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.