Year 13 – critical material on The Tempest
Please bring to every lesson
(Or risk the wrath of Prospero… see above)
Conjuring up a storm
Authority and leadership in The Tempest
Exploring The Tempest in the social and political context of Jacobean England leads Neil Bowen to read it
‘as a coded, but nevertheless daring critique of Jacobean ideology.’
In the opening scene Shakespeare brilliantly uses the resources at his disposal to conjure a storm. Whereas
in a modern film CGI can be used to create a storm scene, in The Tempest Shakespeare only has words, the
stage and perhaps music. This means he has to work much harder than, say, a modern film director to make
the audience imagine the storm. How then does Shakespeare do this?
The situation is, of course, dramatic. The ‘ship’ is being split apart and the social order thrown into
confusion. Shakespeare uses sound effects – ‘a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning’ – to convey this
confusion. But the pace of the dialogue is more important. Shakespeare wants us to believe these characters
are in mortal danger, hence the dialogue cuts urgently from one agitated character speaking to another.
Generally the lines are also very short, often consisting of just a few words:
Do you hear him? You mar our Labour. Keep your cabins. (Lines 12-13)
The rhythm created is suitably swift and choppy.
Tone is also crucial in creating the drama. Normally, in Shakespeare’s plays, we expect lowly characters to
address Noblemen with respect. Indeed at the end of the play that is how the Boatswain addresses his
‘betters’. In this crisis, however, the Boatswain is exasperated by the Noblemen’s interference with his
attempts to save the ship. And when he cries, ‘What cares these roarers for the name of King?’ he openly
challenges the authority of the King and the Court. The challenge is underscored by a series of commands,
‘Hence...To cabin. Silence! Trouble us not’. The language here is sharp and stark. The air crackles with
sedition. Shakespeare then ratchets up the tension through the Noblemen’s enraged response; Sebastian
curses ‘a pox o’ your throat’, and Antonio spits ‘Hang, cur, hang you whoreson, insolent noisemaker’. Later in
the scene we will also hear desperation, ‘lay her a-hold’, and despair, ‘Mercy on us! We split, we split’. The
situation is extreme and the relationships between the characters are violent and stormy.
For an audience, confusion is also created by the simple fact that the characters are not named.
Shakespeare’s usual marker of social status – verse for the nobility, prose for the plebeians – is, as elsewhere
in the play, also scrambled. A profusion of entries and exits punctuates the stage action. Look, for instance,
at lines 4, 8, 26, 32, 36, 49 and 63. Together these devices create a pervasive sense of tension, confusion and
disorder. In short a tempest is conjured.
The Great Chain of Being
For a Jacobean audience the opening of The Tempest must have been even more disorientating. The
dominant model of social order was ‘The Great Chain of Being’, a rigid, pyramid-like structure within which
all things had their rank. In the spiritual sphere, God was at the apex and underneath him were ranked
various types of angels. The earthly world reflected this divine pattern; the Monarch sat at the tip of the
pyramid, on top of the Aristocracy; the Aristocracy looked down on the teeming merchant classes and, down
at the foot were the masses, the peasants; the whole weight of the structure upon them.
A key aspect of the ‘Great Chain of Being’ was that it was sanctioned by God. Hence seeking to change social
position, or worse, questioning the authority of those above you, was seen, not just as questioning your
betters (which could be dangerous enough) but also to be going against God himself. The fear of threats to
this rigid, top-down structure is clear in, for example, the Sumptuary Laws or the 1598 Poor Law Act. The
Sumptuary Laws controlled the dress code at court. The wealthier and more powerful you were the more
colours, patterns and fabrics you were allowed to wear. The Queen could wear ermine, for example,
whereas the Nobles were allowed fox. The Poor Law Act made it legal to beat and drive from a parish
‘masterless men’, i.e. those that did not fit into the ‘Great Chain of Being’. A scene where the normal
hierarchy is so confused would therefore be dangerous and alarming.
Authority in tempest
Shakespeare’s bold opening raises serious questions about leadership and authority. In a crisis, authority
appears to lie with those able to deal best with the situation. It is the boatswain who wields power in this
scene, as indicated, for instance, by his domination of the lines. The Noblemen are at best ineffectual; at
worst an encumbrance. They shout at their potential saviour, and generally get in the way. The Boatswain’s
cry challenges the authority of the King and suggests that monarchy (and by implication ‘The Great Chain of
Being’) is not natural, or God-given. Instead it is an unnatural construct. And one which, crucially, is
vulnerable to outside forces.
The ‘roarers’ are these forces rising. They are loud and violent – hence ‘roaring’ – and ready to mount a
challenge. Later in the play these rebellious forces will be represented, in comic form, by Trinculo, Stephano
and Caliban, and in more sinister form by Antonio and Sebastian. The Tempest can be seen, then, as
exposing fault lines in the seemingly impregnable social order. Thirty or so years after the play was written,
of course, these ‘roarers’ did become so powerful and insistent that a Civil War would break out, a King be
beheaded and the new social order of the ‘Commonwealth’ established.
So from the very opening of the play questions of power, leadership and authority are raised. As in
Shakespeare’s history plays, much of the rest of the action in The Tempest wrestles with these key ideas.
Prospero’s lessons in leadership
Traditional interpretations of The Tempest have often seen the play as obliquely criticising King James;
advising him on good government. In this reading Prospero is identified with the King and is shown, over the
course of the action, to learn how to be a better leader.
If this is the case what does he learn about leadership and authority?
In Act 1 Scene 2 Prospero tells the audience he lost his dukedom because he was too trusting (of his brother,
Antonio) and became too absorbed in his studies to rule effectively, ‘rapt in secret studies’, ‘neglecting
wordly ends’. On the island he suffers for his mistakes, and has to learn the values of patience and fortitude.
At the end of the play he breaks his magic ‘staff’ and ‘drowns’ his books. Thus, as his increasingly Christian
language indicates, he gives up his role of magus and dedicates himself to conscientious government.
Moreover, though Prospero may have intended to revenge his usurpation, by punishing his brother Antonio
and Alonso, in the end he refrains. Despite having all his enemies at his mercy, prompted by Ariel ‘...if you
now beheld them, your affections/ Would become tender’ (Act 5 Scene 1) he forgoes the satisfaction of
vengeance. He learns, instead, the value of mercy and the virtue of reconciliation. He is ready by the end of
the play to reassume his previous role, but now as a wiser, more responsible leader: ‘the rarer action is in
virtue than in vengeance’.
And so The Tempest ends with order emerging from disorder; the ‘roarers’ reconciled by Prospero’s justice.
After the storm has passed, the Boatswain returns in Act 5, humble and deferential; Ariel is finally freed.
Gonzalo’s exclamations set the tone in his celebration of the engagement of Ferdinand and Miranda:
O rejoice
Beyond a common joy, and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars. In one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife.
Alternative readings
But this traditional reading marginalises aspects of the play which do not fall so neatly into its comforting
scheme. Troubling questions persist: is Claribel’s marriage, for instance, really a cause for such celebration?
Did Ferdinand really ‘find’ Miranda? What justification is there for Prospero’s usurpation of the island?
Postcolonial writers, in particular, have highlighted the problems with the simple equation underpinning
traditional readings of The Tempest, i.e. Prospero = noble and civilised; Caliban = savage and uncivilised.
Taking their lead from the postcolonialists, modern critics emphasise the ways in which the play questions
the basis of Prospero’s power and authority. Far from presenting Prospero as learning Humanist values, they
argue, he is an altogether more sinister character. A subtle, but arch Machiavellian, the former Duke stagemanages the action in order to regain power, using his daughter as part of his political game, trampling on
those who do not fit into his scheme.
Certainly, as the opening scene shows, conventional ideas are questioned by the play. Gonzalo’s speech on a
commonwealth, for example, provides an alternative model of society organised on an egalitarian basis. This
utopian vision is juxtaposed with the cut-throat opportunism of Sebastian and Antonio. Moreover,
Shakespeare shows how the political system depends on the subjugation of women – both Claribel and
Miranda are used for geo-political gain by their fathers, and Sycorax is demonised by Prospero. However, it is
the presentation of Caliban that most persuasively points to the play as a coded, but nevertheless daring
critique of Jacobean ideology.
Caliban, the hero
As many critics have noted, Caliban is given verse, not prose, and this can be moving and beautiful. See for
example the speech beginning, ‘The isle is full of noises/Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt
not...’ Furthermore, Caliban’s ability to recognise the beauty of music shows a potentially civilised sensibility,
in contrast to Antonio and Sebastian, for instance, who are deaf to Ariel’s music. Another stark contrast is
between the tender wonder of Caliban’s words and the brutal language Prospero uses against him. The
tirade of abuse against Caliban (‘Hag-seed’, ‘malice’, ‘this thing of darkness’) echoes Antonio and Sebastian’s
cursing of the Boatswain in the opening scene, and Prospero’s bemonstering of Caliban, are also undercut by
the visceral descriptions of his physical suffering. Caliban’s cry of ‘This island’s mine, by Sycorax, my mother’
raises issues about authority and colonialism that Prospero and his sympathisers would rather avoid.
The ending
The end of the play does not provide a simple return to social order; the rainbow Prospero produces for the
Masque is an illusion only. Although Prospero seems to have gained just authority, and although characters
are back within their proper place in ‘The Great Chain’, the ending is undermined by unresolved doubts
about the treatment of Caliban and of Ariel. Moreover, the silence of Antonio suggests that the forces of
discord, the potential ‘roarers’ have not yet been properly reconciled. The manipulation of Miranda and her
evident naïvety are also troublesome:
How beauteous mankind is. O brave new world
That has such people in’t.
Modern critics argue that the ending does not neatly resolve the play’s issues. Instead they are left open and
urgent. The play presents an ambiguous picture of colonialism and of the position of women in society. The
play questions the features of a good society and the basis and nature of just authority. It shows how power
can be generated, used and abused. In troubled times especially, such as during a tempest, it challenges us
to consider what constitutes good, responsible, wise leadership.
Neil Bowen
This article first appeared in emagazine 35.
Claribel’s story
The Tempest
Richard Jacobs argues that The Tempest is haunted by the absent Claribel and her forced marriage.
Claribel? Who’s she? Don’t worry too much if that’s your first response to my title. Claribel doesn’t get
widely discussed in criticism of, and commentary on The Tempest. One reason for that is that the play itself
passes over her, and her story, in a rather perfunctory way. But I think she has important things to say about
the play.
Claribel is one of a number of women who are both in and not in the play. That is, like Sycorax and Mrs
Prospero, as Carol Ann Duffy would call her, Claribel is talked about but doesn’t appear on stage. (Is The
Tempest the only Shakespeare play to feature just one woman in the stage-action?) All three of these talkedabout women, incidentally, do actually appear in Peter Greenaway’s remarkable film Prospero’s Books and
Mrs Prospero even gets allocated a name (but I’ve forgotten it).
Claribel’s story is told in Act 2 Scene 1 when Gonzalo tries gamely, and much to the contemptuous
amusement of Antonio and Sebastian, to cheer up Alonso. Gonzalo is struck by the odd fact that, despite
being ‘drenched in the sea’ during the shipwreck, all their garments are ‘as fresh as when we put them on
first in Afric, at the marriage of the King’s fair daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis’. After three attempts to
draw Alonso’s attention to this fact, he gets this suddenly angry response:
You cram these words into my ears against
The stomach of my sense. Would I had never
Married my daughter there! For, coming thence,
My son is lost and, in my rate, she too,
Who is so far from Italy removed
I ne’er again shall see her.
Alonso is certain that he’s lost Ferdinand to the seas, a wound into which Sebastian then pours some rather
unbrotherly salt.
Sir, you may thank yourself for this great loss,
That would not bless our Europe with your daughter,
But rather lose her to an African…
You were kneeled to and importuned otherwise
By all of us; and the fair soul herself
Weighed between loathness and obedience at
Which end o’th’beam should bow.
Later in the scene, after Ariel has put the rest of the court party to sleep, Antonio tempts Sebastian with his
assassination plot on the grounds that Claribel, after Ferdinand, the next heir of Naples, now ‘dwells/Ten
leagues beyond man’s life’ and therefore can’t possibly pose any threat to their plans.
And that’s the Claribel story. She’s only mentioned once more, in the play’s last moments, when Gonzalo
remarks on the marvel that:
in one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand her brother found a wife
Where he himself was lost.
What do we make of this? One point to start with is that Claribel’s marriage is a forced marriage. It’s made
quite clear that it was only her ‘obedience’ to her father that outweighed her ‘loathness’, her dislike of the
marriage and the husband. This is the tyrannical father imposing his will on his daughter, as threatened (but
not fulfilled) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The next point is that everyone else in the court of Naples
objected to the marriage as well, though not it seems out of sensitivity to Claribel’s feelings: the Napolitans’
objections were racist, opposed to Alonso’s plans to ‘loose her to an African’ rather than to a European. I’m
struck by the word ‘loose’, as if Claribel is being seen as a bit of sweet white meat to be tossed to a wild
black animal. There’s also a submerged pun on ‘lose’ (Alonso loses daughter as well as son). Polonius uses
the word in an equivalent context when planning to use Ophelia as decoy or bait with Hamlet: he tells
Claudius that when Hamlet is next seen reading in the lobby ‘at such a time I’ll loose my daughter to him’.
So why does the marriage happen at all? The play is silent on this but the answer is clear: Claribel is forced
into a marriage with the King of Tunis for reasons of geo-politics and/or trade. Claribel is the commodity or
prize (or bait) in an act of commercial-colonial calculation over Africa. And the reason the Neapolitan court
party is now on Prospero’s island is that they were on their way back to Naples after the marriage in Tunis.
Even Alonso himself, faced with the presumed death of his son, seems to regret his actions with his
daughter, who is now ‘so far from Italy removed/I ne’er again shall see her’. And it’s very remarkable that
Gonzalo forces us to think again about Claribel’s situation at the very end of the play. Yes, ‘in one voyage/Did
Claribel her husband find at Tunis’. But is that a happy ending, for her?
Why is all this important? One answer is that, in this very highly patterned play, we’re being invited, if only
part consciously, to see Claribel as a version of Miranda. At first the differences seem clear: Miranda loves
Ferdinand and Ferdinand is Italian and the marriage is not forced. But it is nonetheless an arranged marriage
– Prospero very deliberately manipulates his daughter into making it possible – and it’s also an important
dynastic marriage that politically consolidates the relations between two Italian city-states, though with the
odd effect, as critics have pointed out, of consolidating and extending the power of Naples over Milan. The
Claribel story, then, gives a muted ironic edge to the Miranda story, making us uneasily recognize that
Miranda too is a commodity.
It also has an effect on the way we perceive Caliban. If the King of Tunis is the unwelcome black suitor whom
the white bride tries to resist, then that’s the Caliban story told in a different way as well. Miranda is able to
resist successfully and her father stigmatizes and punishes the transgressor; Claribel is not able to resist and
her father delivers his daughter into the black embrace. The King of Tunis becomes the son-in-law; Caliban is
the son that Prospero can only unwillingly ‘acknowledge mine’. The Claribel story both sharpens the racist
representation of loathsome Africa, home to Sycorax and Caliban, and also underlines the questionable
morality of Prospero’s European colonizing power over Caliban, equivalent to Alonso’s ambitions with Tunis.
Another pattern positions Claribel as one of three virtuous white women – Miranda, Claribel and Mrs
Prospero, described as a ‘piece of virtue’ (‘piece’ means masterpiece) – who collectively thus further
demonise Sycorax as the ‘dark’ or ‘other’ woman and mother.
One other effect of the Claribel story is odd. It undermines Prospero’s authority and stage-management. In
the first scene he explains to Miranda that ‘by accident most strange, bountiful Fortune… hath mine
enemies/Brought to this shore’. But it’s not an accident at all: it’s Alonso’s decision to impose the King of
Tunis on his daughter that has brought Prospero’s enemies to this shore. Moreover, Prospero, who
apparently knows everything, shows no awareness or knowledge of the Claribel story. The effect of this is to
cast another ironic note, one that makes Prospero, in this matter at least, less often ‘all-powerful authority’
and more ‘victim of circumstance’.
And it’s that way of thinking about Prospero that I find most helpful. For all his stage-management he’s the
victim of one crucial circumstance above all: the fact that his daughter has grown up and he has to
lose/loose her to another man. And he can’t do anything about it. His ignorance of the Claribel story is an
emblem of that inability. The play explores most subtly in the area of father and daughter and that’s why the
Claribel story is so important. From the play’s first moments – and twice in one speech – we can hear a
father trying to tell his daughter that she must now at last know him properly, now before it’s too late. In
what I take to be a very poignant pun, though I don’t think I’ve seen it commented on elsewhere, Prospero
says ‘Tis time/I should inform thee farther’ and, ten lines later, ‘Sit down. For thou must now know farther’.
Richard Jacobs
This article first appeared in emagazine 28 April 2005
Clothing in The Tempest
'Rich garments, linens, stuffs and necessaries'
Roy Booth looks at the motif of costumes and clothing and reveals how the characters’ changing
wardrobes signal the importance of Prospero as controller of others, as well as key shifts in characters’
roles.
In the will which he signed on March 25th 1616, among other bequests, Shakespeare left his sister Joan
twenty pounds ‘& all my wearing Apparrell’. Clothes were important to Elizabethans both as items valuable
in themselves (and hence this legacy to a relative who couldn’t actually wear the garments bequeathed to
her), and, inseparable from their value, as indications of social status. An actor and dramatist would always
have had a special awareness of the contribution of clothing to identity.
You will most likely be aware from other texts how important costumes are in Shakespearean drama – all
those disguises in the comedies, the ‘borrowed robes’ of Macbeth, the ‘lendings’ King Lear frantically
discards. The Tempest continues this attention to clothing, both in major aspects of the play, and in some of
its more puzzling details.
Prospero’s Robes
This short investigation will start with the most obvious special costume of the play, addressing first the
question of what Prospero looked like when wearing his ‘Art’. (The Folio text of The Tempest always gives
‘Art’, meaning magic robes, a capital A.) The critic Keith Sturgess envisaged a cloak covered with cabbalistic
symbols. This is possible, but William Davenant, an early fan and imitator of Shakespeare (he carried his
fandom so far that he was happy to allege that he was Shakespeare’s son) wrote a masque in which, ‘Merlin
the Prophetic Magician’ enters
apparel’d in a gown of light purple, down to his ankles, slackly girt, with wide sleeves turned up with
powdered Ermines, and a roll on his head of the same, with a tippet hanging down behind, in his hand a
silvered rod
(Britannia Triumphans, 1637)
Davenant copied Shakespeare so programmatically that this may involve a recollection of Prospero. Either
way, it’s important that we see that Prospero is able to take off his magical ‘Art’ like a lab coat: magic has not
taken him over. The moments when he coerces Ariel send the same message: Ariel is not an evil spirit
serving Prospero for his own ends, but has to be forced to serve. Prospero is in control of his magic; it isn’t a
black magic in charge of him.
Trinculo’s Clothes, Caliban’s Gaberdine
Another occupational costume in the play is that of Trinculo, who – although he is only a ‘dull fool’ (Act 5
Scene 1 line 297) – ought to be in a jester’s costume (hence Caliban’s ‘pied ninny’ insult in Act 3 Scene 2 line
62). Trinculo is our witness for what Caliban wears:
My best way is to creep under his gaberdine … under the dead mooncalf’s gaberdine for fear of the storm
(Act 2 Scene 2 lines 38-9 and 111-3)
Caliban, whose only mentioned garment is his ‘gaberdine’, is, of course, Prospero’s sartorial opposite. In the
latest Arden text we read that a ‘gaberdine’ was ‘a long loose cloak for men made of coarse cloth'. Its
simplicity contrasts with Prospero’s and the court party’s finery. David Lindley, editing the New Cambridge
text, more imaginatively compares it with the ‘Jewish gabardine’ worn by Shylock in The Merchant of Venice,
suggesting that Shakespeare uses such a cloak as ‘an outsider garment’. An early dictionary by Thomas
Blount (1661) defined a ‘rochet’ as a ‘loose Gaberdine, or gown of Canvas, worn by a labourer over the rest
of his clothes’, while in a little play by Phineas Fletcher (1631), a ‘gaberdine’ seems to feature as something a
fisherman would wear – and that’s appropriate, for Caliban is regularly associated with fishiness and fishing.
Unlike Blount’s labourer, Caliban might be near-naked under a canvas cloak. He is certainly barefoot (hence
the painful effectiveness of the hedgehogs Prospero’s spirits will spitefully put in his path).
Prospero’s Changes of Costume
While Caliban has his one unchanging garment, Prospero himself frequently changes his attire. In the nearcontemporary play by Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, Captain Face, dealing with the many clients of the
alchemist Subtle, wishes for a suit of clothes – ‘To fall now like a curtain, flap’ (The Alchemist, Act 4 Scene 2).
Quick-change artists still perform their strenuous and stylised routines (you can find clips on YouTube). But
Prospero is in a way a slow-change artist:
Lend thy hand,
And pluck my magic garment from me.
So, lie there, my Art
-
Act 1 Scene 2 lines 23-5
I am ready now
-
Act 1 Scene 2 line 187
Ariel sings, and helps to attire him … So, so, so
-
Act 5 Scene 1 line 87 sd; 96
Besides fussing reverently over the robes of his ‘Art’, over the course of the action, he slowly, reluctantly,
changes one role and costume (Magus) for another (Duke of Milan).
At the end of The Tempest, Caliban comes to a new perception of Prospero, who has by then resumed the
clothing he wore as Duke of Milan:
Ariel, fetch me the hat and rapier in my cell;
I will discase me and myself present
As I was sometime Milan
-
Act 5 Scene 1 lines 83-6
Trinculo says, ‘If these be true spies which I wear in my head, here’s a goodly sight’, and Caliban agrees: ‘O
Setebos, these be brave spirits indeed! How fine my master is!’ (Act 5 Scene 1 lines 259-262).
Caliban as ‘savage’ (Act 1 Scene 2 line 357) was always likely to be deployed in a late moment of
endorsement like this. But consider the restless and unappeased Prospero, hander-out of costumes, fusser
about his own, assigner of roles. Dressed up again in his ducal hat, flourishing his ducal rapier (‘these seem
rather basic signs of ducal authority’, as David Lindley rightly says), presenting himself as he formerly
appeared, Prospero is effectively a pretender to his own former dukedom, dressing up as he had appeared
12 years before to convince people he’s the same man. Though Caliban is impressed, these tokens of semiroyal substance seem rather too close to the callow aspirations Antonio uses to spur on Sebastian (‘My
strong imagination sees a crown/Dropping upon thy head’, Act 2 Scene 1 lines 202-3), even to the ‘trumpery’
which distracts Stephano and Trinculo (Act 4 Scene 1 line 186). Can Prospero really relinquish his ‘Art’ for
such rather ordinary regalia?
Restitution to Former Position
Using clothing as a motif, the play works rather hard to make restitution to a previous state something
remarkable and worthwhile. Alonso’s entourage should be imagined as very well dressed. They first wore
their present garments at the wedding of Claribel, from which they were returning. In Act 2, Gonzalo
insensitively reiterates his fascinated observation that despite having been in the sea, all their garments
seem ‘rather new-dyed than stained with salt water’ (Act 2 Scene 1 lines 61-2). This is as Ariel affirmed to
Prospero (Act 1 Scene 2 line 218), the boatswain later affirms the same thing has happened for the rest of
the crew (Act 5 Scene 1 line 236). Gonzalo just can’t get over it: ‘Methinks our garments are now as fresh as
when we put them on first in Afric […] we were talking that our garments seem now as fresh as when we
were at Tunis […] Is not, sir, my doublet as fresh as the first day I wore it?’ (Act 2 Scene 1 lines 66-7; 92-3; 989). The clothes carry some symbolic weight of restitution and restoration, but the human loss seems far
greater, both here (for Alonso believes that he has lost a son and cannot be expected to find much comfort
in this recompense that excites Gonzalo so much), and in Prospero’s brief swagger as restored Duke of Milan
(and self-deposed man of Art).
Delusions of Grandeur
If in this case clothes seem inadequate to suggest a rejuvenation that’s stronger than a sense of loss, clothes
and costuming make other potential contributions to meaning. From beneath Caliban’s gaberdine, Stephano
pulled a fool in his fool’s pied costume. Stephano has delusions of grandeur, and a clothes-conscious
Prospero easily subverts his drunken conspiracy. Despite Caliban’s warnings (‘it is but trash’, Act 4 Scene 1
line 224), the butler and the jester are distracted by the ‘trumpery’ Prospero had put out for them. That
misfiring set of jests about the jerkin being above or below the ‘line’ may just be drunks finding something
funny which isn’t, but it is obvious that stealing ‘glistering apparel’ (Act 4 Scene 1 line 193 sd) and a
befuddled conspiracy to become king go together.
Stephano and Trinculo succumb to more disasters, so that ‘at the play’s end […] they stand forlorn in their
muddied finery’, as David Lindley puts it. The clothing they had stolen came from Prospero. A clever
production might costume the two as parodic versions of Antonio and Sebastian, two more characters who
must surrender signs of status to which they have no proper claim. They must confront a fool and a deluded
drunk as mirrors of their own real status. ‘Look how well my garments fit upon me,/Much feater than
before’ Antonio had bragged, in a Macbeth-like moment (Act 2 Scene 1 lines 267-8). He deserves to see the
same style of garments on a butler who steals the wine, or a fool who isn’t even funny.
A Full Wardrobe
‘Look what a wardrobe here is for thee!’ was Trinculo’s exclamation to Stephano (Act 4 Scene 1 line 223).
Prospero’s desert island is anomalously full of costumes (though as Katherine Duncan-Jones says, with its
store of glistering apparel, twanging instruments and elaborate props the island is ‘an image of the
playhouse and its backstage equipment’). We even see Prospero hand out a costume solely for his pleasure –
with it goes a command to be invisible: ‘go make thyself like a nymph of the sea […] go take this shape/And
hither come in’t’, Act 1 Scene 2 line 301; 304-5). We learn, because the play is attentive to explaining such
things, that it was Gonzalo who placed ‘rich garments, linens, stuffs, and necessaries’ (Act 1 Scene 1 line 164)
in the leaky boat aboard which Prospero and his daughter were to be cast adrift. That the old counsellor
anticipated the future needs of the infant Miranda, and also equipped the exiles with the ‘glistering apparel’
and ‘trumpery’ doesn’t bear much realistic examination.
Freeing Yourself from a Role
In Shakespearean tragedies, saying farewell to your crown, or the armour you fought in (as Mark Anthony
does) can be a terrible moment of loss. But in The Tempest, a play where kings ‘fade […] into something rich
and strange’ in the sea’s unfixed element, where actors are spirits who vanish, Prospero’s last three words
are ‘set me free’. He has learned from Ariel the desire to be unfixed, neither pegged into a tree, nor a
costume. Stage directors have to make up their minds about what to do with Caliban at the end. A.D. Nuttall
suggests that Caliban expects to be retained in service and leave the island with his master. More romantic
stagings leave Caliban alone on the island. Prospero broke his staff and buried it; he drowned his grimoire,
his book of magic. But aren’t we fairly sure that he leaves his ‘Art’ to Caliban, and that our last vision ought
to be of Caliban, out of his gabardine and wrapped in purple splendour?
Dr Roy Booth is a senior lecturer at Royal Holloway College, London University. He specialises in the
literature of the 16th and 17th centuries.
This article first appeared in emagazine 57, September 2012.
Caliban: On the Edge of Humanity
When Trinculo first encounters Caliban in in Act II, scene 2 of The Tempest he says “what have we
here? A man or a fish?” Caliban is “legg’d like a man, and his fins like arms,” and Trinculo wishes he
could take him to England as a freak-show commenting, “any strange beast there makes a man.”
(Shakespeare, II, 2, 25-33). The Tempest is one of the earliest texts which expresses English
colonialist discourses and attitudes to the New World. In it, Caliban, who represents the indigenous
peoples of the New World, is ever on the edges of humanity, never wholly human or wholly animal.
As the early nineteenth-century image above shows, he occupied this problematic space for
centuries. Since the mid-twentieth century postcolonial approaches have seen him reconsidered
and reconstructed in adaptations including Aimé Cesaire’s Une Tempête and Marina Warner’s
Indigo. Such readings challenge the dehumanization of native peoples whose lands were subjected
to Western colonisation. The gaze towards new lands and the future in The Tempest, however, is
through the lens of the medieval past.
Shakespeare’s Caliban was influenced by a long European tradition of ‘wild men,’ dating back
through the Middle Ages to the fauns and satyrs of classical times. The wild man, or wodewose in
Middle English, was a familiar figure in masquerades and masques, as well as the literature, of the
medieval and early modern periods. Hayden White (1972) and Timothy Husband (1980) have both
argued that the wild man operated as a contrast to civilised, socialised humanity; Caliban, who has
known no humans save his mother until the arrival of Prospero and Miranda, and lacking the
restraint imposed by society, is part of this tradition. His attempted rape of Miranda echoes violent
sexual episodes associated with wodewoses in medieval texts such as the Middle English prose
Alexander (see Yamamoto 156) and the Northern Homily Cycle. The lack of impulse control was
associated with animal irrationality.
Yet medieval wild men occupied a literal and metaphorical wilderness on the borders of humanity,
sometimes human, sometimes animal, sometimes a monster (Young 48). The possession of a
rational soul was the key to humanity according to medieval thought, which largely drew on St
Augustine’s City of God for the topic. Yamamoto has pointed out that Mandeville’s Travels contains
an episode where a wild man demonstrates he has a soul by showing knowledge of, and contrition
for, sin (155), and a book of fables printed by William Caxton in 1483 contains a similar episode
(Young 42-44).
Sayers has argued that the English wodewose moved from beast to human over time, and that this
increase in its humanity may have resulted from growing amounts of contact between Europeans
and the peoples of Africa and the Americas. Such a timeline is oversimplified (Young), but Caliban is
far more human than his predecessors either on stage or the page. He may have had to learn
language from Prospero because his mother was mute, but he has a voice, and for all his rage and
cursing he loves his home and speaks some of the most beautiful and haunting lines of the play in
its praise (Shakespeare, III, 2 148-156). Constructed in The Tempest as part human and part animal,
Caliban shares the liminal space occupied by medieval wodewoses, leaving his significance open to
interpretation in later centuries. In the monstrously human figure of Caliban lie the seeds of a major
figure of postcolonial resistance with his roots firmly in the medieval past.
Dr. Helen Young is a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department at the University of Sydney. She
currently holds an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award
Cliff’s notes – historical and cultural context
Historical and Cultural Context
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the threat of the Black Death (the plague) was diminishing, but it
still continued to be a seasonal problem in London, which was overcrowded and suffered from poor sanitation
and too much poverty.
A hundred years earlier, Henry VII had formed alliances with neighboring countries and trade was flourishing in
London. But the coming of trade changed the face of England. Instead of a country composed largely of an
agrarian culture, England, and especially London, became an important center of trade. There was more wealth,
and the newly rich could now afford to escape the congestion of the city. There was a need for large country
estates, and so more and more farm land was enclosed.
Displaced rural families fled to the larger cities, where crowding, unemployment, and disease increased with the
increase in population. As city life flourished, there was a resulting nostalgia for the loss of country life. In
response to this sentimentality, England's poets began to compose poetry recalling the tranquility of rustic life.
Early in the seventeenth century, the masque that comprises much of the fourth act of The Tempest was
becoming a regular form of court entertainment. Masques were elaborate spectacles, designed to appeal to the
audience's senses and glorify the monarch. Furthermore, their sheer richness suggested the magnificence of the
king's court; thus they served a political purpose as well as entertained.
It is important to remember that the masque fulfilled another important function, the desire to recapture the
past. As is the case with most masques, Prospero's masque is focused on pastoral motifs, with reapers and
nymphs celebrating the fecundity of the land.
The masques, with their pastoral themes, also responded to this yearning for a time now ended. The country life,
with its abundance of harvests and peaceful existence, is an idealized world that ignores the realities of an
agrarian life, with its many hardships. The harshness of winter and the loss of crops and animals are forgotten in
the longing for the past.
Elaborate scenery, music, and costumes were essential elements of earlier masques, but during the Jacobean
period, the masque became more ornate and much more expensive to stage. Eventually the cost became so great
— and the tax burden on the poor so significant — that the masques became an important contributing cause for
the English Revolution, and ultimately, the execution of Charles I.
Interpreting The Tempest
Dr Sean McEvoy looks at the wide range of different ways in which Shakespeare has been interpreted over
time, arguing that the interpretations reveal as much about the context of criticism as about the play
itself.
The Tempest (1611) is such a strange play that it has prompted many readers and critics to think that it must
be an allegory. It tells of Prospero, the anxious magician whose devotion to his occult learning enabled his
wicked brother Antonio to depose him from the Dukedom of Milan and exile him to a remote island. On the
day on which the action takes place, Prospero seizes the chance to use his art to wreak vengeance when his
enemies’ ship comes near. Prospero is accompanied in his exile, by his daughter Miranda, and he is attended
by Ariel, a spirit of the air, and he rules over Caliban, described in the cast list as ‘a savage and deformed
slave’. With its airy spirits, magic spells, apparitions and illusions The Tempest seemed in the past to stand
out from the broadly ‘realistic’ human world of the histories, comedies and tragedies. What could
Shakespeare be up to here? What message must be hiding beneath the surface? Different critical views have
been proposed over the years, opening up the possible meanings of the play in fascinating ways, but also
revealing as much about the critic and the context in which they interpret the play, as the text itself.
Is it coded autobiography?
In fact, The Tempest, like The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, was Shakespeare’s response to the new fashion
for ‘romances’: tragicomedies with a fantastic or supernatural element. The plot of The Winter’s Tale turns
on a divine oracle and its denouement requires a statue to come to life (apparently). In Cymbeline the
Roman god Jupiter
descends in thunder and lightning, sitting on an eagle. He throws a thunderbolt.
Rather than look at the theatre for which Shakespeare was writing, 19th- and early 20th-century critics were
wedded to a Romantic idea that the writer’s life had its fullest expression in his or her work, and read the
plays as an account of Shakespeare’s own emotional experiences as his life progressed. The plays, in turn,
were to be read as coded autobiography. (Incidentally, since William Shakespeare’s relatively undramatic
middle-class life could not be mapped onto the high drama of his plays, this way of thinking led some to the
weird conclusion that he couldn’t have written his own plays.)
These critics looked in particular at two climactic moments: when Prospero causes the masque he has
created to celebrate the engagement of Miranda to Ferdinand to disappear, and when he decides to
renounce his magic and forgive his brother. In the first of these moments he declares:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits; and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
This irresistibly seemed to be Shakespeare saying goodbye to the imaginary worlds his plays had created,
with the clincher being his announcement that his theatre (‘the great globe itself’) was to disappear. When
later he talks of how his ‘so potent art’ had summoned up storms and made the dead (historical figures?)
walk again, and then announces that he will break his staff, it seemed clear to critics like John Dover Wilson,
writing in 1932, that this must be Shakespeare’s own ‘farewell to the theatre’.
If The Tempest had been Shakespeare’s last play this idea might perhaps be persuasive, if not very
informative about the play itself. But it was known even in the 1930s that he went on to co-author three
more plays after The Tempest. There is also some evidence that he went on to write The Winter’s Tale on his
own after completing The Tempest. Critical opinion such as this can tell us as much about of the time of the
critics and their ideological views as it can about the play.
Prospero the Director
Two particular interpretations of the play had wide currency in the late 20th century. When in 1956 the
Berliner Ensemble brought Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage to London it began a long-lasting
fascination with the left-wing German playwright and theorist’s work which had a great influence both in the
theatre and among critics. Brecht’s own plays don’t hide from the audience the fact that they are plays and
seek to ‘alienate’ the audience from emotional connection to the action so that they can make judgements
on the political situation depicted. In The Tempest, it could be argued, Prospero acts like a theatre director
at many points. He instructs his actor Ariel how to perform down to the last detail the illusions which will
terrify his shipwrecked brother and his ally Alonso, the King of Naples. These range from the initial tempest
itself, to the magic table which is snatched away by Ariel as a harpy in Act 3 Scene 3, to the spell which traps
them in a lime grove. Apart from the amazing masque which he puts on in Act 4 Scene 1 he also conjures up
the hunting dogs which chase away the drunken conspirators Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban later in that
scene. Prospero also makes his daughter and Alonso’s son Ferdinand fall in love as his ‘soul prompts it’.
In this interpretation Prospero is not Shakespeare the playwright, but Shakespeare the Brechtian director.
The Tempest is one big play-within-a-play, drawing attention to its own theatricality by exposing the way The
Tempest itself manipulates our emotions and thoughts by showing just such a manipulation in action by
Prospero. In the 1980s this approach coincided historically with an attack from some quarters on
Shakespeare’s deployment in English culture as a means of making ‘natural … a ruling-class perspective and
thereby … preserve the status quo’, as an essay of 1988 put it. In the same year the theatre company Cheek
by Jowl toured Britain with a production of the play based closely on this interpretation of Prospero as
director. Prospero was seen putting the other characters in costume and directing their moves on stage. We
see the magician Prospero in action and we see how his tricks are done. Shakespeare himself shows us how
he has duped us into believing in a set of patriarchal, monarchical views through his dramatic skills.
Prospero the Colonist
The other influential late 20th-century view took an interest in Caliban. It noted that one of Shakespeare’s
sources for the play was an account of how an English ship taking the governor to the new American colony
of Virginia had been thought lost in a storm, but in fact safely reached Bermuda. All on board were later
discovered to be safe. This echoes what happens to Alonso’s ship, and Bermuda is even mentioned in play by
Ariel. Since it also seems evident that Gonzalo’s account of his utopian society is taken from the French
essayist Montaigne’s description of New World ‘cannibals’ – the word is so close to Caliban’s own name – it
was argued that The Tempest was about the English colonisation of America, and about colonisation in
general. The play becomes an examination of what happens when Europeans take over distant territories
and enslave the inhabitants by force. The colonised seem to respond in two ways. Ariel seems to seek his
master’s approval no matter how brutally he is threatened; but, though a spirit, his humanity is greater than
his master’s and it is he who ultimately persuades Prospero that
the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance.
The play becomes anti-colonialist: the coloniser is shown to have no innate moral superiority which justifies
his imperialism.
But more critical attention has been paid to Caliban, and to his statement to Prospero that:
You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is I know how to curse.
In a famous 1990 essay the American critic Stephen Greenblatt wrote of the ‘devastating justness’ of this
remark. If Caliban is a savage, a would-be rapist of Miranda, he is also a product of violent enslavement by
Prospero: no matter what the civilising discourse of the coloniser may be, his language is shot through with
the selfishness, fear and hatred which underpin the colonialist project which Caliban learns through speaking
his language. At the end Prospero admits this:
this thing of darkness I
Acknowledge mine
And still Caliban himself, as Greenblatt points out, gets to speak perhaps the play’s most beautiful, lyrical
and hopeful speech, which begins ‘Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises…’. The first notable example of
many stage productions of The Tempest which made the play a commentary on imperialism was directed by
Jonathan Miller in 1970, with two West Indian actors, Norman Beaton and Rudolph Walker, as Ariel and
Caliban.
The New World Tempest probably reflected the fact that Shakespeare criticism in the late 20th century was
increasingly dominated by American academics. Its politics also suited well the strength of anti-imperialist
feeling in the years following the American defeat in Vietnam and the growing multiculturalism of British
urban society. But, as Jerry Brotton pointed out in 1998, the New World Tempest clearly gets its geography
wrong. Alonso’s ship is on its way from Tunis to Naples. Prospero’s island, if anywhere, must be somewhere
in the Mediterranean.
An English Caliban?
Caliban’s language also turns out to be much more European, too. Some new research published in 2013 by
the American academic Todd Andrew Borlik has gone back to looking at the very English landscape of
Caliban’s world. When Caliban curses Prospero, he twice calls for diseases to rise from the fenlands and to
infect his master. Antonio also sees the island as a stinking ‘fen’ and Caliban says it has ‘brine pits’. Caliban’s
tasks seem to be those of fen-dwellers, collecting wood and catching fish. The fens are a large low-lying area
in eastern England. In the early 17th century they were marshy and wild, but there were many schemes to
drain them and exploit the fertile farm land that would be produced (as parodied in Ben Jonson’s 1616
comedy The Devil is an Ass). London was full of money-making schemes aimed at taming the fenlands.
The inhabitants of this muddy and reedy wasteland were regarded as little better than savages, as
superstitious near-pagans who believed in monsters and spirits who dwelt there. Borlik suggests that the
legend of St Guthlac was well-known in Shakespeare’s time. Guthlac was an 8th-century scholarly hermit
who retired to the Lincolnshire fens. Guthlac could make the air and water obey his commands; he brought
demons under his control. He has an angelic familiar, like Ariel, and a magic garment, like Prospero’s cloak.
In other words, we need not look any further than provincial England for the isolated wilderness and the
reclusive magician.
This is not a postcolonial interpretation, it turns out, but an environmentalist one. Caliban is the wild spirit of
the fens and also its inhabitant trying to resist the scientific (i.e. magical) exploitation of the wilderness – the
‘colonisation of non-human nature by anthropocentric science’, as Borlik puts it. It’s an interpretation for our
time. Caliban’s curses call on the forces of nature to fall on their enemies in a kind of ‘environmentalblowback’, when nature enacts its revenge on its exploiters.
The Tempest isn’t a mystery; but it is a richly open text that anticipates the world created by the actions of
our early-modern forebears who wielded power.
Dr Sean McEvoy teaches English at Varndean College in Brighton. He is the author of William
Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’: a Sourcebook.
This article first appeared in emagazine 65, September 2014.
Prospero – A Renaissance Magus
Malcolm Hebron introduces some specialist contextual information about Renaissance attitudes towards
magic, learning and politics and considers the way in which this knowledge illuminates The Tempest.
The Tempest has many familiar characters: the scheming usurper, the clown, the virtuous young nobleman,
the faithful old courtier. We can recognise these types in other Shakespeare plays, and indeed in dramas
today. But what of the figure at the centre of the play, Prospero himself? We can place him as a kind of
wizard, a Gandalf or Dumbledore perhaps, but to a contemporary audience he would have been identifiable
at once as something slightly different – a Magus, or mage, an ancestor of the gentle headmaster of
Hogwarts, but not sharing all of his traits. Understanding what a Magus was can help us to answer one of the
most intriguing questions raised by this play: is Prospero’s magic a force for good, or something more
sinister?
The Renaissance Mage
In Renaissance culture a Magus is someone who understands the cosmos and man’s place within it. This
knowledge is gained principally through study. Prospero prizes his books above his dukedom, and we can
easily guess what kind of books they are. They would include Astrology, the study of planetary influences on
the earth (Prospero notes his magical career is at its height or zenith while a particular star is in the
ascendant). Prospero might have had to hand the mystical texts ascribed to the ancient Egyptian sage
‘Hermes Trismegistus’, which discuss how, through self-knowledge, a person can ascend to the divine.
Perhaps, like the Italian scholar Pico della Mirandola, he also studied the Cabbala, the secret Hebrew Law
given to Moses, where deeper meanings are encrypted within the letters of the text. A self-respecting
Renaissance mage would also have been familiar with the writings of the philosophical school known as
Neoplatonism, based on the idea that the soul naturally yearns to leave the body and be with God. Then
there was Alchemy, concerned with the transmutation of matter (interestingly, in Alchemy, a ‘tempest’ is
the term for sifting out impurities from a mixture). Such studies were ‘hermetic’, closed off to all but the
initiated.
Next to these, Prospero would also have pursued studies we would deem more scientific, since a Magus
must also understand earthly phenomena through careful observation. The goal of all this study is to
transcend human limitations and achieve a complete understanding of the universe: the Magus is familiar
with celestial, inanimate forces and sees how, through a complex system of ‘sympathies’ and
‘correspondences’, these are reflected on earth and in the soul of man. At the highest level, the Magus has
the wisdom to perceive the mind of God. To attain this wisdom, he must not only study but also pursue a
pure life, untainted by sin.
A Force for Good?
A Magus is, then, someone who devotes himself to the pursuit of wisdom. There were Renaissance scholars
who pursued just such a course of study, anxious to unite the various strands of learning – classical, Jewish,
Christian – in a quest to pursue a transcendent understanding of the universe. They included scholars like
Pico, Marsilio Ficino, Cornelius Agrippa and the Englishman John Dee (a likely source for both Prospero and
Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist). But a Magus is not merely a contemplative figure. His wisdom gives him the
power to act, and it is this power that makes him controversial. The virtuous Magus acts only in accordance
with divine Providence: he assists in God’s work, and is thus a force for good. For example, he might apply
his knowledge of the natural powers of plants to heal (several magi were medical doctors); or he might use
astrological knowledge to calculate the ideal times for a harvest. John Dee was consulted on the most
auspicious date for Elizabeth I’s coronation. ‘Good’ magic of this kind is magia, or theurgy. It does not
interfere with God’s actions, but works with them, to the greater good of humankind.
A Force of Evil?
The powers of a Magus might equally lead him into bad magic, or goetia. The Church was particularly
suspicious of those parts of hermetic study that seemed to suggest humans could alter nature as God has
ordered it. Hermes Trismegistus, for example, gives instructions for calling down spirits to animate statues, a
dangerous interference with the cosmos. Then there were the more usual kinds of manipulation, involving
using this specialist knowledge for personal gain, for example by getting money from people by scaring them
or providing a suitably flattering prophecy. There was also the possibility of dabbling in the Occult, or black
arts. The Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, was burned at the stake in 1600 on charges of dealing with the
Occult. Reformed Protestant England was generally suspicious of magic for its associations with Catholic
practices and teachings (such as the idea that relics held miraculous powers), and King James I was highly
suspicious of magical activities. Dee was forced to defend himself and prove that his practices were in
harmony with the divine, and though he succeeded, he died poor and disgraced in 1608, just two years
before The Tempest was (probably) written.
Weighing Up Prospero’s Intent
The Magus, then, was a controversial figure, and it is not surprising that Prospero and his actions have
stimulated much critical debate. Is he a virtuous mage, practising magia for a beneficent end? Or does the
magic of The Tempest have a darker side? Let us review briefly the case for each.
Several scholars have argued that Prospero is a Magus using his powers for the greater good, not for
personal gain. His theurgy contrasts with the destructive goetia of Sycorax. If he simply wanted personal
vengeance, he could have killed everybody in the storm. But he makes sure that no one is harmed. His aim is
to bring his enemies to recognise their evil actions and repent, thus restoring them to divine grace. The
illusions he creates are all for this purpose.
Prospero also wishes to marry his daughter to a worthy suitor. From the pure chastity of this couple a truly
noble generation should emerge, ensuring the security of the dukedom. Ariel represents Prospero’s art in its
most spiritual form, free from the constraints of the body. Caliban symbolises his earthly side, and the fact
that Prospero clearly has control over Caliban shows he has the proper discipline over his lower human
tendencies.
When Prospero renounces his magic art, it is not a sign of guilt, but a necessary step to resuming his worldly
duties as a Duke. The final scene of pardon and compassion is a fitting climax for this beneficent magic. If the
reconciliation is not complete, it is because Antonio is still unable to repent: not even a Magus can take away
divinely bestowed free will, or rid the soul of evil.
However, Prospero and his magic have also led to different readings. Some critics argue that his absorption
in study is irresponsible, taking him away from his duties as Duke and allowing his brother to take over. At
many points in the play, Prospero becomes angry, and his treatment of Ferdinand is hard to understand. His
irritable demeanour and violent imagery hardly suggest a serene mage high above the world of human
rivalry. Prospero himself seems to doubt his own ‘rough magic’ and its dubious effects:
Graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers.
It is as if he has been playing God, and wants to step back from this interference with the natural order. (This
speech has also been interpreted as Prospero moving from a crude stage of magic to a more refined one.)
Even the contrast with Sycorax is not wholly clear, since we have no other real source about her besides
Prospero himself. At one point, it is Ariel who apparently points Prospero away from anger to higher
thoughts of compassion, based on a human sympathy he is in danger of losing. Immersed in the ideal world
of his books, Prospero is possessed by a desire for impossible purity in the world, and incapable of seeing
that evil is a normal part of human affairs: he was naive about his brother, and foolish to leave Caliban alone
with Miranda. He still seems to find it hard to believe that Caliban and his associates would want to plot
against him. According to this argument, Prospero undergoes a journey of self-knowledge in the play: his
magic has distanced him from real human behaviour, and he has to renounce it to return from a world of
illusion and manipulation – a world similar to the art of theatre – to the human community.
A Drama, Not a Thesis
Which of these arguments seems stronger? The magic in the play does seem to be directed towards the
good end of repentance and reconciliation. Yet the play is a drama, not a thesis for or against magic, and it
surely reflects some of the suspicious atmosphere of the time. Prospero is not a benign sage but a troubled
soul, given to irascible outbursts and brooding soliloquies. He does indeed seem ill at ease with his art and its
‘vanity’. Ariel, the disembodied spirit, has to be released; the world must be returned to. Perhaps the play is
not attacking magic but suggesting that it tests our humanity to the utmost. As Prospero leaves the island,
he leaves us with a host of difficult questions, about magic, about colonialism, and about how successful the
outcome of the play really is. On page and stage, the magical action of The Tempest is an abiding riddle, one
to which no answer seems altogether satisfactory. Perhaps this is fitting since magic is ultimately beyond
rational understanding, a hermetic world, a mystery.
Malcolm Hebron teaches English at Winchester School.
This article first appeared in emagazine 51, February 2011.
Caliban's last sigh
Auden's reworking of The Tempest is irritatingly didactic, but 60 years on, the imaginary worlds of The Sea
and the Mirror are as solidly mysterious as ever, says Jeremy Noel Tod
Saturday 27 September 2003 01.21 BST – The Guardian
The Sea and the Mirror
by WH Auden, edited by Arthur Kirsch
Although it is now standard practice in academic publishing, it seems odd that "advance praise"
blurb should have been provided for a reprint of a poem that first appeared in the 1940s. Odder
still that the dust jacket should then quote, from Sylvia Plath's Journals , a description not of the
poem but the poet: "Auden...the naughty mischievous boy genius...gesticulating with a white new
cigarette in his hands, holding matches, talking in a gravelly incisive tone about...art and life, the
mirror and the sea. God, god, the stature of the man."
The publishers of this critical edition presumably sense that Auden's stature is not what it was;
Plath, though, should attract the attention of a large contemporary readership. It is also an expertly
revealing sketch: Auden the compulsive lecturer; the chain-smoking, roving don.
When Auden went off to America in 1939 his poetry, it is generally agreed, went off too. Philip
Larkin's diagnosis, in 1960, seems accurate: by emigrating, Auden lost "his key subject and emotion
- Europe and the fear of war - and abandoned his audience together with their common dialect and
concerns". Instead, wrote Larkin disapprovingly, "he took a header into literature".
The first long poem to result, New Year Letter (1941), was a dud. Composed in sometimes
heroically awful couplets - "The very morning that the war / Took action on the Polish floor" - it
came with even longer "Notes", quoting chunks from the poem's implied reading list. Far from the
action, Auden lectured his readers. The Sea and the Mirror (1944) - a long poem billed as a
"commentary" on Shakespeare's The Tempest - retreated even further into the library. The result,
however, was some of his most inventive and moving later poetry.
Shakespeare's strange final play presents a usurped magician, Prospero, who brings his enemies to
their knees on an enchanted island, and then renounces his powers. It contains echoes of virtually
every other Shakespearean work, and is a honey-trap for the critic seeking a neat allegorical map of
Shakespeare's mind.
Auden, with his love of explanation by system and schema (Freud, Marx), was such a critic. In 1944,
he was orienting his ideas by Christian philosophy. This edition reprints a huge chart of universal
"antitheses" which he drew up while writing The Sea and the Mirror . It divides everything from
"Physical Diseases" to "Political Slogans" along theologically dualistic lines (two flavours of Hell
either side of existential vanilla). Auden found such dualistic oppositions everywhere in The
Tempest : the otherworldly Prospero and his Machiavellian brother, Antonio; ethereal Ariel and
earthy Caliban.
Shakespeare only hints at what Auden rigidly schematised. Arthur Kirsch, commenting on Auden,
doesn't seem always to realise this. For example, Kirsch's introduction states that Ariel and Caliban
(Prospero's non-human servants in The Tempest ) "cannot exist without each other". This idea is
not substantiated by a single line in the play. It does, however, explain Auden's beautiful closing
lyric, "Postscript (Ariel to Caliban. Echo by the Prompter)":
Never hope to say farewell,
For our lethargy is such
Heaven's kindness cannot touch
Nor earth's frankly brutal drum;
This was long ago decided,
Both of us know why,
Can, alas, foretell,
When our falsehoods are divided,
What we shall become,
One evaporating sigh
...I
In other words (Auden's to Plath), Ariel, the "creative imaginative" spirit, is nothing without Caliban,
"the natural bestial projection". Auden wanted to correct what he saw as Shakespeare's
Manichaeism in The Tempest : that is, blaming the bestial for the imperfections of the spirit. In the
theology of The Sea and the Mirror , man is equally imperfect in mind and body (the "falsehoods"
of Ariel and Caliban). Consequently, he will be existentially anxious until death - when, the echorhyme fadingly suggests, the evaporating "I" will finally know wholeness.
This delicate technical conceit is typical also of the lyrics given to Shakespeare's characters in the
book's middle section. Each is a discrete poem, particular in form and diction. Inevitably, they are
not all equally successful - inconsistency is the price of predetermined schematic construction.
Loveliest is "Miranda", Prospero's daughter, who speaks a villanelle of innocent adoration for her
new husband, Prince Ferdinand - affirming, repeatedly,
My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely,
And the high green hill sits always by the sea.
The real achievement of the poem, though, is in the two sections that enclose this lucky dip of lyric
skill. The first is "Prospero to Ariel": a measured, unrhymed, touching speech of farewell, in which
Prospero prepares to return to unmagical mortality and general disillusionment. Auden takes
Shakespeare's sad little touch at the end of The Tempest - Miranda: "O brave new world / That has
such people in't!" Prospero: "Tis new to thee." - and wittily expands it. "Will Ferdinand be as fond of
a Miranda / Familiar as a stocking?" Prospero wonders, imagining himself "an old man"
Just like other old men, with eyes that water
Easily in the wind, and a head that nods in the sunshine,
Forgetful, maladroit, a little grubby...
(Kirsch's notes make public for the first time an amusing line that Auden - part-time mischievous
boy genius well into old age - excised from the final draft: Prospero on adolescent masturbation,
"the magical rites of spring in the locked bathroom".)
The second set-piece in The Sea and the Mirror is "Caliban to the Audience". This prose monologue
breaks with the versified fictions of character and narrative to address the modern reader directly.
Auden's Tempest characteristically leaves out Caliban's tactile nature poetry. Instead, the
subservient savage is given the elaborate prose style of late Henry James, and is employed to evoke
the topography of another enchanted isle, the musty, pagan-industrialised, storybook England
which the young Auden (who once played Caliban in a school production) made his own: "Carry me
back, Master, to the cathedral town where the canons run through the water meadows with
butterfly nets...an old horse tramway winds away westward through suave foothills crowned with
stone circles...to the north, beyond a forest inhabited by charcoal burners, one can see the Devil's
Bedposts quite distinctly, to the east the museum where for sixpence one can touch the ivory
chessmen."
The Sea and the Mirror succeeds because, despite its simplistic schematising, its imaginary worlds
are solidly mysterious; only Auden could have dreamed them. Caliban's speech is particularly rich
with brilliantly casual specifics ("sunset glittered on the plate-glass windows of the Marine
Biological Station"). The wonderful writing remains subservient to a didactic end, however. This, it
transpires, is a campy hellfire sermon. We are intended ultimately to gag on the over-egged
nostalgia; as WH Caliban goes on to explain, we will never be carried back to Paradise in this life.
So, the poem is more than a "commentary" on Shakespeare; it is a lecture that deduces from its
text an existential moral never stated therein. The Tempest , in fact, is a marvel of ambiguity about
cosmological questions (count the number of different gods invoked in it). Auden recast the
dramatic as the didactic. This luxuriously produced edition's exhaustive critical apparatus - which
includes extracts from Auden's private explanations of his project, as well as from his criticism and
working notes - makes the difference unexcitingly clear. New readers should go straight to the
poem.
· Jeremy Noel Tod teaches English literature at the universities of Oxford and East Anglia.