Leda Hoffmann
May 16, 2008
Nature’s Renewal: City and Country in Shakespeare’s Comedies and Romances
London was the center of Shakespeare’s world – the cosmopolitan nexus of
culture and commerce. As the Elizabethan and Jacobean city expanded, Shakespeare
wrote about the problems confronting the city and attempts to harmonize culture and
nature in this growing urban world. Within the conventions of comedy and romance,
Shakespeare’s plays follow a structure of rebirth and renewal. The pattern of escaping
irrational civic laws by leaving for a green world and then returning to the city with a
restored sense of justice illustrates that culture and nature can be harmonized to bring a
higher world order.
Shakespeare’s audience understood that ideal urban space was the place where
human culture and nature fit harmoniously. However, his audience saw imbalances in
power – both in the plays and in the world around them – that created problems in this
harmony. The application of unjust laws usually serves as a catalyst to the action of the
play and an escape to the green world repairs the imbalance in the world as we know it.
The contrast of urban and rural spaces in Shakespeare plays like A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, and The
Tempest emphasizes the country as a place of renewal. Within the city, misguided human
powers and misused human capacity have become a threat to human society, individual
happiness, and the right order. Nature brings release and clarification. As Northrop Frye
points out, “The action of a Shakespearean comedy, then, is not simply cyclical but
dialectical as well: the renewing power of the final action lifts us into a higher world, and
2
separates that world from the world of the comic action itself.”1 Within comedy, nature’s
energies miraculously renew to bring a higher world ransomed from its fallen condition.
The Renaissance was an age of great cities. Renewed interest in Latin antiquity
increased the significance of city and empire as expressions of authority and ideal order.
Cities like Florence and Bruges in mainland Europe became centers of wealth and
commence with highly developed trade routes and powerful municipal structures
governing this new world of merchants. In London, the move towards a great
Renaissance city at the center of trade came later but by the time Shakespeare was
writing London had a highly developed system of trade guilds and London was a
cosmopolitan nexus with a rising merchant class. James I was setting the foundations for
huge trading corporations such as the East India Trading Company.
This new capitalist system of merchants emerging in London was very different
from the medieval system of lords and vassals that was largely based in the country.
Growing up in a thriving market town of Stratford, the son of a glove merchant,
Shakespeare understood the new commercial economy but his proximity to the country
reminded him of the feudal system that had sustained farmers like his wife’s father.2
As well, Shakespeare involved himself economically in both the medieval model of
patronage and the new world model of the capitalist entrepreneur. Shakespeare enjoyed
the patronage of Southampton as well making profits as a joint-stock member of The
King’s Men and other corporations, such as a plantation.3 As Danby says, in
Shakespeare “the artist’s temperament was combined with the business man’s good sense
1
Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 133.
In fact, Arden’s ancestors’ property holdings appeared in the Domesday Book.
3
Scholars speculate that Shakespeare held stock in a corporation building plantations in the New
World. The Tempest then can be explained as a advertisement for the New World.
2
3
[and] the approval of the court offset the applause of the popular audience.”4 As a
liveried courtier of James I and a professional playmaker, Shakespeare lived in the world
of aristocracy and business and witnessed the “clash between the old economy and the
new business methods”5 from both perspectives. Involved in old and new economic
models and living in town and city, Shakespeare knew “what it was to be in transit
between two worlds.”6
Danby suggests Shakespeare’s awareness of his new capitalist world served as
inspiration for competitive machiavellian characters. Writing about Goneril and Regan,
Danby says, “It is as if Shakespeare were underlining the Hobbesian account of human
nature, its inherent competitiveness bases on fear, its mechanical ‘every man against
man’.”7
Within this world of competitive capitalism came a new issue for the city masterless men. Shakespeare witnessed the rise of men who were either unemployed or
sons of the landed elite who had yet to inherit their wealth. These masterless and
propertyless men frequented the London suburbs, borrowing money on the promise of
their inheritance. Contemporary events showed Shakespeare the growing concern over
masterless men. James I worked to create fear of masterless men after the Essex revolt
and the Catholic Gunpowder Plot revealed the potential danger of subversive men.
Danby suggests that Essex was a model for Edmund, Shakespeare’s most dangerous
masterless man. The case of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, would have allowed
Shakespeare to see this “politician,” the new man or machiavel who embodied this new
John Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), 48.
Danby, 48.
6
Danby, 48.
7
Danby, 41-42.
4
5
4
world of competition. When Essex fell out of favor with Queen Elizabeth I, he attempted
to lead an uprising against her. He was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London
but the threat of men like Essex, “who held monopolies [and] had a popular following”8
continued to concern proponents of the old world order. In the Essex case, Danby
suggests, “Shakespeare could observe for himself the kind of world Hobbes is writing
about.”9 Shakespeare experienced Essex’s plot first hand when he was questioned over
his company’s performance of Richard II10 the night before Essex’s attempted rebellion.
“Essex is an instance of what Hobbes saw as the first threat to his commonwealth: a
potent man, who held monopolies, had a popular following, and led a mutiny in the city
of London.”11
The Grand Lease case also brought to light the increasing power of
entrepreneurial men. In the negotiating of the Grand Lease, the Prince Bishop of Durham
surrendered his coalmines to the Leicester group, in particular to Thomas Sutton. A
system in which a private corporation could expropriate ecclesiastical lands is a
“spectacular encroachment of the secular entrepreneur on to territory that had been
ecclesiastical time out of mind.”12 Danby emphasizes that changes to the meaning of
Nature were based upon contemporary events – the mining engineer supplying
Elizabethan navies, doctors anatomizing the mechanisms of the human body, and
“capitalists [becoming] aware of money as the sinews of war and soon to recognize it in
8
Danby, 48.
Danby, 48.
10
In Richard II, the young Bolingbroke forced the legitimate monarch, Richard, to abdicate.
11
Danby, 48.
12
Danby, 49.
9
5
the circulating life-blood of the body politic.”13 These “New Men,” these urban
masterless men, altered nature to make it a tool for producing profits.
Shakespeare’s masterless men reach their most dangerous point in the bastard
Edmund, whose competitive drive pushes him to overtop his legitimate brother and
overthrow his father. Edmund is especially a masterless man, without a place in society,
because he is a bastard and, lacking legitimacy, has no claim to title or inheritance.
Danby explains, “he is outside Society, he is outside Nature, he is outside Reason.”14
As an urban machiavel and masterless man, Edmund characterizes this new
capitalist world. As Danby suggests, Edmund is a ‘New Man’ with new ideas of nature
and reason. In King Lear, Edmund brings this new reason and perception of nature into
an older, more medieval world.15 As Danby points out,
Edmund belongs to the new age of scientific inquiry and industrial
development, of bureaucratic organization and social regimentation, the
age of mining and merchant-venturing, of monopoly and Empire-making,
the age of the sixteenth-century and after: an age of competition,
suspicion, glory.16
This new world of science and capitalism led Shakespeare to see in his
everyday world the social realties that would later give rise to the Hobbesian
account of human nature. Hobbes stated that the three principal causes of quarrel
in human nature are “competition, diffidence, and glory.”17 Edmund, Goneril,
and Regan embody this practical competitiveness that Hobbes believed inherent
to human beings. Like Essex, Edmund is foremost a politician, as person who can
13
Danby, 49.
Danby, 44.
15
Although the setting of King Lear is pre-Roman Britain, the structure of the society depicted in
King Lear is more medieval.
16
Danby, 46.
17
Danby, 41.
14
6
“can play on human nature . . . better than any other.”18 As Shakespeare
witnessed growing business-centered London, he would have been able to see
human nature as Hobbes sees it expressed in the merchants of London.
As well as being a center of commerce, London, as a population center, was a
place of lowlife immorality. So-called masterless men would have frequented London’s
suburbs like Southwark, which Greenblatt describes as full of places of amusement
“include[ing] firing ranges, cock-fighting pits, wrestling rings, bowling alleys, places for
music and dancing, platforms upon which criminals were mutilated or hanged, and an
impressive array of ‘houses of resort,’ that is, whorehouses.”19 While the city was also
primarily a place where people lived, worked, and carried on their day-to-day business,
Shakespeare would have been well acquainted with the bear-baiting rings and brothels
that surrounded the Globe.
Shakespeare was certainly interested in how laws and rulers work in the city. A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure, and The Winter’s Tale all begin with
the imposition of an unjust law from a civil authority. Shakespeare would have been
skeptical of attempts to legislate morality in the city. Greenblatt suggests that
Shakespeare witnessed attempts by London officials to legislate morality fail as moralists
frequently denounced the whorehouses in Southwark and demanded their closure but
attempts by city officials always fell short. In Measure for Measure, Angelo, “embarking
on a campaign of moral reform, gives an order to pull down the ‘houses of resort in the
suburbs’ (I.ii.82-83). The order is not carried out.”20
18
Danby, 45.
Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004) 176.
20
Greenblatt, 176.
19
7
Within 40 years, England would become a constitutional monarch under William
and Mary. As England shifted away from divine right rule, the question of who has the
power and right to legislate society remained at the forefront of Shakespeare’s mind and
the minds of his audience. Renaissance theorists agreed that the state should be involved
with public morality.21 How the state should go about involving itself, however, was a
subject of debate. Despite concern with the application of unjust laws, magistrates did
have a duty to legislate. Elizabeth Pope, in an essay on the Renaissance intellectual
context which informs Measure for Measure, notes that the “Christian prince had not
only authority and privileges, but a clearly defined and inescapable set of duties to
perform as well.”22
Within the structure of comedy and romance, civic laws and rulers tend to be
blocking figures. As Frye highlights, an ideal civic community should be a place where
culture and nature are in harmony. However, imbalances in power (such as the
imposition of an unjust law or the harsh decision of a corrupt magistrate) disrupt this
harmony and lead to a repressive movement. In most Shakespeare comedies and
romances, the imposition of an unjust law and/or the harsh decision of a corrupt ruler set
off the action of the play. Frye agrees the comic structure “normally begins with an
anticomic society [often taking the form of a harsh or irrational law], a social
organization blocking and opposed to the comic drive, which the action of the comedy
evades or overcomes.”23
J.W. Lever, “Introduction,” in William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Ed. J.W. Lever
(London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), lxv.
22
Pope, 7.
23
Frye, Perspective, 73.
21
8
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, Egeus invokes an “ancient
privilege of Athens”24 to enforce his choice of son-in-law. Because a ruler cannot make
himself above the law, Theseus must uphold the unjust law and tells Hermia to be
“dispose[d] of . . . either to this gentleman / Or to her death.”25 However, to soften the
penalty, Theseus adds the option of going to a nunnery and “abjur[ing] / For ever the
society of men.”26 From this action, it is clear that Theseus does not agree with the
ancient law, but it is a law that he “by no means may extenuate.”27 However, within the
conventions of comedy, Theseus is able to overturn the law in Act IV. While normally a
ruler cannot place himself above the law, Frye argues Theseus’ action is acceptable and
welcome within the bounds of comedy: “the fact that . . . Theseus veto[s] the law by his
own will would mean in life that we were regressing from the rule of law to a personal
whim, but in the action of comedy it means precisely the opposite.”28
Measure for Measure offers a case in which an ancient law is used because the
magistrate invokes it. Angelo uses an old law to arrest Claudio for impregnating his
betrothed Juliet before they were legally married. While the Duke wants to reinstate
these “strict statues and most biting laws [that he had] let slip”29 it is clear that these are
unjust laws because they go against natural order. As Roland Frye and John Danby point
out, Shakespeare’s audience would have understood that just civil laws harmonize with
reason or natural law as it operates with human beings. Since Angelo’s law would take a
young man’s life for begetting life, it runs contrary to the natural principle of
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Arden
Shakespeare, 2007), I.i.41.
25
Midsummer, I.i. 42-44.
26
Midsummer, I.i.65-66.
27
Midsummer, I.i.120.
28
Frye, Perspective, 127.
29
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Ed. J.W. Lever (London: Arden Shakespeare,
2006), I.iii.19-21.
24
9
reproduction. Shakespeare’s audience would have understood Claudio and Juliet to be
practically married and believed that there should be a concord between human culture as
exposed by civil structures and the natural world.
In his introduction to Measure for Measure, Lever highlights the injustice of the
law that has been allowed to lie fallow. While Angelo is trying to institute morality in
Vienna, which is quickly slipping into immorality, Angelo is clearly a corrupt judge. The
Duke sets out to test Angelo, the young would-be magistrate. The Duke hopes that
Angelo would allow “morality and mercy in Vienna / [to] Live in [his] tongue, and
heart.”30 However, Angelo does not bring justice tempered by mercy and follows only
the print and not the spirit of the law. In this, Angelo is part of a literary tradition of
corrupt magistrates. Lever emphasizes the prevalence of corrupt magistrates throughout
many of Shakespeare’s source.31 Frye points out that as a corrupt magistrate, Angelo
combines both common obstacles in comedy – irrational laws (as in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream) and a mood of gloom. “The ugly law is scowling at us from the
beginning, and Angelo’s temperament, in both his incorruptible and his later phases,
ensures that there will be enough gloom.”32
Measure for Measure provides an important view into the workings of municipal
law but Shakespeare clearly suggests that these instituting of these old laws goes against
the proper order. The title Measure for Measure indicates the moral bankruptcy of the
law when the penalty lacks mercy. Shakespeare is commenting on contemporary
30
Measure for Measure, I.i.44-45.
Lever in Measure for Measure, xxxvi-xliv.
32
Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, Ed. Robert Sandler (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986), 144.
31
10
political events in civil law such as actions in the 1580s by Puritans demanding the death
penalty as punishment for adultery.
Perhaps the inciting incident resulting in the harshest repressive movement is the
accusation of Hermoine and her trial in The Winter’s Tale. Leontes’ application of his
justice, when he suspects Hermoine of adultery, results in the death of his son and the
separation of the rest of his family for sixteen years. It is clear that Leontes is unjustified
in his accusation – “all proofs sleeping else. But what your jealousies awake.”33 In her
trial, Hermoine identifies this repressive action as “false accusation”34 and “tyranny.”35
In order to move out of this world of tragedy after Leontes realizes his error, time
must take its course and the movement of the young hope – Perdita to a natural world
allows for the play to end in comedy. As Northrop Frye points out in A Natural
Perspective, the “triumph of time” with the “power of nature to bring new life out of
death”36 allows for the revival of Hermoine and the reunion of the family. In all of these
plays, it is the passage of time and the escape into a green world that allows the initiating
repressive incident to be resolved.
Irrational laws and rulers as inciting incidents echoes the archetypal cycle of
nature, Frye demonstrates. The law itself goes through a process of renewal and is
“transformed into an inner sense of coherence.”37 In the context of comedy, Theseus’
decision to veto his own law in “I will overbear your will” does not seem like a
33
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale. Ed. J.H.P. Pafford (London: Arden Shakespeare,
1999) III.ii.112-113.
34
The Winter’s Tale, III.ii.30.
35
The Winter’s Tale, III.ii.32.
36
Frye, Perspective, 116.
37
Frye, Perspective, 127.
11
regression from the rule of law to a ruler’s personal whims; in fact the overbearing of the
irrational law is a positive thing within the comic context of rebirth and renewal.38
Shakespeare’s audience would be familiar with civic festivals in which
communities would gather to mock magistrates under an accepted agreement that is day
of topsy-turvy mocking would bring renewal. Comedy has its origins in festivals and
licensed processions through towns. These festive conventions originate from
Aristophanes and Old Comedy – political comedy that addressed political problems of
Athens as it was mismanaged by demagogues during the Peloponnesian Wars. These
festivals resulted in momentary topsy-turvy-dom, allowing for a reversal of roles that
gave people an opportunity to lampoon public officials and engage in flyting in the hope
that this would correct the ill in the community. C. L. Barber’s argument in
Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy centers on the fact that Shakespearean comedies and
romances worked within these festive conventions. These Saturalian patterns were
licensed correctives to potential abuses of authority. While challenging authority can be
unpleasant in the moment, under the conventions of festival and comedy everyone
participates for the good of the community.
C.L. Barber discusses changing laws and social norms in the context of festival.
He points out that in As You Like It, for example, Rosalind is forced into disguise by the
rule of a tyrant duke, but that her disguise in the Forest of Arden is in a festive mood that
gives her “carnival freedom from the decorum of her identity and her sex.”39 Barber
points out that Elizabethan festive customs gave “license to flout and fleer at what other
38
39
Frye, Perspective, 127.
C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 6.
12
days commanded respect.”40 Kent’s disguise as a servant in King Lear serves a similar
purpose – Kent is able to mock Oswald in the flyting scene because he can affect
fashionable melancholic discontent. While Kent does not get away with it and is stocked,
the audience recognizes the justice of his abuse. The festive mood created by the
conventions of comedy allows for mocking of magistrates and the overthrow of irrational
laws.
Barber discusses Frye’s idea of renewal in the context of “Release to
Clarification.” For renewal to occur, Barber argues, characters must be released from
their current social positions. Within festival, high and low switch places involving
reversals of social status, gender, etc. Frequently this release sends characters into
temporary exile, fleeing the rigid social structure of the city and going into the green
world. Upon return, the characters, like the participants in a festival, return to a renewed,
higher sense of the purpose of human culture, what Barber calls clarification.
Rebirth and renewal comes from nature in Shakespeare’s comedies and romances
as well as in these festivals. Frye explains, “the mythical or primitive basis of comedy is
a movement toward the rebirth and renewal of the powers of nature.”41 C.L. Barber
agrees with this interpretation and phrases his argument in the context of release to
clarification. Comedies, Barber argues, translate festive experiences into drama, thereby
heightening the awareness of the relationship between man and nature.42 Within
Elizabethan conventions of comedy and festivity, irrational laws can be overthrown
without a descent into anarchy; instead these actions move us to a higher level. As Frye
suggests, “the renewing power of the final action lifts us into a higher world, and
40
Barber, 7.
Frye, Perspective, 119.
42
Barber, 8.
41
13
separates that world from the world of the comic action itself.”43 Frequently in
Shakespeare plays, the movement from city to country and into nature leads to renewal
and the resolution of problems rising at the beginning of the play.
In comedies and romances the dramatic action tends to progress from the court
outward to the green world in order to enjoy a period of purposeful anarchy such as the
deliberate inversion of relationships necessary for the return to true self and right
relations with others. At the end of these plays characters return to court with a higher
level of self-knowledge and a better ability to balance culture and nature. In Frye’s
perception of the logic of comedy, comedy moves to establish a “new society” along the
lines of Eden or the Golden Age. Initially in comedy a tense relationship exists between
the troubled aristocratic society and natural society, usually set in a rural landscape. Frye
discusses the pattern of the movement to the green world saying, “young heroes and
heroines will often, during the loss-of-identity phase of comedy, retreat to the “natural
society” in order to stimulate renewal.”44
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It renewal and reconciliation
occurs as a result of a movement into the forest. The lovers trip into the wood, “a league
without the town,”45 which frees them from the repressive laws of Athens. The action of
the play in the green world allows the lovers to pair up amiably and, outside the bounds
of the city, Theseus is able to “overbear [Egeus’] will.”46
The Forest of Arden in As You Like It also serves as a place of renewal. Right
before the movement to the green world, Celia comments how nature will free her and
43
Frye, Perspective, 133.
Frye, Perspective, 130.
45
Midsummer, I.i.165.
46
Midsummer. IV.i.178.
44
14
Rosalind from the tyrannical duke: “Now we go in content / To liberty and not to
banishment.”47 In the forest, the anti-comic characters undergo a purgatorial reformation.
Oliver is changed by Orlando’s rescue of him and does “not shame / To tell [Celia] what
[he] was, since [his] conversion / So sweetly tastes, being the thing [he] is.”48 Duke
Fredrick, on his way to kill Duke Senior and his men with an army, is changed at the
“skirts of this wild wood . . . Where, meeting with an old religious man, / After some
question with him, was converted.”49 The natural world of the forest creates a miraculous
metamorphosis in Duke Fredrick and he bequeaths “his crown . . . to his banish’d brother
/ And [restores] all their lands.”50
This action within this green world involves the inversion of relationships.
Puck’s misapplication of the potion results in a period of confused and misplaced
affection in which the lovers’ relationships are inverted. As well, the Titania and Bottom
subplot can only occur in a topsy-turvy world where social status and relationships are
inverted. In As You Like It, the inversion of gender roles in Rosalind’s adoption of the
figure of Ganymede makes it possible for Rosalind to tutor Orlando to wean him away
from romantic idealization. Within the comic conventions, Rosalind’s homo-social
relationship with Orlando allows her to educate her lover in the right forms of love.
Measure for Measure does not take place primarily in a green world as in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It. But while Measure for Measure focuses
on the city, the Duke does leave the city and then come back renewed in a different guise.
The Duke’s departure from the city allows him to invert his role in society and come back
47
William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Ed. Roma Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
I.iii.135-136.
48
As You Like It, IV.iii.135-137.
49
As You Like It, V.iv.157-159.
50
As You Like It, V.iv.161-162.
15
as a renewing force in the corrupt society. Like Shakespeare’s other comedies, Measure
for Measure involves the internalizing movement of law. Frye suggests that the cycle of
rebirth and renewal for law is clear in Measure for Measure when the Duke leaves the
city to return and be in his society in disguise.51 The Duke’s trip outside Vienna allows
law to return in a new form. In his disguise, the Duke sets up Act V of the play as a way
to correct all the injustices of the play.
Act V of Measure for Measure highlights what Frye calls “the internalizing
movement of law.”52 By the end of the play, the law has reached its highest form and
been internalized. The Duke orchestras the final scene so that external law can be
judiciously applied – “Measure still for Measure.”53 The Duke follows the written law
and condemns Angelo to death. However, the Duke has set up the scene so that Mariana
and Isabella can ask for the sentence to be revoked. The law is no longer an external
restraint but it has been internalized in Mariana. The play ends with Claudio turning up
alive, Isabella marrying the Duke, and Mariana marrying Angelo.54 Just as culture and
nature are harmonized, so are law and mercy.
As Shakespeare’s writing develops, the natural world does not create
instantaneous transformations like the ones in early plays like As You Like It. In his late
romances, such as The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, nature takes on a more
51
Frye, Perspective, 128.
Frye, Perspective, 128.
53
Measure for Measure, V.i.409.
54
Frye points out that “in a typically festive conclusion all previous conflicts are forgiven and
forgotten” (Frye, 128). Unlike in ordinary life where the memory of past events can dampen the mood of
present moments, past trespasses or losses are not in the memory of characters at the end of comedy. The
death of Mamillius is not a major presence at the end of The Winter’s Tale, and the lovers in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream seem to forget the swordplay and fighting that occurred when they wake up. It is within
this convention that Angelo and Mariana can be reconciled without thought of his previous jilting and
breaking of his engagement promise. In comedy, the sense of renewal “annihilates the sense of loss itself”
(Frye, 129).
52
16
complicated role but is still integral to the cycle of rebirth and renewal. Within the
pattern of nature as a place of renewal, Shakespeare offers an examination of the role of
culture and art on Nature.
In The Winter’s Tale, nature certainly acts a regenerative power. Moving from
wintry Sicilia to the festivals of Bohemia, the audience sees the festive mood rejuvenated
in the second half of the play with the pastoral sheep shearing festival. The sheep
shearing festival inverts relationships, making Perdita the “Mistress of the Feasts” even
though everyone believes that she is only a shepherdess. This inversion of relationships
in the natural world allows Florizel to see Perdita in a noble position where “all [her] acts
are queens.”55
Within the context of The Winter’s Tale, human arts seem to be an improvement
to nature. Polixenes talks about the horticultural practice of grafting as man’s way of
improving nature and argues, “art itself is nature.”56 Kermode expands upon this view of
art and nature, emphasizing that with the ‘rebirth’ of Hermoine, the spiritual arts of
patience, penance, and forgiveness in connection transcended the sculptural art of the
statue of Hermione.57 Nature and art are intertwined in The Winter’s Tale and it appears
that each helps the other.
The relationship between nature and art is more complicated in The Tempest. In
The Tempest, Shakespeare writes about the untouched nature of the New World. As in
other comedies, it is on Prospero’s island, through nature, that the injustice of Prospero’s
expulsion is corrected. Following on the desire for harmony between culture and nature,
The Winter’s Tale. IV.iv.146.
The Winter’s Tale, IV.iv.97.
57
Frank Kermode, “Introduction,” The Tempest, Ed. Frank Kermode (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1954), xxxv.
55
56
17
Shakespeare contributes to the discourse on whether it is possible or even desirable to
impose civility on the New World’s “natural man.”
In his introduction to The Tempest, Kermode argues that Shakespeare
intentionally uses Montaigne to critique satirically the idea that a primitive natural society
would be a happy one. Kermode reads The Tempest in opposition to Montaigne’s view in
On Cannibals claiming the representation of supposedly ‘primitive’ characters like
Caliban opposes Montaigne’s utopian vision of the natural. While Montaigne idealizes
the ‘primitive’ man, Shakespeare creates the character of Ariel who seems grateful to
have escaped the primitive practices of Caliban and his mother.
In fact, Shakespeare is not as one-sided as an initial reading of Kermode suggests.
Kermode goes on to put forward that Shakespeare presents opposing versions of the
natural, “on the one hand, that which man corrupts, and on the other that which is
defective, and what must be mended by cultivation.”58 As Kermode says, “Shakespeare’s
treatment of the theme has what all his mature poetry has, a richly analytical approach to
ideas, which never reaches after a naked opinion of true or false.”59 Ariel and Caliban are
opposing views about whether ‘civilization’ is beneficial or detrimental to an untouched
natural order. Caliban misuses the benefits of civility given him by education: “You
taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.”60 Caliban is a nature
to whom nurture will never take. However, if considering Caliban’s situation in the vein
of genre critics like Frye, then Caliban’s ingenious invective is more of illustration of his
position in the romance than a comment on colonial education.
58
Kermode, xxxvi.
Kermode, xxxviii.
60
Tempest, I.ii.363-4.
59
18
Kermode believes that Caliban’s function is to “illuminate by contrast the world
of art, nurture, civility; the world that 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.”61
With the world of art and the world of nature both creating lustful and ambitious men, it
seems clear that a restoration to a society that harmonizes art and nature is best.
Kermode points out that the wild or savage men was “a familiar figure in painting,
heraldry, pageant, and drama.”62
Prospero’s nature has been raised by culture and this suggests a view that nature
should be “civilized.” The baser face of Nature is represented by Caliban who attempts
to persuade Trinculo and Stephano to murder Prospero and take over the island. In the
end, however, cultured nature succeeds and universal order is restored. This is where
Shakespeare differs from Montaigne’s On Cannibals. Montaigne depicts the ‘barbarians’
of the new world as actually more civilized and closer to perfection than the residents of
supposedly civilized Europe.63 The Tempest agrees with Montaigne’s point that outside
of the city/’civilization’ comes the opportunity to learn from these less barbarous people
61
Kermode, xxv.
Kermode, xxxix. In fact, a savage man was a character in Elizabeth’s procession at
Kennelworth in 1575. The savage man is awed at Elizabeth’s appearance and declares his obedience:
O queen, I must confess it is not without cause
these civil people so rejoice, that you should give them laws.
Since I, which live at large, a wild and savage man,
and have run out a wilfull race, since first my life began,
do here submit my self, beseeching you to serve.
Similarly, after seeing Prospero in his robes, Caliban begins to exercise ethical discrimination and
says, “I’ll be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace” (V.i.295-296).
63
Montaigne argues that “We have so much by our inventions surcharged the beauties and riches
of [Nature’s] workes, that we have altogether overchoaked her: yet where ever her puritie shineth, she
makes our vaine and frivolous enterprises wonderfully ashamed” (Montaigne, 147). Montaigne is in favor
of the renewing power of nature, quoting Pluto to highlight that “the greatest and fairest things” are
produced by “nature and fortune” (Pluto in Montaigne, 146), the “least and imperfect” are produced by
“art” (Pluto in Montaigne, 146). Like Montaigne argues that the environment of these new world people
itself is “so exceedingly pleasant and temperate . . . it is verie rare to see a sicke body amongst them,” 63
Shakespeare depicts his natural settings as wonderful environmentally – contrasting them with the dark and
dirty city Shakespearian Londoners would have experienced.
62
19
who have never heard of the words “lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulations,
covetousnes, envie, detraction, and pardon.”64 However, Kermode says that Shakespeare
does not believe in the natural goodness of man and believes that the addition of Old
World “civilization” like ethical achievements can bring the primitive condition of
human life to a higher order. Prospero’s former enemies, who find themselves stranded
on a natural island certainly learn from their experience in nature – however, it is their
experience with cultivated nature as Prospero has created it that brings about their
renewal.
Using Frye’s three level nature paradigm, one can see that Prospero has used art
in the form of his learning and magic to raise nature on the island to a higher level.65 The
renewing ability of nature is more complicated than in Shakespeare’s early plays such as
As You Like It, as Prospero enacts a purgatorial punishment for his former enemies in the
form of a banquet of the senses. This punishment awakens the guilty conscience of the
characters. This magically banquet overwhelms Alonzo, Antonio, and Sebastian and
makes them realize their wrongs. Alonzo exclaims:
O, it is monstrous, monstrous!
Methought the billows spoke and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ pipe, pronounced
The name of Prosper; it did bass my trespass.66
Upon realizing their “trespasses,” the three men are punished no more. When the three
are penitent, Prospero’s punishment goes no further. Through these efforts, Prospero
succeeds in elevating his former enemies to a renewed level of art and nature.
64
Montaigne, 146.
Frye outlines the three levels of nature as the apocalyptic (higher) level, the real world (the
fallen world through human experience), and the demonic lower order of death, madness, and disorder.
66
The Tempest, III.iii.95-99.
65
20
Shakespeare’s use of the convention of renewal gets more complex as
Shakespeare developed his skills as a writer and experimented with the genre
conventions. Whether it is with the miraculous transformation of Oliver and Duke
Frederick in As You Like It or Prospero’s purgatorial punishment in The Tempest, nature
continues to be a source of renewal throughout Shakespeare’s comedies and romances.
The inversion of relationships and the festive topsy-turvy-dom of the green world allows
for the mocking of corrupt magistrates and irrational laws. As laws are internalized and
the conventions of comedy allow rulers to overturn laws contrary to natural law, societies
move to a higher order where culture and nature are in harmony.
Understanding the genre conventions of Shakespeare’s plays and the world in
which he wrote is critical to understanding the patterns of his plays and the way in which
blocking figures and troubled pasts can be so easily overcome. The renewal of comedy
and romance brings a complete reconciliation of the characters of the play and the
glorious harmonization of nature and culture. With the passage of time and the escape
into a green world, the initiating repressive incident can be resolved.
21
Bibliography
Barber, C.L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959.
Brockett, Oscar. History of the Theatre. New York: Allyn and Bacon, 2003.
Danby, John. Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature. London: Faber and Faber, 1949.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004.
Frye, Northrop. A Natural Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.
Frye, Northrop. Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. Ed. Robert Sandler. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986.
Kenyon, J.P. Stuart England. New York: Penguin Books, 1978.
Kermode, Frank. Introduction. The Tempest. Ed. Frank Kermode. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1954.
Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Roma Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Ed. R.A. Foakes. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004.
Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure. Ed. J.W. Lever. London: Arden
Shakespeare, 2006.
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed. Harold F. Brooks. London:
Arden Shakespeare, 2007.
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Robert Langbaum. New York: Signet Classics,
2006.
Shakespeare, William. The Winter’s Tale. Ed. J.H.P. Pafford. London: Arden
Shakespeare, 1999.