"You taught me language": Shakespeare's The Tempest

For our (probably) final episode on Shakespeare's plays, we sail through The Tempest, a late romance which has attracted historical and psychoanalytical interpretations, but stands out for many readers as perhaps a play in which a version of Shakespeare himself appears as the protagonist.  

Audio clip from The Tempest ; 2004 Naxos AudioBooks.  Taken from The Internet Archive

Transcript

Welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast, the show that gives rhyme its reason.  I’m so happy you stopped in.  Today on the show, we’ll take what I plan to be our last look at Shakespearean drama.  Our play for the day is The Tempest, which, according to a comfortable legend, is Shakespeare’s last play, his farewell to the stage.

Of course, legends, regardless of their comfort, are not the same as history, so we’ll have to dismantle this little myth as we go along.  And before we set sail to Prospero’s magical island with its cloud-capped towers, gorgeous palaces, and solemn temples, know that you can contact me at classicenglishliterature@gmail – send me your thoughts, questions, or suggestions.  For instance, though we’ve spent the last six months with the Bard, there are many plays that I’ve not covered.  Let me know if there’s one that you want to hear about – if there’s enough demand, I can put together an episode.  You can also follow the show on TikTok (uh, for now at least. We’ll adjust as Congress sees fit), Instagram, and Facebook to get announcements and cheeky videos.  

Let me also take a moment to express my great gratitude to listener Terri V, who has made a generous donation to the poddie.  Thank you so much, Terri, for your company and support!

(why thank you!)

Ah, looks like the captain’s ready to cast off, so we’d best get aboard!

pause

(sound effects)

The wind’s picking up and the sea’s getting choppy!  Better hunker down!

BOATSWAIN (recording)

Heigh, my hearts! Cheerly, cheerly, my

 hearts! Yare, yare! Take in the topsail. Tend to th’

 Master’s whistle.—Blow till thou burst thy wind, if

 room enough!

The Tempest first appears in the 1623 Folio but was probably written in 1611.  While some have referred to it as a “late comedy,” the play defies easy categorization as it contains both comic and tragic elements.  One most often sees it referred to today as, generically, a romance, though this seems to stress the more fanciful and imaginative tone of the play while bearing little to no relevance to our understanding of medieval romance, such as the Arthur or Charlemagne stories.

The play opens with the eponymous storm threatening to swamp a ship containing Antonio, the Duke of Milan, Alonso, the King of Naples, his handsome son Ferdinand and brother Sebastian, a geezer named Gonzalo, counselor to the king, along with some servants and attendants.  The passengers survive the tempest and wash up on disparate parts of a remote island, which is ruled by a magician named Prospero – who, as it turns out, has conjured the storm to bring that shipful of his enemies to his shores.  His enemies?  Oh, yes, dear listener – Prospero is the rightful Duke of Milan, treacherously ousted by the usurping Antonio in league with Alonso, and, having been exiled, Prospero has lived on this island for 12 years, with his daughter Miranda and his two servants: Ariel, a spirit, and Caliban, a brutish slave and offspring of the witch Sycorax, the island’s previous ruler.  Oho!  Now is the time of reckoning and revenge!

You’d think, wouldn’t you?  But it doesn’t really happen.  Ferdinand immediately falls in love with Miranda because, you know, romance.  Prospero’s good with that, but decides to enslave the boy for a while to make sure he earns the girl’s love. Note that Prospero is big on enslaving things.  Meanwhile, Antonio and Sebastian attempt to assassinate Alonso for the throne of Naples.  Mirroring this plot point, Trinculo and Stephano, a jester and butler, ally with Caliban and decide to stage a worker’s revolt, kill Prospero and institute a proletarian utopia.  It doesn’t work, of course, not only because they are comic relief but also because such revolutions generally have inchoate or naive ideas concerning human nature, the centralization of power, and the implementation of planned economies, not to mention negotiating cultural and ideological differences between entrenched interests and internal dissidents.

The shipwrecked nobles see a vision of a Harpy, who tells Alonso that Ferdinand has died as karmic retribution for Prospero’s deposition.  Of course, this, too, is one of Prospero’s little tricks, and now that all of his enemies tremble before his power, the magician forgives them all.  That’s it.  That’s his vengeance.  Alonso has his son restored as he promises to reinstall Prospero as Milan’s duke.  Miranda and Ferdinand will marry and return to civilization.  Prospero frees Ariel and maybe Caliban . . . ?  That’s unclear.  Anyway, Propspero then lays down his magic, and bids us all farewell.

pause

Almost unique among Shakespeare’s plays, The Tempest has no literary or folkloric source and so is one of probably two plots which are entirely the playwright’s own invention (Love’s Labor’s Lost is the other).  Yes, certainly we can trace the influence of Italy’s commedia dell'arte and there lingers the faint citrusy whiff of a couple of Spanish romances, not to mention the ever-intrusive Ovid with a speech by Medea from the Metamorphoses.  There has even been some scholarly huffing and puffing trying to see a 16th century German comedy (a genre paradoxical at best) as the source.  But, as Robert Langbaum notes, the differences between these and Shakespeare’s creation are more notable than the similarities.

This is not to say, however, that the world beyond Shakespeare’s imagination failed to make itself felt.  Accounts of a fantastic storm and a devastating shipwreck off the coast of Bermuda had reached England.  A ship called the Sea Venture was part of the Third Supply mission of nine ships to the Jamestown Colony in Virginia, which was established by the Virginia Company of London. The fleet encountered a severe hurricane-like storm off the coast of Bermuda in July 1609.   The Sea Venture, separated from the rest of the fleet during the storm, sustained heavy damage but the skilfull crew managed to keep the ship afloat, eventually guiding it onto the reefs of Bermuda. All aboard survived, and the shipwrecked passengers and crew salvaged supplies and materials to sustain themselves on the island.  After several months on Bermuda, two smaller ships, inspiringly christened the Deliverance and the Patience, were built, allowing the voyage to Jamestown to resume. Their arrival in May 1610, a year late, was crucial for the survival of the struggling Jamestown Colony.

Why would a Jacobean playwright be particularly interested in a shipwreck on the other side of the world?  Because he’s a capacious mind and takes an interest in current affairs is one answer.  The other answer – and the two are not mutually exclusive – is that Shakespeare enjoyed the society of two of the Virginia Company’s principals: the Earls of Pembroke and Southampton.  So it is likely with keen interest that Shakespeare perused the pamphlet by Sylvester Jourdain – tellingly subtitled the Isle of Devils –, as well as the official report of the Virginia Company on the incident, and, most probably, a letter dated July 15, 1610 by one William Strachey, the deputy governor of Virginia, which describes how 

For four-and-twenty hours the storm in a restless tumult had blown so exceedingly as we could not apprehend in our imaginations any possibility of greater violence, yet did we still find it, not only more terrible, but more constant, fury added to fury, and one storm urging a second more outrageous than the former whether it so wrought upon our fears or indeed met with new forces. Sometimes shrieks in our ship amongst women and passengers not used to such hurly and discomforts made us look one upon the other with troubled hearts and panting bosoms, our clamors drowned in the winds, and the winds in thunder. Prayers might well be in the heart and lips, but drowned in the outcries of the officers. Nothing heard that could give comfort, nothing seen that might encourage hope. 

It sure makes for a great opening scene, yeah?  Just jump right into the middle of the action!  And the possibilities for special effects!

At any rate, that Shakespeare’s play seems to owe a least part of its inspiration to an event in England’s burgeoning colonial enterprise has prompted many to see The Tempest as an allegory for European expansion.

Prospero is an Italian nobleman who, when cast upon his island, at first accepts the aid of its inhabitants.  Caliban recalls that

When thou camest first,

Thou strokedst me and madest much of me, wouldst give me

Water with berries in’t, and teach me how

To name the bigger light, and how the less,

That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee

And show’d thee all the qualities o’ the isle,

The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:

Cursed be I that did so! 

After Prospero’s acclimation, he establishes a dominion over the island, reducing Caliban to enslavement.  The conquered continues

I am all the subjects that you have,

Which first was mine own king: and here you sty me

In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me

The rest o’ the island.

Many see Caliban as an avatar for the indigenous peoples displaced or worse by the excesses of European colonialism.  His very name may be an anagram of the Spanish word for cannibal or an inhabitant of the Caribbean islands.  

Which leads to some ambiguity about his appearance or indeed, his very being.  He is frequently called monster, slave, savage – Prospero even calls him “thou earth” the lowliest link in the Great Chain of Being.  But how literally are we to take the nomination “monster”?

When Trinculo stumbles upon him on the beach, the clown says

What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish. He smells like a fish, a very ancient and fish-like smell, a kind of not-of-the-newest poor-john. A strange fish! Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man.

Right, so Caliban could be some human/fish hybrid – a merman or Aqua man.  But he could also be, like, a tortoise or sea turtle, for Stephano notes the four legs when Trinculo seeks shelter under Caliban’s cloak.  And Trinculo’s pun that a monster would make a man does seem to indicate something freakish that he could make money on by charging for display.  Despite the rather comic tenor of the scene, we detect a more sordid implication.

For, unfortunately, in the early modern period one could also make money by exhibiting a member of an exotic, newly-discovered race, or by presenting one to an emperor, as Stephano schemes.  And that means that “monster” can simply be read as “non-European” and we can forego the fantastic beast makeup.  Prospero’s sobriquet “earth” gains some resonance here, too, if we recall that, to some extent, European expansion found its moral justification in a quite peculiar understanding of God’s commandment to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28: 

(church music)

“God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

Now, to subdue something one must be apart from and above it: so European thinkers considered themselves in some way distinct from nature.  Interestingly, Adam is given dominion even over the birds, so he is figuratively above that which is literally above him.  Indeed, such a view obtains even today – we often think of nature or the wilderness as that place where people aren’t.  Since many non-western cultures, especially those of the so-called New World, see humanity as part of a homogenous Nature, the logic follows that Europe has a duty to subdue savage peoples like Caliban.  Um, I should note the irony of such a perspective, however, as the Hebrew word for earth, as used in Genesis, is Adama – yep, Adam’s name is a pun.  Isn’t wordplay fun?

This, of course, is compounded by Prospero’s heroic lack of self-awareness.  He laments his own overthrow and exile, but fails utterly to see Caliban’s situation as analogous to his own.  Rather, he dwells upon his slave’s attempt to rape Miranda (now, let me be clear, I in now way intend to diminish Caliban’s assault), and the threat that, as Caliban asserts, this island would be “peopled” with Calibans.  The allegorical notion here involves controlling native populations and a disgust at miscegenation. 

But, as with most allegorical understandings of texts that are not allegories, beyond a few rather crude parallels, such an interpretation of the play betrays the text as a complex and intentional construction.  We are meant to note Prospero's myopism and Caliban’s dignity.  It’s worth noting that Shakespeare has Caliban speak blank verse, granting the islander an essential nobility not contingent upon European social distinctions.  For this, we can almost assuredly see Montaigne’s influence, whose sympathetic portrayal of indigenous American cultures in his essay “Of the Cannibals” Shakespeare would have read.  The counselor Gonzalo fairly outlines a utopian vision of life in a new world even as he is mocked by his ambitious and cynical superiors:

I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries

 Execute all things, for no kind of traffic

 Would I admit; no name of magistrate;

 Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,

 And use of service, none; contract, succession,

 Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;

 No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;

 No occupation; all men idle, all,

 And women too, but innocent and pure;

 No sovereignty—

All things in common nature should produce

 Without sweat or endeavor; treason, felony,

 Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine

 Would I not have; but nature should bring forth

 Of its own kind all foison, all abundance,

 To feed my innocent people.

If you need a refresher on early modern utopian literature, chew a bit of lotus and float back to episode 34: Nowhereland: Thomas More Utopia.  Certainly, we can see an innocent naivete in Gonzalo’s fantastic commonwealth, but that nostalgia, almost, for a return to the paradise of Eden would go on to influence a good deal of western thinking, most notably the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the aesthetics of Romanticism.

But one should be wary of thinking Caliban a superficial “noble savage” trope, because he is capable of inhuman acts like rape and he is prone to a foolish credulity, too often in awe of fools like Stephano.  He can, in some ways, be a willing accomplice in his own subjection.  He is no flat symbol – even such a comparatively minor character Shakespeare imbues the roundness or personality, of complexity and contradiction.

And so it is with Caliban’s master.  Psychoanalytic critics, leaning heavily on Freud, see in the trinitarian Caliban, Prospero, and Ariel the figure of the unconscious: id, ego, and superego, respectively.  English departments are still occasionally peopled by faithful monks defending the catacombs of Freudian thought, despite the gleeful patricide by psychology and neuroscience.  Prospero’s ego must suppress the libidinous Caliban while being managed by a conscientious Ariel.   We’ve already noted Caliban’s attempted rape, and we can see Ariel enforcing socio-moral norms when reminding the wizard of his obligations.  For instance, he pities the men held in Prospero’s thrall, saying, “Your charm so strongly works ‘em / That if you now beheld them, your affections / Would become tender.”  The magician, perhaps a bit petulantly, replies:

Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling

Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,

One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,

Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?

Nobody really likes the nagging conscience, particularly when it’s right.  Which, frustratingly, it usually is.  Prospero’s reply assumes, however, that sympathy (or empathy as we now recklessly and smugly call it) is conditioned by likeness – that is, people or creatures of the same kind are naturally more sympathetic to each others’ conditions, an assumption which also might do much to explain Prospero’s willingness to enslave the island’s inhabitants.

But such psychoanalytic renderings are also but a form of allegory, a crude thrusting on of a soft science lens to clarify artistic complexity.  But it’s not the one that has the longest pedigree in Tempest criticism.

pause

Prospero’s farewell speech, in an epilogue, has led generations of critics, readers, and theatre-goers to see the retiring magician as an avatar for Shakespeare himself.  Prospero begs the audience to let him not

dwell

 In this bare island by your spell,

 But release me from my bands

 With the help of your good hands. 

which sounds to many like it could be the Bard’s own retirement speech.  Here, he sounds quite like Ariel, begging for liberty, in this case by the audience’s approval – their applause.  Put this against probably the most famous speech in the play:

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. 

The direct naming of actors and the only slightly less direct reference to Shakespeare’s theatre, the Globe, do seem to offer a plausible context to see the epilogue as the playwright’s final bow.  And it’s a lovely thought, if you’re of a particularly romantic cast of mind.  I remember one of my college professors straining to impose a narrative arc to Shakespeare’s career.  He began in youthful comedy and dashing history plays.  As he matured, the great tragedies, and finally, the affirmation of the late comedies – not as frivolous as in his youth, but tinged with the darkness of the tragedies – yet affirmative nonetheless.

But such a pleasant symmetry sustains itself only if we ignore some rather inconvenient facts about Shakespeare’s corpus and biography.  For the myth to hold, The Tempest must be his final play, his last work.  And, unfortunately for the dreamers, it simply isn’t.  At least three plays – all in collaboration with the Globe’s rising playwright John Fletcher – post-date the Tempest:  these are The Two Noble Kinsman, which could not have been written earlier than 1612, Henry VIII or All is True from 1613, as well as the Cardenio, the most famous lost play in history.  Indeed, The Tempest may not even be Shakespeare’s final solo project.  There’s a possibility that The Winter’s Tale could hold that distinction.

But let’s say we throw chronology to the stormy winds – is there not a poetic truth that transcends mere material facts.  Well, yes, in a general way, I’d like to think so.  I’d think the world an arid and desolate place if data were the only truth.  Perhaps Shakespeare, while not at the end of his career, nonetheless saw it shimmering out on the distant horizon.  Perhaps that’s why Fletcher became part of the company, an apprentice to the master as his time winds down.  

This idea first began to take hold in the early 1800s.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge – that giant of Romanticism – made the connection in an almost off the cuff remark:  Prospero is "the very Shakespeare himself, as it were, of The Tempest".  This seems to me a quite defensible comment.  Coleridge merely analogizes Prospero’s control of nature, the island, and the characters in The Tempest to Shakespeare’s control as the author.  Propsero can make storms with his “art” as he calls it – he can conquer land and bid Ariel, Caliban, and Fernando do his will.  With his art, Shakespeare creates the entire imaginary world in which the magician operates.  Coleridge’s remark is pleasant metaphor.  And if we left such speculations at that, we certainly don’t care in what order or at what time Shakespeare historically composed his work – they’ve no bearing on Coleridge’s bit of fancy.

But in 1875, in his first major work Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, Irish critic Edward Dowden wrote: "We identify Prospero in some measure with Shakespeare himself … because the temper of Prospero, the grave harmony of his character, his self-mastery, his calm validity of will … and with these, a certain abandonment, a remoteness from the common joys and sorrows of the world, are characteristic of Shakespeare as discovered to us in all his latest plays."  Now, I feel we enter less sure scholarly ground.  This, too, may be hyperbolic, but it makes a claim on historical and material facts, over which hyperbole has little authoritative to say.  Furthermore, those facts – concerning the “Shakespeare as discovered to us in all his latest plays” – are, to my mind, all but impossible to establish.  What “Shakespeare” is revealed to us at all in the later plays?

Fans of any kind, but especially fans of artists, are wont to be gnostics; that is, their devotion to their favorite writer, or singer, or painter, or actor is such that the feel they must be privy to secret knowledge, that they are part of the elect, as it were, elevated beyond the mass of more  casual enthusiasts.  Perhaps the Beatles – I know, I mention them a lot but that’s only because I love to talk about them – best exemplify this type of gnostic fandom (well, next to the Big JC himself, who had some uber-gnostic fans).  Secret messages in song lyrics or on album covers were thought to communicate arcane knowledge to the most devoted disciples.  So is it, too, with Shakespeare.  His work has had such a profound effect, not only on a macro-cultural level, but has meant so much to people personally.  But the fact that, as a man, he is such puzzle-wrapped enigma that many can’t help filling the silence of biography with their own noise.

Oxford professor Emma Smith notes that purveyors of the “Shakespeare is Prospero” rumor point to Easter eggs in The Tempest: parallels and allusions to earlier plays in Shakespeare’s career.  They note the revenge plot from Hamlet, the world of fairy from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, just about every pair of lovers from every comedy, and powerful men like Lear and Pericles as antecedents for Prospero.

All this is perhaps true, and a bit interesting, and no doubt distracting for a certain type of reader.  But none of it gets us any closer to a vision of the “real” Shakespeare.  Such projection is, too, such stuff as dreams are made on.

The plain fact is, obviously, that we can no more argue that Prospero is Shakespeare than we can that Hamlet or Macbeth or Othello or Beatrice or Lucrece is Shakespeare.  OK, yes, let me qualify – I’ll admit that writers probably cannot help inserting something of themselves in the characters they create; it lends something of psychological verisimilitude.  But we strain allegory, an already strained literary type, if we imagine the Bard as a player character in a game he made up.

But . . . but but but.  If we may without qualm largely disregard the position laid out by Dowden, we cannot do so as readily, as I indicated earlier, with that by Coleridge.  The latter sees Prospero as a playwright just as Shakespeare is a playwright, and that leads me to note the peculiar kind of creation both “writers” produce.  And for that, I’d also like to return to the ever-fruitful Book of Genesis.

Bear with.  While re-reading The Tempest for this podcast, I was struck by the frequency and volume of words indicating speech-acts.  Just our garden variety words for using language, mostly.  The word “say” appears 33 times, “speak” 25 times, “talk” seven times, “spell” four times, and “enchant” twice.  

That’s a fascinating catalogue, old man, what’s the point?

Well, if we think about both Shakespeare and Prospero as creators, we note that their method or vehicle of creation is language – the word, speech.  They speak things into being – what you can find called “manifesting” if you cared to look..  I suppose it’s a handy enough term.  They manifest a reality through the word.  

Now, let’s pop back to Genesis, and you holy-rollers will remember that in the first creation story (yes, kids, there are two in Genesis) God creates the heaven and earth by . . . well, manifesting.  The author of Genesis 1 repeats the phrase “and God said” ten times, emphasizing the power of God to bring forth creation by the power of language alone, which, in a more modest sense, is what Shakespeare and Prospero do.  Shakespeare literally writes the play, and Prospero manipulates the events of the storm, shipwreck, and reconciliation largely through speech, and other characters, too, contribute to the motif of language as manifestation.  If I wanted to push an already idiosyncratic notion – and of course I do – I might direct your attention to the opening verses of St. John’s gospel, which assert: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . .  All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”  Well, that’s pretty clear.  God is word and word made everything.  What we translate as “word” in English is the Greek word “logos,” which can also mean thought, principle, or speech.  So the Judeo-Christian tradition emphasizes at its very core the idea of language as a supreme creative force.  

Now, in 1962, a collection of Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin’s lectures were published under the deceptively apropos title How to Do Things with Words.  And it’s the “doing” part of that title that works for us here.  Austin distinguishes between different kinds of speech acts, the broadest distinction being between what he calls constative utterances and performative utterances.  The former are statements that can be evaluated according to some standard of trueness; these are assertions about facts in the world: the sky is blue, tacos are delicious, the Beatles are the greatest popular musicians of all time.  All of these are, indisputably, true.

On the other hand, performative utterances are statements that actually accomplish something in the world.  These words do things.  So, when one says “I swear” in a courtroom, the act of speaking is coeval with the act of swearing.  Same thing with saying “I pledge allegiance” or “I baptize thee” or “I promise.”  The speaking is the action.  When a priest says, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” he has altered the composition of the world, a marriage has been created merely by this utterance.

OK, where was I going with this?  Oh, yeah!  When Prospero speaks of his “art,” meaning his magical power to manifest experience and phenomena, in some sense these utterances are performative.  Especially words we often associate with magic, like “spell” and “enchant,” because, like the word “spell” is comes from the Old English meaning to talk, to speak, or to tell and only in the 1570s do we get recorded uses meaning “to perform magic” or something like that.  Incidentally, that’s how we get the English word “gospel” – which we take now to mean something like good news, but is probably closer to “God’s speech.”  And the word “enchant,” meaning to bewitch or cast a spell on someone, originally comes from the Latin verb “to sing.”  

So, I’m looking for a way to wrap all this up neatly, come up with some grand synthetic summation that’ll blow your minds, but I . . . can’t.  So I’m just going to go to the interstitial music.

pause

And we’re back.  Umm. . .  still have no idea how to close this up.  What have we covered?  Well, there’s the fact that many people read The Tempest now through a post-colonial lens, highlighting its position as an influential text in the early years of English expansion.  Others like to think about the Freudian resonances of the protagonist.  Far and away the most trodden interpretive path has been trying to read that protagonist as a version of the author himself, laying down his pen and bidding farewell to his office of creation.  Then I started babbling about how language itself is a force of creation.  Oh, you know what?  I could’ve mentioned Percy Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry.”  Shelley, another raving Romantic who, like Coleridge before him, saw in Shakespeare a rather proto-Romanticist spirit, says in that defense poetry is the highest art form because is most closely approximates divine creation: “It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes.”  Yeah, should’ve mentioned Shelley.  Oh, well.  There’ll be other times.

Take care, everyone.  Talk to you next time.