THE TEMPESTWASSHAKESPEARE’SFAREWELL TOTHE STAGE

Myth

20In 1740 a life-size statue commemorating Shakespeare was erected inPoets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. The dramatist leans his elbow ona pile of books, and points to a scroll on which is written a variant ofProspero’s valedictory lines in The Tempest (4.1.152–6): ‘‘The Cloudcapt Tow’rs, / The Gorgeous Palaces, / The Solemn Temples, / The GreatGlobe itself, / Yea all which it Inherit, / Shall Dissolve; And like thebaseless Fabrick of a Vision / Leave not a wreck behind.’’1 The textserves as an epitaph for the playwright, and their original speaker inthe play becomes a transparent mask for Shakespeare himself: the myththat Shakespeare wrote his own farewell in The Tempest here receivesconcrete – or rather marble – form.

The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s last plays. It tells the story of amagician, Prospero, who lives on an island with his daughter Miranda,having been exiled from his dukedom in Milan by his brother Antonio.Prospero causes Antonio, his friend Sebastian and ally Alonso, togetherwith Alonso’s son Ferdinand, to be shipwrecked on his island. Withthe help of his airy spirit-servant Ariel, Prospero subjects his enemiesto various magical punishments, brings Ferdinand to woo Miranda,and finally confronts his brother, whom Ariel prompts him to forgiverather than chastise: ‘‘The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance’’(5.1.27–8). Vowing, in elegiac tone, to give up his powers and to drownhis books of sorcery, Prospero prepares to return to Milan to take up hisdukedom.

That this play might serve as a kind of allegory for Shakespeareas playwright is an interpretation with a long critical history – dating

30 Great Myths About Shakespeare, First Edition. Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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back to the first adaptation of The Tempest by John Dryden and WilliamDavenant, Restoration dramatists adept in reworking Shakespeare’s playsfor the tastes of the late seventeenth century. Writing in the Prologue totheir The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island (1667), they acknowledge‘‘Shakespear’s Magick’’ as the equivalent of Prospero’s. The analogyis developed through eighteenth-century criticism, which entrenched theview of Prospero as a portrait of the artist as an old man, and, necessarily,constructed a highly positive reading of Prospero’s character. EdwardDowden, writing at the end of the nineteenth century in an influentialintellectual biography of Shakespeare, is exemplary:

It is not chiefly because Prospero is a great enchanter, now about to breakhis magic staff, to drown his book deeper than ever plummet sounded, todismiss his airy spirits, and to return to the practical service of his Dukedom,that we identify Prospero in some measure with Shakespeare himself. It israther because the temper of Prospero, the grave harmony of his character,his self-mastery, his calm validity of will, his sensitiveness to wrong, hisunfaltering justice, and, with these, a certain abandonment, a remotenessfrom the common joys and sorrows of the world, are characteristic ofShakespeare as discovered to us in all his latest plays.2

Dowden’s argument is beautifully circular, even syllogistic. Prosperoreminds us of Shakespeare because his character constructs our ideaof what Shakespeare must have been like: 1. Prospero is a good guy.2. Shakespeare is a good guy. 3. Therefore Prospero is Shakespeare. (Orperhaps it is 1, 3, 2; or even 3, 2, 1.)

Despite the logical fallacy of Dowden’s argument, there are, asDavenant and Dryden identified, parallels between Prospero’s art ofmagic and the art of the theater. The play’s first scene is a good example.The dramatic opening stage direction, A tempestuous noise of thunderand lightning heard: Enter a Ship-master and a Boatswain, pitches us intothe pitch and roll of the eponymous tempest, as the bewildered passengerson the storm-tossed ship listen to the mariners exchanging increasinglydesperate and technical instructions: ‘‘take in the topsail’’ (1.1.6), ‘‘downwith the topmast! Yare’’ (1.1.33), ‘‘we split, we split’’ (1.1.59). We thinkwe are in the middle of a ‘‘real’’ storm, but the next scene reveals that thiswas a theatrical illusion, magicked up by Prospero from the island to bringhis enemies into his power. The seafarers were never in danger: the eventslooked believable but were created out of a few props and a believablescript. As in a play, events happen, controlled by an unseen dramatist, tofurther a yet unknown plot. Throughout the play Prospero controls theother characters like a playwright, filling out their back-stories, creatingencounters by bringing them together or keeping them apart, and creating

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a denouement in which all is revealed. He refers to his magic as ‘‘mineart’’ (1.2.292) and uses theatrical props – a disappearing banquet table, aline of glistering apparel (stage direction, 4.1.193), a play-within-a-playfor the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda. And when he vows to giveup his magic the speech, represented on the Poets’ Corner monument,seems to draw on the language of theater, in particular in its evocation ofthe ‘‘great globe’’ (4.1.153; the name of the Shakespeare company theateron Bankside).

Saying that Prospero’s role in the play is akin to that of a dramatistdoes not, however, mean he is a Shakespearean self-portrait. Other figureselsewhere in the canon share these qualities – Iago, the arch-plotter ofOthello; the Duke who manipulates events in the guise of a friar inMeasure for Measure; Paulina, the keeper of secrets in The Winter’sTale – and we might see the self-reflexivity of The Tempest alongsidethat of Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both of which performinset plays which occasion commentary on the nature of theater and theblurred lines between illusion and reality. But the idea that Prospero is apicture of Shakespeare has drawn strength from the persistent claim thatThe Tempest is the playwright’s final play before retiring to Stratford.Prospero’s farewell to his magic becomes Shakespeare’s to the theater, andthe Epilogue’s poignant appeal for ‘‘release’’ (Epilogue, 9), forgiveness,and applause a final curtain-call for the King’s Men’s superannuatedplaywright.

In fact we do not know that The Tempest, written and performedin 1610–11, is Shakespeare’s final play: no reliable external evidencecan guarantee its order alongside the other late plays The Winter’sTale and Cymbeline. It is because we want the Epilogue to read asShakespeare’s farewell to the stage that we place The Tempest at the endof Shakespeare’s career, and then use that position to affirm that the playmust dramatize Shakespeare’s own feelings. We know that he workedon Two Noble Kinsmen and All Is True with John Fletcher afterwards,so it was certainly not his last writing for the stage. In fact his lastperformed words may have been Theseus’s rather unsonorous ‘‘Let’s gooff / And bear us like the time’’ (5.6.136–7) at the end of Two NobleKinsmen (most scholars attribute the Epilogue to that play to Fletcheras co-author). And we also know that in 1613 Shakespeare boughtproperty in Blackfriars near to the theater – the first time he appears tohave purchased in London – thus giving the lie to the sentimental ideathat he was withdrawing from the hurly-burly to the quiet of Stratford(and setting aside that the movement for Prospero is quite the opposite:he is returning from retirement to active life as Duke of Milan). It hasbeen suggested that Prospero is Shakespeare the actor, retiring from thefray to concentrate on writing, perhaps on preparing his own complete

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works like his rival Ben Jonson (see Myth 4); relatedly, the position ofThe Tempest as the first play in the First Folio (1623) has been readas a recognition that in it Shakespeare asserts an authorial identity. Buteven if external evidence did not compromise the reading of Prosperoas Shakespeare, it is still an anachronistic assumption that any earlymodern dramatist ever wrote autobiographically (see Myths 7, 10, and18). Instead, as we have repeated in the essays in this book, the ability tosee issues from multiple perspectives and to make competing world viewsequally compelling is intrinsic to successful dramaturgy, is encouragedby the rhetorical training of the Elizabethan grammar schools, and isappropriate to a culture in which literary expression was public andparticipatory rather than private and confessional.

The readings of The Tempest that draw on the play’s place in an assumedchronology of Shakespeare’s writings are not, however, unique to this play.Writing early in the twentieth century, Lytton Strachey argued strenuouslyagainst the chronological assumptions of Victorian scholarship. Stracheycountered the general idea that the mind of the artist could be deduced fromthe character of the art, and in particular scorned the narrative that ‘‘aftera happy youth [the writing of the comedies] and a gloomy middle age [thetragedies] he reached at last – it is the universal opinion – a state of quietserenity in which he died.’’3 The implications of Strachey’s trenchant rejec-tion of this explanatory framework are far-reaching. If The Tempest hasbenefited from assumptions about the aesthetic values of ‘‘lateness,’’ so toohave other plays been pigeonholed though chronological evaluation. Asone critic pointedly asks: ‘‘how many unexpected virtues would suddenlyappear in The Two Gentlemen of Verona if it were proven to date from1597, or . . . 1603? Its reliance on duologues and soliloquy, for example,no longer a mark of immaturity, might emerge rather as a strategicallydisintegrative gesture functioning as a check on conventional romanticmomentum’’: the counterfactual scenario here sardonically reveals thatapparently chronological words like ‘‘early,’’ ‘‘late,’’ and ‘‘mature’’ carryimplicit value judgments and predetermine our critical response.4 We pre-fer a chronology that places the mechanicals’ bathetic love tragedy of‘‘Pyramus and Thisbe’’ (the inset play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream),in which the lovers mistakenly kill themselves each believing the other tobe dead, after its more somber equivalent of Romeo and Juliet, but thereis no external evidence to certify this order. We expect the earliest historyplays, 2 and 3 Henry VI, to show immaturity when compared with thelater ones, and, lo and behold, the plays’ depiction of claim and counter-claim in the Wars of the Roses seems to support that expectation. Moderncollected editions of Shakespeare’s plays, in particular the Oxford Shake-speare (edited by Wells and Taylor) and the Norton Shakespeare whichfollowed its text, often order the plays by presumed chronology. While

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this gives readers used to the generic divisions of the First Folio of 1623some unexpected and fruitful juxtapositions – attitudes to battle and tocourtship in the adjacent Much Ado About Nothing and Henry V, forinstance, or the bleak fairy-tale of the revised King Lear (see Myth 24)alongside Cymbeline – it ultimately privileges an implicitly biographicalreading: the chronology is that of the author’s life.

Strachey proposes commercial rather than autobiographical impera-tives: attentive to the fairy-tale aspects of Shakespeare’s last plays, heargues that their happy endings show an awareness of genre rather than‘‘serene tranquillity on the part of their maker.’’ If they reveal anythingabout Shakespeare’s mind, it is that ‘‘he was getting bored’’; ‘‘he is nolonger interested, one often feels, in what happens, or who says what,so long as he can find place for a faultless lyric or a new, unimaginedrhythmical effect, or a grand and mystic speech.’’5 Whereas many schol-ars wanted to establish The Tempest as Shakespeare’s last play and toread into that position a corresponding and culminatory wisdom, theplay as the benign and humane pinnacle of his dramatic career, Stracheysees it here as a decline. Shakespeare is losing his touch, rather thanascending some mystical poetic throne. It’s a view echoed in more prosaicterms a hundred years later in a newspaper article by Gary Taylor. Underthe headline ‘‘Shakespeare’s Midlife Crisis,’’ Taylor argued that after aperiod of high commercial popularity in the 1590s, Shakespeare’s careerafter 1600 was in the doldrums. ‘‘Like many other has-beens,’’ Taylorcontinues provocatively, ‘‘Shakespeare in his 40s tried to rescue his sink-ing reputation by recycling his 20s and 30s.’’6 His collaborations withJohn Fletcher become, in this revisionist argument, a desperate attemptby a worn-out writer to piggy-back on a younger one (rather than, asthey have tended to be seen, the work created by an apprentice workingunder the supervision of the old master: see Myth 24).

So, reading The Tempest as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage is notsupported by the evidence about Shakespeare’s career, and imposes ananachronistically autobiographical framework on dramatic writing. It isalso, as noted above, crucially dependent on a reading of Prospero’s char-acter as benevolent sage, attentive to his only daughter, using his learningto bring about harmony and reconciliation, forgiving rather than punish-ing those who have done him wrong. In fact, this positive interpretationoverlooks problematic aspects of Prospero’s characterization, and thesecan be discussed in relation to his ‘‘slave’’ Caliban.

Since at least the late nineteenth century when the scholar SidneyLee discussed knowledge of the New World in early modern England,The Tempest has been connected with stories of exploration and, moredistantly, with the early colonization of the Americas. This reading of

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the play has gained ground, particularly because of significant post-colonial rewritings – among them the Martinique poet Aime Cesaire’sUne Tempete (1969) – of its parable of language, domination, and defeat.When the French/Madagascan psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni’s bookPsychologie de la colonalisation was translated into English in 1956, ithad the title Prospero and Caliban. We might sum up the shift in criticismby pointing to the difference between Frank Kermode, introducing thesecond Arden edition of the play in 1954 with the brisk ‘‘it is as wellto be clear that there is nothing in The Tempest fundamental to itsstructure of ideas which could not have existed had America remainedundiscovered,’’ and Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan’sperspective in the third edition of the Arden series in 1999: ‘‘the exten-sive and varied discourses of colonialism, many critics argue, are deeplyembedded in the drama’s language and events’’ such that the play is‘‘a theatrical microcosm of the imperial paradigm.’’7 A similar shift ininterpretative priorities has taken place in the theater. After JonathanMiller’s 1970 staging of the play it has been hard to recover a sym-pathetic Prospero unmarked by colonial guilt. As reviewers describedthat landmark production, Prospero was ‘‘a solemn and touchy neurotic,the victim of a power complex’’ who ‘‘has arrogated to himself thegod-like power of the instinctive colonist . . . by the end the cycle ofcolonialism is complete: Ariel, the sophisticated African, picks up Pros-pero’s discarded wand, clearly prepared himself to take on the role ofbullying overlord.’’8 Recent Prosperos have tended to be so unpleasantthat any association with Shakespeare would reflect very badly on theplaywright himself.

Notes

1 The lines in Shakespeare read: ‘‘The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,/ The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shalldissolve; / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rackbehind.’’

2 Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1875), pp. 319–20.

3 Lytton Strachey, ‘‘Shakespeare’s Final Period,’’ in Literary Essays (London:Chatto & Windus, 1948), p. 2.

4 Anthony B. Dawson, ‘‘Tempest in a Teapot: Critics, Evaluation, Ideology,’’ inMaurice Charney (ed.), ‘‘Bad’’ Shakespeare: Reevaluations of the ShakespeareCanon (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 1988), p. 62.

5 Strachey, ‘‘Shakespeare’s Final Period,’’ pp. 11–12.6 Gary Taylor, ‘‘Shakespeare’s Midlife Crisis,’’ Guardian, 3 May 2004.

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7 The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Methuen, 1954; repr. 1958),p. xxv; The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan,Arden (London: A. & C. Black, 2001), pp. 39–40.

8 Reviews by Eric Shorter and Michael Billington, excerpted in John O’Connorand Katharine Goodland, A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance1970–2005, vol. 1: Great Britain, 1970–2005 (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2007), pp. 1357–8.