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From Female Fairy to Fallen Angel: Interpreting Ariel
One of the most problematic relationships in Shakespeare’s plays is the one between Prospero
and Caliban in The Tempest. A first, superficial reading of the play suggests that Prospero is a
wise, dignified, moderately pleasant old man and that Caliban is a heinous villain, but upon
closer inspection certain questions arise: Is Prospero really as nice as he seems to be? Is he an
entirely reliable narrator? Is Caliban really wicked, or are there redeeming circumstances?
Much critical study has been devoted to these two characters, and as a result another
fascinating character has had to make do with a place in their shadow: Ariel. Prospero’s other
servant may seem a straightforward enough character, but taking a closer look at
interpretations and adaptations of his role can evoke interesting questions and yield rewarding
results.
Ariel on stage
The series Shakespeare in Production publishes annotated editions of Shakespeare’s plays
which are accompanied by very useful notes and commentary: they focus on the stage
productions of the play they are discussing. This series' edition of The Tempest offers a wealth
of background information that is not only interesting to read, but also encourages readers to
take a closer look at the play. Especially enlightening are the details of how various actors
portrayed characters such as Prospero and Caliban, who are open to multiple interpretations,
and the seemingly straightforward character Ariel acquires debt when we look at the various
stagings. Ariel’s asking for his liberty (act 1, scene 2), for example, has been played with
diverse emotions ranging from “wary respect” to “frightening malevolence” (Dymkowski,
245 ff). In this scene, Ariel can be presented as bold and confident, as hesitant, as reasonable
and entreating or as sulky and moody, and these various interpretations define his relationship
with Prospero and hence comment on Prospero’s character and motives as much as on Ariel's.
An Ariel who argues his case reasonably and is rebuked for that will put his servitute to
Prospero in a completely different light from an Ariel who has a threatening air or sulks like a
moody child.
Not only do various interpretations of a character encourage a student of Shakespeare's
work to rethink his or her own first impression of that character, but they can also shed light
on the importance of cultural circumstances. In her introduction to The Tempest, Christine
Dymkowski pays particular attention to the role of Ariel in connection with gender issues; she
argues that a director’s decision to have Ariel played by a man or a woman is highly
significant for the interpretation of the play. The part in itself is androgynous: although Ariel
refers to himself as male (“Ariel and all his quality”, 1.2.193), the roles he plays on
Prospero’s orders are all female, namely a sea-nymph, a harpy and the goddess Ceres. It is
likely that the part was played at first by a boy-actor, who would of course generally take up
the role of a woman.1 The Dryden-Davenant adaption, however, firmly established the part as
male and even gave Ariel a female counterpart and lover, Milcha. Dymkowski suggests that a
male Ariel ratifies Prospero’s princely power by an act of male subservience. Inherent in this
idea is the thought that Prospero’s power could be questioned and hence had to be ratified,
and it is precisely this tension which demands that Ariel be played by a woman in later
versions where Prospero is a figure of patriarchal authority: “Such a paternalist interpretation
of Prospero necessitates a demure Miranda, a beast-like Caliban and an Ariel whose willing
servility is seen as natural and inevitable: in other words, a gossamer female fairy”
(Dymkowski, 37). From the moment Caliban is staged as a more human figure and Prospero’s
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Dymkowski follows Keith Sturgess in this, and refers to his work: Jacobean Private Theatre (London:
Routledge & Kegan Pual, 1987), p. 77.
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authority and righteousness is being challenged, Ariel’s bondage is also questioned.2 The
spirit is increasingly played by men once more, since a male slave is more disturbing than a
woman in a serving role. The subsequent rise of feminism calls for female Ariels who also
manage to question Prospero’s authority... and thereby the authority of men over women. A
brief look at the history of Ariel’s role in terms of gender shows how culturally defined the
interpretation of a play really is: society's view on gender influences the audience's experience
of the relationship between two characters (and of course this relationship is inevitably tied to
the relationship between Prospero and Caliban). Directors in every generation have their own
way of looking at these issues and bringing them across to their audience. An awareness of
this helps readers critically examine their own interpretations of The Tempest and exhorts
them to understand that no text or an interpretation of that text can exist in a cultural vacuum.
Adapting Ariel
An interesting adaptation of The Tempest is Tad Williams’s novel Caliban’s Hour. As the
title implies, the main character in this work is Caliban, who appears at Miranda’s door and
forces her to listen to his version of the story. His narrative is set mainly before the events of
The Tempest (though a brief reworking of the play is presented near the end) and presents
Caliban as a sympathetic character and Prospero as the villain of the piece. Ariel is for most
of the story a brooding presence in the background: Caliban occasionally visits the tree in
which the spirit is imprisoned, which is situated in a hidden valley with overtones of the
garden of Eden. When he finally is freed (only 40 pages from the end of the novel), Ariel is
given the epithet “the Fallen” by Prospero. This, in combination with the characteristic –iel
ending of his name (compare Gabriel, Uriel), strongly gives the impression that we are
dealing with a fallen angel. This theory is further supported by the fact that Ariel literally fell
from the heavens, as Caliban relates: “Then something fell burning from the sky. [...]
Something rose from the pit it had dug into the sand, amorphous as smoke, but fast
coalescing. My mother fought with it. [... She] at last found the chain of thought that would
bind the thing” (Williams, 47). Ariel itself3 claims to be “one of Lucifer’s rebel army”, though
at other times it says it is “the shade of a man [Sycorax] had murdered with her witchcraft”
(Williams 153). Whatever its origin, in this version of the story there is nothing human or
sympathetic about Ariel; on the contrary, it is a willing accomplice of Prospero and delights in
cruelly torturing Caliban:
As some take their hours of leisure walking or singing, the creature Ariel delighted in
following me about, filling my day with tricks and taunts and other persecutions. [...]
It flew around my head in the shape of a wasp, stinging me until tears of helpless rage
ran down my face. It sang to me songs of my mother’s putrefaction, chirping sweetly
of her eyes falling into her skull and her fles becoming sodden muck – even that she
and the murdered sow had joined together beneath the earth as a sort of rotting family,
that even my dead mother had forgotten me. (Williams, 152)
Prospero comes across as a harsh, unfeeling tyrant, but it is Ariel who is pure evil. The spirit
is far more malignant and fiendish than Caliban himself in The Tempest ever was. If an author
wants to rewrite a story to create understanding and sympathy for a previously maligned
character, such as Caliban, he must attempt to explain away this character’s bad deeds (in
Caliban’s case, the attempted rape of Miranda and his grumblings against Prospero). In order
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Dymkowski discusses the influence of colonial thinking and Darwinism on the process of humanising Caliban.
In Caliban’s Hour the spirit is neither male nor female and is consistently referred to as ‘it’. Theo D’haen
explicitly connects Ariel with Lucifer himself in his analysis of the novel: “The episode in which Caliban and
Miranda almost engage in sexual contact uncannily echoes the Biblical scene of Man’s banishment from the
Garden of Eden, with Ariel in the rol of the snake” (D’haen, 325).
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to create a sympathetic Caliban, Tad Williams has not only taken the obvious path of turning
Prospero into an unpleasant and tyrannical figure, but Ariel is also re-created as a rather nasty
piece of work. This effectively turns Caliban into the poor, put-upon underdog who receives
nothing but pain for his troubles. Ariel’s role in Caliban’s Hour shows that everything in
Shakespeare’s play is interwoven: taking one character (Caliban) and turning him around,
immediately necessitates adapting other characters and events to suit this new situation. Such
a new reading of the story encourages readers to go back to The Tempest itself and to become
more aware of the situation in the ‘original’. By looking at the changes an adapting author has
made, for example to particular characters or scenes, readers become more aware of the
function of these characters or scenes in the source text. Williams’s reworking of The Tempest
gives us a story that fits almost perfectly with the events in Shakespeare’s play, but is seen
from another perspective, and thereby encourages us to examine the point of view in The
Tempest with a critical eye. It heightens our awareness of the fact that we often only see
Prospero’s side of things and it makes us ask questions about his reliability as a narrator; these
questions were of course already present in the play itself, but they are made even more
visible by this adaptation. In addition, Caliban’s Hour makes us more aware of the
complexity of the relationship between Caliban and Ariel. Often, these two are seen as
complementing and contrasting each other and are placed in a simple dichotomy, but the rift
that is created between them in this novel hints at a more complex situation. They are not
simply two sides to one coin and Ariel is not simply a benevolent shadow to Caliban’s
fiendishness; he is an interesting, intriguing character in his own right. As is pointed out in
Shakespeare’s Caliban, “[a]llegorical interpretations [...] place Caliban in a convenient binary
opposition to Ariel. [...] And though at some basic level this opposition is built into The
Tempest’s structure [...] it neverheless oversimplifies both Caliban’s and Ariel’s complexity”
(Vaughan 82-83). If an adaptation points its readers towards the difficulties and complexity in
its source, and thereby helps them to re-examine that source and their own understanding of it,
that adaptation can indeed be called succesful.
Conclusion
Becoming aware of the process of interpretation makes us realise that we ourselves are
constantly interpretating: we mean by Shakespeare. An awareness of this makes us more
careful and hopefully less prone to pronounce judgment on either original texts or
interpretations of those texts. Reworkings of Shakespeare’s work which radically turn around
certain aspects of their source or place them in a completely different light, encourage us to
reflect upon the role of these aspects within the original play and their place within its
structure. In this light, interpretations and adaptations are not only relevant for their own sake,
but also help us to examine and understand their source.
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Bibliography
Williams, Tad. Caliban’s Hour. London: Legend Books, 1994.
D’haen, Theo. “The Tempest Now and Twenty Years After. Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs Caliban and
Tad Williams’s Caliban’s Hour.” Constellation Caliban: Figurations of Character.
Amsterdam: Atlanta, 1997. 312-331.
Dymkowski, Christine. Introduction. The Tempest. By William Shakespeare. Cambridge:
CUP, 2000.
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Christine Dymkowski. Shakespeare in Production.
Cambridge: CUP, 2000.
Vaughan, Alden T. and Vifginia Mason Vaughan. Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural
History. Cambridge: CUP, 1991.