The Tempest

1
The Tempest

• First lecture

2
Performance of Act III, scene 1

• This will happen at 3 p.m., so well finish the
  lecture at this point.
• The student actors, from the BFA program are Josh
  Keeler and Samantha Stinger.
• Their director is Professor Irwin Appel, from
  Dramatic Art.

3
Shakespeares most experimental play

• The Tempest feels like Shakespeares last play.
• (Though Henry VIII, written with John Fletcher,
  is his actual last play.)
• Prospero isnt Shakespeare, but when P. bids
  farewell to his art at V.3.33ff, we feel it has
  something to do with Shs retirement from the
  theater and his return to Stratford that year.
• And the metatheatricality of the play, the way
  it refers so often to theatrical processes, gives
  us a sense it has to do with playwrighting.
• Its certainly his most experimental play.
• Strange characters Ariel and Caliban.
• A plot driven partly by magic.
• Observing the unities of time and place a
  first for Shakespeare
• A wedding masque enacted by spirits.
• And Ben Jonson, Shakespeares colleague and
  friend (well, sort of), seems to have disliked
  it.

4
Bens critique

• Jonsons own plays are mostly set in London, his
  characters, while comic exaggerations, are London
  types.
• In the Induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614),
  Jonson has his spokesman, the Bookholder,
  indicate what the audience will not find in his
  play
• There is no servant-monster or a nest of
  antics.
• Jonson is loath to make nature afraid in his
  plays, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and
  such like drolleries, to mix his head with other
  mens heels, let the concupiscence of jigs and
  dances reign as strong as it will amongst you.
• The servant-monster must Caliban, and the
  nest of antics refers almost as obviously to
  the dancers of The Tempest or WT.
• In both plays, Sh. mixes his head with other
  mens heels and includes country dances.
• Ben disliked the reliance on fantasy, on the
  strange and outlandish.
• Characters and events that can happen only in the
  imagination.
• But more than subject matter he disliked
  theatricality that isnt afraid of dancing,
  music, exotic theatrical effects.
• Even though The Tempest observes the unities.

5
Dating, sources, text

• As we noted in discussion of WT, the play was
  performed at court on Nov. 1, 1611.
• There is no narrative source for the play . . .
• . . . a distinction it shares with Midsummer
  Nights Dream and Merry Wives of Windsor.
• Two minor but interesting sources
• In 1610 a document was circulating in manuscript
  (not printed until 1625) by William Strachey
  called A True Report of a Wrack.
• Described the shipwreck of the Sea-Venture, the
  flagship of a flotilla going to Virginia, wrecked
  on Bermuda.
• Contained descriptions of a storm and various
  elements of Bermuda.
• And Michel de Montaignes essay Of Cannibals,
  which praises the inhabitants of the New World
  (Brazil) and imagines the possibility of an
  earthy paradise there.
• Translated by John Florio and published in 1603.
• It forms the basis of Gonzalos discourse on a
  utopian commonwealth.
• The text of the play is the First Folio of 1623,
  where it appears as the first play.

6
Metatheatricality

• Is Sh. having some fun with Ben Jonson?
• In spite of all the bizarre romance material of
  the play and the fact that the plot stretches
  over 12 years
• the play observes the unity of time and place.
• P. asks Ariel (I.2.239) What is the time o th
  day?
• And learns that its just after 2 p.m. (when
  plays began at the Globe). Lots to do before 6.
• At beginning of Act V, Ariel says its 6.
• Bosun says (V.1.223) that three glasses since
  three hours ago we gave the ship up for lost.
  
• Hey, Ben, I can do the unities if I want.
• The storm and shipwreck pulling out all the
  theatrical stops thunder, squibs for lightening,
  lots of noise.
• And very realistic sailing commands to keep a
  ship off a lee shore bring her to try with the
  main course.
• But all fake!
• Miranda was terrified, but Prospero says there
  was no harm just his art.
• Prosperos speech to Miranda, to Ariel, to
  Caliban a kind of jokey way of doing
  exposition? Teasing the audience too? And Ben?
• Dost thou attend me? Thou attendst not!
  Dost thou hear?
• The quarreling with Ariel and Caliban Ben
  Jonsons favorite way of doing exposition was to
  have two characters come on stage quarreling with
  each other.

7
More metatheatricality

• What are we supposed to believe about the island?
• How lush and lusty the grass looks, Gonzalo
  says.
• The ground indeed is tawny, Antonio replies.
• Theyre both pointing to the same bare stage of
  the Globe.
• Which do we believe? A version of the Dover
  Cliff problem from Lear.
• Prosperos wedding masque some vanity of mine
  art.
• Spirits, which by mine art/ I have from their
  confines called to enact/ My present fantasies
  (IV.1.121-23).
• Interrupted in a way that again reminds us were
  in a theater.
• And Prosperos speech that points also! -- to
  the theater and to London (ll. 146ff).
• And the epilogue spoken by Prospero that
  enlists the audience in the business of ending
  the story and the play.
• And in the theme of forgiveness as well.
• Which makes explicit the collaboration of the
  audience in the whole project of theater.
• Shakespeares constant insistence on the role of
  the audience.
• (Very different from Ben Jonsons attitude toward
  audiences.)

8
Prospero

• Not an easy-going guy!
• Does his experience explain that?
• He had been a devoted scholar for the liberal
  arts/ Without a parallel (I.2.73-74).
• Me (poor man) my library was dukedom large
  enough.
• In a way, he becomes a kind of fantasy of the
  Renaissance man, the magus who could, through
  mastery of arcane learning, control the elements.
  
• And also of the artist who could body forth his
  imaginative life?
• But the result was to neglect the real business
  of being a duke (and to neglect the real business
  of life?).
• Which meant near death and 12 years of exile.
• And the result of his indulgent treatment of
  Caliban?
• Will he allow himself to be inattentive in the
  future.
• Or to control everything?
• Finally, what does he intend in the round-up of
  his enemies?
• How can they be properly punished?
• Does he know?
• How can he be sure that Ferdinand is not some
  spoiled aristocratic jerk?