And I Quote: The Tempest.
1.1.16-17:
What cares these roarers for the name of king? The Tempest opens
with a storm at sea. The courtier-passengers (returning to Italy from a
wedding in Tunis) anxiously question the crew. The Boatswain
(pronounced bosun) here introduces the theme of power. A King cannot
control the elements, his authority is limited to people (and only then
under certain circumstances, the Boatswain implies, telling the Courtiers to
go to their cabins). The ‘name’ of King has no true authority. Prospero,
however, (unknown to either audience or seafarers), does control the
storm. Although he has not the ‘name’, he has the power, which he will
use to regain his Dukedom. When he does so, he will give up this power.
‘Roarers’ can also mean bullies. The normal social world of the Court has
become dislocated: the Boatswain shows no deference to his superiors, but
regards them as a nuisance.
1.2.341-342: For I am all the subjects that you have / which first was mine own
king. Caliban protests against his enslavement. This speech fits well with
a colonialist interpretation of The Tempest. This is our introduction to
Caliban, and he has a powerful speech stating his sense of injustice, before
Prospero and Miranda tell us why their attitude to him has changed: his
attempted rape of Miranda.
1.2.351-352: Abhorred slave / Which any print of goodness will not take.
Miranda’s angry response to Caliban’s speech indicates her conviction that
Caliban is racially, genetically inferior, incapable of education and
improvement. Caliban is an anagram of ‘cannibal’ (if we ignore an ‘n’,
which would be good enough for Shakespeare). Whether Caliban’s
attitudes and actions are due to his parentage and result from an evil
nature, or whether they are a natural and justifiable response to his
situation is left open to interpretation, although Miranda and Prospero are
sure Caliban is in the wrong throughout. Whether Caliban learns over the
course of the play is also debatable. Miranda’s attitude to Caliban is
reflected in her response to Ferdinand, in whom she finds beauty and
nobility combined, in line with fashionable Jacobean Neo-Platonism.
‘There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple’ – 1.2.458.
1.2.363-364: You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.
Caliban rejects his education, but cannot avoid expressing that rejection in
the form he has been taught. What he can do is turn this knowledge against
his oppressors. Caliban later makes more attractive use of language, as in
3.2.136: ‘Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises….’, one of the finest
speeches in the play.
1.2.391-392: Weeping again the King my father’s wrack / This music crept by me
upon the waters. Ferdinand, charmed by Ariel’s music, believes his father
(Alonso, King of Naples) drowned, and here draws an association between
the sea and music, both powerful symbols in The Tempest. These lines are
used by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land. The healing power of music is
attested: as in King Lear, where music is used to soothe the mad King, and
Pericles, where the sea is again a vital element.
1.2.339-402: Those are pearls that were his eyes / Nothing of him that doth fade /
But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.
Ariel calms both the sea and Ferdinand with his songs. The ‘sea-change’
has often been taken as a key image in The Tempest. Also used by Eliot in
The Waste Land. A strange, otherworldly view, as befits a spirit. ‘Seachange’ has entered the language as meaning a complete transformation.
The ‘otherness’ of the sea is made explicit; it is an alien and mysterious
element. The song can be seen as preparing Ferdinand for his forthcoming
commitment to Miranda by laying his father and his grief to rest.
3.3.102-104: Therefore my son i’th’ooze is bedded, and / I’ll seek him deeper than
e’er plummet sounded / And with him there lie mudded.
In fact, Alonso did not drown, any more than Ferdinand did. Here Alonso,
already apprised of his guilt in Prospero’s banishment by Ariel, mourns his
son in words which prefigure Prospero’s later renunciation of magic ‘And
deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book. (5.1.56-57).
4.1.150:
Are melted into air, into thin air. Spirits were thought to be made of air,
and to make themselves visible by a thickening of the element of which
they are made. See also John Donne’s ‘Air and Angels’. Thus spirits
dissolve back into ‘thin air’ on their becoming invisible again.
4.1.156-158: We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life /
Is rounded with a sleep. Prospero interrupts Miranda and Ferdinand’s
betrothal Masque (unnecessarily, as Caliban’s plot offers no real threat).
Life is associated with dream, and thus illusion and stagecraft. The
Masque being interrupted by comic villains reverses the emerging
conventions of the Court Masque (constructed largely by Shakespeare’s
friend and rival Ben Jonson). In the Masque proper the ‘antimasque’,
which precedes the Masque itself, is a plot by low-status types is quelled
by the appearance of court figures representing the Gods or Virtue,
whereupon the Gods leave the stage and engage in all-night dancing with
the audience. Prospero’s sentiments recall the Spanish playwright
Calderon’s Life’s a Dream.
4.1.188-189: A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick;
The Nature/Nurture dichotomy, relating to the question of whether
genetics or upbringing are more influential on our behaviour, is still in
current use. Prospero echoes Miranda’s attitude (above). Prospero is angry
that his ‘pains, Humanely taken’ (4.1.189-190) in Caliban’s education
have had no effect. His certainty that Caliban is ineducable by nature (and
by implication, that evil persists despite the efforts of the good) may be the
self-justification of a failed teacher. At the end of the play, although
Caliban says he will ‘seek for grace’ (5.1.296), Prospero still condemns
him: ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.’ (5.1.275-276)
5.1.27-28:
The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance. ‘Rarer’ has a double
sense, both ‘finer’ and ‘more unusual’; (‘less common’ covers both).
Prospero is stirred to this conclusion by Ariel, who has no human feelings,
but nevertheless says he is (or would be, ‘were I human’), moved by the
suffering of Prospero’s captives. This is one of the points that suggests a
parallel between Prospero and God to Christian interpreters.
5.1.48-51:
graves at my command / Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em
forth / By my so potent art. But this rough magic / I here abjure.
This speech as a whole, in which Prospero surrenders his magic, is close to
one from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (book 7), delivered by the sorceress
Medea. Shakespeare seems to use both the original Latin and Golding’s
translation (1567, lines 265-277). That Prospero claims to have raised the
dead positions him as a ‘Necromancer’, a practitioner of a form of black
magic, rather than a Christian ‘mage’. ‘Rough magic’ has entered the
language. The speech is often taken to be Shakespeare’s farewell to the
Theatre, as The Tempest is probably his last sole-authored play, and
Prospero cantrols the action on the Island, much as a playwright controls
the action on stage.
5.1. 178:
Though the seas threaten, they are merciful. Sometimes taken to be the
‘moral’ or summation of the play. Ferdinand says it when reunited with his
father. It shows Ferdinand’s optimism.
5.1.183-184: O brave new world / that has such people in’t. Miranda’s exclamation
on seeing the Courtiers is reminiscent of Caliban’s reaction to Stephano
and Trinculo, showing her naivety. Prospero is not so sure; he replies ‘Tis
new to thee’. His response has two interpretations: either he disagrees with
Miranda’s ‘new’ (to Prospero this is the old world, to which he is
returning), or he disputes her assessmebnt of it as ‘brave’ (worthy,
beautiful), since he knows otherwise. ‘Brave New World’ was used by
Aldous Huxley as the title of his highly dystopian science-fiction novel.