however, to parody their social superiors). All three are next chased off by Prospero’s hounds. The pool and the show of garments will now be understood, but what of the hounds? Hounds are impregnated with a sense of healthy, non-brutal, and (like Shakespeare’s horses) manserving virility, occurring favourably at Venus and Adonis 913–24; Henry V III.i.31; and Timon of Athens 1.2.198. Hunting is a noble sport, though sympathy can be accorded to the hunted hare (at Venus and Adonis 679–708, and 3 Henry VI II.V.130). Courteous gentlemen, such as Theseus and Timon necessarily hunt, especially important being the long description of Theseus’ musical hounds, with reference also to those of Hercules, baying the bear in Crete (A Midsummer Night’s Dream IV.i.112–34). Hounds are adversaries to the bear and (in Venus and Adonis) the boar, both ‘tempest-beasts’, and, though the fawning of dogs is used satirically, hounds, as such, may be musically, almost spiritually. Conceived: hence their picturesque names in The Tempest: ‘Mountain’, ‘Silver’, ‘Fury’ and ‘Tyrant’. They are spirit-essences directed against the bestial Caliban and his companions. So, too, the fleshy and ‘corrupt’ Falstaff was punished by fairies or supposed fairies in The Merry Wives of Windsor by pinching, conceived as a punishment of ‘sinful fantasy’, ‘lust’ and ‘unchaste desire’ by spirits (v.v.96–108). Here Caliban regularly (I.ii.328–30, 371–3), and now Stephano and Trinculo, too, are thoroughly pinched and given cramps and aches (IV.i.258–61). Such is Shakespeare’s judgement on drunkenness, sexual lust and braggart ambition. Such evils have, held dignity, as in Falstaff ’s speech on sherris-sack (Henry IV IV.Iii.92), the riotous love of Antony and Cleopatra and, for the power-quest, Macbeth; but it is a tight-rope course; one slip and the several vices appear in their nakedness. That naked essence, in all its lewd and ludicrous vulgarity, is here emphasized. There remain Ferdinand and Miranda. These are representative of beautiful and virtuous youth as drawn in former plays (Marina, Florizel and Perdita, Guiderius and Arviragus), though lacking something of their human impact. Our new pair illustrate humility (as in Ferdinand’s log-piling), innocence, faith and purity; their words being characterized by utter simplicity and sincerity. They are whittled down to these virtues with slight further realization, and in comparison with earlier equivalents must be accounted pale. As elsewhere, essences are abstracted and reclothed. Except for Prospero, Ariel, Caliban, the people scarcely exist in their own right. The real drama

 Wilson Knight, Commentary on The Tempest 307 consists of the actions and interplay of our three major persons with the natural, human and spiritual powers in which their destiny is entangled. Prospero, who controls this comprehensive Shakespearian world, automatically reflects Shakespeare himself. Like Hamlet, he arranges dramatic shows to rouse his sinning victims’ conscience: the mock-feast (whose vanishing, as we have seen, recalls Macbeth’s ghost shattered anquet), brought in by ‘living drollery’ of ‘shapes’ (III​.iii​​.21); and the masque of goodness and dancers (IV.i), which, like the Final Plays themselves (of whose divinities these goddesses are pale reflections), is addressed to the purer consciousness (Ferdinand’s). This tendency, as in Hamlet, reflects some degree of identification of the protagonist with the playwright, whose every work is a parable. Prospero himself delivers what is practically a long prologue in Act I, and in his own person speaks the epilogue. He is, even more than the Duke in Measure for Measure, a designer of the drama in which he functions as a protagonist. We have seen how many of Shakespeare’s tragic themes are covered by him; and that his farewell might have been spoken by Shakespeare is a correspondence demanded by the whole conception. He addresses (V.i.33–57) the various powers (drawn from folklore and called, with a grand humility, ‘weak’) by whose aid he has ‘bedimm’d the noontide sun’ (as ‘the travelling lamp’ is strangled in Macbeth II.Iv.7) and loosed the ‘mutinous winds’ to ‘set roaring war’ between sea and sky, thereby recalling such tempests throughout the great tragedies, in Julius Caesar, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, with their many symbolic undertones of passionate conflict here crisply recapitulated in thought of warbetwixt ‘sea’ and ‘sky’. He has used ‘Jove’s own bolt’ to blast (as at Measure for Measure II​.ii​.​ 116 and Coriolanus V.iii.152) Jove’s tree, the oak, recalling Jupiter the Thunderer in Cymbeline. From such images the speech moves inevitably to: ‘Graves at my command/ Have wak’d their sleepers, op’d, and let them forth/ By my so potent art’ (V.i.48–50). The statement, with its parallel in the resurrection of Pericles and The Winter’s Tale and the less vivid restoration of Imogen in Cymbeline, may seem to apply more directly to Shakespeare than to Prospero; though the miraculous preservation of the ship and its crew must be regarded as an extension of earlier miracles. Prospero’s speech, ending in ‘heavenly’ or ‘solemn’ (V.i.52, 57) music, forms a recapitulation of Shakespeare’s artistic progress from tempest-torn tragedy to resurrection and music (cp. The ‘music of the spheres’ at Pericles V.i.231), and the resurrection music of Pericles III​.ii​.​88, 91; and The Winter’s Tale V.iii.98) corresponding to its forecast in Richard II. Prospero uses his tempest-magic to draw his enemies to the island, and there renders them harmless. He wrecks and saves, teaches through disaster, entices and leads by music, getting them utterly under his power, redeeming and finally forgiving. What are the Shakespearian analogies? The poet himself labours to master and assimilate the unassuaged bitterness and sense of rejection so normal a lot to humanity (hence the popularity of Hamlet) by drawing the hostile elements within his own world of artistic creation: and this he does mainly through tragedy and its thunderous music; and by seeing that, in spite of logic, his creation is good. By destroying his protagonists, he renders them deathless; by expressing evil, in others and in himself, he renders it innocent. And throughout this tumult of creative activity, turning every grief to a star, making of his very loathing something ‘rich and strange’, there is a danger: a certain centre of faith or love must be preserved, this centre at least kept free from the

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taint of that rich, wild, earthy, lustful, violent, cursing, slimy yet glittering thing that is creation itself, or Caliban; that uses cynicism (born of the knowledge of lust) to ruin Desdemona, though not Othello’s love for her; that tries in vain, but only just in vain, to make of Timon an Apemantus. Therefore Prospero keeps Miranda intact, though threatened by Caliban, just as Marina was threatened in the brothel of Mitylene. Alone with her he had voyaged far to his magic land, cast off in a wretched boat ‘To cry to the sea that roar’d to us; to sigh/ To the winds whose pity, sighing back again/ Did us but loving wrong’ (I.ii.149–51). When an image of lonely, spiritual voyage, like that of Wordsworth’s Newton ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’; while echoing back, through the long story of Shakespearian ‘sea-sorrow’ (I.ii.170), to the Nordic origins of our literature in The Wanderer and The Seafarer. Prospero, unlike Lear, Pericles and Leontes, guards his Miranda, and with her survives on his island of poetry, with Ariel and Caliban. Who are these? The one, clearly, his art, his poetry in action; the other, the world of creation, smelling of earth and water, with the salt tang of physical, of sexual energy, and with, too, all those revulsions and curses to which it gives birth. Prospero finds both Ariel and Caliban on the island, releasing the one (as genius is regularly characterized less by inventiveness than by the ability to release some dormant power) and aiming to train the other; and both be strictly controlled. Prospero, Ariel, Caliban, Miranda: all are aspects of Shakespeare himself. Prospero, corresponding to the poet’s controlling judgement, returns to Milan, uniting his daughter, his human faith, to his enemy’s son; and Shakespeare’s life-work, in Henry VIII, draws to is conclusion. It is, indeed, remarkable how well the meanings correspond. Prospero has been on the island for twelve years (I.ii.53); and it is roughly twelve years since the sequence of greater plays started with Hamlet. Before that, Ariel had been prisoned in a tree for another twelve years (I.ii.279); again, roughly, the time spent by Shakespeare in his earlier work, before the powers of bitterness and abysmal sight projected him into the twilit, lightning-riven and finally transcendent regions; rather as Herman Melville passed Typee and White Jacket to Moby Dick, Pierre and his later poetry. And now as the end draws near, Ariel cries (as does Caliban too) for freedom from ceaseless ‘toil’: ‘Prospero. How now! Moody?/ What is’t thou canst demand?/ Ariel. My liberty./ Prospero. Before the time be out? No more!’ (I.ii.244–6). Prospero dominates Ariel and Caliban with an equal severity: as Shakespeare may be supposed to have willed. Sternly, the safe conclusion of his labour in Henry VIII. That labour is not all easy. Prospero, though still, is not static. Like Hamlet’s, his very centrality is dynamic, drawing others to him, like Timon in his retirement, radiating power: or rather those earlier spiritual radiations are here given appropriate, symbolic, action, just as, according to Shelley’s definition poetry itself holds, in its very reserve, its stillness, a myriad radiation. (203–23)

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G. E. Bentley, the Blackfriars Theatre 1948

From ‘Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre’, Shakespeare Survey 33 (1948), 40–9. Gerard Eades Bentley (1901–94) was affiliated with the University of Chicago and Princeton University. He wrote Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared (1945) and Shakespeare: A Biographical Handbook (1961), as well as several important works on theatre history, including Shakespeare and His Theatre (1964), The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (1971), The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (1984) and a seven-volume work, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (1941–68). This essay, ‘Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre’, appeared in the inaugural issue of Shakespeare Survey and has been widely reprinted. Bentley claims that the single most important event influencing The Tempest is the King’s Men Company of Players’ new affiliation with the private Blackfriars Theater. This event called for a new kind of drama. Bentley even attributes the wider tragicomedy trend as a result of the new circumstance. Shakespeare’s acute understanding of the workings of the theatre business, Bentley writes, does not take away from his literary merits.

The variations which these [last] plays show from the Shakespearian norm have long been a subject for critical comment. The first three of them [Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest], in particular, since they are the only ones which have been universally accepted as part of the Shakespeare canon, have commonly been discussed as a distinct genre. .... My basic contention is that Shakespeare was, before all else, a man of the theatre and a devoted member of the King’s company. One of the most important events in the history of that company was its acquisition of the Blackfriars Playhouse in 1608 and its subsequent brilliantly successful exploitation of its stage and audience. The company was experienced and theatre-wise; the most elementary theatrical foresight demanded that in 1608 they prepare new and different plays for a new and different theatre and audience. Shakespeare was their loved and trusted fellow. How could they fail to ask him for new Blackfriars plays, and how could he fail them? All the facts at our

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command seem to me to demonstrate that he did not fail them. He turned from his old and tested methods and produced a new kind of play for the new theatre and audience. Somewhat unsurely at first he wrote Cymbeline for them, then, with greater dexterity in his new medium, The Winter’s Tale, and finally, triumphant in his old mastery, The Tempest. (47, 49)

59

James Nosworthy, structure and sources 1948

From ‘The Narrative Sources of The Tempest’, Review of English Studies 249 (1948), 281–94. James Nosworthy (dates unknown) was the author of Shakespeare’s Occasional Plays, Their Origin and Transmission (1965) and editor of the Arden edition of Cymbeline (1955) and the Penguin edition of Measure for Measure (1965), among other works. Nosworthy’s source criticism stems from his interest in a text’s narrative structure: The Tempest has a structure that is repeated twice comprising of a ‘causal plot’ (Prospero’s loss of his dukedom), an ‘effectual plot’ (events on the island) and a ‘link episode’ (the storm). Nosworthy identifies possible source texts that have a similar structure, motifs and characters. Among these sources, Nosworthy includes several European texts including the Aeneid. He sees the New World documents as providing detail but not as narrative sources.

No single source that will cover The Tempest as a whole has yet come to light, and it is tolerably certain that none exists. Scholars, who have been excusably deceived by the perfect unity and harmony of the play, have sought far and wide and have recovered merely a few fragments that seem to have some vague connexion with Shakespeare’s play. Vague they are bound to be as long as they are measured against the full play. Once, however, we grasp the structural make-up of The Tempest and admit the existence of three components and the individual importance of each, certain of these findings fall into place, and the vagueness disappears. The main body of the causal plot is contained in Prospero’s narrative in I. ii, and all that is required of the source is that it should furnish the tale of a duke’s deposition and banishment. If it also relates that the banished duke sailed to a far country and devoted himself to study, so much the better. The infant daughter and the penchant for necromancy are not required, since both are unifying factors in The Tempest and, most decidedly, not requisite details in an account of banishment. It was long pointed out by Halliwell-Phillips[1] and Hunter[2] that Thomas’s Historie of Italie supplies not only the incidents for this section of The Tempest but also the names of the characters. The facts presented by Thomas are that Prospero Adorno became the Duke of Milan’s lieutenant in Genoa, that his relations with Ferdinand, King of Naples, led to his deposition, that Genoa later accepted Milanese rule once

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more and received Antony Adorno as governor. . . . William Thomas’s Historie of Italie, of which there were editions in 1549 and 1561, seems, then, a likely source for the causal plot, though we must not ignore the possibility that Shakespeare knew these odd details of Italian history without having to burrow for them in books. The only tolerably close parallel to Shakespeare’s effectual plot is found in the fourth chapter of Antonio de Eslava’s Noches de Invierno, published at Pamplona in 1609 and reprinted in the same year at Barcelona. . . . It can scarcely be denied that Noches de Invierno and The Tempest tell the same tale, but it is very doubtful whether Shakespeare’s source stands here revealed. We may well question whether Shakespeare commanded sufficient Spanish to read Eslava’s book, and there are certain reasons for believing that the tale was known to English readers, Shakespeare among them, long before 1609. The theory that Shakespeare based this part of his play on Jakob Ayrer’s Die Schone Sidea has never won general acceptance, and rightly so. Yet there are some points of resemblance between the two plays than coincidence can readily account for. . . . . It would be reasonable to maintain that Shakespeare and Ayrer derived their plots independently from some lost folk-tale or other common source, but one point of similarity, which is, however, curious rather than decisive, suggests a somewhat closer connexion. The words ‘mountain’ and ‘silver’ applied by Prospero and Ariel to the hounds in iv. I are found in close propinquity in Ayrer’s play in a speech given to Julia, Engelbrecht’s betrothed, whom he has discarded in favour to Sidea. . . . . Now it is very strange that in this otherwise intelligible speech one sentence. ‘He has promised silver, hill, and mountain’, just does not yield sense. It is quite ludicrous to suppose that Shakespeare battened on two substantives in a German play, turned them into English, and used them as names for his spirit hounds. He had used ‘Silver’ for that purpose long before The Taming of the Shrew, and it is likely that both were in general currency among hunting folk. A much more reasonable inference is that Ayrer heard these names in the English play, failed to grasp their significance, but reproduced them, nevertheless, at a vaguely appropriate point in his paltry little comedy. In other words, there is just this scrap of evidence to suggest that Die Schone Sidea was based on an English original. . . . . We must conclude . . . that, if he was indebted to an English original, it was to some earlier play written, probably in the fifteen-nineties, by Shakespeare or another. . . . . It has long been established that Shakespeare was directly indebted to contemporary pamphlet literature dealing with the wreck of Sri George Somers’s fleet off the coast of the Bermudas in July 1609. . . . . Are we really to accept the naïve assumption that Shakespeare read his pamphlets and then, inspired by one of Nature’s commonplaces, a storm at sea, added a delightful but rather incongruous fairy-tale to it and called the amalgam The Tempest? Surely he did not need an actual shipwreck and its concomitant pamphlets to tell him that vessels sometimes come to grief in squally weather. . . . Prospero’s island derives, I think, from Thomas’s Historie and the causal plot. Sicily, and not Bermuda, is its dam. . . . What Jourdain, Strachey, and the rest contribute, they contribute incidentally, and the bulk of the play’s narrative stuff can be better accounted for in other ways. Had the calamities of 1609 never occurred, there would still have been a Tempest, less

 James Nosworthy, Structure and Sources 313 rich, perhaps in circumstantial detail, but otherwise very much the play that has come down to us. . . . . The Tempest is a play in which we might reasonably expect to find material of classical origin.. . . It is worthy of note that Shakespeare introduces classical deities in the masque, and that, if we expect the dubiously authentic apparition of Jupiter in Cymbeline, practically for the first time.3 In themselves, these features have no special significance, but their collective import is augmented if, as I believe, the Aeneid stands as a narrative source and a pervasive influence. Shakespeare’s tempest and Virgil’s storm are analogous in origin and in outcome. Both are provoked by supernatural means to ensure that a certain character shall arrive at a certain requisite locality and there be brought into relation with other characters. Inevitably, both poets effect this requirement by means of shipwreck. These motives are, of course, absent from the accounts of the 1609 disaster, and I do not think that those accounts could possibly have suggested these narrative points. As sources of tributary detail they have already received mention, and their particular virtue is that they enabled Shakespeare to disguise an eminently Virgilian squall, for the salient features of the storm in the Aeneid are retained and elaborated in The Tempest. . . . It is significant that what may be termed the execution of the storm in The Tempest is carried out by Ariel, who, as the spirit of air, corresponds closely to Aeolus, the ruler of winds, who, in the Aeneid, raises the storm at the behest of Juno. . . . We may note, however, that both occur in the Mediterranean, and that both result in the characters being thrown ashore in unfamiliar territory.4 . . . . I suggest, then, that The Tempest is an amalgam of three narrative sources combined by Shakespeare with the utmost perfection of his art. He set out, in the first place, with an older play or romance covering the adventures on the island, and then elected to lend those adventures a heightened purpose by developing the theme of the earlier wrong done to Prospero. For this he found another source, which may, as we have seen, have been Thomas’s Historie. Finally, he unified these two plots by adapting a familiar and favourite tale to serve as a link. (282–94)

60

Derek Traversi, artistic and moral purpose 1949

From ‘The Tempest’, Scrutiny 16.2 (1949), 127–57. Derek Traversi (1912–2005) is considered among the most important Shakespeare scholars of the twentieth century. He taught at a number of American institutions, including Swarthmore College, the University of California at Davis and Hofstra University. Among his publications were the seminal An Approach to Shakespeare (1938), later expanded into a two-volume work providing a full commentary on the whole canon of the plays, Shakespeare, The Last Phase (1955), From Richard II to Henry V (1957), The Roman Plays (1963) and The Literary Imagination: Studies in Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare (1983). He also wrote for journals and anthologies, beginning with his collaboration with F. R. Leavis on the literary journal Scrutiny. In his Approach to Shakespeare Traversi writes that the aim of the modern critic of Shakespeare is ‘as far as possible to isolate and define the experience which sought expression in the plays, and which makes them individual and valuable. It seems obvious that this experience will find its most immediate expression in the language and verse of the plays.’[1] So, the artistic and moral purpose of the plays are intertwined. In the case of The Tempest, Shakespeare offers a personal interpretation of the moral problem of reconciling good and evil, accepting destiny and going through painful experience – all important to creating a ‘brave new world’ of social and spiritual harmony. The play is ultimately Christian in its vision.

In his presentation during the same scene[2] of the social situation created on the island mainly by Prospero’s devising, Shakespeare carries (forward) his analysis of the nature and development of evil. He relates it, in fact, to a personal interpretation of the doctrine of the original innocence of man. This he does by putting into the mouth of Gonzalo an example, apparently drawn from Montaigne, of those nostalgic speculations about primeval simplicity which seem to have so greatly attracted the sophisticated court societies of the sixteenth century and to which the discovery of the New World had given a fresh meaning. In landing upon the island Alonso and his followers are placed in the possession of virgin soil. Here, according to Gonzalo is their opportunity to organize a community untainted by competition or the shadow of ambition, an arcadian anarchy founded upon the permission given to each of its

 Derek Traversi, Artistic and Moral Purpose 315 members to follow his own instincts. His remarks with the accompanying comments of Antonio and Sebastian, are full of interest: [Quotes 2.1.144–59: ‘Gonzalo: Had I plantation of this isle, my lord . . . .’]. The dispassionate, academic catalogue in which Gonzalo expresses himself reflects perfectly the unreality of the whole dream. The nostalgia for an arcadian simplicity which produced, among other things, the pastoral convention of the sixteenth century was an international development which a writer like Cervantes, in Don Quixote’s discourse on the Golden Age,3 could raise to genuine intensity of feeling. No doubt it was a half-realized reaction against the sense of anarchy and moral pessimism which dominated so much of the court life of the time. Yet it is not Shakespeare’s purpose here to express any nostalgia of this kind, but rather to use its inherent weakness as a foil to bring out certain conceptions of his own. The sources of human misery are indeed to be excluded, according to Gonzalo, from the commonwealth; but with them, as soon appears, every distinctive quality of human life. Gonzalo’s next words show that the state of innocence is also necessarily the state of inexperience; [Quotes 4.1.160–5: ‘All things in common nature should produce . . . .’]. All this is to come about, according to Gonzalo’s ideal, ‘without sweat or endeavour’; but also without the salutary experience of effort from which is born, often slowly and painfully, the capacity to distinguish between good and evil which is the foundation of the whole moral life. For knowledge of good implies awareness of the evil from which it is distinguished; and this knowledge is acquired through a process, difficult but redeeming, of procreation and maturity. The inadequacy of Gonzalo’s simplicity, already sufficiently indicated in his own words, is revealed once more by the comments of Antonio and Sebastian: ‘Sebastian: No marrying ‘mong his subjects?/ Antonio: None, man, all idle; whores and knaves’ [2.1.166–7]. Gonzalo’s commonwealth is founded upon an amorality which leaves place for ‘nettle-seed’, ‘docks’, and ‘mallows’ to take possession of the ground. The fact that men like Antonio and Sebastian exist proves that some kind of cultivation of the human terrain is necessary. This cultivation, as they point out, is admitted by Gonzalo himself when he imagines that he is king of the island; for the ‘latter’, the anarchic end of his commonwealth had forgotten that its beginning was founded upon the kingship, accepted authority, ‘degree’. The substance of the passage is evidently paralleled in the conception which underlies the treatment of the pastoral scene in The Winter’s Tale. The state of nature is one which man must in the nature of things, outgrow as his experience develops; the crucial problem is whether this development will be towards good, in the acceptance of some defined moral standard (sanctioned, in this play, by the Destiny which upholds Prospero) or towards the anarchy of unlimited personal desires. At this point it is time to consider Caliban. For Caliban, half man and half beast, represents the real state of nature far more truly than any of Gonzalo’s courtly theorizings, and in his relations with Prospero the connection between ‘nature’ and the moral, civilized state is far more profoundly considered. The poetic strain which, it has been generally agreed, Caliban possesses, represents in him the positive aspect of the real state of nature. Unlike the men with whom he comes into contact and who corrupt him, Caliban has the advantage of being in touch with natural simplicity.

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His poetry turns invariably upon his knowledge of and appreciation for the natural forces of the island. When Trinculo and Stephano meet him he offers, in language that contrasts vividly and surely of set intention with their coarseness, to show them ‘the best springs’ and ‘berries’, where the jay’s nest is to be found, and how ‘to snare the nimble marmoset’. All this is attractive, so attractive that we are sometimes apt to find Prospero’s harshness to him – ‘Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself ’ [1.2.319–20] – excessive and unsympathetic. Yet, if we consider further, the harshness is a necessary part of Shakespeare’s purpose. For Caliban, with his natural simplicity, is indissolubly bound to Prospero. Prospero himself admits this to Miranda when he tells her: ‘We cannot miss him; he does make our fire,/ Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices/That profit us’ [1.2.311–13]. The kind of life that Prospero has established on his island assumes, in short, the existence of Caliban as a necessary condition. Besides being necessary, moreover, Caliban is in part Prospero’s creation. Finding him already on the island and needing him, Prospero tried from the first to incorporate him into the new civilized order of moral realities; and Caliban himself in his reply at once admits this and turns it into a most formidable indictment of the whole civilizing process which began by flattering him and finally turned into his tyrant: [Quotes 1.2.332–42: ‘When thou camest first,/ Thou stro’st me . . . .’]. From this we may learn more than one thing fundamental to the play. In the first place, the poetry which we admire in Caliban was given to him, at least in part by Prospero; the instinctive appreciation was, if we like, his own, a natural endowment, but the gift of expression, essentially a social, a civilizing gift, came to him from Prospero. The natural and the civilized orders are, in other words, inextricably mixed, and the problem with which Prospero is wrestling is simply that the natural, animal man is a complete anarchist. For the burden of Caliban’s grievance is that Prospero has deprived him of his freedom, subjected his physical individuality to the preeminence of spiritual rule: ‘For I am all the subjects that you have,/ Which first was my own king;’ [1.2.341–2] and he goes on to accuse Prospero of keeping him in prison who had originally been master of the whole island. Prospero’s answer once more shows the problem in all its complexity: ‘I have used thee,/ Filth as thou art, with human care, and lodg’d thee/In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate/ The honour of my child’ [1.2.344–8]. Caliban, who is necessary to Prospero, whose animal instincts are a true part of human nature, is yet, by virtue of his very character, recalcitrant to all restraint, to every claim of moral discipline. Regarding himself as lawful owner of the island he echoes, in his own way, Antonio by the assertion of his right to enjoy everything that appeals to his passions as desirable; so that when Prospero gave him liberty and the use of his own cell, he used his liberty to attack his master’s dearest possession in the person of his daughter. The conflict of flesh and spirit, which is simply that between civilized values and the state of nature, is not at this point in the play within sight of resolution. The animal instincts which man inherits from nature can neither be ignored, for they are a necessary part of his being, nor integrated in the new spiritual order; and so they lie in bondage to the master who came to give them spiritual significance but who has in fact destroyed their original spontaneity: [Quotes 1.2.352–64: ‘Abhorred slave,/ Which

 Derek Traversi, Artistic and Moral Purpose 317 any print of goodness will not take, . . . .’]. Prospero’s denunciation and Caliban’s reply are each, from their own point of view, unanswerable. How to harmonize these points of view, how to fit the claims of animal instinct into those of reasonable spirituality, is something that Prospero himself does not yet appear to see; not until the events precipitated on the island by the advent of strangers have taken their course and Ariel has spoken with the voice of judgement, is there any sign of clarification. The deficiencies of Caliban’s natural anarchism, already suggested by Prospero, are further brought out by his meeting with Stephano and Trinculo. Once more the theme is one which was being worked out in the New World before the eyes of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The arrival on the island of men from the outer world of ‘civilization’ is fatal to the natural creature, who escapes from the bondage of Prospero only to fall into that, infinitely more degrading, of the basest camp-followers of a supposedly civilized society. Caliban is, of course, greatly superior to Stephano and Trinculo. The poetry of his simplicity is enough to ensure that; but, divorced as he is from spiritual judgement and seeking only the anarchic freedom of his desires, he falls into a slavery which the superiority of the expression, being so incongruous, only serves to make more grotesque. Seduced by the ‘celestial liquor’ which Stephano gives him, he offers to serve him as a god: ‘I prithee be my god. (2.2. 149); ‘That’s a brave god and bears celestial liquors;/ I’ll kneel to him’ [2.2.118–19]; ‘I’ll kiss thy foot and swear myself thy subject’. [2.2.152]. His aim in doing so is above all to free himself from service –‘I’ll bear no more sticks, but follow thee’ – but, In following the freedom thus offered him by his fallacious instincts, he goes out drunk, crying ‘Freedom, hey-day!’, indeed, but reduced in reality to a slavery far more degrading than any to which he had been subjected before. The depth of his degradation, and that of his new masters, is fully brought out when the next appear. Completely enslaved as he now is in his ignorance to the worthless Stephano, Caliban’s savagery begins to inspire the drunken sailors to plot against Prospero; animality takes charge of human nature and debases it to new levels of evil. For Caliban, ridiculous though he has become in his worship of Stephano and Trinculo, is far more dangerous than the other two. In the brutal savagery of his proposals something breaks out which has been held in check so far by the domination of Prospero. That something finds expression in the unrestrained physical cruelty of the speeches in which he outlines his plot against his former master. Prospero is to be brained in his sleep, to have his skull battered with a log, to be ‘paunched’ with a stake, to have his throat cut; most brutally of all perhaps– ‘I’ll yield thee him asleep/ Where thou mayst knock a nail into his head’ [3.2.60–1]. But first, and above all, he must be deprived of his book: ‘Remember / First to possess his books; for without them/ He’s but a sot as I am, nor hath not/ One spirit to command: they all do hate him/ As rootedly as I’ [3.2.91–5]. In ascribing his own hatred to the other spirits Caliban is speaking falsely, measuring spiritual things in terms of his own anarchic bestiality; but his emphasis on the books, and on his own comparative sottishness without them, shows that he realises and fears the sources of Prospero’s power. His realization accounts for the vehemence of his proposals. Against the spiritual power of Prospero his own instincts arise in physically inspired revulsion. The true motive of his craving for liberty is expressed more directly in the same and other speeches: ‘that most deeply

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to consider is/ the beauty of his daughter./ She will become thy bed, I warrant, /And bring thee forth brave brood’ [3.2.98–9, 105]. The use of the word ‘brood’ to describe the progeny of this imagined union brings out well the animal spirit in which it is conceived, the revolt of passion against reason, of ‘blood’ against moral control which it implies. And this is the spirit which leads Caliban to ‘lick the boots’ of the coarsest, lowest kind of human being. That he is still superior to Stephano and Trinculo is shown by the survival of his poetic instincts (‘be not afeared, the isle is full of noises’ [3.2.135]); but his subjection is in essence complete and springs inevitable from his conception of liberty. We are reminded of Shakespeare’s treatment of the problem of liberty in Measure for Measure. In the play Claudio, as he is being taken to prison, freely, confesses that the cause of his present condition is ‘liberty, too much liberty’.4 Freedom from restraint, unchecked by adherence to any spiritual loyalty freely accepted, can lead man through his instincts only to moral dissolution and chaos. This in turn is the lowest form of slavery. Caliban is bound by his nature to service, but his service, which might have been that offered him by Prospero when he first took him into his cell and tried to teach him the civilized graces, turns to a mixture of the lowest animal brutality and sheer folly. At this point the development of the situation on the island is substantially complete. The two plots – that against Alonso and that against Prospero – are fully launched and the original seclusion of the island has been most effectively shattered by the entry of human passion and sin. Yet Prospero, in spite of all, has the threads in his hands and it is precisely at this moment that he chooses to indicate the moral resolution. Ariel’s great speech addressed to Alonso and his companions before he deprives them of the enchanted banquet that has just been set before them is, in fact, nothing less than the keystone upon which the structure of the whole play rests: [Quotes 3.3.53–9: ‘You are three men of sin, whom Destiny . . . .’]; [Quotes 3.3.68 – 83: ‘But remember/(For that’s my business to you) that you three . . . .’]. Here at last – rather even than in any speech of Prospero’s – is an explicit statement of what The Tempest is about. Shakespeare is careful to introduce the speech with a degree of pageantry and circumstance that make it stand out with great dramatic force against the general action. Ariel – generally the ‘gentle Ariel’ of Prospero’s preference – is brought on to the stage in the form of a harpy to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning. He causes the banquet to vanish by a motion of his wings and then, left face to face with those he has come to judge, he speaks. His words have a weighted simplicity that underlines their unique character and seriousness. The effect is obtained by means so direct that they barely call for analysis. Partly by the persistent use of heavy vocalic stresses, partly by the emphatic use of pauses in the middle and at the end of lines, partly by the significant insertion of parenthetic pauses into long unfolding sentences, the speech attains a measured magnificence unsurpassed, in its kind, anywhere in Shakespeare. Unsurpassed because, perhaps for the first time in his work, the voice of Destiny delivers itself directly in judgement. ‘I and my fellows’, says Ariel, ‘are ministers of Fate’ [3.3.60–1]. As such he speaks and, by so speaking, he brings out the full meaning of the play. The most important feature of the speech, indeed, is its affirmation of Destiny. This affirmation is, in its unequivocal expression, unique in Shakespeare’s work. Much of

 Derek Traversi, Artistic and Moral Purpose 319 the symbolism of the later plays – the use, for example, of the associations of ‘grace’ in relation to fertility – has religious implications; but nowhere, not even in The Winter’s Tale with its still rather misty references to ‘the gods’, is Destiny so personally conceived or conceded such absolute power in the working out of human affairs. Destiny, according to Ariel, ‘hath to instrument the lower world’. ‘Delaying, not forgetting,’ it watches over the whole story and brings the characters concerned in it, with infallible foreknowledge to the conclusions willed by absolute justice. All this, however it may have been foreshadowed in earlier works, is substantially new, but at the same time inevitable. For all Shakespeare’s symbolism, with the harmonizing purpose which underlies it, moves towards the presentation of the problems, moral and artistic, involved in this final acceptance of the personal reality of Destiny. Without that acceptance the intuition of ‘grace’ is only an insubstantial dream, a tenuous harmony woven out of elements that have no more validity than that of a personal mood; with it, possibly, the author lays himself open to the charge of going beyond his experience, of introducing an element of discontinuity in what had been so fare the harmonious pattern of his work. Whatever we may conclude in this respect, we should do well to begin by recognizing that the problem, and the effort to resolve it, were implicit in the whole Shakespearean experience. Needless to say it was not part of the artist’s purpose to substantiate this objective conception of Destiny by argument; but it was his aim, inevitable and necessary, to place it in the centre of his play, to allow the symbolic web of experiences to from around it and to see if it would, in the last analysis, fit. In the detailed working out of this conception he returns to familiar ground. The symbolic use of the storm and its association with new-born forces of harmony is one common to all Shakespeare’s last plays. Marina in Pericles loses her mother and is herself apparently lost in a storm at sea, but the storm itself throws her upon a friendly shore and eventually she is restored to her father’s arms. In The Winter’s Tale, when Perdita is exposed to the elements by her father’s unreasoning folly, she is found by the shepherds and her finding, while the storm is still raging and the younger Clown sees a ship struggling in vain to preserve itself against the elements, is really the first step to reconciliation: ‘thou mettest with things dying, I with things new-born’.5 So it is in The Tempest. Only here ‘the never-surfeited seas’ are explicitly controlled by a Destiny which has ‘incensed’ them against the ‘foul deed’ of those who plotted against Prospero and made them, in their anger, the instruments of an inexorable justice. The sea, to which Prospero and Miranda are exposed by human selfishness, has – through Prospero’s own action –brought the criminals to judgement. The key-note of the whole play, which Ariel comes to emphasize, is indeed judgement. Only when the good and evil in human nature have been understood and separated will the final reconciliation and restoration of harmony take place. This moral judgement is based in The Tempest upon an objective sanction which needs to be proved in operation. For this purpose – and really for this purpose alone – the various actors in the forgotten story of Naples and Milan have been brought together through the providential action of the storm upon ‘this most desolate isle’, ‘where man doth not inhabit’. Desolate surely because the work of purgation which is about to be accomplished needs to be accompanied by abstinence and a certain asceticism; and desolate too because it is not a place upon which men are to live their full, civilized

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lives – after the final reconciliation it is felt by all except those whose nature debars them from playing a part in the ‘brave new world’ of beings at once spiritualized and social to which they are being offered entry – but on which they are to achieve moral understanding and learn to accept the judgement passed upon them. In this process of education the fundamental need is for repentance. Repentance is the necessary consequence, on the human side, of accepting judgement. Here again the conception is not new in Shakespeare. His last plays throw an increasing stress upon the Christian conception of penitence. Lear is restored to his daughter after becoming aware of his own folly although the restoration, still insufficiently developed to prevail against the tragic spirit which dominates the play, is only temporary and illusory; Leontes, after sixteen years of penance for the follies to which his own passion has prompted him, is restored to Hermione and, through the innocence of his daughter, to his broken friendship to Polixenes. Ariel calls for a similar repentance from Alonso and his fellows. Unless their sojourn ‘on this most desolate isle’ has taught them their own evil and folly, unless it has shown them the necessity for ‘heart’s sorrow’ and ‘a clear life’ to follow, their doom is certain. For it is in the nature of unbridled passion, as Shakespeare had already presented it in the great series of tragedies from Othello to Timon of Athens, to lead its victims to self-destruction; and The Tempest, with its insistence upon ideas of penance and amendment that can only follow from acceptance of a personal. Spiritual conception of Destiny is conceived as nothing less than a counterpoise to this tragic process of ruin. (140–9)

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Nevill Coghill, Christian myth 1950

From ‘The Basis of Shakespearean Comedy,’ Essays and Studies, New Series III (London, 1950), 1–28. Nevill Coghill (1899–1980) was a university teacher and theatre producer. He produced many plays for the Oxford University Dramatic Society and various college societies. These include Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida in 1937, The Winter’s Tale in 1946 and Hamlet in 1940. His 1948 production of The Tempest was long remembered for its magical effects. Apart from numerous articles and book chapters, he completed several translations of The Canterbury Tales and completed the book-length work Shakespeare’s Professional Skills (1948). Coghill writes that The Tempest’s strong appeal, notwithstanding what he sees as its thin characterization and tenuous plot, lies in its affinities to the Genesis myth. This excerpt occurs amidst a discussion of the allegorical nature of Shakespeare’s comedies. The Tempest is not a systematic allegory of the biblical myth but rather a kind of ‘allegorical impressionism’.

Now if we take such a story on the natural plane of meaning only, it is impossible to account for the deep impression made upon us by the play. Compared with any other play of Shakespeare the sequence of action from scene to scene is tenuously spun; the succession of incidents in the loves of Ferdinand and Miranda, the bewildering of the royal party and the debauch of Caliban is even less integrated into a firm and purposive the debauch of Caliban is even less integrated into a firm and purpose narrative-line than the actions in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The characters are less sharply observed; villains are merely villainous, comics are merely comics. Prospero himself is not psychologically recognizable in the sense that can be claimed for other male protagonists in Shakespeare. The natural plane of interpretation is insufficient to explain the effect the play produces. . . . What story then, familiar to Shakespeare and to his audience, does this Tempest story of a man and a woman exiled from their natural inheritance for the acquisition of a forbidden knowledge resemble? An answer leaps readily to mind; it resembles the story of Adam and Eve, type-story of our troubles. The Tempest also contains the story of Prospero and his brother Antonio, that has something of the primal, eldest curse

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upon it, something near a brother’s murder. There is in Genesis, as well as the story of Adam and Eve, the story of Cain and Abel. But in The Tempest there is also a turn in both stories by which there may be a repentance and a forgiveness, and a homecoming in harmony. This is the shape of the promise of the New Testament and of the Second Adam. There is the hope of a return to Paradise when we come to die. Trouble will turn to joy. These simplest and most obvious elements in the Christian story, upon which (but literally and without allegory) the great medieval mystery cycles were built, are, at a distance, mirrored in the story of The Tempest, well enough at least to be worth investigating. Let us then turn to the second point on which an Elizabethan audience would be more instinctively understanding than we are, namely the natures of Ariell and Caliban. Can these be fitted into the suggestion I have put forward? Medieval science believed and Marlowe in his poetry reiterated that the physical body of man is composed of the four elements. Air and fire, earth and water were the constituents of the human frame; everybody knew that. It would have been no great leap of recognition to see in Ariell the elements of air and fire, and in Caliban (at once addressed by Prospero as ‘Thou earth, thou!’ and constantly mistaken for a fish) the elements of earth and water. These two, Ariell and Caliban, are the only occupants of Prospero’s island at his coming thither. Their functions in the play are for Ariell obedience to the will of Prospero in his spiritual designs upon the royal party, for Caliban rebellion against Prospero and a drunken and murderous association with the lower louts, Stefano and Trinculo. They are the images of what is higher and lower in man, the occupants of his body, the servants (both subject to momentary rebellions) of his intellect, By this account Prospero himself stands for the intellect and Miranda for his soul. The island, which he is shortly to leave, is the form of his body. Caliban is to be left behind and Ariel to be freed; the elements are to return to the elements from which they came. Miranda is pure where Eve was not; but if she be taken on this plane of meaning to figure the soul of Prospero, it can be seen why she is so. Prospero has not used his forbidden knowledge in sinful ways. He is a magician, but a white one. Yet by being so he has alienated elements in his own nature, and has been cut off from them, particularly from the most royal. His faults have begotten theirs. These are seen in the persons of Alonzo, Gonzalo, Sebastian, Antonio and Ferdinand, variously disposed towards him. Separated from him by the gulf of the seas, nothing but a tempest can bring them together, and at the moment determined by Destiny (the moment of preparation for death) Prospero commands the tempest to arise, that he may reassemble and set in harmony all the wrongs and enmities that stand between him and wholeness of being. The psychologist Jung would agree. This harmony is not too facile; its achievement is as grave as the airy texture of the play permits. Prospero has to abjure as well as to rebuke before he can forgive and reunite. These more painful things must not be out-run by the image of happy love. It was a part of Prospero’s design that Ferdinand should wed Miranda, that the image of marriage no less than that of music and the blessing of the Gods should celebrate

 Nevill Coghill, Christian Myth 323 the reconcilement of his soul. But this easier image had to be delayed, threatening as it did to accomplish itself too quickly; there were things more intractable to settle first. A wound must heal from the bottom, otherwise there is only a skinning and a filming of the ulcerous place. It is not until Prospero, in summoning an invisible music, has for the last time exercised his forbidden knowledge and until he has confronted and rebuked the enemy that he can forgive them and show them the image of that forgiveness in the love of Ferdinand and Miranda at their game of chess. Then Stephano and Trinculo can return, chastened, to their proper service, and Caliban, come to his senses, can acknowledge his master and be accepted into grace. In this way the story completes its image of the Old Adam made whole by the New, and of a reconcilement before the return to a lost Paradise. Shakespeare is too subtle an entertainer to preach openly. I do not even think it was his purpose to do so under a veil. I suppose he took the basis of his vision for granted, what everyone in Christendom knew to be true of life. It was a natural, time-honoured shape for a story, re-told in contemporary terms. His purpose was (he says) ‘to please’, and how please better than by comfortable words and a new fable to body forth the old beliefs in an harmonious world where trouble was an intrusion and joy the goal? He left to Ben Jonson the preaching of a morality that fundamentally presupposes the opposite, namely a world of discordant self-interest in which the most we can hope for is a sort of social prudence, kept in being by the continual castigation of unethical excesses. (25–7)

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Frank Kermode, commentary 1954

From The Tempest (Surrey, 1954). Frank Kermode (1919–2010) was Professor of English at University College London, Cambridge University, Columbia University and Harvard University. An acclaimed academic critic and reviewer, his literary interests were wide-ranging – he wrote on Medieval, Renaissance and Modernist literature with equal proficiency. Among his works on Shakespeare are titles such as William Shakespeare – The Final Plays (1963), On Shakespeare’s Learning (1965), Shakespeare’s Language (2000) and The Age of Shakespeare (2004). The premise of Kermode’s discussion is that the play is a pastoral romance and, like other pastorals, the Nature – Art dichotomy is central to its structure and theme. Caliban is Nature: the ground against everything else in the play – goodness, civilization and above all Art (represented by Prospero) – are contrasted.

[From ‘Introduction’]

Themes of the play The main purpose of what follows is to sketch the themes of The Tempest. It has rarely seemed sufficient to discuss the play at the level of plot alone, and there are many allegorical interpretations, some of them assuming a political, some an autobiographical, and some a religious purpose and key. These somewhat desperate expedients are unnecessary, for The Tempest, though exceptionally subtle in its structure of ideas, and unique in its development of them, can be understood as a play of an established kind dealing with situations appropriate to that kind. The Tempest is a pastoral drama; it belongs to that literary kind which includes certain earlier English plays, but also, and more significantly, Comus; it is concerned with the opposition of Nature and Art, as serious pastoral poetry always is, and it shares this concern with the other late comedies, and with the Sixth Book of the Faerie Queene, to which it is possibly directly indebted.

 Frank Kermode, Commentary 325 The main opposition is between the worlds of Prospero’s Art, and Caliban’s Nature. Caliban is the core of the play; like the shepherd in formal pastoral, he is the natural man against whom the cultivated man is measured. But we are not offered a comparison between a primitive innocence in nature and a sophisticated decadence, any more than we are in Comus. Caliban represents (at present we must over-simplify) nature without the benefit of nurture. Nature, opposed to an Art which is man’s power over the created world and over himself; nature divorced from grace, or the senses without the mind. He differs from Iago and Edmund in that he is a ‘naturalist’ by nature without access to the art that makes love out of lust; the restraints of temperance he cannot, in his bestiality, know; to the beauty of the nurtured he opposes a monstrous ugliness; ignorant of gentleness and humanity, he is a savage and capable of all ill; he is born to slavery, not to freedom, of a vile and not of a noble union; and his parents represent an evil natural magic which is the antithesis of Prospero’s benevolent Art. This is a simple diagram of an exquisitely complex structure, but it may be useful as a guide. Caliban is the ground of the play. His function is to illuminate by contrast the world of art, nurture, civility; the world which none the less nourishes the malice of Antonio and the guilt of Alonso, and stains a divine beauty with the crimes of ambition and lust. There is the possibility of purgation; and the tragicomic theme of the play, the happy shipwreck – ‘that which we accompt a punishment against evill is but a medicine against evill’ – is the means to this end. The events of 1609 in Bermuda must have seemed to contain the whole situation in little. There a group of men were, as they themselves said, providentially cast away into a region of delicate and temperate fruitfulness, where Nature provided abundantly; brought out of the threatening but merciful sea into that New World where, said the voyagers, men lived in a state of nature. Ancient problems of poetry and philosophy were given an extraordinary actuality. The Bermuda pamphlets seem to have precipitated, in this play, most of the major themes of Shakespeare’s last years indeed, that is the whole importance. ....

Prospero’s Art At risk of introducing ‘distincts’ where there is no ‘division’ it may be said that Prospero’s Art has two functions in The Tempest. The first is simple; as a mage he exercises the supernatural powers of the holy adept. His Art is here the disciplined exercise of virtuous knowledge, a ‘translation of merit into power’,1 the achievement of ‘an intellect pure and conjoined with the powers of the gods, without which we shall never happily ascend to the scrutiny of secret things, and to the power of wonderful workings’.2 This Art is contrasted with the natural power of Sycorax to exploit for evil purposes the universal sympathies.3 It is a technique for liberating the soul from the passions, from nature; the practical application of a discipline of which the primary requirements are learning and temperance, and of which the mode is contemplation. When Prospero achieves this necessary control over himself and nature he achieves his ends (reflected in the restoration of harmony at the human and political levels) and has no more need of the instrument, ‘rough magic’.4

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The second function is symbolic. Prospero’s Art controls Nature; it requires of the artist virtue and temperance if his experiment is to succeed; and it thus stands for the world of the better natures and its qualities. This is the world which is closed to Caliban (and Comus); the world of mind and the possibilities of liberating the soul, not the world of sense, whether that be represented as coarsely natural or charmingly voluptuous.5 Art is not only a beneficent magic in contrast to and evil one; it is the ordination of civility, the control of appetite, the transformation of nature by breeding and learning; it is even, in a sense, the means of Grace. Prospero is, therefore, the representative of Art, as Caliban is of Nature. 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, an achievement essential to success in any of the other activities. Prospero describes his efforts to control his own passion in V.i.25–7 – ‘Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick,/ Yet with my nobler reason ‘gainst my fury/ Do I take part’. In an age when ‘natural’ conduct was fashionably associated with sexual promiscuity, chastity alone, could stand as the chief function of temperance, and there is considerable emphasis on this particular restraint in The Tempest. The practice of good magic required it;6 but in this it is again merely the practical application of civility. Prospero twice, and Juno again, warn Ferdinand of the absolute necessity for it, and Ferdinand’s ability to make pure beauty ‘abate the ardour of his liver’7 is in the strongest possible contrast to Caliban’s straightforward natural lust for it. The unchaste designs of Stephano arouse Prospero’s anger also; it is as if he were conducting, with magically purified book and rod,8 the kind of experiment which depended for its success on the absolute purity of all concerned; and indeed, in so far as his aims were a dynastic marriage and the regeneration of the noble, this was so. This is characteristic of the way in which the magic of Prospero translates into more general terms. The self-discipline of the magician is the self-discipline of the prince. It was the object of the good ruler to make his people good by his own efforts; and that he might do so it was considered necessary for him to acquire learning, and to rid himself ‘of those troublous affections that untemperate mindes feele’.9 The personal requirements of mage and prince are the same, and Prospero labours to regain a worldly as well as a heavenly power. Like James I in the flattering description, he ‘standeth invested with that triplicitie which in great veneration was ascribed to the ancient Hermes, the power and fortune of a King, the knowledge and illumination of a Priest, and the learning and universalitie of a Philosopher’.10 Learning is a major theme in the play; we learn that Miranda is capable of it and Caliban is not, and why this should be so; but we are given a plan of the place of learning in the dispositions of providence. Prospero, like Adam, fell from his kingdom, by an inordinate thirst for knowledge; but learning is a great aid to virtue the road by which we may love and imitate God and ‘repair the ruins of our first parents’,11 and by its means he is enabled to return. The solicitude which accompanied Adam and Eve when ‘the world was all before them’ went also with Prospero and Miranda when they set out in their ‘rotten carcass of a butt’: By foul play as thou say’st, were we heaved thence/ But blessedly holp thither’ (vVii. 62–3). They came ashore ‘By Providence Divine’; and

 Frank Kermode, Commentary 327 Gonzalo leaves us in no doubt that Prospero’s fault like Adam’s, was a happy one: ‘Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue/ Should become king of Naples? O rejoice/ Beyond a common joy! . . . .’ (V.i.205–7) He had acquired the great object of Learning, and regained a richer heritage.12 But he is not learned in only this rather abstract sense; he is the learned prince. Like Boethius, he had been a natural philosopher and learnt from Philosophy, that ‘to hate the wicked were against reason.’ He clearly shared the view that ‘no wise man had rather live in banishment, poverty, and ignominy, than prosper in his own country . . . . For in this manner is the office of wisdom performed with more credit and renown, where the governor’s happiness is participated by the people about them.’ And Philosophy, though ambiguously, taught both Boethius and Prospero, ‘the way by which thou mayst return to thy country’.13 There’s nothing remarkable about Prospero’s ambition to regain his own kingdom and strengthen his house by a royal marriage. To be studious and contemplative, and to translate knowledge into power in the active life was the object of his discipline; the Renaissance venerated Scipio for his demonstration of this truth; and Marvell’s ‘Horation Ode’ speaks of Cromwell in the same terms . . . . Prospero is not at all paradoxical in presenting himself in the climax as he was ‘sometime Milan’ (V.i.86). Yet he does not intend merely to look after his worldly affairs; very third though is to be his grave. ‘The end of the active or doing life ought to be the beholding; as of war, peace, and as of paines, rest’.14 The active and contemplative lives are complementary. In all respects, then, Prospero expresses the qualities of the world of Art, of the non vile. These qualities become evident in the organized contrasts between his world and the world of the vile; between the worlds of Art and Nature.

Art and Nature The Vigour of Vice We can now see the force and purpose of the plot-devices by which Shakespeare compares the education of Miranda with that of Caliban. The love of Ferdinand with the lust of Caliban, the magic of Prospero with that of the parents of Caliban; but there are other contrasts also, which are equally clear, and in which Caliban serves as a criterion, not of the beauty and civility, but of the corruption, of the nobly born. The intemperance and folly of Stephano and Trinculo are easy enough to explain, but how are we to account for the guilt, already borne and the new evils planned by men of princely stock, endowed with the ‘seed’, and higher in the scale of life than Caliban? Antonio is a degenerate nobleman of such the opinion of the civilized aristocrat may be summed up in the words of Owen Felltham: Earth hath not anything more glorious than ancient nobility, when it is found with virtue. What barbarous mind will not reverence that blood, which hath untainted run through so large a succession of generations? Besides, virtue adds a new splendor, which together with the honour of his house, challengeth a respect from all. But bad greatness is nothing but the vigour of vice, having both mind and

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means to be uncontrollably lewd. A debauched son of a noble family is one of the intolerable burdens of the earth, and as hateful a thing as hell; for all know he hath had both example and percept flowing in his education both which are powerful enough to obliterate a native illness: yet these in him are but auxiliaries to his shame, that, with the brightness of his ancestors, make his own darkness more palpable.15

‘Good wombs’, says Miranda, ‘have borne bad sons’ – in the realm of the better nature there are ‘unnatural’ men. Cordelia had Regan for a sister, and Edmund was Gloucester’s ‘natural’ son and Edgar’s brother.16 Pallavicino reminds the company, who have just listened to Canossa’s clear-cut theory of nobility, of the many ‘who for all they were borne of the most noble bloud, yet have they been heaped full of vices’.17 Obviously among the better natures there were those upon whom some encounter or accident might beget an evil nature; that from the seed could grow degenerate plants. Many reasons were alleged to explain this, some astrological, some theological and ultimately nobleman do ill because, being sons of Adam, they are free to choose. The fact of degeneracy offers little difficulty to those who, with Dante, make nobility dependent upon virtue, shunning the magical view which accepts melior natura as distinguished from natura essentially, and not merely in respect of good or bad conduct in individual cases. On this magical view, it remains troublesome to account for the fact that vileness of conduct and nobility of birth are found together. Thus Prospero finds it difficult to accept the fact. Caliban has no choice but to be vile; but in Antonio there was surely a predisposition to virtuous conduct; and it could not be easy to think of one who, in the eyes of Caliban, was a ‘brave spirit’, as the betrayer of the fulness of his own more perfect nature, as a man so unnatural as to be impervious to the action of grace, a Macbeth of comedy. We see in Antonio the operation of sin in a world magically purified but still allowing freedom to the will; inhabitants of this world can abase themselves below those who live unaided at the level of nature. And it is a comment upon his unnatural behavior that we are offered a close structural parallel between Antonio’s corrupt and Caliban’s natural behaviour in the two plots against Alonso and Prospero. Are we given any notion of the manner of this degeneracy? What has become of Antonio’s nobility, his predisposition to virtue? There is a hint to the answer in the treatment in the play of the word ‘virtue’, which is, as I have suggested, closely related to the nature of the noble. The noble are virtuous, as was Miranda’s mother (I.ii.56) – her virtue expresses itself as chastity; this is always so in noble women. Miranda has ‘the very virtue of compassion’ (I.ii.27), the noble essence of it. Ferdinand has admired several women for ‘several virtues’, which he paraphrases as ‘noble graces’ (III.i.42 ff). He admires Miranda because she has all these qualities without their defects, being purely noble, the perfection of her own nature. Prospero, with true princely magnanimity, decides that the act of revenge, when at his mercy lie all his enemies, must remain undone, since ‘virtue’ is nobler than vengeance (V.i.27–8). This is virtue in a Christian sense; specifically, the virtue of forgiveness and it supplants revenge as the duty of the courtier. But it had been virtuous in a courtier to seek vengeance – it had been of the essence of nobility to do so;18 the conflict between these two concepts of virtuous action in a certain situation had for long been a feature of the Elizabethan drama. For the virtue which is the essence of a magical nobility is

 Frank Kermode, Commentary 329 not necessarily a Christian or a stoic virtue; it can be, and very generally is, virtu. This paradox is most clearly seen in Machiavelli with whom virtu is a favourite word, and means the proper action of a prince on the political level, whether it is ‘virtuous’ in the ethical sense or not. Thus Machiavelli commends the virtu of Agathocles, who, though of infamous life, understood so well the need for prudent cruelty in a usurper, that he established his virtu by luring his enemies to a banquet and assassinating them all.19 The proposal Antonio makes to Sebastian in the second Act is that Sebastian should secure his accession to the throne of Naples by the murder of all the opposition, that is of Alonso and Gonzalo; he would include the rest were he not sure of their support. Indeed, throughout the scene, Antonio’s conduct is perfectly ‘virtuous’ in a Machiavellian sense, and this radical perversion of virtue represents the extent of his degeneracy, and the degree to which he is alienated from the redemptive scheme of which Prospero is the agent. The moral pervert sinks below the brute in his desire for ‘good mischief ’. ‘The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance’ would be to Antonio an utterly meaningless phrase. In so far as Caliban is his measure, the natural man functions like the virtuous shepherd of normal pastoral, to indicate corruption and degeneracy in the civilized world; if the natural man is a brute, so much more the terrible is the sin of the nobleman who abases himself below the natural.

The Magic of Nobility Romance could be defined as a mode of exhibiting the action of magical and moral laws in a version of human life so selective as to obscure, for the special purpose of concentrating attention on these laws, the fact that in reality their force is intermittent and only fitfully glimpsed. Thus although we may believe that in the end the forces of fertility, or of plenty, triumph, and that it is a law of human life that they should do so, we would not hold it as a rational conviction that this must be so in every single case, of every individual; yet comedy by a formal law, proved by a few exceptions, ends in a feast or a wedding. In the same way we accept even more arbitrary devices, such as that of the crucial ‘recognition’ of tragedy and comedy, as formal laws corresponding to, and in some valuable way illuminating, diurnal forces which are intermittent and rarely visible. In the realm of what we agree to call romance these conventions are both more frequent and more arbitrary. The Tempest has always been recognized as a romance; it so clearly belongs to this world that some critics, misguided by the resemblances between this play and The Winter’s Tale, have supposed that at some stage in its history it must also have been analogous in structure. But there is no equation between romance and unclassical form; one need not look further than Sidney’s Arcadia to establish that, though it is perhaps also relevant to look in the direction of Italian pastoral tragicomedy. It is therefore easy enough to describe the factors which, in The Tempest, depend upon the ideal structure of moral and magical law in romantic thought. Miranda introduces the Platonic theme in their initial comments on Ferdinand. ‘There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple . . . .’ (I.ii.461) [1.2.458] – and throughout the play the noble (and therefore virtuous) are beautiful, the vile ugly. Sycorax was an envious hoop, Caliban’s mind cankers ‘as with age his body uglier grows’ (iv.i.191–2); even the wicked courtiers appear as brave spirits, much as the fallen angels, retained something of their

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original brightness, and conversely, as Duessa, stripped of her evil power became: ‘A loathly, wrinckled hag, ill favoured, old,/Whose secret filth good manners biddeth not be told,’ (Faerie Queene I.viii.46.) This is a law which operates imperfectly in the world of actuality.20 Thus voyagers expressed some surprise that the natives of the new world, though they lived in sin, were not unspeakably hideous; they looked for the actual operation of this law. In the same way the Courtier held that ‘as there can be no circle without a centre, no more can beautie be without goodnesse.’21 But in romance the law operates without interference, and the physical appearance of the characters becomes an index of their nobility or vileness, their virtue or depravity. In romance there survives that system of ideal correspondences and magic patterns which in actuality could not survive the scrutiny of an informed and modern eye. It thrives upon the myth of the indefeasible magnanimity of royal children as it does upon the myth of the magical connexion between the fertility of a king and of his lands and subjects. Hence it is the only atmosphere in which extended consideration may plausibly be given to such explorations of nature as Shakespeare attempted in the group of plays known as the romances; for in actuality the issue is always obscured, but in art the ideas can develop as it were of themselves, with ideal clarity, as if to show us that a formal and ordered paradigm of these forces is possible when life is purged of accident, and upon the assumption that since we are all willy-nilly platonists we are perfectly able to understand the relevance of such a paradigm. Thus, in Shakespeare’s romances, the virtue of royal children is given; it controls their behaviour, and cannot be mistaken; they have it by nature. . . . Miranda, like her sisters in the Tempest-analogues, is remarkably frank in her offers of love, and Ferdinand equally insistent that his desires are under control, that her beauty abates the ardour of his liver. Nature is always fertile; the better nature, however, is under a magical restraint; and virginity is immemorially associated with magic power, witness the Golden Legend, The Old Wives’ Tale, and Comus. The Tempest makes much of this, and also of the contrast between the unchastity of the natural man, in whom cultivation has brought forth only ‘the briers and darnell of appetites’ and the man of better nature, represented under this aspect by Ferdinand; the comparison at the level of ideas is expressed in their attitudes to Miranda, and at the level of narrative in their reactions to the duty of log-bearing which Prospero enforces upon them severally; to Ferdinand it is a sanctified labour, it physics pain with delight; it is the restraint – horticulturally one might say, the cutting back–from which the fruit of good develops: but to Caliban it is a discipline of fear.22 Ferdinand is not lacking in the virtu which makes him try to draw on Prospero (to be thwarted by the magic or divine power that hedges a prince) but he quickly understands the purpose of his suffering because he has the power properly to estimate the value of the regard; he has already taken Miranda for a goddess. The virtue of these romantic heroines so illuminates their physical bodies that, like Pastorella their Spenserian prototype, they could be mistaken for goddesses. (Pastorella is also the cause of a contrast between nobility and vileness, with Calidore as the knight of courtesy filling Ferdinand’s place and Coridon as the boor deficient in virtue (all definitions) and courtesy filling Caliban’s. This is a hint as to the extent to which Shakespeare’s is a ‘stock’ situation.) Marina’s specialy efficacious virtue transforms her into a splendid apparition which the vexed Pericles can scarcely accept

 Frank Kermode, Commentary 331 as human; Perdita appears as Flora; ‘This your sheep-shearing/Is a meeting of the petty gods,/ And you the queen on’t.’ (Winter’s Tale, IV​.iii​.3–5) Ferdinand’s greeting of Miranda (which his father’s later, substantiates) glances back through the earlier romantic drama to Virgil, to the hero’s interview with Venus; establishing at one stroke the typical qualities of Ferdinand’s sea-adventure (later reinforced by further significant allusions to the Aeneid) and the divine quality of Miranda’s nobility, expressed as both virtue and beauty. There is no need to labour the connexion between this romantic convention and the fitful divinization of beauty in the actual world. It corresponds to the extension of Prospero’s princely powers into the realm of magic. The romantic story is, then the mode in which Shakespeare made his last poetic investigation into the supernatural elements in the human soul and in human society. His thinking is Platonic, though never schematic; and he had deliberately chosen the pastoral tragicomedy as the genre in which this inquiry is best pursued. The pastoral romance gave him the opportunity for a very complex comparison between the worlds of Art and Nature; and the tragicomic form enabled him to concentrate the whole story of apparent disaster, penitence, and forgiveness into one happy misfortune, controlled by a divine Art.

Pastoral Tragicomedy It is well known that romantic comedy was unfashionable during the opening years of the seventeenth century, and that it was rather suddenly restored to favour towards the end of the first decade. At this time Beaumont and Fletcher were becoming established, and Shakespeare seemingly changed his general direction to produce his part in Pericles, and the other three romances which are his last plays except for Henry VIII, in which he collaborated with Fletcher. About this time (1610) the King’s Men revived the old romance Mucedorus, and it is by no means impossible that Bremo, the wild man in that play, contributed to the emotional situation which was realized in Caliban. It seems most likely that Mucedorus was dug out because of the new demand for romantic comedy, though evidently there were differences between the old and new types. One can scarcely believe that Mucedorus was responsible for the vogue, even though it was somewhat refurbished. In addition to this, it has long been known that an old play of an academic type called The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune has some curious resemblances to Cymbeline and also, though in lesser degree, to The Tempest.23 I do not know that the full extent of the latter resemblance has been recognized;24 but in any case it is not of much importance, except as an additional token that The Tempest, like its fellows, has native progenitors. Nor is this native line merely dramatic, for its most impressive product before The Tempest is the Sixth Book of The Faerie Queene (itself connected, like Sidney’s Arcadia, with the Greek romances) which exploits the pastoral situation for comment upon the theme of the contrast between nature and nurture. It might be possible to argue that Spenser alone is sufficient to account for the pastoral situation in The Tempest; but there is a fairly strong suspicion that this play and the other romances excluding

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Pericles, being perhaps designed for a more sophisticated audience, shows some marks of influence from Italian pastoral drama. This is a problem which demands elaborate treatment and it is beyond the scope of the present work. It is clear that Fletcher was familiar with the new pastoral tragicomedy of which the laws had been promulgated and defended during an extensive controversy by Guarini,25 and it is conceivable that Philaster was an attempt, after the failure of the more formal Faithful Shepherdess, to adapt the genre to the stage of the private theatre. It is also conceivable that Shakespeare may have taken advice from Fletcher at the time of the company’s commencing to play at the Blackfriars,26 so that in one way or another the fashion of Guarini may have affected Shakespeare. Daniel’s Queenes Arcadia, ‘a Pastorall Trage-Comedie’, was performed in 1605; Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess probably in 1608. By this time the theories of Guarini were common literary intelligence, and the Preface to the published version of Fletcher’s play gives a straightforward account of some of them. It has been shown that Fletcher was familiar not only Guarini but with lesser playwrights in the same tradition,27 and it is very unfortunate that so little is at present know about the details of this indebtedness. One finds in Guarini and Fletcher the ‘Shakespearian’ themes of royal birth, the sacrifice for love, and resurrection from death or seeming death. Fletcher gave these elements of Italian pastoral a place in the context of English popular drama; though neither he nor his Italian master so much as attempt to use the themes in a Shakespearian way. Guarini is not a great poet; indeed, with all his weight of theory, he is a pretentious poet. Fletcher is remarkably like him in so far as they both denied a predominant moral function to poetry and trifled with the genre in which the experimented. Nevertheless the tradition in which they worked may have blended with the native tradition in which Pericles was written to give The Tempest a certain resemblance to the Italian form and its popular descendant, the Commedia dell’ Arte. Even if we cannot ascertain its antecedents, there can be no question that the tragicomic form of the last plays was dictated by the nature of the fables treated, and that these were chosen because they lent themselves to the formulation of poetic propositions concerning the status of human life in relation to nature, and the mercy of a providence which gives new life when the old is scarred by sin or lost in folly. The themes are thus pastoral and tragicomic.28 Prospero pitches his countrymen into a sea that threatens but is merciful, and does not so much as stain their clothes; into a penitence which washes away old guilt and brings new life. This is the tragicomic shipwreck of which the Bermudan castaways spoke; the apparent disaster which was a means of grace; the gods ‘chalk’d forth the way’ for every man to find himself ‘when no man was his own’ (V.i.203, 213). This is the great achievement of Prospero, and Gonzalo sums it up for him: selfconquest, followed by the redemption of the noble, their liberation from the sense of loss and impurity which haunts them as they wander exhausted in search of Ferdinand and themselves. Even Antonio has not lost all his original brightness; he is part of Miranda’s brave new world, and one of those brave spirits which give the natural slave the insight to ‘be wise hereafter And seek for grace’ (V.i.295–6). (The reactions of Caliban and Miranda to the sight of the castaways are carefully compared both at the beginning and at the end of the play, just as their reaction to the same education

 Frank Kermode, Commentary 333 is compared.) But Antonio is, none the less, one of Prospero’s failures; as far as can be deduced from the closing passages, in which Antonio is silent, he will not choose the good; unlike Sebastian he is unimpressed by it, and refuses to close the circuit of noble virtue which excludes only Caliban. Prospero must acknowledge another thing of darkness. In his fantasia on The Tempest Mr. Auden, with an admirable imaginative exactitude, gives Antonio as chorus the last ironic word to each dream of the good or new life: ‘Your all is partial, Prospero;/ My will is all my own;/ Your need to love shall never know/ Me: I am I, Antonio,/ By choice myself alone.’29 A world without Antonio is a world without freedom; Prospero’s shipwreck cannot restore him if he desires not to be restored to life. The gods chalk out a tragicomic way, but enforce only disaster. The rest is voluntary . . . . (xxiv–xxv, xlvii–lxii)

Notes 1. EDMOND MALONE 1

 ‘Let greatness of her glassy scepters vaunt, Not scepters, no but reeds, soon bruis’d, soon broken, And let this worldly pomp our wits enchant, All fades, and scarcely leaves behind a token. Those golden palaces, these gorgeous halls, With furniture superfluously fair, Those stately courts, these sky-encount’ring walls, Evanish all like vapours in the air.’

Darius, Act III. Ed. 1603 2 See a note on Julius Caesar, Act 1. Sc, 1. 3 Observations on the Tempest, p. 67. Mr. Holt imagined, that the Lord Essex was united to lady Frances Holt in 1610; but he was mistaken: their union did not take place till the next year. 4 Jan. 5, 1606–07; the earl continued abroad for four years after that time; so that he did not cohabit with his wife till 1611.

3. GEORGE CHALMERS [1] ‘An Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare Papers, which were exhibited on Norfolk Street’ (London, 1797), p. 572. 2 The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the Great and Golden Citie of Manoa, which the Spaniards call El Dorado. Performed in 1595 by Sir W Raleigh (London, 1596). Imprinted at London by Rob Robinsion, 1596. The book was dedicated, by Raleigh, to the Lord Admiral Howard, and to Sir Robert Cecyll. 3 It was printed by Windet for Barnet in St. Dunstan’s Churchyard. 4 This pamphlet was printed by W. Stansby for W. Welby: And, it is merely a republication of Jourdan’s Tract, with an addition, containing the voyage and settlement, under Master R. More, the deputie governor, with a change of the name, and a softening of the description, as to the hellishness of the thunder, lightening and storms; yet, retaining the following passages in Jourdan’s pamphlet, which is very material to remember, and very curious to remark now, as it has never been remarked before: ‘For the islands of the Barmudas, as every man knoweth, that hath heard, or read of them, were never inhabited by any Christian, or heathen, people, but ever esteemed, and reputed, a most prodigious, and inchanted, place, affoording nothing but gusts, storms, and foul weather; which made every navigator and mariner to avoid them, Scylla and Charydis, or as they would shun the Devil himselfe.’ 5 In the Plain Description, when printed, in 1613, there is a superaddition to the original passage which is very remarkable: ‘it is reported, that the land of the Barmudas ‘with the many islands about it are inchanted, and kept ‘with evil and wicked spirits; it is a

336  Notes most idle and false ‘report.’ – To this the writer of the supplemental account adds: ‘For, our inchanted islands, which is kept as some ‘say with spirits, will wrong no friend, nor foe.’ Three mariners, who had been left on Bermudas in 1610, were found by the planters, in 1612, more civil than savage, and more industrious than idle: For, they had planted corn, wheat, beans, tobacco, and melons. We now see how many hints Shakespeare gained from those Bermudean pamphlets. 6 Who did not think, says the writer, till within these four years, but that those islands had been rather a habitation of devels, than fit for men to dwell in? Who did not hate the name, when he was on land, and shun the place when he was on the seas. The writer, then, speaks of the Bermudas as desert, yet says it was inhabited by three men; who were more civil, than savage; that they were surrounded by dangerous rocks, lying seaven leagues into the sea, yet, there are many good harbours in it: They found the ayr so temperate, and the country so aboundantly fruitful of all fit necessaries for the sustentation of a man’s life; and though this island has been, and is, accounted, the most dangerous, infortunate, and most forlone place in the world, it is in truth, the richest, healthfullest, and pleasing land, merely natural, as ever man set foot upon. The ground is the richest to bear fruit, whatsoever one shall lay on it, that is in the world, and very easy for digging; for it is a fat sandy ground, and of colour a brown red: Many seeds were sown, the cowcumber and the melon among the others, and they were seen above the ground on the fourth day: They went into the bird-islands; and without stick, stone-bow, or gun, they took up the birds with their hands, so many as they would. Fish of every kind swarm about those islands. And for such extraordinary weather, for thunder and lightning, as is re-ported, I can see no such matter, but better weather than they have in England; and, if we had been wet by weather, or by wading, we may lay us down, so wet, to sleep, with a palm-tree leaf or two under us and one over us, and we sleep soundly, without any taking cold; your airs in England are far more subject to diseases that these islands are. 7 Mr. Malone has clearly shown, that Gonzalo’s discourse, both in sentiment, and language, was borrowed from Florio’s Translation of Montaigne’s Essaies, which was published, in 1603; [Shak. Vol. ii. 38] but our critic did not advert to a material circumstance, in this question, that the second edition of Florio’s Translation was published, in 1613: And our commentator is egregiously mistaken, in sup-posing, that Shakespeare was led by the perusal of this book, to make the scene of the Tempest in an unfrequented island; as I have evinced from the Bermudean pamphlets, and other documents, though it is probable, that Shakespeare, when he was writing The Tempest, in the winter of 1612–13, may have thrown his eyes on the second edition of Florio, and, as he often did, caught at the above-quoted words, which were suitable to his purpose. Shakespeare, as I have already shown, was perfectly acquainted with the canniballes, before he could have seen that translation: and he undoubtedly saw much about that man-eating people, in the improved edition of Hackluyt’s Voyages, 1598–1600: Yet, I think it probable that Shakespeare may have anagrammatized canibal into Caliban. It is, moreover, to be observed, that there is annexed to the Plaine Description of the Bermudas, 1613, what would be called, at present, the fundamental constitution of the colony, containing, some of the contrarieties, which Shakespeare ridicules; particularly, their engagement to defend manfully the commonwealth we live in, if any foreign power should. Should attempt to dispossess them, – without sword, pike, knife, or gun. The opening of Gonzalo’s speech, Had I a plantation of this isle, points his discourse to that enchanted spot, and the strain of his sentiments shows how much his sarcasm was levelled at the projects of coloniza-



8 9

10 11

Notes

337

tion, which, in the reign of James, were daily circulated by the chartered-companies: The adventurers to Bermuda were sent out by projectors, who had bought the Bermudas from the Vir-ginia Company, to whom the planters promised suit and service. Trivet had written of antartic France, or the Caribbee islands, before Montaigne: And, Professor Magini, who published, in 1597, his Geographiae Universae Opus, has an express chapter, in vol. ii. p. 291: — Canibalorum, Seu Caribum Insulae, which includes the whole of the present West-Indies. Magini says, that the inhabitants of those islands are dark coloured, without hair, fierce, cruel, and anthropophagi. Steevens’s Shak. Vol. iii. p.78. Prince’s New Eng. Chron. 33. Prince is very dull, but very accurate. Agawam, where Harlie, and Nicholas were well received by the natives, was afterwards called Southampton. To those savages, Stephano may allude, when he speaks of savages and men of Ind. All America was then denominated Ind. Ib. 39; Smith’s N. Eng. 204. Stith’s Hist. Virg 123.

4. EDMOND MALONE 1 A briefe and true Relation of the Discovery of North Part of Virginia, being a most pleasant, fruitful, and commodious, soile, &c. by John Brereton. 4to. 1602. 2 This is not quite correct. They sailed in fact, as will be seen hereafter, on the 8th of June. 3 History of the first discovery and settlement of Virginia, by William Stith, A. M. 8vo. 1747, pp. 101–2. 4 One of the persons on board, whose narrative will be hereafter quoted, says, ‘only half a mile.’ 5 Ibid. pp. 113, 114. 6 The New Life of Virginia, 4to. 1612. 7 This pinnace, which Mr. Stith calls a small CATCH, was lost. 8 ‘A true and sincere Declaration of the purpose and ends of the plantation begun in Virginia, for the degrees which it hath received, and meanes by which it hath been advanced; and the resolution and conclusion of his Majesties Council of the Colony, for the constant and patient prosecution thereof, until by the mercies of GOD it shall retribute a fruitful harvest to the kingdom of heaven and this commonwealth. Set forth by the authority of the Governors and Councellors established for that plantation.’ 4to. 1610. This pamphlet was entered in the Stationers’ Register by John Stepney on the 14th of December 1609, and was licensed by the Lord De la Ware, Sir Thomas Smith, [the Treasurer of the Company,] Sir Walter Cope, and Mr. Waterson, Warden of the Stationers’ Company; and though, according to the custom of booksellers, with a forward aspect it bears the date of 1610, it is clear from this entry and the paragraph here quoted, that it was published either in Dec. 1609, or before Jan. 31, 1609-10. 9 Imprinted, at London, by Thomas Hareland, for William Welby, and are to be sold at his shop in Paul’s Church-yard, at the signe of the Swanne, 1610 [probably Jan. 1609–10], a half-sheet. 10 Mr. Strachey’s letter, dated James-Town, July 7, 1610. MSSHarl.7009. art. 12. Fol. 35. 11 Escaet. 10 Jac. P. 2. N. 127.

 Notes 338 His body was landed at Lyme, in Dorsetshire, and he was buried in the church or cemetery of Whitchurch Canonicorum, on the 4th of June, 1611; as appears by an entry in the Register of that parish, which the Rev. Mr. Tucker, in the year 1802, obligingly examined, at my request. 12 ‘A true Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia, with a confutation of such scandalous reports as have tended to the disgrace of so worthy an enterprise. Published by advise and direction of the Councell of Virginia’ 4to. 1610. 13 In ‘the New Life of Virginia,’ 4to. 1612, this narrative is ascribed to Sir Thomas Gates. Mr. Strachey speaks of it as the relation of him and those associated with him in command. In a subsequent page, I have called this tract, ‘Gates’s Narrative,’ as unquestionably a great part of the materials was furnished by him; but I suspect that it was written by Sir Edwin Sandys, the well known author of EUROPE SPECULUM, and a zealous promoter of the settlement in Virginia. 14 By Sil. Jourdaan. 4to. 1610. 15 ‘A vessel of about 300 ton,’ says Howes, in his Continuation of Stowe’s Chronicle, 1615. 16 ‘A True Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia, &c. ut supra, 4to. 1610. This pamphlet was entered in the Stationers’ Register by William Barret, Nov. 8, 1610; being licensed by Sir Maurice Berkeley, Sir George Capon, Mr. Ric Martyn, and the Wardens. 17 Under a former article. 18 See p. 23. 19 p. 23 and 30. 20 p. 14. 21 p. 13. 22 In the original, indeed, strongwaters are drunk on shipboard by those who conceived that the ship was sinking; in the play, Stephano’s liquor is sack, and it is drunk on the island after his escape. But Shakespeare; when he borrowed hints from others, often made such slight changes. Here, the change is easily accounted for: that pleasantry in which he delighted, could not with any propriety have been introduced among men, who supposed themselves at the point of death. 23 pp. 24, 28. 24 p. 23. 25 Observations on The Tempest, [by Mr. Holt] 8 vo. 1749, p.17. That writer, erroneously supposing this consummation to have taken place in 1610, seems here to ascribe this play to that year: afterwards (p. 67) he places it in 1614. [26] No tali auxilio . . . nec defensoribus istis tempus eget’ (‘This time does not need such help nor such defenses as these’.) Virgil, Aenied, Book 2.

7. WILLIAM HAZLITT [1] William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (London, 1838).

8. EDMOND MALONE 1 The dress worn by this character, which doubtless was originally prescribed by the poet himself, and has been continued, I believe, since his time, is a large bear-skin, or



Notes

339

the skin of some other animal; and he is usually represented with long shaggy hair, as in the foregoing description. In the play we find Stephano speaking of Caliban’s two mouths and a forward and backward voice, which may have been suggested by the words above-quoted. In the same scene Caliban asks, ‘Hast thou dropp’d from heaven?’ and in other places twice mentiones his dam’s god Setebos. The singing and dauncing of our savage, Act II. Sc. II (for such is usually the stage representation) seem to be derived from the same source. 2 So, in The Tempest, Act I Sc. II.: ‘Abhorred slave, ‘Which any point of goodness will not take; ‘Being capable of all ill, I pitied thee, ‘Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour ‘One thing or other; when thou did’st not, savage, ‘Know thine own meaning, and woild’st gabble like ‘A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes ‘With words that made them known.’ 3 Natural History, translated by Philemon Holland, folio, 1601, p. 136. 4 Thus Caliban, Act II. Sc. II.: ‘I pr’ythee, let me bring thee where crabs grow’; ‘And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts; &c.’ The Devil was usually represented with long unpared nails. See a note on the words – ‘Pare thy nails, dad,’ Twelfth-Night, Act V. Sc. Ult. So also, Caliban, when Prospero reproaches him with having attempted to violate the honour of his daughter, replies, ‘Oh ho, oh ho, would it had been done!’ where we have ordinary exclamation both of the devil when introduced speaking exultingly, and of the Powke or Robin Goodfellow. So, in the well-known epitaph: ‘oh ho, quoth the devil, ’tis my John a Combe.’ See also The Midsummer-Night’s Dream, vol. v. p. 284, n. 7. 5 See Mr. Douce’s Observations on Shakespeare, vol. I. p. 8.

11. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE [1] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Progress of the Drama’ in Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare, edited by Mrs. H.N. Coleridge (London, 1853), p. 35.

14. WASHINGTON IRVING 1 Newes from the Barmudas, 1612.

18. W.J. BIRCH [1] J.W. Birch, An Inquiry into the Philosophy and Religion of Shakespeare (London, 1848), p. 12.

340  Notes [2] H.H. Furness, ‘Introduction,’ in New Varorium Edition of Shakespeare: King Lear (Philadelphia, 1880), p. 135. [3] Herbert Thurston, ‘The Religion of Shakespeare’, in Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).

20. DANIEL WILSON [1] Alfred Tennyon, ‘In Memorium, A.H.H.’

21. EDWARD DOWDEN 1

2

3 4

5

Karl Elze, in his article ‘Zu Heinrich VIII,’ (Shakespeare Jahrbuch. Vol. ix), attempts to show, not successfully, I think, that the play was written in 1603, and ‘was set aside on account of Elizabeth’s death, and kept there till Rowley brought out his “When you See Me you Know Me, or the famous Chronicle Historie of King Henrie the Eight,” in 1613. The Globe company thereupon thought of their unused Henry VIII, put it into Fletcher’s hands to alter, and then acted it’. The portions of the play by Shakespeare are Act i. Scenes 1 and 2; Act ii, Scenes 3 and 4; Act iii, Scene 2 (in part Shakespeare). Act v Scene 1/ Roderick, in Edwards’ ‘Canons of Criticism,’ (1765) noticed the peculiarity of the versification of this play. Mr Sped ding and Mr Hickson (1850) independently arrived at identical results as to the division of parts between Fletcher and Shakespeare. Mr Fleay (1874) has confirmed the conclusions of Mr Spedding, (double endings forming in this instance his chief test); Professor Ingram has further confirmed them by the weak-ending test, and Mr. Furnivall by the stoptline test. The same appears in the lines which end, Act iii Scene 1. The same feeling appears in the lines which end Act iii Scene 1. Prospero, So glad of this as they I cannot be. Who are surprised with all, but my rejoicing At nothing can be more. The same feeling appears in the lines which end Act iii, Scene 1 Prospero, So glad of this as they I cannot be. Who are surprised with all; but my rejoicing. At nothing can be more. This point of contrast between The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is noticed by Mezieres. ‘Shakespeare, ses CEuvres et ses Critiques.’ pp. 441, 442. This point of contrast between The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is noticed by Meziere’s ‘Shakespeare, ses CEuvres et ses Critiques.’ pp. 441–442. See a remarkable article on Goethe and Shakespeare by Professor Masson, reprinted among his collected Essays. On The Tempest, the reader may consult as an excellent summary of facts, the article ‘On the origin of Shakespeare’s Tempest.’ Cornhill Magazine, October 1872. It is founded upon Meissner’s ‘Untersuchun- gen uber Shakespeare’s Sturm,’ (1872). See also Meissner’s article in the ‘Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare- Gesellschaft,’ vol. v. Jacob Ayrer’s ‘Comedia von der schonen Sideat’ will be found, with a translation, in Mr. Albert Cohn’s interesting volume, ‘Shakespeare in Germany’ (Asher 1885). Ariel is promised his freedom after two days, Act i, Scene 2. Why two days? The time of the entire action of the Tempest is only three hours. What was to be the employment of Ariel during two days? To make the winds and seas favourable during the voyage to Naples. Prospero’s island therefore was imagined by Shakespeare as within two days’ quick sail of Naples.

6

Notes

341

The conception of Caliban, the ‘servant-monster,’ plain fish and no doubt marketable ‘the tortoise,’ ‘his fins like arms,’ with ‘a very ancient and fish-like smell,’ who gabbled until Prospero taught him language-this conceptions was in Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote Troilus and Cressida. Thersites describes Ajax, (Act iii., Scene 3) ‘He’s grown a very and-fish, languageless, a monster’. 7 Mr. Furnivall, observing that in these later plays breaches of the family bond are dramatically studied, and the reconciliations are domestic reconciliations in Cymbeline and A Winter’s Tale, suggest to me that they were a kind of confession on Shakespeare’s part that he had inadequately felt the beauty and tenderness of the common relations of father and child, wife and husband; and that he was now quietly resolving to be gentle; and wholly just to his wife and his home. I cannot altogether make this view of the later plays my own, and leave it to the reader to accept ad develop as he may be able. [8] German critic F. Kreyssig, author of Vorlesungun uber Shakespeare (Berlin, 1862). [9] Alfred Mezieres, French critic who published several works on Shakespeare in the 1860s. 10 This last suggestion is that of M. Emile Montegut in the Revue des Deux Mandes. The following passage from Professor Lowell will compensate for its length by its ingenuity. ‘In The Tempest the scene is laid nowhere, or certainly in no country laid down on any map. Nowhere, then? At once nowhere and anywhere, – for it is in the soul of man that still vexed island hung between the upper and the nether world, and liable to incursions from both . . . . Consider for a moment if ever the Imagination has been so embodied as in Prospero, the Fancy as in Ariel, the brute of Understanding as in Caliban, who, the moment his poor wits are warmed with the glorious liquor of Stephano, plots rebellion against his natural lord, the higher Reason. Miranda is mere abstract Womanhood, as truly so before she sees Ferdinand as Eve before she was awakened to consciousness by the echo of her own nature coming back to her, the same, and yet not the same, from that of Adam. Ferdinand, again, is nothing more than Youth, compelled to drudge at something he despises, till the sacrifice of will, and abnegation of self, win him his ideal in Miranda. The subordinate personages are simply types: Sebastian and Antonio of weak character and evil ambition; Gonzalo, of average sense and honesty; Adrian and Francisco, of the walking gentleman, who serve to fill up a world. They are not characters in the same sense with Iago, Falstaff, Shallow, or Leontius, and it is curious how every one of them loses his way in this enchanted island of life, all the victims of one illusion after another, except Prospero, whose ministers are purely ideal. The whole play, indeed, is a succession of illusions, winding up with those solemn words of the great enchanter, who had summoned to his service every shape of merriment or passion, every figure in the great tragicomedy of life, and who was now bidding farewell to the scene of his triumphs. For in Prospero shall we not recognize the Artist himself – ‘That did not better for his life provide/ Than public means which public manners breeds. Whence comes it that/ his name receives a brand, – who has forfeited a shinning place in the world’s eye by devotion to his art, and who, turned adrift on the ocean of life in the leaky carcass of a boat, has shipwrecked on that Fortunate Island (as men always do who find their true vocation) where he is absolute lord, all the powers of nature serve him, but with Ariel and Caliban as special ministers? Of whom else could he have been thinking when he says, “graves, at my command,/ Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth, By my so potent art?” ’ ‘Among my Books Shakespeare Once More,’ pp. 191–192.

 Notes 342 11 Ulrici has recently expressed his opinion that a farewell to the theatre may be discovered in The Tempest, but he rightly places Henry VIII, later than The Tempest Shakespeare Jahrbuch, vol. vi. p 358. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, p 67. 12 Whitman, Democratic Vistas, p. 67. 13 Troilus and Cressida, Act iv., Scene 2.

24. HORACE HOWARD FURNESS [1] George Sharswood (1810–1883), Pennsylvania jurist and Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme court.

25. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [1] Henry Irving (1838–1905), English actor and manager famous for a number of leading roles and productions, including Shakespearean plays. [2] Eugene Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940), French-born musician and instrument maker who lived in England and was involved in the revival of early European music. [3] William Poel (1852–1934), English director, manager, and dramatist, known for his Shakespeare presentations. [4] Maurice Materlinck (1862–1849), Belgian playwright and essayist. [5] Fernand Khnopff (1858–1921), Belgian painter in the symbolist style.

26. RUDYARD KIPLING [1] Historia de Aurelio et Isabel (1521), probably a translation of the Spanish author, Juan Flores’s, sentimental novel Grisel y Mirabella (published c. 1495).

27. FRANK BRISTOL [1] Frank Bristol, Shakespeare in America (Chicago, 1898), p. 1 and p. 8.

28. LUCE MORTON 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

i.ii.319, 320; v.i.272–273. See quotations in Appendix, p. 170. Cf. ‘Lose her to an African’ (ii.i.125). Orig. Caribbean. His deformity is, in part, a Platonic conversation. Earlier than the ‘accurate description of Africa,’ by John Ogilvy 1670. Some refer this to her pregnancy. See i.ii.269. Though he is ‘Found/In fire, air, flood, or underground.’ – IL Penseroso.



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8 Of course, ‘fish’ was a cant term of the time for any oddity; cf. The Citye Match, 1639, ‘Enter Bright . . . hanging out the picture of a strange fish.’ So we retain the expression ‘a queer fish.’ Cf also in this play, ‘One of them Is a plain fish, and, no doubt, marketable.’ (v.265.266). 9 Because of i.ii.316. Yet he wears a gaberdine (II​.ii​​.42). 10 Cf. ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’ (v.275, 276), where ‘thing of darkness’ bears two meanings. For Indian, see new Preface p. v. 11 I may here anticipate an objection which asserts that the more interesting features of the character of Caliban are due to the training of Prospero and Miranda. This cannot be seriously admitted by any who read The Tempest carefully; the whole play implies that these and other qualities of the ‘savage’ are native rather than acquired; and they are often contrasted favourably with the baseness of European civilisation. Shakespeare nowhere emphasizes the indebtedness of this child of nature to the good offices of Miranda and Prospero; on the contrary, their nurture would not stick on him; and if they taught him language (but see note, pp. 35, 36) his profit thereby was that he knew how to curse; this Shakespeare does emphasise. Perhaps my contention may be better understood if I give one example of the evidence in its favour. Caliban’s interest in nature is no less marked when Prospero first comes to the island – ‘And then I loved thee,/ And show’d thee all the qualities o’th’isle,/ The fresh springs, brinepits, barren place and fertile’ (1.2. 336–338), than it is twelve years later when he uses almost the same word to Stephano (2.2.150, 160). 12 Mankind was a scarce commodity on this particular island; and among the humours of criticism none can be more delightful than the objection that Caliban eats roots! I never heard that cannibals were limited to a diet of flesh, much less of human flesh; I am sure they were allowed roots for a change. But apart from all such trifling, the wonder is that this complex creation should be so perfect as a type; for it must be admitted that although Shakespeare attempted the impossible in making three characters into one, he nevertheless gave us in the three individually such complete and vivid sketches as might well be the despair of any other artists, especially under such exacting conditions. 13 ‘In a cowslip’s bell I lie’, sings Ariel; and the elves of the earlier play to whom cowslips are tall, ‘creep’ into ‘acorn cups’. 14 Ariel’s popular ancestry may be traced to the popular elf; the romantic fairy, the classic faun, sartyr, and divinity, the Hebrew spirit, and the medieval daemon. 15 Ariel’s ‘meaner fellows’ – however, – and, if they are identical the ‘elves’ of v.33, – are not to be distinguished so clearly from the fairy tribe of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; as these delighted to dance their ringlets to the whistling wind, so the elves of the fifth act of The Tempest: ‘By sunshine do the green sour ringlets make/ Whereof the ewe not bites’. 16 Shakespeare, of course, is the most inscrutable of artists, and I like to believe it; but my apology for this slight trespass upon his undoubted privilege will be found on pp. lix–li below. 17 Under this head a ‘tempest’ was a most appropriate theme; to rouse a tempest was a common function of the medieval spirit. ‘Hast thou, spirit,/ Perform’d to point the tempest that I bade thee?’ 91.2.193, 194). 18 With these ‘Indian’ was almost a generic term for ‘savage’ . . . . 19 ‘Shakespeare has evinced the power, which above all other men he possessed, that of introducing the profoundest sentiments of wisdom when they would be least expected, yet where they are most truly natural.’ (Coleridge). See also note on v. 256.

344  Notes 20 21 22 [23] 24

III.iii​​ ​ .79–82. See ‘human,’ v.i.20. See paraphrase, p.147; also p. lxiii. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 4. Language must have been taught to Caliban by his mother, from whom he derived the name of her (alien?) god Setebos. Again, brought up by Prospero and Miranda, Caliban could not have learnt to curse. But similarly we might object that there could be no horse-pond on the island; that Prospero’s magic power might have prevented his banishment; that Miranda’s ‘plain and holy innocence’ was impossible if she had access to her father’s library (we need not suppose that it included the Te Deum, or even the Bible); and so forth. Briefly, these inconsistencies are not glaring; we have to accept the ideal conditions without which the poet’s task and our delight in it are equally impossible. We are tempted to add that when next some dramatist tries to sketch a woman who has been kept unspotted from the world, he should profit by the mistakes of Shakespeare, and, to be absolutely correct, make her ‘languageless, a monster.’ 25 The terms virtue and vengeance are chosen by the poet chiefly for alliterative effect sound is often more suggestive than mere logical sense; it is so here.

29. ASHLEY THORNDIKE 1 Note also Caliban’s attempted rape of Miranda.

31. W.W. NEWELL 1 The reference here is to Albert’s Cohn’s essay, ‘English Actors in Germany,’ Atheneum 1652 (1859) 32. MAX.

32. MAX BEERBOHM [1] Sir Francis Benson (1858–1903), actor-manager who produced all but three of Shakespeare’s plays. [2] William Poel (1852–1934), actor, manager and dramatist best-known for his stagings of Shakespeare. [3] Acton Bond (1861–1941). [4] Mrs. Leigh (1884–), also known as Thyrza Norman. [5] Charles Lander (1863–1934).

33. A.C. BRADLEY 1 Biblical ideas seem to be floating in Shakespeare’s mind. Cf. the words of Kent when Lear enters with Cordelia’s body, ‘Is this the promised end?’ and Edgar’s answer, ‘Or image of that horror?’ The promised end is certainly the end of the world: cf. ‘the



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image’ ‘the great doom’s image,’ Macbeth, II, iii. 83); and the next words, Albany’s ‘fall and cease’ may be addressed to the heaven or stars, not to Lear. It seems probable that in writing Gloster’s speech about the predicted horrors to follow ‘these great eclipses’ Shakespeare had a vague recollection of the passage Mathew xxiv., or of that in Mark xxii., of the tribulations that were to be a sign of ‘the end of the world’ (I do not mean, of course, that the prediction of I.ii.119 is the prediction to be found in one of these passages. 2 Cf. Hamlet III.i.181: ‘This something-settled matter in his heart/Whereon his brain still beating puts him thus/ From fashion of himself ’. 3 I believe that the criticism of King Lear that has influenced me most is that in Prof. Dowden’s Shakespeare, his Mind and Art (though, when I wrote my lectures, I had not read that criticism for many years); and I am glad that this acknowledgement gives of repeating in print an opinion which I have often expressed to students, that anyone entering on the study of Shakespeare, and unable or unwilling to read much criticism, would do best to take Prof. Dowden for his guide.

35. LYTTON STRACHEY [1] Frederick J. Furnivall (1825–90), English philologist. [2] Bernard Ten Brink (1841–1892), German philologist. [3] Israel Gollancz (1825–1910), Professor of English Literature at King’s College, London. [4] Georg Brandes (1842–1910), Danish critic and scholar.

36. HENRY JAMES [1] Quoted in William T. Stafford, ‘James Examines Shakespeare: Notes on the Nature of Genius’, PMLA 73 (1958), pp. 123–128. 122. 2 George Brandes (1842–1910), Danish critic and scholar. 3 James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (1820–1889), English critic and Shakespearean scholar.

39. JOHN CHURTON COLLINS [1] ‘What we were in the air or the foamy waters’, Dante, Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto XXIV. [2] John Connington (1825–1869), English classical scholar. [3] ‘Felling is everything/Name is but sound and smoke/Clouding heaven’s fire’, Goethe, Faust, I.

43. ARTHUR QUILLER COUCH [1] Richard Garnett, philologist, author and librarian at the British Library. [2] ‘The goddess indubitable was revealed in her step’. Virgil, The Aenied.

 Notes 346 [3] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lecture 1, Lectures on Shakespeare (1811–19).

47. COLLIN STILL 1 Note that there are two mythical Dragons, the higher and the lower. The higher Dragon is native to the WATER ABOVE (FIRE), which is the element of intuitional wisdom; hence the higher Dragon is held to be sacred as by the Chinese. It is the ‘Serpent of Wisdom.’ But the lower Dragon, being native to the passional WATER BELOW, is evil. It is the Tempter who is Desire – ‘the great dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan’. 2 Cf. footnote, Rodwell’s Koran, Sura iv.18. 3 Inferno, vii. 4 In the first Folio the name appears not only as Caliban, but also as Calliban. It is, perhaps worth mention that the Greek word kalliboas means ‘sweet-toned’; also, that the name Calypso, the seductive nymph of the Island of Ogygia, is derived from the root kalyp – or kalyb-. The story of the detention of Odysseus by Calypso is (as I shall show later) a temptation myth, in which Calypso plays practically the same part as I am here imputing to Caliban in The Tempest. 5 Cf Job i.6. 6 Zohar i. 45, 168; ii. 97. See Ency Brit., 9th ed., vol. xii., p. 813. Nevertheless, Shakespeare declares elsewhere that for the fallen Lucifer there is no hope (Hen VIII., III.2.371). 7 Ps. civ. 4. The Greek αyyελος from whence the word angel is derived actually means messenger; and πνεύϳια means both spirit and wind. 8 Cf. wisdom of the Ancients, final paragraph on ‘Prometheus’: ‘And thus I have delivered that which I thought good to observe out of this so well-known and common fable; and yet I will not deny but that there maybe some things in it which have an admirable consent with the mysteries of Christian religion . . . but I have interdicted my pen all liberty in this kind, lest I should use strange fire at the altar of the Lord.’ 9 Roscher, in fact, identifies him entirely with the wind (Hermes der Wind-Gott). 10 The Greek Pneuma and the Hebrew Rauch both mean spirit or wind. Cf. Acts ii.2–4, where ‘the Spirit’ is said to come as a rushing mighty wind. Note also that those to whom it comes see ‘tongues parting asunder, like as of fire’; and compare this with the appearance of Ariel during the wreck as a fire that divides and burns in many places. 11 Exod. xxii.20 ff. 12 Cf. Exod. Xxiii. 20–21: Behold, I send and Angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. Beware of him, obey his voice; provoke him not; for he will not pardon your transgressions; for my name is in him.’ Similarly, Hermes is the patron of travellers and the guide through Purgatory (Wilderness). In the pagan initiations the candidate was led and instructed in the ceremonies by the Hierocceryx, who represented Hermes (cf. Mr. Dudley Wright, Phil.B., F.S.P., in The Eleusinian Mysteries and Rites). 13 Cf. Verse 32: ‘Behold I am come forth for an adversary (satan), because thy way is perverse before me’. 14 Cf. Rich III, I.3. 222: ‘The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul’. 15 Cf. Num. xxi, 32 (Revised Version).



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16 According to Genesis and Enoch, the angels lusted after the women and descended from above in order to enjoy them; but the Book of Jubilees (iv.15 and v. I ff.) declares that the angels were sent down to the earth by God to instruct mankind in right-doing and descending to do so began to lust after the ‘daughters of men’ (see Dr. Charles’s footnote to Enoch, in loc.) for reasons that will presently appear, I think the latter version is undoubtedly the sounder. 17 It is true that Sycorax is described by Prospero as a ‘foul witch,’ old and hideous whereas the angels loved the ‘daughters of men’ for their elegance and beauty. But, although Sycorax was hideous to Prospero, she must have been alluring to someone, for she became pregnant. Compare the case of the ‘blue-eyed witch’ Sycorax with that of the ‘blue-eyed witch’ whose evil beauty drew down and perverted an angel from Heaven in Browning’s Pauline (lines 96–123). 18 Note that the term ‘conscience’ is used in the widest sense to signify the upwardimpelling, guiding, and accusing spirit. Ariel is, of course, a typical archangel; and, as such, he is equivalent to the seven archangels mentioned in Enoch – viz., Gabriel, Michael, Remiel, Uriel, Raphael, Raguel, and Saraqael. The terminal el, common to all these names, denotes ‘strength’ or ‘of God (the Mighty One)’. 19 Enoch, Archbishop Lawrence, 3rd ed, pp. 5 – For what it may be worth, I suggest that the tree was split by lightning. According to Ps. Civ. 4, the ministers of God are a flaming fire, and hence they may be imagined as coming down to earth in the form of lightening. (Cf. Dr. Charles’s Introduction to Enoch, 2nd ed., p. xciii, quotation from Acts of the Disputation of Archelaus with Manes, ch. xxxii.: ‘Angelorum quidam, mandato Dei non subditi, voluntati eius restituerunt, et aliquis quidem de caelo, tanquam fulgar ignis, cecidit super terram, alii vero infelicitate hominum filiabus admisti, a dracone affliciti, ignis aeterni peonam suscipere meruerunt.’) according to the myth of the Fall of Satan – a myth which differs somewhat in conception and in form from that of the Sin of the Angels, seeming to signify rather the transmutation of spiritual desire into evil lust through impatience with the divine discipline – Satan fell as lightning from Heaven (St. Luke x. 18).

49. RICHARD NOBLE [1] Richard Noble, Shakespeare’s Use of Song (Oxford, 1923), p. 9. [2] The first really theatrical music we have in England is the Curtain Music to Macbeth, formerly ascribed to Lock, but which, Mr. Lawrence has proved, was composed by Purcell. 3 In Shadwell’s version Milcha, Ariel’s fellow spirit, sings ‘Full fathom five’. [4] Thomas Augustine Arne (1710–78), English composer. [5] Robert Johnson (c. 1583–1633), lutenist to James I and Charles I and composer of incidental theatre music. [6] Pelham Humphrey (1647–74), English composer; John Bannister (1630–79), English composer and violist. [7] Thomas Shadwell (1642–92), English playwright and Poet Laureate; the reference here is to Shadwell’s 1674 operatic adaptation of the Dryden-Davenant version of The Tempest. [8] Mathew Locke (1621–77), English composer; Henry Purcell (1659–95), English composer.

348  Notes

50. ENID WELSFORD [1] Enid Welsford, The Court Masque – A Study in the Relationship between Poetry and the Revels (New York, 1927), p. viii. 2 Cf. Prog. James, vol. i, pp. 339 ff. 3 The Tempest, in a New Varorium Edition of Shakespeare, edited by H. Furness, vol. IX, pp. 215–17. 4 For the dramatic significance of this pessimistic utterance and its connection with the preceding masque see Professor A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1911), p. 328 ff.

51. E.K. CHAMBERS 1 2 3 4 5 6

Var. xv. 423. Ibid. 414. F.G. Fleay (1831–1909). Shakespeare scholar. J.M. Roberston (1856–1933), Shakespeare scholar. Eliz. Stage, II, 284. 289. Var. xv 2.

52. WILSON KNIGHT [1] Wilson Knight, The Shakespearean Tempest (London, 1960), p. 4.

53. E.M.W. TILLYARD 1 The Meaning of The Tempest, the Robert Spence Watson Memorial Lecture for 1936 delivered for the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, on October 5th 1936. 2 Op. cit., pp. 14–18. 3 See the admirable discussion of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ in The Tempest is Middleton Murry’s Shakespeare, pp. 396 ff. 4 Op. cit., pp. 249–250.

54. JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY 1 Now a new generation.

56. THEODORE SPENCER 1 See W.C. Curry, Shakespeare’s Philosophical Patterns (Baton Rouge, LA, 1937), p. 194. 2 Op. cit., p. 196. In support of this view, Mr. Curry, like Mr. Middleton Murry, interprets Prospero’s epilogue in religious terms [quotes Epilogue 13–20]. But the



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prayer is obviously merely a prayer to the audience. It is conventional for an actor to step half out of character in an epilogue, and that is what Prospero is doing here. His ‘prayer’ consists of the last two lines, and has no metaphysical connotations.

57. WILSON KNIGHT [1] Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (London, 1947), p. 9, p. 23.

59. JAMES NOSWORTHY [1] James Halliwell-Phillips (1820–89), Shakespeare scholar and antiquarian. [2] Perhaps Joseph Hunter (1783–1861), antiquarian and records scholar. 3 Hymen in As You Like It, Hecate in Macbeth, and Diana in Pericles can be cited against me, but the last two are dubiously Shakespearian, so that if these really are exceptions they are of the kind that proves the rule. 4 Teste Gonzalo (ii.i.75 ff.) the sea routes are almost identical.

60. DEREK TRAVERSI [1] [2] 3 4 5

Derek Traversi, Approach to Shakespeare (London, 1938), p. 13. Act II, Scene 2. Don Quixote, Part 1, chapter xi. Measure for Measure, I, ii. Act III, Sc. iii. I have tried to indicate the importance of this and other passages from The Winter’s Tale in an essay on the play published in Arena, January 1938, pp. 301–14.

62. FRANK KERMODE 1 2 3 4

West, op. cit., pp. 41–45. Agrippa, op. cit. III. Iii. supra. p. xl. The Tempest, severe and refined as it is, is still a development of folk-tales in which magicians and their agents have not a precise status in academic demonology. Hence Prospero shows certain unschematic resemblances to the simple magicians of Italian popular comedy and Ayrer’s Die Schone Sidea, and Ariel (see Appendix B) is not the unalloyed Platonic demon of Comus. Nice distinctions are, however, impossible here. 5 Despite the attention given to verbal echoes of The Tempest in Comus, the deep indebtedness of Milton to the play has not been understood. Shakespeare is of course less formally allegorical, but the play is almost as important to Milton as The Faerie Queene. 6 Cf. Jonson’s comic use of this law in The Alchemist.

350  Notes 7 4.1.56. C. Leech in his Shakespeare’s Tragedies (1950) finds the repetition of Prospero’s warning ‘impertinent’ and thinks it ‘cannot be understood other than pathologically’; this is the starting point; as I understand it, of his demonstration that ‘The Tempest gave the fullest and most ordered expression of the Puritan impulse in Shakespeare.’ 8 The book, so highly valued by Prospero and Caliban, as well as the rod, occur in all demonology, popular and learned, they were required to be of virginal purity. 9 Castiglione, op cit., p. 277. 10 Cleland, The Institution of a Young Nobleman II. 1. 11 Milton, ‘Of Education’, in Prose Works, ed. Hughes, p. 31. 12 For a somewhat similar reading, though different in detail, see N. Coghill, ‘The Basis of Shakespearean Comedy’, Essays and Studies (1950), pp. 1–28. 13 The Consolation of Philosophy IV Prose 5, V Prose I (Loeb Edition, p. 355, p. 365). 14 Castiglione, op cit., p. 280. See also Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, World’s Classics e. pp. 11–12, 15–16, 42. The theme is a humanist commonplace. 15 Resolves Divine Moral and Political excm (1623?), ed. Of 1840, p. 305. 16 On this see G.C. Taylor, ‘Shakespeare’s Idea of Beast in Man’, S.P. xxlii (1945), pp. 530–543. 17 Castiglione, op. cit., p. 33 Cf. Henry VIII, I, ii, 114 ff. 18 Cf. Othello, I.iii, where Iago and Roderigo use ‘virtue’ to mean ‘predisposition’, with Iago ridiculing the idea. Like Edmund and Antonio, he represents that scepticism, declining into ‘naturalism’ and ‘atheism’, which was a strong Renaissance undercurrent, particularly strong at the turn of the century. Shakespeare always treats it as degenerate. 19 Il Principe, viii. 20 See Spenser, An Hymns in Honour of Beautie; Milton, Comus, 453 ff; and for the quasi-scientific justification of it, its apparent imperfection, Felltham, Resolves, xxx – ‘Philosophy tells us, though the soul be not caused by the body, yet in the general, it follows the temperament of it; so the comeliest outsides are naturally (for the most part) most virtuous within’ (ed. cit., p. 74). 21 Castiglione, op. cit., p. 309. See also note on I. ii. 460. 22 I am here and elsewhere indebted to one of the most valuable studies of this play, A. H. Gilbert’s ‘The Tempest Parallelism in Characters and Situations.’ J.E.G.P. xiv (1915), 63–74, though my conclusions differ rather from Gilbert’s. 23 R. W. Boodle, ‘The Original of Cymbeline and possibly of The Tempest’, N. & Q. 19 Nov. 1887. 24 The hermit Bomelio calls his unwilling servant Lentulo much as Prospero calls Caliban, and with similar results (Dodsley, vi. 175–176). Hermione, Bomelio’s son, finds and destroys his father’s magic books. (218). Lentulo is accused of stealing the hermit’s ‘suit of apparel’ (219). 25 The Controversy lasted from 1587 (two years before the publication of Il Pastor Fido) until the 1620s. Guarini claimed that pastoral was a moral and socially valuable genre (his opponent De Nores had questioned this) and that tragicomedy was critically acceptable provided it was not a clumsy intrusion of comedy into tragedy but a third kind, such as Aristotle allows for (Poetics, xiii), a harmonious mixture of comedy and tragedy and not a composite. ‘From the one it takes the noble characters, not the action; the fable . . . the emotions, aroused but tempered; the delight, not the sadness; the danger, not the death; from the other, the sober gentleness, the invented plot, the happy “change”, and above all the comic order’ (Translation of F. H. Ristine, English Tragicomedy [1910], p. 37, with some modification.)



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26 See G. E. Bentley, ‘Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre’, Shakespeare Survey, I (1948), pp. 38–50. 27 See V.M. Jeffery, ‘Italian Influence in Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess’, M L. R xxi (1926), 147 ff. 28 Ristine wisely remarks: ‘The ruling spirit of romance is the very essence of tragicomedy . . . Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale and the Tempest, whatever the inspiration, are closely identified with the new drama of tragicomic romance’ (op. cit., pp. 73, 114). 29 The Sea and the Mirror, in For the Time Being (1945), p. 18. This poem provides some brilliant insights into the play although it is not in the ordinary sense a commentary. Caliban goes remarkably well as a personification of the It. (as good a modern pastoral hero as could be found).

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354

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(B) Plays, poems and fiction (i) Editions of Shakespeare in chronological order Rowe, Nicholas (ed) (1709) The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare, 6 vols, London, 1709; the first volume of this edition contains Nicholas Rowe’s ‘Some Accounts of the Life of Mr. William Shakespeare’ (pp. i–xl); the spurious ‘seventh’ volume of this edition (1710) contains Charles Gildon’s ‘Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare’, which include his observations on The Tempest (pp. 258–274). Johnson, Samuel (ed.) (1765) Works of William Shakespeare in Eight Volumes, London. Johnson, Samuel and George Steevens (eds.) (1773) Works of William Shakespeare in Ten Volumes, London. Johnson, Samuel and George Steevens (eds.) (1778) The Plays of William Shakespeare with Corrections in 10 Volumes, London. Malone, Edmond (ed.) (1790) Plays and Poems of Shakespeare in Ten Volumes, London; Edmond’s Malone’s essay ‘An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays of Shakespeare Were Written’ appears in Volume 1 (pp. 261–386). Johnson, Samuel and George Steevens (eds.) (1802–1804) The Dramatick works of William Shakespeare, Boston. Boswell, James (ed.) (1821) Plays and Poems of Shakespeare, London; Edmond Malone’s ‘Preliminary Remarks’ on The Tempest appears in Volume XV (pp. 10–17). Campbell, Thomas (1838) The Dramatic works of W. Shakespeare, London. Knight, Charles (1843) The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakespeare. Volume 1 – Comedies, London. Furness, Horace Howard (1895) A Variorum Edition of Shakespeare – The Tempest Vol. 9, Philadelphia. Morton, Luce (ed.) (1901) The Tempest, London; Luce Morton’s ‘Introduction’ appears in this edition (pp. ix–lxx). White, Richard Grant (ed.) (1903) ‘The Tempest,’ Works of William Shakespeare, Boston; Edward Everett Hale’s ‘Introduction’ (pp. 3–13) and his essay ‘On the Conditions of the Elizabethan Stage and their Effect on Shakespeare’ (pp. 15–24) appear in Volume 1 to this edition. Lee, Sidney (ed.) (1907) The Tempest, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare With Annotations and a General Introduction by Sidney Lee - Volume XVI, Cambridge, MA; Henry James ‘Introduction to The Tempest’ appears in this volume (pp. ix–xxxii) Kermode, Frank (ed.) (1954) The Tempest, Surrey; Frank Kermode’s ‘Introduction’ appears in this edition (pp. xi–xciii). Orgel, Stephen (ed.) (1987) The Tempest, Oxford and New York; Stephen Orgel’s ‘Introduction’ appears in this edition (pp. 1–89). Vaughan, Alden T. and Virginia Mason (ed.) (1999) The Tempest, The Arden Shakespeare, Surrey; the Vaughans’ ‘Introduction’ appears on pp. 1–138.

(ii) Other Dryden, John (1670) The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island. Dryden, John (1679) ‘The Preface’, In Troilus and Cressida or Truth Found Too Late – A Tragedy, London, pp. 14–37. Jonson, Ben (1735) Bartholomew Fair, London.

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(C) Criticism and other secondary works Addison, Joseph (1712) ‘Untitled Essay’, The Spectator (No. 279, Saturday January 19); reprinted in The Spectator – A New Edition, Reproducing the Original Text Both as First Issued and as Corrected by its Authors. London, 1891, pp. 253–258. Adelman, Janet (1992) Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest, New York. Albanese, Denise (1996) New Science, New World, Durham, NC. Andrews, Richard (2014) ‘The Tempest and Italian Improvised Theater’, In Bigliazzi, Silvia and Calvi, Lisanna (eds.) Revisiting The Tempest: The Capacity to Signify, New York, pp. 45–62. Auden, W.H. (1948) ‘Music in Shakespeare’, In The Dyers Hand and Other Essays, London, pp. 500–527. Barber, C.L. and Richard Wheeler (1986) The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development, Berkeley. Barker, Francis and Peter Hulme (1985) ‘“Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish” – The Discursive Con-Texts of The Tempest’, In Drakakis, John and Hawkes, Terence (eds.) Alternative Shakespeares, London, pp. 191–205. Bate, Jonathan (1989) Shakespeare Constitutions – Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730– 1830. Oxford. Bate, Jonathan (1993) Shakespeare and Ovid, Oxford. Beerbohm, Max (1903) ‘The Tempest’, The Saturday Review, 96.2506: 575–576. Benjamin, Walter (1982) ‘Edward Fuchs: Collector and Historian’, In Arato, Andrew and Gebhradt, Eike (eds.) The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, New York, pp. 225–253. Berger, Harry Jr. (1969) ‘Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, Shakespeare Studies, 5: 253–283. Birch, W.J. (1848) An Inquiry into the Philosophy and Religion of Shakespeare, London. Bigliazzi, Silvia (2014) ‘“Dost Thou Hear?” – On the Rhetoric of Narrative in The Tempest’, In Bigliazzi, Silvia and Calvi, Lisanna (eds.) Revisiting The Tempest: The Capacity to Signify, New York, pp. 111–136. Bradley, A.C. (1905) Shakespearean Tragedy, London. Breight, Curt (1990) ‘“Treason doth never Prosper”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Treason’, Shakespeare Quarterly 41.1: 1–28. Bristol, Frank (1898) Shakespeare and America, Chicago. Brotton, Jerry (1998) ‘“This Tunis, Sir, was Carthage”: Contesting Colonialism in The Tempest’, In Loomba, Ania and Orkin, Martin (eds.) Post-Colonial Shakespeares, London and New York, pp. 23–42. Brower, Reuben (1991) ‘The Mirror of Analogy’, In Palmer, D.J. (ed.) Shakespeare:’ The Tempest’ – A Selection of Critical Essays, London and New York, pp. 153–175. Brown, Paul (1985) ‘“This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’, In Dollimore, Jonathan and Sinfield, Alan (eds.) Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, Manchester, pp. 48–71. Bruster, Doug (1995) ‘Local Tempests – Shakespeare and the Work of the Early Modern Playhouse’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 25.1: 33–53. Burnett, Mark Thornton (1997) ‘“Strange and Woonderfull Syghts”: The Tempest and the Discourses of Monstrosity’, Shakespeare Survey, 50:187–199. Callaghan, Dympna (2000) Shakespeare without Women, New York. Capell, Edward (1783) Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare, 3 vols, London.

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Carslon, Donald (2015) ‘“Tis New to Thee”: Power, Magic, and Early Science in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.’ Ben Johnson Journal, 22: 1–22. Cartelli, Thomas (1987) ‘Prospero in Africa – The Tempest as colonialist text and pretext’, In Howard, Jean and O’Connor Marion (eds.) Shakespeare Reproduced – The Text in History and Ideology, New York and London, pp. 99–115. Cawley, Robert Ralston (1926) ‘Shakespeare’s Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest’, PMLA, 41: 688–726. Cheney, Patrick (2008) Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship, Cambridge. Childress, Diane T. (1974) ‘Are Shakespeare’s Late Plays Really Romances?’ In Tobias, R.C. and Zolbrod, P.G. (eds.) Shakespeare’s Late Plays, Athens, OH, pp. 44–55. Cobb, Noel (1984) Prospero’s Island: The Secret Alchemy at the Heart of ‘ The Tempest, London. Coghill, Neville (1950) ‘The Basis of Shakespearean Comedy,’ Essays and Studies, New Series III: 1–28. Cohen, Derek (1996) ‘The Culture of Slavery: Caliban and Ariel’, The Dalhousie Review, 75.2: 153–175. Cohen, Walter (1985) Drama of a Nation – Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain, Ithaca and London. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1817) Biographia Literaria, London; reprinted in 1906. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1836–39) The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected and Edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge, 4 vols, London. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1856) ‘The Ninth Lecture’, In Collier, Payne J. (ed.) Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, London, pp. 94–126. Collins, John Churton (1908) ‘Poetry and Symbolism: A Study of The Tempest’, Contemporary Review, XCIII: 65–83. Clemen, Wolfgang (1951) The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery, New York. Craig, Hardin (1948) An Interpretation of Shakespeare, New York. Curran, Kevin (2017) ‘Prospero’s Plea: Judgment, Invention, and Political Form in The Tempest’, In Curran, Kevin (ed.) Shakespeare and Judgment, Edinburgh, pp. 159–171. Curry, Walter Clyde (1937) Shakespeare’s Philosophical Patterns, Baton Rouge. Dolan, Frances E. (1994) Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700, Ithaca. Doren, Mark Van (1939) Shakespeare, New York. Doty, Jeffrey (2017) ‘Experiences of Authority in The Tempest’, In Fitter, Chris and Patterson (eds.) Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners: Digesting the New Social History, London, pp. 236–252. Dowden, Edward (1876) Shakespeare: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art, London. Empson, William (1964)‘Hunt the Symbol,’ The Times Literary Supplement, (23 April 1964), reprinted in Essays on Shakespeare, edited by David B. Pirie, Cambridge, 1987, pp. 231–243. Erlich, Bruce (1977) ‘Shakespeare’s Colonial Metaphor: On the Social Function of Theater in The Tempest’, Science and Society, 41: 43–65. Felperin, Howard (1972) Shakespearean Romance, Princeton. Fiedler, Leslie (1964) The Stranger in Shakespeare, New York. Frye, Northrop (1965) A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance, New York. Fuchs, Barbara (1997) ‘Conquering Islands: Contextualizing The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 48.1: 45–62. Furness, Horace Howard, ‘Introduction’, See Furness (under Editions).

 Select Bibliography 357 Gayley, Charles (1917) Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America, New York. Gibbons, Daniel R. (2017) ‘Inhuman Persuasion in The Tempest.’ Studies in Philology, 114.2: 302–330. Gildon, Charles(1710) ‘Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare’, See Rowe (under Editions). Gillies, John (1986) ‘Shakespeare’s Virginian Masque,’ ELH, 53.4: 673–707. Goddard, Harold C. (1951) The Meaning of Shakespeare, 2 vols, Chicago. Greenblatt, Stephen J. (1988) Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Irvine. Greenblatt, Stephen J. (1992) Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, New York. Grey, Zachary (1754) Critical, Historical and Explanatory Notes on Shakespeare, London. Gurr, Andrew (1989) ‘The Tempest’s tempest at the Blackfriars’, Shakespeare Survey, 91: 91–102. Gurr, Andrew (1996) ‘Industrious Ariel and Idle Caliban’, In Maquerlot, Jean Pierre and Willems, Michele (eds.) Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, Cambridge, pp. 193–208. Gurr, Andrew (2014) ‘Sources and Creativity in The Tempest’, In Vaughan, Alden T. and Vaughan, Virginia Mason(eds.) The Tempest – A Critical Reader, London, pp. 93–114. Hale, Edward Everett (1903) ‘Introduction’(3–13), See White (under Editions). Hale, Edward Everett (1903) ‘On the Conditions of the Elizabethan Stage and their Effect on Shakespeare’, See White (under Editions). Hall, Kim F. (1995) Things of Darkness; Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Ithaca. Hamilton, Donna, B. (1990) Virgil and ‘The Tempest’: The Politics of Imitation, Columbus. Hartwig, Joan (1972) Shakespeare’s Tragicomic Vision, Baton Rouge. Hawkes, Terence (1985) ‘Swisser Swatter: making a man of English letters’, In Drakakis, John (ed.) Alternative Shakespeares, London, pp. 26–46. Hazlitt, William (1838) Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays. London. Henke, Robert (2014) ‘Pastoral Tragicomedy and The Tempest’ In Bigliazzi, Silvia and Calvi, Lisanna (eds.) Revisiting The Tempest: The Capacity to Signify, New York, pp. 63–76. Holland, Norman (1968) ‘Caliban’s Dream’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 37: 114–125. Holt, John (1975) ‘Remarks on The Tempest’, In Vickers, Brian. William Shakespeare – The Critical Heritage – Vol. 3, London and Boston, pp. 342–358. Hulme, Peter (1981) ‘Hurricanes in the Caribbees: The Constitution of the Discourse of English Colonialism’, In Barker, Francis, Bernstein, Jay, Coombes, John, Hulme, Peter, Stratton, Jennifer, and Stone, Jon (eds.) 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century; Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, Colchester, pp. 55–83. James, D.G. (1937) Scepticism and Poetry: An Essay on the Poetic Imagination, London. James, D.G. (1967) The Dream of Prospero, Oxford. James, Henry (1907) ‘Introduction’, See Lee (under Editions). Jameson, Anna Brownell (1832) Shakespeare’s Heroines: Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical, London; reprinted in 1900, Boston and New York. Kahn, Coppélia (1980) ‘The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family’, In Schwartz, Murray M. and Kahn, Coppelia (eds.) Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, Baltimore, pp. 217–243. Kastan, David Scott (2000) ‘“The Duke of Milan/ And His Brave Son”: Old Histories and New in The Tempest’ In Graff, Gerald and Phelan, James (eds.) The Tempest – A Case Study in Critical Controversy, Boston, pp. 268–286.

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Katz, David (2018) ‘Theatrum Mundi: Rhetoric, Romance, and Legitimation in The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale’, Studies in Philology, 115. 4: 719–741. Kearney, James (2002) ‘The Book and the Fetish: The Materiality of Prospero’s Text’, Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, 32.3: 33–68. Kelsey, Rachel (1914) ‘Indian Dances in The Tempest’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 13: 98–103. Kemble, Frances Anne (1882) Notes Upon Some of Shakespeare’s Plays, London. Kernan, Alvin (1979) The Playwright as Magician, New Haven. Knight, Wilson (1932) The Shakespearean Tempest, London. Knight, Wilson (1961) The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays, London. Knowles, James (1999) ‘Insubstantial Pageants: The Tempest and Masquing Culture’. In Richards, Jennifer and Knowles, James (eds.) Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, Edinburgh, pp. 108–125. Kott, Jan (1966) Shakespeare our Contemporary, translated by Boleslaw Taborski, Garden City, NY. Kunat, John (2014) ‘“Play Me False” Rape, Race, and Conquest in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 65.3: 307–327. Lamb, Charles (1891) The Dramatic Essays, edited by Brander Mathews, New York. Leavis, F.R. (1942) ‘The Criticism of Shakespeare’s Last Plays – A Caveat’, Scrutiny X.4: 339–345. Lee, Sidney (1913) ‘Caliban’s Visits to England’, Cornhill Magazine, New Series 34: 333–345. Leininger, Lori (1980) ‘The Miranda Trap: Sexism and Racism in The Tempest’, In Swift, Carolyn Ruth, Greene, Gayle, and Neely, Carol Thomas (eds.) The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, Urbana, pp. 285–294. Levin, Harry (1969) ‘The Tempest and The Alchemist’, Shakespeare Survey, 22: 47–58. Lindsay, Tom (2016) ‘“Which First Was Mine Own King”: Caliban and the Politics of Service and Education in The Tempest’, Studies in Philology, 113.2: 397–423. Loomba, Ania (1989) Gender, Race and Renaissance Drama, Manchester and New York. MacDonald, Joyce Green (2002) Women and Race in Early Modern Texts, Cambridge. MacDonnell, Patrick (1840) An Essay on the Play of The Tempest, London. Maisano, Scott (2014) ‘Shakespeare’s Revolution – The Tempest as Scientific Romance’, In Vaughan, Alden T. and Vaughan, Virginia Mason(eds.) , The Tempest – A Critical Reader, London, pp. 165–194. Mannoni, Octave (1956) Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, New York. Marcus, Leah S. (1996) Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, London. Marx, Leo (1964) The Machine in the Garden, Oxford. Mebane, John S.(1989) Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare, Lincoln. Morgann, Maurice (1972) ‘A Commentary on The Tempest’, In Fineman, Daniel (ed.) Shakespearean Criticism, Oxford, pp. 291–334. Morton, Luce (1901) ‘Introduction’, See Morton (under Editions). Mowat, Barbara A. (2001) ‘Prospero’s Books’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52.1: 1–33. Mowat, Barbara A. (2000) ‘“Knowing I Loved my Books”: Reading The Tempest Intertextually’, In Hulme, Peter and Sherman, William H. (eds.) The Tempest and Its Travels, Philadelphia, pp. 27–36. Mullaney, Steven (1983) ‘Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance’, Representations, 3: 40–67.

 Select Bibliography 359 Murry, Middleton J. (1936) Shakespeare, London. Nardizzi, Vin (2013) Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theaters and England’s Trees, Toronto. Netzloff, Mark (2003) England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capitalism and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism, New York. Noble, Richard (1932) Shakespeare’s Use of Song, Oxford. Norbrook, David (1992) ‘“What Care these Roarers for the Name of the King?” Language and Utopia in The Tempest’, In Gordon McMullan, Gordon and Hope (eds.) The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, London, pp. 21–54. Nuttall, A.D. (1967) Two Concepts of Allegory, London. Orgel, Stephen (1984) ‘Prospero’s Wife’, Representations, 8: 1–13. Orgel, Stephen, ‘Introduction’, See Orgel (under Editions). Orkin, Martin (2005) Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power, London. Patterson, Annabel (1999) ‘“Thought is Free”: The Tempest’, In White, R.S. (ed.) The Tempest – Contemporary Critical Essays, New York, pp. 123–134. Popelard, Mickaël (2017) ‘Unlimited Science: The Endless Transformation of Nature in Bacon and Shakespeare’s The Tempest.’ In Chiari, Sophie and Popelard, Mickaël (eds.) Spectacular Science, Technology and Superstition in the Age of Shakespeare, Edinburgh, pp. 171–195. Priestley, Joseph (1977) A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, London. Quiller-Couch, Arthur (1917) Notes on Shakespeare’s Workmanship, New York. Raleigh, Walter (1907) Shakespeare, London. Retamar, Roberto Fernandez (1974) ‘Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in our America’, translated by Lynn Garafola, David McMurray, and Robert Marquez. Massachusetts Review 15: 7–72. Richardson, William (1789) Essays on Shakespeare’s Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, and in his Imitation of Female Characters, London. Rodó, José Enrique (1922) Ariel, translated by S.J. Stimpson, Cambridge. Rufo, Jeffrey (2014) ‘“He needs will be Absolute Milan”: The Political Thought of The Tempest’, In Vaughan, Alden T. and Vaughan, Virginia Mason (eds.), The Tempest – A Critical Reader, pp. 137–164, Ruskin, John (1872) Munera Pulveris: Six Essays on the Elements of Political Economy, New York. Sanchez, Melissa E. (2008) ‘Seduction and Service in The Tempest’, Studies in Philology, 105.1: 50–82. Schlegal, August Wilhelm (1846) Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, translated by John Black, London. Sebek, Barbara Ann (2001) ‘Peopling, Profiting and Pleasure in The Tempest’, In Murphy, Patrick (ed.) The Tempest – Critical Essays, London and New York, pp. 463–481. Shaw, George Bernard (1897) ‘“The Tempest” – Performance by the Elizabethan Stage Society at the Mansion House, 5 November 1897’, The Saturday Review, 84: 514–516. Smith, Hallet (1972) Shakespeare’s Romances, San Marino. Sill, Richard (1797) Remarks on Shakespeare’s Tempest, Cambridge. Singh, Jyotsna G (1996) ‘Caliban vs. Prospero: Race and Gender Conflicts in Postcolonial Rewritings of The Tempest’, In Kaplan, Linsay M. and Callaghan, Dympna (eds.) Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, Cambridge, pp. 191–209. Sisson, C.J. (1958) ‘The Magic of Prospero’, Shakespeare Survey: 70–77. Skura, Meredith Anne (1989) ‘Discourse and the Individual: the case of Colonialism in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 40.1: 42–69. Spencer, Theodore (1942) Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, New York.

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Srigley, Michael (1985) Images of Regeneration: A Study of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Its Cultural Background, Stockholm. Stauffer, Donald (1949) Shakespeare’s World of Images -The Development of His Moral Ideas, Bloomington. Still, Collin (1921) Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: A Study of The Tempest, London. Stoll, E.E. (1932) ‘The Tempest’, PMLA, 47: 699–726. Stopford, Brooke (1905) On Ten Plays of Shakespeare. London. Strachey, Lytton (1922) Books and Characters – French and English, London. Sundelson, David (1980) ‘“So Rare a Wonder’d Father”: Prospero’s Tempest’, In Schwartz, Murray M. and Kahn, Coppelia (eds.) Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, Baltimor, pp. 33–53. Swinburne, A.C. (1880) A Study of Shakespeare, London. Thompson, Ann (1991) ‘“Miranda, where’s Your Sister?”: Reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, In Susan Sellers, Susan, Hutcheon, Linda, and Perron, Paul (eds.) Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, Toronto, pp. 45–55. Tieck, Ludwig (1992) ‘Shakespeare’s Treatment of the Marvelous’, (1793), translated by Louise Adey, in Bate, Jonathan (ed.) The Romantics on Shakespeare, London, pp. 60–66. Tillyard, E.M.W. (2014) Shakespeare’s Last Plays, London. Traversi, Derek (1949) ‘The Tempest’, Scrutiny, 16.2: 127–157. Ulrici, Hermann (1876) Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art – Vol 2, translated by L.D. Schmidt, London. Upton, John (1748) Critical Observations on Shakespeare, London. Warner, Marina (2000) ‘The “Foul Witch” and her “Freckled Whelp”: Circean Mutations in the New World’, In Hulme, Peter and Sherman, William (eds.) in The Tempest and its Travels, Philadelphia. Warton, John (1753) ‘Observations on The Tempest of Shakespeare’, The Adventurer, Vol. 93. Warton, John (1754) ‘Observations on The Tempest Concluded’, The Adventurer, Vol. 94. Webb, Daniel (1976) ‘Shakespeare’s Poetry, 1762’, In Vickers, Brian (ed.) William Shakespeare – The Critical Heritage, Vol. 4, London and Boston, pp. 505–524. Whall, Helen (2014) ‘Commedia dell’ Arte, The Tempest, and Transnational Criticism’, In Vaughan, Alden T. and Vaughan, Virginia Mason (eds.) The Tempest – A Critical Reader, pp. 115–136. Willis, Deborah (1989) ‘Shakespeare and the Discourse of Colonialism’, Studies in English Literature, 29.2: 277–289. Wilson, Dover John (1932) The Essential Shakespeare, Cambridge. Wilson, Daniel (1873) Caliban: The Missing Link, London. Wilson, Richard (1997) ‘Voyage to Tunis: New History and the old world of The Tempest’, English Literary History, 64.2: 333–357. Wilson-Okamura, David Scott (2003) ‘Virgilian Modes of Colonization in The Tempest’, English Literary History, 70.3: 709–737. Young, David (1972) The Heart’s Forest: A Study of Shakespeare’s Pastoral Plays, New Haven and London.

Index adaptation  1, 2 Addison, Joseph  4 Adelman, Janet  34 Albanese, Denise  33 allegory  21, 23, 24, 27, 135, 215–18, 243–54, 284, 322–3 America  16, 19, 20, 23, 26, 31, 35, 153–6, 204–10, see also Bermuda; New World; Virginia Andrews, Richard  35 anthropoid  127–8 anthropological theory  27 Antonio  20, 24, 74, 93–4, 216, 333 archetype  17, 18, 25, 27, 81, 243–54 Ariel  5, 11, 14, 17, 25–7, 34, 36, 67, 72, 120, 131, 135–6, 141, 160–1, 183–5, 215–6, 241, 248, 255–6, 258–9, 261, 299–301 Ariosto, Orlando Furioso  12, 99, 108 Aristotelian theory  3, 36, 167 art  1, 24, 26–8, 135, 164, 283, 285, 303, 325–7 Auden, W.H.  26 Ayrer, Jakob, Die Schnone Sidea  23, 157–8, 171–2, 270, 312 Bacon, Francis  30, 248–9 Barber, C.L.  35 Barker, Francis  31 Bate, Jonathan  9, 35 Beaumont, Francis  4, 20, 29, 165–7, 219, 331 Beerbohm, Max  21, 174–7 Benjamin, Walter  37 Bennet, George  106 Benson, Frank  121, 174 Bentley, G.E.  26, 309–10 Berger, Harry  28 Bermuda  8, 12, 29, 53–65, 94, 95, 97, 101, 150–1, 153–6, 168–9, 205–6, 235, 238, 269–70, 325

Bible  25, 35, 116, 246, 247, 249, 251–4, 321–3 Bigliazzi, Silvia  36 Birch, W.J.  13, 114–18 Blackfriars Theatre  26, 35, 237, 309–10 Bradbrook, M.C.  22 Bradley, A.C.  18, 21, 178–9, 272 Breight, Curt  30 Bristol, Frank  16–17, 153–6 Brooke, Stopford  18, 180–6 Brotton, Jerry  32 Brower, Reuben  27 Brown, Paul  31, 32 Bruster, Douglas  36 Burnett, Mark Thornton  30 Caliban character  2–5, 11, 13, 14, 30, 35, 36, 67, 73, 75–8, 105–6, 123–9, 133–4, 141, 144–6, 158–60, 164, 176, 191–2, 216, 245–8, 286–8, 293, 301–2, 315–8 education  14, 34, 127, 145–6 language  6, 31, 67, 78, 128, 316 missing link  13, 121–19 Native American  17, 19, 31, 155–6, 159, 206–10, 220–3 nature  26–8, 77, 282, 316, 324–7 savage  17, 19, 80–4, 105, 121–2, 126–7, 159, 163, 207, 223, 325 slave  19, 119–20 songs  26, 259 source of  81–2, 121–29 Callaghan, Dympna  32 Campbell, Thomas  15, 95–6 Capell, Edward  6, 8 Carlson, Donald  30 Cartelli, Thomas  32 Cawley, Robert  19–20 Chalmers, George  8, 50–2 Chambers, E.K.  21, 269–1

362 characterization  2, 3, 5, 69–70, 74, 77, 290, 292–5 Cheney, Patrick  36 Childress, Diana  29 Christianity  18, 24, 25, 114–18, 183, 215–18, 238–54, 320–3 civilization  19, 27, 28, 89, 93, 103, 106, 162–4, 206, 207, 210, 216, 222, 290, 298, 315–17, 324–5, 329 class  11, 29, 33–4, 94, 231–4 Clemen, Wolfgang  24 close reading  27 Cobb, Neil  34 Coghill, Neville  25, 321–3 Cohen, Derek  31 Cohen, Walter  34 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  11, 14, 67–76, 90, 112 Collins, John Churton  18, 215–18 colonialism  8, 28, 30–2, 51, 222, 230–4 commonwealth speech (by Gonzalo)  7, 19, 51, 163–4, 204, 233, 286–88, 314–15 courtship (Ferdinand-Miranda)  93, 96, 142–3, 180–2, 331 Cowley, Robert Ralston  19 Craig, Hardin  23 cultural materialism  29 Curran, Kevin  36 Curry, Walter  23, 28 Cymbeline  161, 165–7, 183, 189, 190, 211, 217–19, 225, 275, 277, 279, 282, 296 Darwin, Charles  13 Davenant, William  1, 2 Dee, John  28 Dolan, Frances  34 Doty, Jeffrey  34 Dowden, Edward  13, 15, 16, 23, 130–7, 188–9 Dryden, John  1–4, 6 Ecocriticism  36 Eden Richard  35 Elizabethan Stage Society  147–9 Empson, William  27 epilogue  36, 134 Erasmus  235–6

Index Erlich, Bruce  33 evil  74, 93–4, 106, 130, 293–4, 314, 325, 327–28 evolutionary theory  13–14, 123–8 fantastic element  1, 3, 4, 110–13, 190 Farmer, Richard  6 Felperin, Howard  29 female characters  5, 14, 32, 34, 92–3, 139–43 female critics (early)  14, 15, 22, 87–9, 139–43, 224–5 feminist criticism  14–15, 29, 32, 33 Ferdinand  15, 26, 78, 89, 93, 134, 135, 141–2, 306–7, 330, see also courtship Fiedler, Leslie  28 final period (Shakespeare’s career)  33, 131–7, 153, 187–203, 211–14, 272, 279, 284, 297 Fletcher, John  1, 20, 29, 94, 165–7, 219, 331, 332 folklore  20, 170–3 forgiveness  5, 18, 19, 24–6, 115, 117, 118, 126, 131, 134, 161, 164, 179, 183, 189, 211, 215, 249, 266, 280, 307, 322, 323, 328 formalist reading  17–18, 22, 27, 270–8 freedom  8, 17, 20, 31, 37, 73, 94, 126, 133, 134, 142, 160–1, 163, 184, 185, 199, 211, 215, 230–3, 255, 259, 308, 316–18, 325, 328, 333 Frye, Northrop  18, 27 Fuchs, Barbara  32 Furness, Horace Howard  14, 144–6 Gates, Thomas  53, 55, 58, 60, 61, 64, 95, 230–2, 270 Gayley, Charles  19, 20, 230–4 genre  12, 25, 29–31, 33, 34, 90–7, 109–14, 211, 219, see also comedy; romance; tragedy; tragi-comedy German criticism  8, 11, 66–7, 108–13 Gibbons, Daniel  36 Gildon, Charles  3, 15 Gillies, John  31 Goddard, Harold C.  26 Gonzalo, see commonwealth speech Greenblatt, Stephen  29, 31

 Index 363 Greene, Robert  29 Gurr, Andrew  31, 35 Guthrie, William  5 Hale, Everett Edward  168–9 Hall, Kim  31, 32 Hamilton, Donna  35 Hartwig, Joan  29 Hawkes, Terence  30 Hazlitt, William  10, 11, 76–9 Heath, Benjamin  5 Henke, Robert  35 historicist approach  7, 20 History of the Book studies  36 Holt, John  6 Hulme, Peter  30 Hunter, Joseph  8, 12, 97 Hurd, Richard  7 imagery  24, 272–8, 304 Ireland  32 Irving, Henry  148 Irving, Washington  100–3 Italian sources  35, 158, 166, 311–12 James, D.J.  25, 27 James, Henry  17, 193–203 Jameson, Anna Brownell  14, 87–9 Johnson, Charles  9 Johnson, Samuel  5, 7, 9 Jonson, Ben Alchemist, The  28 Bartholomew Fair  1, 51 masques  21, 31, 141, 260–2, 265 Jourdain, Sylvestor  53, 59, 60, 95, 269–70 Kahn, Coppelia  34 Kames, Henry  6 Kastan, David  33 Katz, David  36 Kean, Charles  12 Kearney, James  36 Kelsey, Rachel  20, 224–5 Kemble, Fanny  15, 139–3 Kermode, Frank  1, 26, 29, 324–33 King Lear  18, 72, 179, 274, 298 Kipling, Rudyard  16, 150–2 Knight, Charles  6, 12, 107–9

Knight, Wilson  18, 22, 24, 272–8, 296–309 Knowles, James  35 Kott, Jan  27 Kunat, John  36 Lamb, Charles  11–12, 85 Lamming, George  28–9 Lampedusa  12, 98 last play  96, 107–8, 131–7, 187–93 Law, Ernest  21, 237–42 learning (Shakespeare’s)  6 Leavis, F.R.  290–5 Lee, Sidney  19, 204–10, 220–3 Leininger, Lori  33 Levin, Harry  28 Levi-Strauss, Claude  27, 33 Lindsay, Tom  34 local readings  36 Loomba, Ania  33 Macdonald, Joyce  31, 33 MacDonnell, Patrick  14, 104–6 magic  3, 4, 7, 23, 28, 30, 80, 125–6 Maisano, Scott  30 Malone, Edmond  8, 12, 47–8, 53–65, 80, 97, 150, 269 Mannoni, Octave  28 Marcus, Leah  33 Marlowe, Christopher  35, 305, 322 Marx, Leo  28 masque  7, 21, 35, 141, 166, 169, 179, 225, 242, 260–8 McKenna, Rose  36 mechanic regularity  10, 69 Mediterranean  12, 32, 97–100 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A  67, 78, 95, 108, 110, 111, 140, 148, 162, 175, 191, 260–2, 264, 266–8, 297, 303 Milton, John  11, 72, 122, 123, 159, 218, 263–4, 266–7, 280 Miranda  4, 14–15, 26, 31, 33, 70, 75, 78, 87–9, 92–3, 134, 139–40, 142, 145–6, 164, 181–2, 216–17, 228–9, 246, 282, 285, 288, 306–7, 330 missing link  13–14 Moisane, Scott  30 monstrosity  121, 160, 245–6

364 Montaigne, Michel de  7, 35, 206, 286–7 morality  24, 27, 117 Morton, Luce  19, 157–64 Mowat, Barbara  30, 35 Mullaney, Stephen  30 Murray, John Middleton  26, 283–9 Muslim  32 Mystery play  244–54 Nardizzi, Vin  36 Native Americans  7, 17, 19, 26, 31, 52, 54–5, 65, 205–9, 220–5, 287 nature  1, 2, 5, 26–8, 77, 234–7, 282, 316 neoclassical criticism  1–9 Neoplatonism  23–4 Netzloff, Mark  33 New Criticism  22, 23, 25, 26 Newell, W.W  20, 170–3 New Historicist criticism  29–30 New World  8, 19, 27, 150–6, 204–10, 325, see also America; Bermuda; Virginia Noble, Richard  25, 257–64 Norbrook, David  34 Nosworthy, James  25, 311–13 Nutall, A.D.  27 organic regularity  10, 68, 69 Orgel, Stephen  34, 36 Orkin, Martin  36 Ottoman Empire  32 Ovid, Metamorphoses  35 pastoral  17, 27, 29, 35, 225, 324–32 Patterson, Annabel  33 penitence  13, 117, 130, 131, 161, 184, 189, 190, 216, 248, 252, 291, 320, 331 Pettet, Ernest  24 plot  5, 11, 24, 25, 31, 66, 68–9, 84, 92, 166, 170–3, 311–13 political power  30, 230–4, see also colonialism Popelard, Mickaël  30 post-colonial criticism  17, 28–33, 255 Priestley, Joseph  6 Prospero  15, 17, 20, 21, 26, 27, 31, 125–6, 131–3, 139–1, 175, 176,

Index 179, 193–203, 248–50, 280–2, 284, 288–99, 307–8, 321–2, 325–7, 332 Prospero as Shakespeare  15, 17, 23, 24, 95, 193–203, 284, 307 providence  13, 115–17, 319 psychoanalytic criticism  28, 34–5 Quiller-Couch, Arthur  21, 226–29 race  28, 31–3 Raleigh, Sir Walter  52, 211–14 Raleigh, Walter  20 Rawlings, Peter  16 Rea, John  20, 235–6 religion  18, 24, 114–18, 183, see also Christianity Retamar, Roberto Fernandez  29 revels speech  13, 15, 185–6, 213–14, 265–6 revenge  14, 31, 35, 106, 164, 280, 281, 328 Ristine, F.H.  20, 219 Rodó, Jose Enrique  17, 29, 255–6 romance  12, 20, 24, 29–31, 34, 90–7, 165–7, 211–14, 219, 329–30 romantic drama  10, 90–4 Romanticism  8–12, 66–94, 110–13 Rufo, Jeffrey  30 Ruskin, John  13, 119–20 Sanchez, Melissa  33 Schlegel, Wilhelm  10, 11, 66–8 Schmidgall, Gary  29 science  33, 121, 123 Sebastian  74, 93–4, 216, 288, 291, 303, 333 Sebek, Barbara  33 self-reform  163, 164 servitude  13, 33, 34, see also slavery Shaw, George Bernard  12, 147–9 Singh, Jyotsna  33 Sisson, C.J.  28 Skura, Meredith  34 slavery  13, 19, 31, 32, 119–20, 163, 317, see also Caliban, slave Somers, George  8, 53–65, 95, 101, 154, 162, 238, 269, 312

 Index 365 songs  20, 25, 26, 78, 184, 241, 257–9, 261–2 source/source criticism  8, 12, 20, 25, 35, 80–4, 95, 150–8, 162, 166, 175, 230–6, 238, 269–71, 311–13 Spencer, Theodore  26, 292–5 Spenser, Edmund  36, 324, 331–2 spirits  67, 77 Steevens, George  5, 6, 47, 48, 155 Strachey, Lytton  17 Strachey, William  35, 187–92, 232–5, 269–70 stage production  1, 12, 14, 21, 26, 33, 36, 85–6, 105–6, 147–9, 174–5, 226–9, 237–42, 270 Stauffer, Daniel  22 Stephano  20, 103, 231–2, 259, 293, 304–6 Still, Collin  18, 243–4 Stoll E.E.  23 storm  62–3, 99 Sundelson, David  34 supernatural  67, 77, 161 Swinburne, Charles  12, 138 symbolism  22, 216, 284, 319 symbolic imagination  91 Sycorax  17, 32, 33, 98, 156, 158–9, 253–4, 325 Taylor, William  8, 49 Theobald, Lewis  4 Thomson, Ann  33 Thorndike, Ashley  20, 165–7 Tieck, Ludwig  10 Tillyard, E.M.W.  24, 26, 279–2 tragedy  18, 24, 25, 178, 212, 279 tragicomedy  8, 13, 20–1, 26, 27, 29, 35, 49, 64, 209, 211, 219, 309, 329–3 Traversi, Derek  24, 27, 314–20

Trinculo  10, 31, 94, 293, 304–6 True Declaration of Virginia, A  20, 154, 230, 233, 270 Ulrici, Hermann  12, 109–13 unities  1–3, 49 Utopia  79 Van Doren, Mark  26 Vaughan, Alden  19, 31, 35 Vaughan, Virginia Mason  19, 35 Vickers, Brian  2, 37 Victorian criticism  12 Virgil, Aenied  35, 311, 313 Virginia  8, 16, 19–21, 25, 35, 53, 55, 59–60, 62, 95, 154, 162, 221, 230–4, 269 Warburton, William  5, 8 Warner, Marina  33 Warton, Joseph  5 Webb, Daniel  6 Welsford, Enid  21, 35, 260–8 Whall, Helen  35 Whalley, Peter  5, 6 Wheeler, Richard  35 wild men  35, 121–3, 220 Willis, Deborah  32–3 Wilson, Daniel  13 Wilson, John Dover  24, 280 Wilson, Richard  32 Wilson-Okamura, David  35 Winter’s Tale, The  161, 165, 166, 183, 189, 190, 194, 211, 219, 225, 237, 240, 262, 266, 277, 279, 281, 283–5, 287–90, 296, 298, 309, 319 Yates, Frances  28 Young, David  29

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