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Caitlyn Girardi
Dr. Lauren Maxwell
ENGL 700
23 October 2014
The Supernatural in The Tempest and A Tempest
One of the immediate differences between Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Césaire’s A
Tempest is the description of Ariel: In Shakespeare’s version, Ariel is a “spirit”, and in Césaire’s
rewriting, Ariel is a “mulatto slave”. This small difference represents a much larger difference
between each text’s view of the supernatural: The Tempest affirms a legitimate supernatural and
man’s ability to harness its power, and A Tempest undercuts the seemingly supernatural by
offering human intuition and natural explanations to debunk it. This difference becomes clear
while analyzing corresponding events in The Tempest and A Tempest: Prospero’s conjuring of
the storm and shipwreck, and Ariel’s final errands for Prospero. Other notable scenes
demonstrate supernatural forces; notably, Ferdinand’s foiled attempt to strike Prospero with the
sword, and the presence of a seemingly magic feast that is then taken away, and Eshu, are
puzzling. However, these scenes are frequently addressed by scholars and connected to
Prospero’s position as a Western colonizer, so I have chosen to analyze scenes that are not as
often compared in criticism of the two texts.
When Prospero explains the storm to Miranda in The Tempest, he ascribes to a belief in
the supernatural. Prospero acknowledges the intervention of outside forces in earthly events,
these forces being Fortune and “a most auspicious star”, which he must “court” in order to
ensure his good fortune (I.II.178, 184). His usage of his books and charts to capitalize on the
power that stars have over natural events refers to his status as a “magus”, or one with “pride in
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his secret knowledge” (Mowat 198). Yet, not only does Prospero acknowledge the existence of a
force that can control nature, but he also asserts his own power over nature, claiming, “…I first
raised the tempest” (V.I.6). This power assertion refers to another one of Prospero’s roles: the
enchanter (Mowat 198). While criticism of The Tempest formerly debated Prospero’s magical
abilities and “discount[ed] Prospero’s magic Art as simply a metaphor for creative imagination”
(193), Curto affirms that recent scholarship has resurged the reality of his power as a “magician
capable of controlling nature” (165), and not merely as the illusionist he emerges to be in
Césaire’s play.
Ariel’s involvement in this scene further supports the reality of the supernatural; unlike
magician-yet-mortal Prospero, Ariel’s abilities come from his existence as a spirit. Prospero may
use books to harness the power of the stars, but Ariel does the real work of the shipwreck. When
Prospero asks Ariel, “Hast thou, spirit,/ Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee?”
(I.II.194) Ariel’s answer reveals his paranormal abilities: he somehow “board[s]” the vessel and
conjures a fire to destroy the ship (I.II.196). In an analogy that emphasizes his role as a spirit,
Ariel refers describes himself as the fire: “Sometimes I’d divide/ And burn in many places; on
the topmast,/ The yards, and bowspirit would I flame distinctly,/ Then meet and join” (I.II.198200). He then boldly compares himself to the Greek gods and goddesses, saying that “Jove’s
lightnings” are not as “momentary” and “sight-outrunning” than his own flames (I.II.201-203).
Ariel also brags that his “fire and cracks/ Of sulfurous roaring” would “besiege” “the most
mighty Neptune” and “make his bold waves” “tremble” and “his dead trident shake” (I.II.203206). Since Ariel conflates himself with the fire, not only is he saying that his work is superior to
that of the gods, but that he is superior to their work, which strengthens his position as a
paranormal figure.
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In contrast to their supernatural origins in The Tempest, Césaire’s placement of humans
behind the storm and shipwreck undermines the reality of supernatural forces. First, the
mainstream ability to detect human desires challenges the idea that Prospero has any magic
abilities. Prospero’s language echoes that of his predecessor by crediting the storm to Fortune
and by citing “prophetic science” as the source of his foreknowledge that his usurpers would set
out for sea (15). However, as Prospero explains his story, the veneer of a “prophetic science” is
stripped to reveal basic human intuition. The men come to the island due to their greed and
desire to conquer, and being able to predict that those who usurped him for his new territories
would eventually try to visit and colonize these territories accepts of the inevitable rather than
demonstrates superhuman use of knowledge. In fact, framing a lack of psychic power with the
pretense of calling it “prophetic science” (more specific than Shakespeare’s “prescience”, which
can just mean foreknowledge) creates irony, and parodies Prospero’s lack of psychic power and
his corresponding over-compensation to make up for this lack with language. Prospero is no
magician, but only a manipulative and egotistical illusionist.
In contrast to The Tempest’s depiction of Ariel’s agency in the shipwreck, Ariel’s account
in A Tempest is sparse, but the Prologue subverts the supernatural by placing humans behind the
myth of the storm. While all Ariel offers is a reluctant “Mission accomplished” (13), the
Prologue’s Master of Ceremonies emerges as the true maestro behind the constructed the storm.
He asks actors to pick their parts, and, even calls for someone to play “the Tempest…a storm to
end all storms” (7). He commands the actors, “Blow, winds! Rain and lightning…ad-lib!” (8).
Humans power this storm, and they are not magical humans, either. Curto interprets the Master
of Ceremonies as functioning to “call attention to the artifice involved in staging the tempest in
order to debunk Prospero’s claim that he created it” (167). While this seems true, I would also
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argue that the Master of Ceremonies debunks a larger claim that a mythological force controls
the natural elements on earth; he simultaneously performs an etiological myth and parodies its
acceptance as truth. Performing the storm caricatures those who used etiological myths to
explain natural events, and thus subdued and controlled those around them. Such figures are
mocked in this scene as literally blowing wind.
In the closing scenes of The Tempest, supernatural events continue in Ariel’s final errands
for Prospero. As Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo threaten Prospero’s dominance, Ariel tricks
them into disunity with his powers. He becomes invisible and speaks as one of them, plays
enchanting music and causes them to follow it, and distracts them with fine clothing.
Technically, these acts might be explained without magical involvement: Ariel could merely be
hiding, and not corporeally invisible; he might be able to throw his voice, much like a
ventriloquist; and putting clothing on a line does not require any unnatural skill. This uncertainty
might be an instance of what Mowat refers to as the “inability to fix this power as supernatural or
as sleight-of-hand” (203); rather than seeing The Tempest overtly assuming the supernatural
throughout the whole play, Mowat suggests a tension between “the central ambiguities in our
own vision of man in the natural and supernatural worlds” (208). However, when viewing the
play as a whole, The Tempest text does not seem to allow for a suddenly realistic and scrutinizing
reading of Ariel’s actions, and the consistency between this errand and the others he performs for
Prospero suggests that Ariel still acts out of his mystical abilities.
However, one trick that Ariel plays on Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban cannot be
explained without acknowledging his access to the supernatural. While the would-be usurpers
play dress-up, the stage direction indicates, “A noise of hunters heard. Enter divers spirits in the
shape of dogs and hounds, hunting them about” (V.I). Comical as it may be to imagine the
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characters running scared from what the reader knows to be an illusion, the illusion would likely
have been terrifying, a “supernatural presence frightening them so much that they leave” (Curto
163). The text is careful to note that real dogs are not the culprits here, but rather “spirits”, whose
paranormal status Prospero affirms by calling them “goblins” (V.I.258). While assuming the
outward appearance of animals, preternatural spirits are culpable, and it is the magical abilities of
both Ariel and Prospero that are able to bring this illusion about.
In the final scenes of A Tempest, Caliban’s affliction with mud and mosquitoes emerges
as naturalistic, demystifying the supernatural and critiquing those who promote mystical
mythologies in order to keep their subjects subordinated. In “Two Tempests”, Arnold argues that
Act III Scene IV is “entirely” created by Césaire, but I claim that it is actually a more culturally
authentic (for the setting of A Tempest) rewriting of Act V Scene I from The Tempest. In
Césaire’s version of the scene, Ariel is tasked to set various natural elements against Caliban,
Stephano, and Trinculo. Before continuing, it is necessary to address the stage direction
immediately preceding the scene, which tells the reader that the “spirits of the tropical forest are
heard” (52). Too, the first dialogue in the scene is a roll call among the creatures of the forest.
Ariel has called upon animals, insects, and the earth: “Snakes, scorpions, porcupines, all stinging
poisonous creatures, he is to be spared nothing! His punishment must be exemplary. Oh, and
don’t forget the mud and mosquitoes!” (50). On the surface, talking to animals, or animals
talking at all, suggests the supernatural. However, as the scene rounds out, this initial event
functions as a hyperbolized representation of man’s capacity for a connection to the natural
world.
The completion of this scene uses characters’ conflicting interpretations of the seemingly
magical mosquitoes and mud to debunk supernatural agency and replace it with naturalism.
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Immediately after Ariel’s call to the animals, Caliban makes an appeal, too. His self-defense is
his connection to nature: “How can any animal—any natural animal, if I may put it that way—go
against me…Prospero is the Anti-Nature!” (52) The fight is between anti-Nature and Nature, and
while Curto cautions the reader against viewing Caliban as “the staunch defender of a natural
way of living” because “he wants, more than anything else, to obtain the scientific and technical
knowledge Prospero has brought” (165), I would say that Caliban is, without knowing it, correct
that Prospero is “Anti-Nature”. Since Prospero wants Caliban to remain afraid of and dependent
upon him, Prospero attempts to immolate the natural world with the mystical, proposing scary
magical constructs that are really just insects and wet earth; Caliban thinks that the mud and
mosquitoes are “something Prospero’s dreamed up” (53) and “some kind of gas that stings your
nose and throat and makes you itch” (54). Prospero has succeeded in tricking Caliban. However,
Trinculo is able to notice Caliban’s delusion by Prospero: “There’s a savage for
you…everything’s always caused by someone. The sun is Prospero’s smile. The rain is the tear
in Prospero’s eye…And I suppose the mud is Prospero’s shit” (53). Yet, while Trinculo blames
Caliban’s delusion on him being a “savage”, reflecting what Arnold calls “the traditional
European misunderstanding of animism as primitive superstition” (247), the Western figure of
Prospero is behind this misconception. Eventually, Caliban will snap out of the spell and call
Prospero out for the “inventor” that he is (Arnold 239), and Prospero will be “demystified” even
to Caliban (Curto 165).
Depictions of the supernatural in The Tempest and A Tempest identify each text’s overall
position toward the paranormal world: The Tempest takes for granted a real supernatural, and A
Tempest gives human—or naturalistic—reasons for seemingly unnatural events. Much of the
reason for this difference in attitude concerns each author’s historical context: Shakespeare’s
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world was in the process of transitioning from one view of magic toward another: the Medieval
world of the mysteriously sacramental to the Renaissance world of applying pagan magic to the
Christian worldview in order to ascend the chain of being. By the time Césaire wrote, man had
moved past the Renaissance to secular Humanism, and into Post-Modernism, where magic is
mostly discounted and parodied. Shakespeare’s work is important as a product of his time, and
while it critiques the bad intentions that Prospero initially has when pursuing magic, conflicts
resolve themselves and end in a happy reconciliation and wedding. Yet due to the fact that
Césaire re-writes Shakespeare, his text has the opportunity to speak not only to his context, but to
all contexts that bridge between Shakespeare and himself. In conclusion, rather than merely
commenting that magic has no place in the post-modern world, depictions of magic in A Tempest
that differ from The Tempest show the historical danger of visible magic when it is in the hands
of colonizers, which results in a Prospero, a “ tyrant who practices a crude mode of illusionmaking with the sole purpose of reinforcing his power through trickery” (165). When viewed
together, The Tempest and A Tempest offer a perspective across generations that views the value
of the supernatural in politics and society, and Césaire, having the last word, leaves readers with
a warning: blindly accept the supernatural, and one may become an enslaved Caliban, but realize
the power that the idea of magic has over man’s perception of reality, and one may become a
freed Caliban.
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Works Cited
Arnold, James A. “Césaire and Shakespeare: Two Tempests.” Comparative Literature
30.3 (Summer 1978): 236-248. Web. 12 October 2014. JSTOR.
Curto, Roxanne. “The Science of Illusion-making in Aimé Césaire's La tragédie du roi
Christophe and Une tempête.” Research in African Literatures 42.1 (Spring 2011): 154171. Web. 12 Oct. 2014. Project MUSE.
Mowat, Barbara. “Prospero, Agrippa, and Hocus Pocus.” Critical Essays on
Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. G.K.
Hall & Co: New York, NY 1998. 193-208. Print.