the tempest

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Introduction

Today I wish to provide something of a short introduction to Shakespeare's Tempest, first, by acknowledging some of the interpretative richness of this play and, second, by outlining two very different approaches. The contrast between them will serve as a final reminder of something we have (I hope) discovered many times in this course, the interpretative fecundity of Shakespeare's work.

Let me begin by acknowledging an interesting point about this play: interpretations of the Tempest tend to be shaped quite strongly by the particular background which the interpreter brings to it. This point sounds like a truism (and it is), but I simply want to point to the fact that this play, more so than many others, tends to bring out in interpreters what their particular interests are in a way that other plays often do not (at least not to the same degree). At least that has been my experience.

In part, this happens because this play puts a good deal of pressure on us to treat it allegorically, that is, to find a conceptual framework which will coordinate our understanding of what goes on in the play. I think we feel this mainly because there is little complex characterization in the Tempest (except perhaps for the figure of Prospero himself) and there are many elements which we cannot simply account for by taking the action naturalistically. So we want to know what they stand for: What exactly is Prospero's magic? What does Caliban represent? Is the island a depiction of the new world or a world of the imagination or something else? And so on. The answers to these questions, in my experience, tend often to depend upon the major interests of the person seeking to understand the play.

So, for example, those, like me, with a strong interest in reading Shakespeare, a lively interest in theatrical productions of Shakespeare, and what many might take to be an old-fashioned humanist perspective, tend to emphasize the extent to which the main focus in the Tempest is on the nature of art and illusion, especially theatrical art. This tendency is powerfully reinforced by the fact that this play is almost certainly Shakespeare's last full work, so that the Tempest is, in effect, his farewell to the stage. No doubt there is a certain sentimentality in this view (certainly in my case there is).

People with a strong interest in politics, however, often take a different slant, and see the play as having less to do with an exploration of theatre than with a probing artistic analysis of important political issues, especially those relevant to the oppression of the inhabitants of the new world (that is, the issue of colonialism) or to the relationship between the intellectual and the political world. So, for example, the play has been presented as a statement about colonial attitudes in North or South America or as an exploration of the role of the intellectual in post-glasnost Eastern Europe. Other interpreters dismiss those suggestions and see in the play a vital exploration of education (the nature versus nurture dispute) or theories of politics or knowledge or whatever. I hope to touch on some of these possibilities (in addition to my own preferences) in the remarks below).

The Tempest as an Exploration of the Nature of Art

By way of introducing the first popular interpretative approach to the Tempest, I want to begin with a very obvious point. The Tempest is a very theatrical play, that is, it is obviously a wonderful vehicle for displaying the full resources of the theatre: dramatic action, special effects, music, magic, monsters, dancing, storms, drunken humour, and so on. Anyone who wants a Shakespearean play to produce mainly as an extravagant theatrical tour de force (say, a rock and roll extravaganza or an opera) would turn naturally to this play, which, among Shakespeare's works, is rivaled only by Midsummer Night's Dream in this respect. And a number of productions, past and modern, have stressed mainly that element, without bothering about anything else. Musical adaptations of The Tempest have a long tradition.

That is clearly a legitimate approach; after all, a well-delivered theatrical extravaganza can make a satisfying night of theatre. And it is clear that The Tempest does depend for much of its effectiveness on a wide range of special effects--sound, lighting, fantastic visions, a whole realm of "magic" (it may well have been written in response to the changing theatrical tastes of an audience that was requiring more theatrical effects in the presentation of dramatic productions). But I think there's more to the theatricality of the play than just its style. In my view, a central issue of the Tempest is an exploration into the nature of theatre itself.

For those who have read a certain amount of Shakespeare, the theatrical theme gets considerable impetus from the fact that The Tempest seems, in some ways, to revisit many earlier Shakespearean themes and characters, so that at times it comes across almost as a final summary look at some very familiar material, something Stephen Greenblatt calls "a kind of echo chamber of Shakespearean motifs":

Its story of loss and recovery and its air of wonder link it closely to the group of late plays that modern editors generally call "romances" (Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline), but it resonates as well with issues that haunted Shakespeare's imagination throughout his career: the painful necessity for a father to let his daughter go (Othello, King Lear); the treacherous betrayal of a legitimate ruler (Richard II, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth); the murderous hatred of one brother for another (Richard III, As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear); the passage from court society to the wilderness and the promise of a return (A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It); the wooing of a young heiress in ignorance of her place in the social hierarchy (Twelfth Night, Pericles, The Winter's Tale); the dream of manipulating others by means of art, especially by staging miniature plays-within-plays (1 Henry IV, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet); the threat of a radical loss of identity (The Comedy of Errors, Richard II, King Lear); the relation between nature and nurture (Pericles, The Winter's Tale); the harnessing of magical powers (. . . [2 Henry VI], A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth).

So, given this rich allusiveness to other plays, at the end of a course like this there is a natural tendency to want to link the concerns of the play with a celebration of the wonderful achievement we have been studying so far.

But there is more to this approach to the play than simply nostalgia. To give you a sense of what I mean, let me mention two questions that puzzled me about this play when I first read it. The first is this: If Prospero's power is so effective against his opponents as it appears to be, then why didn't he use it back in Milan to avoid having to be exiled in the first place? And the second one, which arises naturally from that first one, is this: Given that Prospero is so keen on his magic and takes such delight in it and that it gives him so much power, why does he abandon it before returning to Milan?

I puzzled over these questions until I came to what seems to me the most satisfying answer. It is a very obvious one: the magic does not work in Milan; it is effective only on the island, away from the Machiavellian world of the court, where plotting against each other, even against one's own family, for the sake of political power is the order of the day and where, if you take your mind off the political realities for very long, you may find yourself in a boat with a load of books heading to an unknown exile. Prospero's magic can only become effective in a special place, a world of spirits, of illusion, song, and enchantment, on a magic island--in other words, in the theatre.

After all, look what happens in this play. A bunch of political types and all their attendants (sailors, butlers, and so on) from the busy court of Naples and Milan are lured away from their power political business into a world of illusion, where they are led around by strange powers (above all, music and apparitions) they do not fully comprehend but whom they cannot resist until they all come together inside Prospero's magic circle. Prospero controls the entire experiment through his ability to create and sustain illusions. He is throughout the master of the action, and there is never any suspense (well, almost none), since he has such absolute control of human beings through his control of what they see and hear and experience.

[There's a similar sense in the recent film Shakespeare in Love, where daily life in London is often a hard business, with arranged marriages to brutal men, hateful money lenders, and so on; all that changes in the theatre, where miraculously things always come right, at least for a time, even money lenders become enthusiastically cooperative and supportive and a love impossible in the world outside can thrive]

If we accept this possibility as an interpretative metaphor, then we need to explore how that might make sense of other elements in the play. Remember that in such questions the Principle of Inclusiveness is an important guiding rule: the interpretation should make sense of as much of the play as possible, and in any conflict between rival interpretative possibilities one important criterion for judgment is the adequacy of each interpretation at providing a coherent and consistent sense of as much of the play as possible.
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In order to pursue this idea of the Tempest as an celebratory exploration of the nature of theatrical art, I want to turn for a while to what happens in the play.

Prospero's Experiment

The Tempest, it is clear, features an experiment by Prospero. He has not brought the Europeans to the vicinity of the island, but when they do come close to it, he has, through the power of illusion, lured them into his very special realm. The experiment first of all breaks up their social solidarity, for they land in different groups: Ferdinand by ...

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