[ AN ANTI-ANTI-PRESENTIST
READING ]
by
Kalu Singh
[Spring
2006/Autumn 2007]
I intend to attempt a challenge to the received interpretation of The
Tempest.
This project accepts that
the play is a masterpiece. I am not an adolescent trying to ride into fame by
inventing spurious controversy. The received interpretation, I will argue, is
plausible only by a wilful mis-seeing that has become culturally, and
individually, unconscious. There are some parts of it that I find
uncontroversial and with which I agree. But I will show that most of its major
conclusions are so muddled that reading against the avowed intellectual
paradigm of the play, one can disclose a conflict Shakespeare fails to resolve.
If Eliot is allowed to advance the possibility that Hamlet is an “artistic
failure”, I hope I may suggest that The Tempest fails in a similar
way.
One popular element of the received interpretation is that the play
contains autobiographical resonance & interpolations. My challenge will
also include ad hominem elements: though very few.
THE RECEIVED INTERPRETATION
Its basic tenets are:
a)
The dominant theme of the play is
forgiveness and hope of reconciliation, instantiated by the great soul
Prospero. This foregrounds ethics & theology.
b)
The fascination with the human
potential for dominion over Nature, over other natural beings and over other
supernatural beings: and, contra Kurtz, the Christian virtue in
renouncing such power and dominion & freeing other beings. This foregrounds
ontology – who or what are the gods of power that Miranda
implores - as well as ethics.
c)
In the post-war period, non-English
critics have fore-grounded the colonial politics of this play, set outside
d)
It is Shakespeare’s farewell to the
stage. This foregrounds autobiography.
I anticipate that the principle retorts to my argument will be that it
is vitiated by presentism and irrelevant moralising. So I would
like to sketch some remarks on the content and psychology of these forms of
rebuttal. This section may be skipped or
read later. The main essay begins at My New Lenses.
Presentism is a pejorative term to castigate
those who transfer present ideas and values into descriptions and explanations
of past historical events – whether political, theological or artistic.
Anti-presentism is a kind of anti-foundationalism. After Marx & Sartre, it
is no longer tenable to argue that there is a human essence that is timeless,
ahistorical, asocial, given: all human values are constructed. We might
fail to understand how even present values within our own society are
constructed – ideological false consciousness etc - so it is not surprising that we might
misinterpret the desires of mortals far way in time and space.
And yet, all human societies are based on values and narratives
that are treated foundationally. Most world religions include an
assertion/axiom of the absolute equality of all humans before God. Alas, most societies soon establish
hierarchies based on minor differences, which are argued to be eternal.
Hinduism seems to assert equality before eternity in order to justify
the caste system, a brilliantly cunning but utterly shameful trick by the
self-ascribed top-caste Brahmins. All other hierarchies are but diluted forms
of this depravity.
What kind of arguments are the following?
a)
Many members of the English
aristocracy in the 1930 casually resorted to loose anti-semitic jibes – but
they weren’t anti-semitic like the Germans or the Russians.
b)
There were no pogroms or expulsions
of Jews in the
c)
"When I was coming up in
(
d)
“A woman’s place is in the
home” and/or “A
woman’s place (in the revolution) is on her back”
Argument (b) whether standing alone, or to support argument (a) is just
historically wrong. There were expulsions – for in 2006 we celebrated the 350
anniversary of the re-admittance of Jews to the
Anti-presentists
argue that because some present words were unknown in an earlier period, or
because the modern inflections and meanings of certain words from the past are
so utterly different from the original usage, then it is unfair to berate past
communities with them. This is easier
seen with words such as ‘electro-magnetism’ and ‘‘3D-Cinema’ than with
‘pre-nup’ or ‘civil partnership’ or ‘married-priest’ or ‘equality’ or ‘justice’.
Perhaps anti-presentists are closer to a foundationalist like
Ecclesiastes than they would like to be. The Preacher said “There is no new
thing under the sun”. He is obviously not talking about ipods and
liposuction! I’d guess that most Third World Catholics don’t know that for the
first eleven centuries priests were not forbidden to be married. Christ did not appear in 1139 in
A SIMPLE REFUTATION OF ANTI-PRESENTISM
The defining and assertion of an orthodoxy instantly and logically
defines the heterodoxy. If the orthodoxy states X, then the heterodoxies
are varieties of Not-X, both opposites and contraries. People in the
past who believed X, did-not not-know
Not-X which people in later centuries believed: in fact the people from the two
different centuries could have a discussion. . This is a crucial point to
refute the implication of absolute ignorance in the past that anti-presentists
require. What is puzzling from a
psychological rather than logical point of view is how & where the
‘knowledge’ of the heterodoxies, Not-X, is held.
Some historians propose that the Ten Commandments, the basis of the
three vainest world religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - were/are the mere contraries and opposites of
a sufficiently ethical form of life in Egypt & Canaan. Consider for a
moment, the emotional structure of language : it tells us that it is positive
assertion that, in the sexist metaphor,
‘wears the trousers/toga”. X trumps Not-X! The Actor trumps the
Reactor! I don’t know if the Egyptians
had a code that advocated Thou shalt commit adultery or Thou shalt
kill. But it can be argued there was (and remains) an emotional failure in
the strangely irreligious legalism instantiated by the Mosaic form of
commandment – Thou shalt not do
X : a point wittily captured in the alternative decalogue: “Thou shalt not kill, but need not strive,
officiously, to keep alive”
Of
course a truly divine commandment to all equal humans to help
them with the fact of death would state Do all you can to keep all other
humans humanly-alive. This might/should include the idea of quality
of life, that a patient might deteriorate to a point after which you don’t
strive officiously to keep alive. I would argue that the commandment is not
given in the more ethical form for political reasons. Merely not-killing one’s
enemies, or even one’s relatives, allows one to let them die because our
community won’t share the resources of food, shelter & fuel with them.
Perhaps surprisingly, or perhaps not, the givers & holders of that
commandment, the Jews, went on to
designate their highest award, Righteous Among the Nations, to those
who precisely keep the harder commandment, rescuers like Schindler &
Foley or even blustering Bob Geldolf.
Try a thought experiment – try to generate the affect that goes with the
following contrary of Commandment Seven – “Do be loyal to your
married (sexual) partner – their body and their creativity & their
conversation”. The received commandment & interpretation from 3000BC
ends with President Clinton saying before the State’s lawyers and priests; I
did not have sexual relations with that woman”
Eny Fule Kno that it is not hard to hold in mind the
opposite/contrary to any given rule: X & Not-X. Belief is giving emotional
assent to a statement (belief/rule) to such an intensity that the forms of behaviour
dictated and allowed by the contrary feel comfortably, and not reluctantly or
coercively, closed to one’s desires and intentions. Psychoanalysis can give countless examples of
psychopathology which results in beliefs being held with the surface experience
of comfort & socially functioning well-being: but there being a deeper
strata of ambivalence or opposite desire which is contained only by the
unconscious means of symptoms.
Beliefs, conscious and unconscious, collect affect and are strengthened
by affect. These strata of affect support the belief and its contribution to
well-being. Continuing in this metaphor, the intellectual assent – after many
years - to the opposite belief, can feel
as if it initiates an earthquake within one’s deepest layers of being. The new
belief will take time to bed in, to become part of the Self. By 1560 some
English men & women– including Shakespeare’s kin - had, within 30 years,
had to go from Catholicism to Protestantism to Catholicism to Protestantism. By
1990 some Germans had gone from Nazism to Communism to Americanism. At the
time, Gunter Grass remarked this was asking too much from people’s psyches. But
one must not forget the (logical) fact that whatever one’s beliefs, the
contraries of those beliefs will continue to reside at the edge of reason and
feeling. People make their adjustments to their presence as virtue and
pathology guide. (Alas Grass!)
We saw above that even the commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill is
compromised by an ambivalence about equality – the supposedly first
presupposition of the human community given by God. There are a set of basic
comparative phrases that each child will come to learn – the same as, as
good as, as deserving of compassion and help as, as deserving of generosity and
excess as. The hardest tasks in the
world are to decide who can be and should be the comparators and what are the
political as well as moral consequences of these decisions. “He is the same
as me.” “She is as good as him.” “The Dalits are as deserving of compassion
& help as the Brahmins.” “The Jew is as X as The Arab”.
To reiterate my basic
point: if a person has been taught, whether kindly or tyrannically – “You
& Me & Us are better than Group-Other, for reasons R1-10” – he
or she still might have experienced moments (or hours) when s/he has puzzled
over the contrary “I, him, and us are
not better than Group-Other : reasons 6-9 are flimsy” . This may eventually
lead to the budding belief : “I am no better than X. Differences in
opportunity based on the four cardinal differences - in gender, race, religion or power - are
morally untenable. He, she, they deserve
my compassion and help. I wish them the best State opportunities & the good
fortune Life has granted me. One of my life-tasks is to change the State to
facilitate this.”
Is it tendentious to say
that this, Belief-HB, is the highest order of humanity (and spirituality) ?
How and why does a person
fall into doubt and puzzlement about beliefs s/he was taught in childhood &
youth, in the home, school, church and civic hall? Is it moral intuitionism –
that slightly mystical branch of ethics?
Or is it the simpler point that orthodoxies only ever imperfectly hide
heterodoxies: each statement and each narrative contains – between the lines –
contraries, corollaries and opposites? I think of those laser pictures that
contain two dissimilar embedded images – each visible from a different angle.
Perception always involves
not-seeing as well as seeing: remembering always involves not-recalling as
well as recalling/reconstructing: (moral) understanding always involves
rejecting possible perspectives of sympathy and assistance. In a beautiful
Copernican shift, a neuro-scientist recently explained that the middle-aged
person’s sense of a weakening memory is not due to a failing of the power to
collect from the memory-bank: but a mis-direction of effort, a tendency to try
to collect too much of the background in which the principle memory is
embedded, such that it is not quite recognised, grasped & named.
Science is said to be that
modality & perspective of knowing that any and all persons can occupy
without prejudice to themselves or others. Alas, almost all religions, in
practice, and even in theory, do not include that much democracy and equality!
The work of the
psychoanalyst Matte Blanco is one of the great advances in trying to understand
how humans, babies, children and adults learn and live with the diurnal task of
sameness-recognition. He reminds us of how much affect there is in the supposedly
affectless experience of thinking: and thereby discloses how much difficulty
there may be in displacing a familiar thought.
Finally, how does one live
with the Highest Belief? Let us reread it:
“I am no better than X.
Differences in opportunity based on the four cardinal differences - in gender,
race, religion or power - are morally untenable. He, she, they deserve my compassion and help.
I wish them the best State opportunities & the good fortune Life has granted
me. One of my life-tasks is to change the State to facilitate this. I guess
I’ll be a different person by then”
Ignorant mockers castigate
Freud for his complacent vanity about the worth of the explanatory value of his
new science of the human mind, psychoanalysis. But there are many occasions in
his writings when Freud, with humility and awe, concedes the laurels of
understanding to the poets – especially the Greeks & Shakespeare. It would
be jejeune to try to find a comprehensive or consistent moral & political
paradigm in Shakespeare’s Complete Works: and then to deduce intentionality and
biographical detail. There may be works like Vivian’s The Shakespearean
Ethic or Kott’s Shakespeare, Our
Contemporary that assert more persuasively than others that there is a
discernible dominant set of beliefs among that luminescent milkyway of negative
capability. It should be obvious
that Kott’s very title implies an anti-anti-presentist reading. One would like
to think Shakespeare believed in the Highest Belief, as much as Jesus
& Buddha, and Paine & Marx
& Wollstencraft & Fanon did: or
even as much as de Sade did, as a
reference point to scorn and degrade. But in the end all one can do,
like Freud, is attempt some critical archaeology.
MY METHODOLOGY
How might one proceed? We
can foreground the plays in which Shakespeare himself foregrounds these puzzles
of difference & sameness and of equality of opportunity & hope. Let us
stay with what I call the four cardinal differences – gender, race, religion,
power - and sketch how Shakespeare confirmed or subverted received ideas about
them in his artistic development. This will form the background to my
re-examination of The Tempest.
REFERENCES
I have used various
editions of The Tempest : Signet,
All Shakespeare quotations
are given in black italic. No line references are given in this draft. But Tempest
quotes will be easy to trace within the scene reference. All quotations
from other authors will be given in plain italic.
1)
POWER
1a) Human Political Power
This is power based on a
human ideology centred on the idea of hereditary right and hereditary virtue,
not on lived merit. The absolute ruler, the King, is shown brought down to the
level of his lowliest subjects. Even an early play like Henry VI has the
speech where a King compares his life with a shepherd. Richard II is
Shakespeare’s most overtly political play – for it shatters the received
ideology of the divinity of kingship: and shows a subordinate aristocrat
(Bolingbroke) assume kingship by cunning and force. Like Middleton’s A Game
at Chess, this play got people – but not Shakespeare - into trouble, even
prison. In comparison, Lear’s inditements of power seem stylised: and of course
they are undercut by the ambiguities of madness. By contrast, in the prologue
to The Taming of the Shrew we are shown a tinker transported to the
aristocratic state, but then mocked.
1b) Human Knowledge Power
This is power based only
on knowledge & skill – know-how & can-do – and is utterly indifferent
to all other distinguishing characteristics – political rank, gender, race,
religion etc. Statecraft is a form of knowledge which, in fact, Shakespeare’s
ruler’s rarely possess. Obviously, for mortals, knowledge is most precious when
it prevents death. The ailing King in Alls Well That Ends Well places
his life in the hands & brain of anon-court, upper-middle class
orphan-girl,
2: GENDER
The woman who has been
denied, by the State, formal equality of access to knowledge is shown to have somehow
raised herself beyond male understanding: Portia in The Merchant of
But Shakespeare doesn’t
argue that Portia be given the Dogeship or even a consultancy role to the
judiciary of
3: RACE
The Other by colour and background
is shown to have the ability and goodwill to protect our community : Othello.
He is contrasted with Aaron, the
homicidal Moor (with a Jewish name) in Titus
Andronicus..
4: RELIGION
The Other, by religion, is
allowed to argue his equality with our community: but then shown to be
intrinsically merciless & wicked and so deserving of humiliation: Shylock
in The Merchant of
SHAKESPEARE’S MORAL PARADIGM & HIS CARNIVALS
Before moving onto the
play itself we must further clarify the parameters of moral comment in literary
criticism.
An author - novelist or
dramatist or filmmaker – presents a group of characters who respond to changing
circumstances with changing actions. The characters are shown as existing and
belonging to a shared community whose theo-political ideology has set certain
moral ideas & ideals: the community moral paradigm, CMP. One can imagine a
play or film in which there is a complex multi-cultural society that includes
two or even three distinguishable CMPs: and in which the story or main theme is
the tension between the CMPs. But let’s stick to one for a moment, and use a
play.
We can and should always
ask - Where is the author, and where is the author’s CMP, in the play?
a) He could be the narrator or just a
character in his own play.
b) He could be a transparent mouthpiece in
the play.
c)
He
could structure the moral resolution of the play such that an audience:
(i)
Intuits
that he is happily aligned with the CMP he shares with the audience.
(ii)
Intuits
that he is challenging the CMP that he, like the audience, has inherited.
(iii)
Knows
rather than intuits, from his non-artistic pronouncements, his belief in or his
challenge to the CMP.
d) He could make it impossible to find in
his play (and corpus) any clear alignment or any clear challenge : except at
such a high level of generalisation as to be worthless for a biographical
appraisal. This is Eliot’s aspirational line of impersonality.
But one should not let
this last artistic choice draw one into magical thinking, or the despairing
ignorance of the remark – We just can’t know what the author believed.
Imagine someone arguing that, despite all the documentary evidence of his
working life, Hitler really loved Jews, the Torah, the
a) Shakespeare believed it was worthwhile writing
difficult plays & not merely hacking out cash cows: and that he chose to
show certain CMPs with certain moral resolutions.
b) He chose not to develop (logically and
psychologically) certain themes he had introduced: and some themes he avoided
altogether. Given his God-like negative capability, his hesitations were not
caused by intellectual weakness but by either:
(i)
His
genuine belief in the CMP and his belief that the preservation of this required
hesitation and silence.
(ii)
Lack
of courage to proceed to show the flaws, hypocrisies and failures in the CMP:
and thereby incur the loss of wealth & status, & even liberty, even
life.
Even the playwright
willingly tamed by the authorities has got to be able to count on the audience
finding a resonance with his presentation of suffering & joy. Imagine a
neo-Nazi watching Playing for Time or Sophie’s Choice or Schindler’s
List. An audience member can:
a) Refuse to identify with a character’s
suffering.
b) Deny that the character is suffering.
c)
Insist
that the suffering is deserved.
All three responses
inhibit any kind of aesthetic tension developing in the audience. It becomes a
documentary or a pseudo-snuff movie.
BEING A PART
OF THE AUDIENCE viz The Rest of Us.
Years ago I came across a
ditty: I forget the author:
There is so much good
in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the
best of us.
That it hardly behoves
any of us,
To talk about the rest
of us.
But a play depends on the
shifts in affect that accompany the shifting moral appraisals of the characters
as they traverse Freytag’s pyramid. Not only can the audience judge, it must
judge or cease being an audience.
We
all appraise the distress we sense in the character we are reading about or
watching, before we sympathize or even empathize. “How much pain is
Character-X in? Allowing for the distance in time and culture, would I or
anyone I know feel so much pain in such a way.” Behind such appraisals is
Dostoevski’s mighty challenge: “Imagine
that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men
happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential
and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...and to found that
edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on this
condition?”
Of course this bears the
stigma of his disturbed (& anti-Semitic) interpretation of Christianity,
the setting up of a Christ-like kid. But it still usefully foregrounds the idea
of a zero-sum in the emotions of human connectivity. Other reference points are
the UN charter and, back in the literary world, John Osborne’s character’s
rhetorical question “How much does your safety depend upon the goodwill of
others” : one form of goodwill being a willingness to suffer for others.
I also factor in the
Freudian position, that all humans equally have desires and anxieties, many of
them unconscious but still shaping our actions. The highest humanity is
to facilitate for others the experiences of creating & audiencing and also
the mutually respectful conversations & connectivities of the mouth and of
the genitals. Inhumanity begins with all increments of refusing to facilitate
such experiences: and the worst brutality is to barter another person’s desires
and anxieties for your own gain of position or power or merely selfish
pleasure. Here is an example from a
different art form: Manzoni’s novel, The Betrothed.
The Re-abandoned Heroine : The Nun of
By this criterion the most
tragic figure in the book is Signora Gertrude, the Nun of Monza, suffering the
most dirt and opportunist abuse by other people, despite the comparative
material privileges of her upbringing. Manzoni with great fairness describes
her father as : “ a Prince…his one thought was to preserve the family
fortune.. .the eldest son’s fate to
beget children to torture them and himself in the same way that his
father had done…” (p.17: my emphasis)
Of course such opportunist
paternalist brutality is cross-cultural. There was a Newsnight feature
about three years ago on young women, even now, in Afghanistan/Pakistan being
‘married’ to the Koran and kept in the family house (not even a nunnery), from
puberty to death, to prevent family land being divided and sold. In her
wonderful biography of Lucrezia Borgia, Maria Bellonci refutes the common
cliché of her as the serial killer’s sister-moll. Though she does marry and
have kids and travels and meets artists, she is still a tragic figure. Poor
Gertrude is destroyed young, and then emotionally flayed forever after:
occasionally enjoying the perverse relief of sadism herself. “Whenever she
saw the face a bride – a bride in the obvious and normal sense of the word –
she felt intolerable gnawing envy…. [And also] a bitter envy [of her
convent-school pupils] almost a desire
for revenge… she ill-treated them, she made them pay in advance for the
pleasures they would one day enjoy”
(p.202/205)). These are sublime descriptions of the most tragic
human depravities – parental and theo-pedagogic child abuse.
The references to a
‘bride’ and to ‘pleasures’ are the only mentions of human sexuality, apart from
the menace of rape, in this strangely sexless novel about two lovers. Her
greater tragedy is subsumed by the picaresque odysseys of Renzo and Lucia,
which I found only intermittently emotionally engaging or even interesting. I
feel that Manzoni also abandons her.
Of course the audience
must be fair. It must note and then appraise the author’s choice with respect
to the internal reference point of the narrative. Does it offer:
a) Counsels of Perfection: as commonly given in the theologies that underpin
the CMP. Obviously a play about martyrs will foreground absolute uncompromising
beliefs. Martyrs (theological or political) go for total not muted altruism.
OR
b) Counsels of Sufficiently Honourable
Effort: as commonly given in
psychoanalysis: a paradigm that is often at loggerheads with the CMP. The
defining adjective of this position is of course Winnicott’s good-enough
as in good-enough mother(ing). Here the point is that in the presence of
good-enough effort, any desire to mock or punish is evidence of
psycho-pathology not virtue.
Interestingly, the
corollary adjective ‘bad-enough’ is rarely used. This states that the behaviour
is not merely average-bad, but there is a discontinuity between that
ordinary-bad (range) and
this bad-enough = unacceptably-awful behaviour. My explanation for this
is that there is a difference in the manageability of affect released by
remarking on good-enough behaviour and that released by remarking on bad-enough
behaviour. The limiting-case is the inability of most people, even
late-middle-aged adults, to state clearly what they know experientially and
intellectually is bad-enough behaviour by their family members, especially by
their parents.
The
Enough-Already Calculus!
Truest to life,
Shakespeare shows all his major characters acting with ambivalent as well as
opposing, or at least contrary, motives: and doing varieties of good as well as
harm.Minor characters veer towards type & cliché. We are quick to
extrapolate from one action, particularly a first impression. Perhaps it is a
mark of adolescence to need to judge in black and white. The great
psychoanalyst Matte Blanco would add that this kind of tendency to generalise
is part of the mind’s primary process motions. Therefore a great author factors
in this psychological fact about his audience, and so deliberately induces such
generalisations and the affects that accompany them, and then manipulates them
for aesthetic rather than propagandist effect. The two commonest shocks
(reversals) are when a character shown so-far to be very-good, rather than
average-good, does a dreadful thing eg. Angelo’s proposition to Isabella in Measure
for Measure: and when a character shown so-far to be very-bad, does a
very-kind thing: these latter examples seem harder to find : Lear in King
Lear, Orlando’s brother Jacques in As You Like It. Leontes in The
Winter’s Tale.
The hardest thing for the
audience is to know how and when to make appraisals and judgements, both
interim and summary. To take an example, one knows that reputations are slowly
established and yet destroyed in an instant : Cassio’s speech after his drunken
brawl. Unlike Charles Kennedy, he gets second chance at ultimate power, his
fault, albeit bad-enough, finds extenuation.
The most ridiculous
defence is the common speech “He wouldn’t hurt a fly, he loves animals and
children” spoken of tyrants: as if getting on with alsation-dogs and babies
makes tyranny and mass murder not really bad-enough! Another ridiculous defence
is to say that even at the end of the play you can’t sum up characters because
they have a post-play life (as well as their pre-play lives) of which one knows
nothing. All lit-crit is based on judgement & some plausible extrapolation
from only the text-given incidents. In my essay I will try to reappraise some
behaviours that the received interpretation ignores, fudges, mis-describes or
just hides in great poetry. The denouement of a play is like the final columns
and lines of a moral calculus: the summing-up represents the author’s true
belief or at least an opportunist pandering to his community audience. What if
the characters are given different references, what happens to the play then?
CARNIVAL
It is said that
Shakespeare often introduces the theme of inversion, the world turned upside
down, the Carnivalesque – whether in the city – or the removed realm of the
forest – in order to display the flaws & hypocrisies in society. Often this
glimpse of a different ordering of society approaches what I call the Highest
Belief: but he quickly re-institutes received hierarchies. No doubt it is
unfair to expect him to be Che or Gramsci or even Spartacus. But one can look
for hesitations and contradictions in the way the Carnival is set up and then
the way it is aborted: and reflect on what these might mean. Does Shakespeare
take fright and why? Did Marlow try harder?
MY NEW LENSES
TRAILERS & THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING
Isn’t it every artist’s
dream that the audience enters the gallery & auditorium, or opens the book,
in Bion’s recommended state for psychoanalysts –“without memory or desire -
not with snatches from trailers and reviews which already shape a response
before the arrival at the complete narrative. Should there be a virginal or at
least knowledgeless reading/watching: and always or at least sometimes? It is
an axiom that “Literary criticism is a discussion of the second
reading of a work.” (Anon?) So should criticism include a reading that
attempts to recapture that virginal reading: being as surprised by every new
scene as the characters.
I will proceed act-by-act
& scene-by-scene but not line-by-line: trying to focus on the action
presented and not to anticipate the later action. I will give a brief summary
of the plot/action of the scene. Then, I will give the received interpretation.
I will not quote any authors of the received interpretation until the Appendix:
hoping my summaries are fair-enough. Finally, I will give my interpretation
& commentary.
One
lens is comprised of the four cardinal differences described above – power,
gender, race, religion. The other lens foregrounds six types of failure of
imagination that I believe are cross-cultural and as common & eternal
as rain.
1:
An inability to see people in their real as opposed to ideal relations. (Wilde)
2:
An inability to produce present wincing at the memory of past prancing
cruelties.
3:
An inability to recognise the depravity of child-like spoiling of other’s joy.
4:
An inability to recognise the depravity of adult bystander strategy of
withholding aid.
5:
An inability to protect one’s avowed pleasures.
6:
An inability to see courage as an absolute sui generis virtue, the precondition
of adult humanity and genuine adult dialogue.
Each one adds a little
warp to the mind so lamed: the totality produces someone profoundly disturbed,
even if not sectionable. Now imagine
filtering people you know through these criteria. Now imagine filtering Shakespeare’s
characters through these. Don’t these complement the criteria
Shakespeare has his characters use to judge each other. Surely a great writer
instantiates these failures in his/her characters and has healthier characters
recognise them as failures.
I will refer to other
Shakespeare plays, as all these precede this. I will refer to some other
authors.
My title obviously refers
to Dover Wilson’s 1935 “What Happens In Hamlet”.
========================================================================================================================================
ACT 1 : SCENE 1
PLOT
1: A fatal storm at sea.
2: A ship with two classes
– aristocrats & mariners
3: The aristocrats
interrupt the mariners’ attempts to save the ship: & insult them.
4: The tempest worsens and
fearing death, everyone prays in the Christian idiom.
RECEIVED INTERPRETATION
1: The mariners are
impressively professional and daring.
2: The aristocrats are
officious and dangerous to all, and insulting.
Gonzalo manages to have some witty
thoughts.
3: In a near-death
situation anyone might behave very badly.
COMMENT
1: POWER
In this tiny opening
scene, three modalities of power are clearly introduced, in descending order of
(real) power:
Nature – the tempest
Human Knowledge – the
mariner’s sea-craft
Hereditary Political Power
– the aristocrats
There is a vague fourth,
Fate – to which I return below.
Before human words, we
hear and see the power of the tempest. Though the third word of the play is Master,
this is descriptive of only the hierarchy of professional knowledge. All
the crew, the non-aristocrats, speak respectfully to each other. In great
danger, there is great grace in the Boatswain’s informal encouragement Heigh,
my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! Flush
with adrenaline, he can even commune with Nature herself, Blow, till thou
burst thy wind, if room enough!
The aristocrats know that their lives depend upon the
mariners guiding the ship through the storm. But their awareness that they do not
have the knowledge-power that the mariners possess, that in fact for all their
political power they are right now utterly impotent, does not induce in them
humility and gratitude, but rather intensifies their habitual hauteur. They
interrupt the mariners’ life-saving work. The Boatswain pleads: You mar our labour: keep your cabins:
you do assist the storm. When Gonzalo pulls rank,
the Boatswain gives him the moral lesson of humility & gratitude he is too
arrogant to have seen. You are a counsellor; if you can command
these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not hand
a rope more; use your authority: if you cannot, give thanks you have lived so
long. And
still Gonzalo won ‘t be humbled. In fact he indulges in fantasy of the boatswain’s
death. As psychoanalysts would say, this is pure & simple projection. He
feels the Boatswain’s lesson has ‘killed’ him, and so he tries to evacuate the
death-words and put death back in the Other. I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks he
hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows. He will repeat this weak
but vicious joke twice more.
Being less temperate and witty, Sebastian and Anthony, start
effing & blinding at the Boatswain, whose only reply is to withdraw his
labour. (Obviously Shakespeare’s legal right to the public use of the
vernacular on-stage was limited, but we are to understand the aristocrat’s
language as being at this tone.)
Re-enter SEBASTIAN, ANTONIO, and GONZALO
BOATSWAIN: Yet again! what do you here? Shall we give
o'er and drown? Have you a mind to sink?
SEBASTIAN : A pox o' your throat, you bawling,
blasphemous, incharitable dog!
BOATSWAIN : Work you then.
ANTONIO : Hang, cur! hang, you
whoreson, insolent noisemaker!
We are less afraid to be drowned than thou
art.
The highest gratitude one
can offer the lifesaver is to grant freedom and to acknowledge equality. The
aristocrats aren’t merely in a physical storm, they are in ideological crisis.
They would rather drown than shift positions.
The
Boatswain’s challenge Work you then carries something of the
mixture of despair and rage as Hamlet’s taunting of the unmusical Guildenstern
to play the pipe.
Hamlet : Will you play up this pipe?
Guildenstern : My lord, I cannot.
Hamlet : I
pray you…..[reprise]
Guildenstern : But these cannot I command to any utterance
of harmony.
I
have not the skill.
Hamlet : Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you
make of me!
You would play upon me, you would seem to know my
stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery…
After imagining the Boastwain as dead, Gonzalo thinks of sex, and comes
out with a misogynist joke.
I'll
warrant him for drowning; though the ship were no stronger than a nutshell and
as leaky as an unstanched wench.
Near
death, a person may think of many things, even cheap & tawdry sex-thoughts.
But, in our time recall, the 9/11 ansafone and email affirmations of love sent
by the doomed. Perhaps even
3: RACE
This has no relevance yet.
The
king and prince at prayers! let's assist them…..
The wills above be done!
As
believers know, the Lord’s prayer has a singular will: Thy Will be done. As any lit student
knows, the Elizabethan stage did not allow oaths naming Christ: but there is
plenty of mariolatory: Marry! By Our Lady! etc . So what is the
meaning of the fact that in this first scene, Shakespeare is refusing to fix
the Christian paradigm?
Another way to think about
this scene is to imagine the same emotional structure in an analogous realm of
near-death. Imagine six surgeons in a MASH tent in
All moral judgements stand
on a foundation. Where have we got to in Scene One? Wouldn’t both Christ and
Marx say the following:
a) The mariners were brave and humane
b) The aristocrats were cowardly,
dangerous, ungrateful shit-heads.
The most difficult
questions are
a) Is Shakespeare asking us, the audience
to think these conclusions?
b) And if not these, why not?
c)
And
then which?
ACT 1 SCENE 2
PLOT
1: A middle-aged man and
his daughter on an
2: Prospero has caused the
tempest: Miranda pities the seafarers.
3: Prospero reassures her
no-one is harmed: then tetchily tells their biography.
4: Prospero gives orders
to his supernatural assistant Ariel & to the subnatural Caliban.
5: Miranda falls in love
with the supposedly-dead king’s son, Ferdinand.
RECEIVED INTERPRETATION
Shakespeare quickly
introduces two familiar devices:
a) Aristocrats away from the city.
This is the limiting case:
an island so far away, it is only found by chance – twice.
Here city laws are
suspended: but also natural law. Anything or any creature might be here, even
dragons, even Kong.
b) Familial primal curse
treachery. But unlike Cain & Claudius, Antonio does not kill Prospero.
There is also the familiar distinction between the philosopher-scientist who
semi-abdicates in order to study more and the sensual-materialist who usurps:
cf.The Duke of Vienna & Angelo in Measure for Measure.
Prospero is established as
awesome, Miranda and Ariel as equally delightful children, Caliban as a beast.
COMMENT
1: POWER
By
the end of this scene we’ve seen Prospero
a) Demonstrate power over nature.
c)
Boast of his intellectual power & of lack of
desire for political power
c) Admit powerlessness against mortal
politicians - familial and external.
d) Reveal a faltering power of human
conversation.
e) Boast of his parental skills/power
e) Exult in
his power over his former enemies.
f)
Recall and demonstrate power over a non-human
supernatural being, Ariel & over what he deems a subhuman, Caliban.
g) Be
surprised at his powerlessness at love passing between Miranda & Ferdinand
1a : Power over Nature
In a brilliant
plot-reversal, we are shown a kinsman of the aristocrats of the First Scene,
who were impotent before the power of nature and the knowledge-power of their
own servants, to be absolutely powerful over nature, his family, and the
unusual supernatural beings he found on the island. He may no longer be Absolute
Milan but he is Absolute IslandMan.
Human mythology introduces
supernatural beings, and also human beings granted supernatural powers, but
despite the implications of omnipotence, there is always an illogical weakness.
Obviously a narrative involving more than one truly omnipotent being would
instantly be a stalemate. This logical weakness is rarely fore-grounded, for it
would make the story seem silly.
If Prospero, with his
books and cloak and staff, is such a wondrous magus, then why doesn’t he get a
boat built, staff it with Ariel et al, and even with a five mile limitation
over wind & sea, sail back home, and like Odysseus slaughter all who
surround his wife and rule again? Why does he need a logger like Caliban?.
Like Ibsen, but unlike Marlowe,
Shakespeare rarely says to what purpose his over-reading Philosopher-Princes
are holed up in their studies. We are certainly never told one usable
conclusion from their intense thinking: nothing like - : The
Monarch/Pope/State should introduce access to clean water & sufficient
bread for all people over whom they have power. The Bible is contradictory.
Human laws should reflect the fact that human sexuality is protean. All women
should be educated from age 5.
Why? For sure, a play is not a treatise: but at least Marlowe has a go.
There is the assumption that unworldliness is a good thing. So the self
description:
…Me, poor man, my
library
Was dukedom large
enough.
rides on the virtue of
asceticism implicit in the Beatitude meaning of poor.
The most fundamental
paradox in the play is what kind of theological world has Shakespeare given his
characters to inhabit. Who rules this world – the Christian God? Because most
of the characters are Christians, from the heart of Catholicism, and not a bunch
of Protestant dukes from
Miranda’s first speech
shows she’s not had the ordinary catechism. When she says:
If by
your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them….
Had I
been any god of power, I would
Have sunk the sea …..
she reveals that she knows she lives in a place where humans
can be god-like in ruling Nature, which may or may not be a god. It is doubtful
that this would be a Sunday Sermon in the Great Cathedral of Milan. Down the
road, Dante had put all such power-seekers and magicians in Hell for attempting
to usurp the powers of the Trinity. A younger Shakespeare had Hotspur mock
Glyndwr for boasting of supernatural prowess:
Glyndwr I can call spirits
from the vasty deep.
Hotspur Why, so can I, or
so can any man;
But will
they come when you do call for them?
Prohotspuro’s self-explanation for semi-abdication is as
follows:
Prospero
the prime duke, being so reputed
In dignity, and for the liberal arts
Without a parallel; those being all my study….
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies…..
I,
thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated
To closeness and the bettering of my mind
With that which, but by being so retired,
O'er-prized all popular rate…………
……..Me,
poor man, my library
Was dukedom large enough….
This poses a fundamental question : is the pursuit and
maintenance of political power more or less honourable than the pursuit of
knowledge-power as an absolute calling for the Good Man? The Good Life is of
course a Greek concept: the Holy Life (a
Kempis) is a Christian concept. Shakespeare keeps asking this question, in
several plays, but never quite explores it properly. It is already half-answered
in the early play Richard III : when it becomes
obvious that political power requires the cunning and amorality of Machievelli.
Kingship is an intrinsically filthy life.
One obvious comment that Miranda might have made, but
doesn’t, “Why didn’t you
abdicate completely?” Prospero doesn’t offer a reason. In Richard
II
Shakespeare had tackled the most controversial topic of whether English history
contains an abdication or usurpation: both being an absolutely immoral,
unChristian, disgrace: the former for the abdicator and the latter for the
usurper. Shakespeare wants us to think well of Prospero, so I presume we are to
think that he didn’t abdicate because it would be morally wrong: rather than
that he was vain, in wanting to have the name of Duke, while his brother did
the dog-work of State admin.
1c) Impotence against mortal
politicians – familial and
external.
There
is a tragic irony in his phrase,
….being transported
And rapt in secret studies…
for that is what his
treacherous brother does – literally transport him. All his secret studies
couldn’t prevent Antonio’s own secret studies to usurp him. Another more
complex irony will be apparent by the end of the scene. Earlier in his
autobiographical speech he had castigated his brother because he:
…..new
created
The creatures that were mine, I say, or changed 'em,
Or else new form'd 'em; having both the key
Of officer and office, set all hearts i' the state
To what tune pleased his ear;
This is of course Prospero’s modus operandi on the
1d: Faltering Power
of Human Conversation
Dante
famously finds Virgil hoarse from long silence : and many a mother, from
Pharonic times to today’s
There are five phases to
the conversations/dialogues in this Scene.
(Different editions have
‘cloak’ or ‘cape’ or ‘robe’ or ‘mantle’ for the magic-making garment.)
di :
With-Cloak to daughter
dii :
Without-Cloak to daughter
diii : With-Cloak to Ariel
div : With-Cloak to Caliban
dv : With
Cloak to Ferdinand
di & dii: Prospero & Miranda
It is clear both have seen
the tempest and that both are physically and emotionally shaken. He decides
'Tis
time
I should inform thee farther. Lend thy hand,
And pluck my magic garment from me. So:
[Lays down his mantle]
Lie there, my art.
Perhaps the cloak stage
business is just physical theatre. At least some of the audience will have seen
the woodcuts of Faust: many more will have seen Marlowe’s Faust in full
magus rig-out: and some will remember the children’s parable: Truth &
False go swimming. False gets out first and steals Truth’s clothes. There
is an innocent symbolism here: just as he (temporarily) disrobes, he will
reveal his true-self and her true-self to her. But this facile equation of magic-less
& artless = good & honest & true throws a black light
backwards: that the with-cloak actions are a contrary if not an opposite of his
without-cloak actions and, at the least, not-innocent, not-quite-good.
One thing taking the
charmed-cloak off seems to have done is to take off a layer of charm. During
the long exposition Prospero is tetchy. He is anxious about his audience’s
attention, and a captive audience at that, in the benign & malign
sense.
Dost thou attend me?
Thou attend’s not!
Dost thou hear?
This hectoring is psychologically
implausible: for Miranda is about to hear what every child fantasises about -
being a foundling prince or goddess. At best it can be explained by the
artistic necessity to introduce tension into exposition. All early scenes carry
the burden of exposition, sometimes of dramatic fore-events, both for the
audience and also for other on-stage characters. [I once saw a
I’d guess there is an
unintended parallel between Prospero’s three questions to Miranda and the three
questions put to Peter after the crucifixion. But why did Shakespeare choose
this? A deeper interpretation is to say that a person who keeps asking the listener
if they are listening is deeply anxious:
a) that his speech is worthless, or will
be thought so.
b) that the listener suspects a lie when
there isn’t one
c)
that
there truly is something of a lie in the speech, even if the listener will
never find out.
d) The lie might be unconscious: such that
the speaker is unaware
diii : Prospero &
Ariel
Prospero goes from Approach,
my Ariel, come to How now? Moody
to Thou liest, malignant thing in less than a
hundred lines, a few minutes. The tone passes from an affectionate master
calling his servant to challenging to weary repetition to menacing. Ariel
buckles and finally says
Pardon,
master;
I will be correspondent to command
And do my spiriting gently.
A few minutes later Prospero hails him:
Come, thou tortoise! when?
[Re-enter ARIEL like a water-nymph]
Fine apparition! My quaint Ariel,
Hark in thine ear.
There
is something disturbed about traversing such emotions so quickly in a
conversation. I will comment on the hierarchical relationship below.
div: Prospero & Caliban
(and Miranda)
But far more disturbed is
his invitation to Miranda recently woken from a shocked-sleep.
Shake
it off. Come on;
We'll visit Caliban my slave, who never
Yields us kind answer.
At
the plot & stage level, this is a brilliant trailer – get ready folks for
swearing & fighting. We see this: Miranda joins in - echoing her father’s Poisonous
slave with her own Abhorred slave - and Caliban is predictably
humiliated.
dv : Prospero &
Ferdinand & Miranda
Unsurprisingly, Prospero is shown talking gracelessly to Ferdinand, a
fellow-aristocrat. I’ll return to the power relations below. Miranda remarks:
Why speaks my father so ungently?
He replies later:
Silence!
one word more
Shall make me chide thee, if not hate thee.
The scene closes with her explaining to her longed-for
boyfriend:
Be of comfort;
My father's of a better nature, sir,
Than he appears by speech: this is unwonted
Which now came from him.
Of course to her it must seem odd to hear her dad frothing like Caliban:
but for the audience this tone of Prospero’s is already familiar.
1e: Parental (& Pedagogic) Power
It is clear that the mid-teenager Miranda has been allowed (or even
made) to see the tempest and the expected painful death of the seafarers. I am
not a parent but I guess most parents would have protected their child from
such a sight.
The most famous example of protection of a child from horror is in Life
is Beautiful but I was deeply sceptical of this thesis. A recent powerful
example of the failure of the horror lesson is in Brokeback Mountain –
where despite being shown a man castrated by rednecks for his gayness, the boy
grows up gay. Perhaps even Miranda can see that this lesson is too much for a
child, for her first lines are a conditional imperative:
If by
your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
I have
done nothing but in care of thee,
Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter,
And there is truly sublime tenderness when he says:
O, a
cherubim
Thou wast that did preserve me. Thou didst smile.
Infused with a fortitude from heaven,
When I have deck'd the sea with drops full salt,
But returning to his vain exposition, he goes on:
and
here
Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit
Than other princesses can that have more time
For vainer hours and tutors not so careful.
That final noun tutors will have a harsh echo in a few minutes. For when she pleads with her
father to Make not too
rash a trial of Ferdinand, he is
outraged:
What?
I say,
My foot my tutor?
From highest cherubim to lowest foot in a few lines – again!
1f: Power over former Enemies
Here is a test of my anti-anti-presentism, I will argue that
Prospero is engaged in Extraordinary Rendition. This is defined as :
removing one’s enemies from their place of safety & hope of familiar
justice to a place where one can safely torture them into giving knowledge and
make them, in Ariel’s apologetic submission,
correspondent
to command. If Prospero is a torturer, and I believe he
is, then Ariel is the torture’s whore. Of course the seafarers think the
tempest is just bad luck: but the audience has now been told it was intended
suffering. Danger and pain in Shakespeare can quickly get smothered by the high
poetry and lost in the emotionally stylised preambles to plot-shifts. So when
listening to Prospero and Ariel bragging, it is important to keep in mind the
comparatively innocent perspective of Miranda
O, I
have suffered
With those that I saw suffer .
Listen to the lads larfing….
PROSPERO
Hast thou, spirit,
Perform'd to point the tempest that I bade thee?
ARIEL
To every article.
I boarded the king's ship; now on the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flamed amazement: sometime I'd divide,
And burn in many places; on the topmast,
The yards and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly,
Then meet and join. Jove's lightnings, the precursors
O' the dreadful thunder-claps, more momentary
And sight-outrunning were not; the fire and cracks
Of sulphurous roaring the most mighty Neptune
Seem to besiege and make his bold waves tremble,
Yea, his dread trident shake.
PROSPERO
My brave spirit!
Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil
Would not infect his reason?
ARIEL
Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad and play'd
Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners
Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel,
Then all afire with me: the king's son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring,--then like reeds, not hair,--
Was the first man that leap'd; cried, 'Hell is empty
And all the devils are here.'
PROSPERO
Why that's my spirit!
Sixty years ago, the Nazis brought captured US&GB agents to other lands
and tortured them. A few weeks ago (Spring 2006) it was finally admitted that
the US&GB have been bringing their enemy agents & suspected combatants
to other lands to torture them. We have seen the laughter in the photos and
videos of Abu Gharib. During that international scandal, Gerry Adams commented
that the taking of photos of humiliated IRA prisoners was familiar to him from
his days in British custody. The only difference was technology : which
now easily facilitated moving pictures through videos and or camera phones.
That such behaviour is seemingly eternal and a seemingly necessary adjunct of
political power does not mean it can be misdescribed or ignored wherever it
occurs. Had Prospero access to recording media he would surely have filmed his
tempest for those quiet, dull nights back in
I am astonished there can be any doubt about the scandalous
mis-description of this scene in the Received Interpretation. Everyone, baby
and adult and gerontion knows what it is like to be as scared as-if death-next:
everyone has his/her reference point of frantic fragmentation. To take another example : even, and perhaps
especially, people from rural times, like the Elizabethan, will have seen how a
dog or horse repeatedly kicked or just menaced with loud shouts or bangs or
fire, even for a few hours, will have its nerves shot forever. Shakespeare
knew as well as Primo Levi, that a similarly tormented human being is
almost broken forever. So there is something so wretchedly hypocritical in
Prospero, having lavishly enjoyed his revenge, asking next:
But are, they Ariel safe?
Here is where the play is riding on two modalities or genres:
basically true psychological observation and fairy-story/myth. In no ordinary
realm can they be psychologically safe, feel untraumatised, within minutes.
Only in the fairy tale & myth can bad emotions & terrifying experiences
be undone, erased, forgotten quickly.
Later in the scene Prospero is quickly threatening Ferdinand. One of the
features of the mythic landscape is the rule of hospitality: all strangers must
be honoured: a fact that Hamlet in his own hysteria remembers more clearly than
the temperate Horatio Therefore as a stranger give it welcome. Whereas
Prospero menaces the young man:
One
word more; I charge thee
That thou attend me: thou dost here usurp
The name thou owest not; and hast put thyself
Upon this island as a spy, to win it
From me, the lord on't….
… a
traitor. Come;
I'll manacle thy neck and feet together:
Sea-water shalt thou drink; thy food shall be
The fresh-brook muscles, wither'd roots and husks
Wherein the acorn cradled. Follow.
Imagine young men brought to a Cuban island, and
manacled……..
Prospero provokes Ferdinand by these insults, and when the
latter moves to protest, he magically paralyses him and then delivers another
dirty taunt:
Put
thy sword up, traitor;
Who makest a show but darest not strike, thy conscience
Is so possess'd with guilt: come from thy ward,
It’s hardly a fair fight! It is vicious to say Ferdinand
feels guilt. I don’t think Shakespeare has arrived at survivor’s guilt. Perhaps
it is projection – again.
1f: Power over Supernatural
Beings: not honour'd with A human shape.
Let
us reprise what the plot has established by the end of Act 1. Having been cast upon the open sea by a
murderous brother & his confederate, Prospero, a scholar-magus of
As one of Shakespeare’s best loved plays The Tempest has been comparatively free from
controversy. For three centuries, during British political ascendancy it had
almost none, being seen as one of the late great Romances, existing in some
ahistorical realm. But as anti-imperialist movements developed, and with the
flowering of post-colonial lit-crit, the
play has become problematised, the controversy being anchored in this scene.
PROSPERO
We'll visit Caliban my slave, who never
Yields us kind answer.
MIRANDA
'Tis a villain, sir,
I do not love to look on.
But, as 'tis,
We cannot miss him: he does make our fire,
Fetch in our wood and serves in offices
That profit us. What, ho! slave! Caliban!
Thou earth, thou! speak.
How hard to get staff: pretty and polite servants! As I say above, this
speech is logically ridiculous: a magus whose raised a storm – no doubt
displaced trees and water- cannot
miss, do without, a hewer of wood, and drawer of water for a
family of two. It is of course dramatically necessary. The profit
is obviously not capitalist economy profit: but the post-colonial reading is
precisely that : invading and conquering nations seek to find the grail of the
pool of compliant, cheap labour.
Interestingly, no ruler is ever satisfied with mere power,
the subjugated must believe in the legitimising narrative of power.
These narratives contain such ideologically charged concepts as – right of
conquest, civilising force, spreading God’s word to the dumb pagans, economic
miracle : any of which can become the absolute foundational principle.
Political history is mostly a tale of the displacement of earlier foundational
principles. Both Sycorax and Prospero
are agreed – Most powerful
resident rules.
Let us compare foundational narratives, first Prospero:
This damn'd witch Sycorax,
For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible
To enter human hearing, from Argier,
Thou know'st, was banish'd: for one thing she did
They would not take her life. ….
…This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child
And here was left by the sailors….
….Then
was this island--
Save for the son that she did litter here,
A freckled whelp hag-born--not honour'd with
A human shape.
Caliban protests:
This
island's mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou takest from me…
…For 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.
Though he learns in pain and bitterness:
I must obey: his art is of such power,
It would control my dam's god, Setebos,
and make a vassal of him.
What happens when two foundational narratives collide? Who
can adjudicate? Who is to be believed, by what evidence, based on what moral principles?
Of course, the first response is what Prospero says next:
Thou most lying slave.
Why
should we believe Prospero, we’ve already seen him lie and use power to evade a
moral failing, which is rarely noted by critics. The first words between Prospero
and Ariel affirm their respective status – servant and master.
Later Ariel protests:
ARIEL
Is there more toil? Since thou dost give me pains,
Let me remember thee what thou hast promised,
Which is not yet perform'd me.
PROSPERO
How now? moody?
What is't thou canst demand?
ARIEL
My liberty.
PROSPERO
Before the time be out? no more!
ARIEL
I prithee,
Remember I have done thee worthy service;
Told thee no lies, made thee no mistakings, served
Without or grudge or grumblings: thou didst promise
To bate me a full year.
Now either Ariel is telling the truth or he isn’t: and he might be
not-truthing out of forgetfulness or cunning. It is aristocratic vanity to
arrogate all virtues and to cast slaves as barely more moral than animals. All
slave-narratives show masters breaking promises eg Equiano’s The Interesting
Narrative, more often than their slaves – who obviously daren’t.
Between equals, a challenge to a promise would meet the explanation of the
terms of the promise and the extenuation: “Yes I promised after one year:
and there are two days to go – look at this contract and calendar” or “Yes
I promised after a year and it’s two days after. Sorry, but I need you a bit
longer, please” . Of course the latter is impossible for a Master to say,
for that already implies entreaty between equals. So Prospero ignores his own
probable fault and changes the terms of the discussion, irrelevantly reprising
an ancient indebtedness, and so casting Ariel at fault.
Dost thou forget
From what a torment I did free thee?
This is irrelevant: except of course for Shakespeare’s exposition of the
back-story! Prospero within minutes promises Ariel twice more to free him. Only
liars repeat in this manipulative, seductive, occasionally sadistic way.
Very few foundational narratives contain an injunction to the conquerers
to share the available resources with the conquered. The misrepresentation of
the natives as dumb, devious, dangerous legitimises, hierarchy and partiality
and subjugation and even humiliation.
One of the hardest tasks for any writer is to restrain his/her
cleverness so that the streams of the flood of great writing isn’t given to
dumb characters just because he/she can’t bear great lines being lost eg
Stoppard. There is a similar paradox about Caliban’s knowledge and its
expression. Unlike many a low character, he speaks poetry – even when cursing.
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! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
Here Caliban remembers himself & Prospero being mutual
teachers: a utopian state. Consider this speech, long before Edward Said
introduced his paradigm shift:
“
Sagamore… even names the tribe of the poor devil, with as much ease as if the
scalp was the leaf of a book, and each hair a letter. What right have christian
whites to boast of their learning when a savage can read a language, that would
prove too much for the wisest of them all!” (223) Fennimore Cooper’s hero, Hawkeye, is acknowledging the
Mohican’s preeminence in the semiotics (knowledge-power) of the forest. It is
obvious right from the introduction of Caliban, that Shakespeare doesn’t solve
an intrinsic ambiguity about his own created character. Of course this speech
opens up all the puzzles of language that such modern disciplines as
linguistics and child development as well as old philosophy are still
exploring. It would be a task for Chomsky et al to say what kind of
pre-Prospero language Caliban had: after all he had survived by distinguishing
and pointing, even supposedly without naming/gesture/sign: and surely Sycorax
had taught him something. Could
Caliban only show the fresh springs after he’d learned Prospero names for
other things? Unlikely! From the chapter epigraphs, it is clear that Fennimore
Cooper worships Shakespeare: but he doesn’t make his fundamental and
condescending mistake.
Then follows one of the most famous curses in
world-literature:
You
taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
The post-colonialist critics have historicised this famous
speech: foregrounding language displacement and language destruction as tools
of war & colonialism. Think of the wonderful Irish play Translations set on another nearer island, only
a few decades after The
Tempest.
1g: Impotence at other’s Love
Within seconds of Miranda seeing Ferdinand, she is elevated
to a different state of being & desire. Prospero’s first response is
ambiguous.
It
goes on, I see,
As my soul prompts it.
The
history of the world and the literature of the world have ever-proved that one
person can’t make another truly fall in love. There are countless tales of love
potions – eg Shakespeare’s Dream – creating cunning & entertaining
plots, but never love. This seems to be the limit of Prospero’s hubris, that he
feels he has prompted/caused love. Though he soon observes a process outside
his control:
They
are both in either's powers… he wants to, needs to intervene:
….but
this swift business
I must uneasy make, lest too light winning
Make the prize light.
It is worth remembering that Romeo & Juliet manage
between themselves to negotiate the worth and duties of love and desire. Is it fatuous
to conjecture that self-styled Top-Teacher Prospero would have taught Miranda
enough ethics, if not sexual biology,
for her to have a sense of the meaning and worth of her virginity? She
certainly knows lowborn Caliban wasn’t getting it.
So Prospero decides to menace a teenager, recently
traumatised by a shipwreck and the loss of his father and countrymen. (Why do
female comics not to do many father-in-law jokes?) He also lies to Miranda about Ferdinand’s handsomeness.
Thou
think'st there is no more such shapes as he,
Having seen but him and Caliban: foolish wench!
To the most of men this is a Caliban
And they to him are angels.
This is surely more about sexual envy than prudence and
guidance.
2: GENDER
I have discussed in detail elsewhere the lack of mothers in
Shakespeare’s canon. Here I want to look at the three women introduced into the
play in this scene: Miranda, the unnamed Milanese Duchess - Prospero’s wife
& Miranda’s mother- and Sycorax.
Why is the older-man&younger-woman couple so
dramatically interesting. Apart from George Eliot with Dorothea & Casaubon,
I can’t think of many woman-writers using that theme. It’s all over
Shakespeare: it’s in Dr Who: it’s in Sophies World….
Why didn’t Shakespeare take on the Oedipus theme? Yes, Hamlet
– but, as Germaine Greer famously said, Gertrude is a fuckwit : and Sophocles’s Jocasta certainly
isn’t. In any culture of
arranged-marriages, or without companionate-love marriage, the parent &
child become the romantic couple. There was a tv-discussion some years ago with
the title : Are all Indian
men mummy’s boys?
2a : The Duchess of
She, unlike Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, is a cipher: defined only by the
male-standard of purity. The Duke has weak joke about this.
PROSPERO
Twelve year since, Miranda, twelve year since,
Thy father was the Duke of
A prince of power.
MIRANDA
Sir, are not you my father?
PROSPERO
Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and
She said thou wast my daughter; and thy father
Was Duke of
And princess no worse issued.
That’s it. There is no further mention of her. There is no sense of what
she was doing when Prospero was at his books - was she a library-widow – or any
imagining of her or of maternal or conjugal sorrow? In all patriarchal
cultures, a wife without an accessible husband is insulted and vulnerable viz
Penelope. One gets a good idea of these marriages from Maria Bellonci ’s lovely
biography of Lucrezia Borgia: who,
despite desperate social constraints,
certainly did more reading and speaking with artists than Shakespeare’s
Duchess or Portia or Olivia. The place of his wife in his affections is given
away in the following lines.
My brother and thy uncle, call'd Antonio--
I pray thee, mark me--that a brother should
Be so perfidious!--he whom next thyself
Of all the world I loved
So in Prospero’s primary affections, he loves himself, his daughter, his
brother. The rest of the world, including his wife, are way below. Of course those were the mores. But it is
important to see that a corollary of those mores is the heightening of
incestuous longing. This aspect of
2b: Miranda
In the catalogue of Shakespearean girls, where should one place Miranda?
She is not as confident or plucky as her co-teenagers - Julia, Jessica, Juliet,
Viola, Rosalind. It is true the scene begins and ends with her challenging her
father:
If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
O dear father,
Make not too rash a trial of him, for
He's gentle and not fearful….
…Sir, have pity;
I'll be his surety.
She has what her father calls the very virtue of compassion …
and she is unable to imagine human deviance and sinfulness.
O, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel,
Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,
Dash'd all to pieces. O, the cry did knock
Against my very heart.
More
to know
Did never meddle with my thoughts.
Even her mother is not remembered directly:
…..Had
I not
Four or five women once that tended me?
Aristocracy is apparently more important than maternity.
2c: SYCORAX
As another absent character, she gets more lines of description than the
Duchess.
The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy
Was grown into a hoop? ….
….This damn'd witch Sycorax,
For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible
To enter human hearing, from Argier,
Thou know'st, was banish'd: for one thing she did
They would not take her life. ….
This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child
And here was left by the sailors. Thou, my slave,
As thou report'st thyself, wast then her servant;
And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate
To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands,
Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,
By help of her more potent ministers
And in her most unmitigable rage,
Into a cloven pine; within which rift
Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain
A dozen years; within which space she died
And left thee there; where thou didst vent thy groans
As fast as mill-wheels strike. Then was this island--
Save for the son that she did litter here,
A freckled whelp hag-born--not honour'd with
A human shape.
[Ariel’s] was a torment
To lay upon the damn'd, which Sycorax
Could not again undo: it was mine art,
When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape
The pine and let thee out.
The
young Shakespeare had shown another malign foreign witch, Jean d’Arc, outwitted
by bluff-hearty Englishmen in Henry VI. The mature Shakespeare had shown
yet an-Other African temptress seduce the mighty Caesars in Antony &
Cleopatra. I have always felt that even the old Shakespeare hesitated – for
some reason – in writing a play in which male intelligence, the male principle,
at its limits would be pitted against female intelligence, the female
principle, at its limits with all the reason and sensuality and politics
this would draw in. There is something of this with Edmund & Goneril in King
Lear .
Edmund Yours in the ranks of
death.
Goneril My most dear
(Exit
O, the
difference of man and man!
To thee a woman’s services are due;
My fool
usurps my body.
Instead
we get the uncontrollable Sycorax already defeated : and Prospero not having to
enter into a dialogue with an adult woman at all.
In
two superb modern works with echoes of The Tempest, her type reappears
as the epiphenomenon of male longing: Charles Williams Descent into Hell and
Lem’s Solaris : the greatest novel about the unknowable power of the
ocean since Moby Dick.
Let us begin with a conceptual distinction. In the
Judaeo-Christian dispensation, God gives man dominion over animals. The puzzle
is why would a monotheistic God create non-human, non-animal creatures. They,
sometimes called angels, feature in the Bible as messengers and testers of
humankind: but always under God’s power, never man’s. Elizabethan’s feared
other-beings coming under the power of mortals, especially women: thus the witch
scares. But that which is forbidden remains exciting in one’s mind’s private
corners, and so utterly marketable on stage.
The stage icon of that time was Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, with
his cloak and tricks and demons. A magus as protagonist would be a cash-cow.
But to remain emotionally connected to the audience and to avoid charges of
heresy, again like Marlowe & Kydd, the writer had to remain anchored in the
Christian paradigm. This tension gives rise to the what we may call the mixed
theologies in the play. There is the familiar use of Graeco- Roman terms – Jove
and
By
accident most strange, bountiful Fortune,
Now my dear lady, hath mine enemies
Brought to this shore; and by my prescience
I find my zenith doth depend upon
A most auspicious star, whose influence
If now I court not but omit, my fortunes
Will ever after droop.
There
is a reference to Sycorax’s more potent ministers. Ariel is of
course not the Deus but the Magus Ex Machina facilitating all sorts of
non-Christian manoeuvres. Prospero
little cares for such pulpit cautions as :
Turn the other cheek.
Forgive seven times seventy-seven.
Don’t say to thy brother, Thou Fool.
It
is a more pre-Christian, ancient-Greek ethic – Use what you can & who
you can, even the Gods, & cheat if
you must, and show no mercy – but whatever you do, win!
Hardly
the near-monastic man the received interpretations propose.
4: RACE
I’ve reversed my categories of comment, to make a point. Religion and
race are usually distinguished by the possibility of intentionality: one can
choose one’s religion, but not one’s race. But the designations of racial
categories are intentional human constructs, not divine givens. Putting aside
the fanciful references to Achilles & Leda, one must assert clearly that
Sycorax and Caliban were humans. Shakespeare complicates the plausible
indignation of post-colonialists against Eurocentrism, by having Sycorax thrown
out of
For mischiefs
manifold and sorceries terrible
To enter human hearing,
This is a brilliant and subtle move – the yoking of
============================================================================
ACT 2 SCENE 1
PLOT
1:
The aristocrats are shown, as described by Ariel, to be unharmed by the
tempest: and, in fact, strolling in their Sunday best.
2:
Their response to their near-death experience varies:
a)
Verbal jousting
b)
Grief-sick misery
c)
Philosophising on alternative societies.
3:
Ariel puts all to asleep except Antonio, the brother who usurped Duke Prospero,
and Sebastian, the brother 2nd in line to King Alonso.
4:
Antonio persuades Sebastian they are in an inaccessible, invulnerable amoral
realm and so might kill and usurp Alonso.
5:
As swords are raised Ariel wakes the royal party.
RECEIVED INTERPRETATION
1:
The magical nature of the island, and the play, is affirmed by the spectacle of
shipwrecked
persons promenading.
2:
The minor lords engage in shallow, mean wit, as they often do.
3:
The Nestor of the party philosophises in the European tradition of Utopian
discourse. (Erasmus & More were only two generations older than
Shakespeare)
4:
Prospero, like Hamlet, arranges the mis en scene of his own torment, - the
moment of usurpation – but being a great soul, he subverts it, so the
conspirators are saved from sin & guilt and will join him on the higher
moral plateau.
COMMENT
PREAMBLE
1:
As I remarked above, the play easily shifts between two modalities:
psychological & social realism and magic realism (avant la lettre). One
comparison from the psychological realism realm might be the film Fearless.
After surviving a plane crash, a man believes he is special, chosen,
invulnerable and repeatedly seeks great danger to prove this; whereas another
character feels paralysed by survivor guilt. Our present term for this array of
responses is PTSD. In magic realism, as in fairy stories, as in cartoons, as
Freud remarked of the unconscious, there are no contradictions. Wiley Coyote is
smashed to smithereens, but instantly recomposes himself and keeps on running.
2:
The play is moving in real time: but it also moves in narrative time.
Shakespeare shattered the classical unities and brilliantly manipulated our
emotions to ignore temporal anomalies: the speed of events in Romeo &
Juliet, the seventeen years of Macbeth’s reign, the double-time in Othello.
A moment’s thought would reveal the anomaly: but the point is that when one is
responding to the flow of narrative - in the theatre or even one’s room - there
is not time for that moment’s thought. If it is true that literary criticism is
a discussion of the second viewing/reading of a text, then there is the moral
point - how fair is to judge a first experience by a second experience.
1: POWER
There are three phases to the presentation of power in this scene.
1a: The Wits Joust
1b: The Philosopher’s verbal usurpation.
1c: The Murderer’s move
1d: The Magician’s triumph
1a: The Joust : Is There Balm in
Gonzalo
opens the scene attempting to reassure his master, the King Alonso. Prior to
this we know two things about this senior lord.
a)
His own behaviour: obstructing the mariners who were trying to help save him:
and telling two weak jokes - imagining the death of the boatswain & on
loose women.
b)Prospero’s
encomium as he tells Miranda of how they were helped by him to survive not only
physically – with food & water but also intellectually - with his books.
Beseech you,
sir, be merry; you have cause,
So have we all, of joy; for our escape
Is much beyond our loss.
As
he proceeds we might hear echoes of a similar moment, in a comedy and in a
tragedy.
i)
As You Like It
Here,
untypically, the balm-pourer is the ruler, not a courtier. With his Sweet
are the uses of adversity speech, Duke Senior sets a sublime example of
optimism, without any shadow of Pollyannaesque rictus smile. The canon is full of speeches of condolence
and consolation and counsel after disaster. For dramatic purposes, they are
usually weak, irrelevant or disastrous themselves, compounding pain. Doesn’t
our own experience of sorrow teach us that during the first wave of misery all
sensible comparisons and matter of fact statistics are not merely irrelevant
but wounding in denying one the felt uniqueness of one’s anguish.
[This
truth is entirely cross-cultural. It was a month after my elder sister’s sudden
death that my French lodger-friend told me that he had some sense of sibling
grief, for his brother had died of an accident in the Pyrenees a few years
earlier. I remember being so impressed and touched when I realised that though
he had been with me on the day I got the bad news from abroad, he did not tell
me then.]
The
unspoken fact is that of the party (on stage) only Alonso is bereaved. So there
is a nadir in voluble boorish stupidity in Gonzalo’s comparisons & mention
of millions (rare for Shakespeare to use this word) and his summation:
Our hint of
woe
Is common; every day some sailor's wife,
The masters of some merchant and the merchant
Have just our theme of woe; but for the miracle,
I mean our preservation, few in millions
Can speak like us: then wisely, good sir, weigh
Our sorrow with our comfort.
ii)
Macbeth
In
the whole canon, the most dignified response to shattering bereavement,
including just anger, is given by Macduff. He is already is in a state of high
emotion from testing & being tested by the virginal Malcolm, when the
messenger arrives to tell his wife & children have been slaughtered by
Macbeth. Within seconds, young Malcolm interrupts his devastation with: Dispute
it like a man. To which Macduff replies:.
But I must
also feel it as a man.
I cannot but remember such things were,
That were most precious to me.
These
are sublime words. Critics agree that the referent of his earlier remark He
has no children is ambiguous. It could be for Malcolm against Macbeth:
or it could be for the audience against the dumb virgin. The audience of Hamlet
is quickly persuaded of the Prince’s horror at his mother’s but two
months of grief.
[Given
their history, it is not surprising that the Jews have probably written and
discussed more than any other nation and culture – the work of remembering. A
fine recent contribution is Eva Hoffman’s book, After Such Knowledge
with its compelling title, from Eliot’s Gerontion. I have written two
unpublished essays on the temporal rhythm of understanding, in ordinary life,
and in counselling. It is reassuring that most commentators felt Charles
Kennedy had further proved his own unfitness for power when he suggested that two
months of ginlessness established recovery from years of alcoholism!]
Gonzalo
is revealed as a type Shakespeare showed to perfection in Polonious: the
pompous, garrulous, self-serving court-survivor. He is the pharasaical
councillor-whore to the
Power-that-be-here-now.
He will never go down with the previous regime, which has fallen by natural
death, murder, or invasion. The new ruler quickly works out he is pliable and
afraid. He, in turn, knows that Power is best soothed by flattery and
distracting stories. This is also the Schehezerade position! In a hierarchical
monarchist culture only two non-aristocrats might transcend their birth-class
and gets so close to absolute power: the pliable councillor and the Fool. As
Malvolio learns bitterly, the Fool has more class!
As
the cliché has it, some people, even gobby types, are literally dumb-struck by
terror, and remain so in the aftermath. Others, even wall-flowers, can’t stop
talking. Verbosity often includes a variety of defences. There is a fear of
silence in which memories & thoughts might come flooding forward. One has
learned that it is hard to remember & talk at the same time : and also,
endless talking is a way to stop someone else talking: or a way of teaching
them how you want to be soothed. Melanie Klein calls these strategies the
manic defence: a veneer of bold aliveness that hides a great fear of the
knowledge of a deep depression and anxiety.
At times, this level of transparent gobshitery becomes painful to behold
for anyone. Fie, what a
spendthrift is he of his tongue! says
Duke Antonio. Fie is one of the most powerful expressions of
moral disgust in Shakespeare: the best example being from Hamlet: meditating on
his incestuous family/state –
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
I
don’t know if there is also a class-coding on Fie – U & non-U
loathing. An index of sycophancy and of tedious predictability in conversation
is that other people start betting on when you’ll speak and what you’ll say.
Antonio opens the bidding.
Which, of he
or Adrian, for a good
wager, first begins to crow?
Given
Shakespeare’s skill & delight in doubling, he introduces a trainee-Gonzalo,
into the scene, young
Next
is a crux for interpreters: how to judge the joust. I believe it is unfair
to judge it by what the characters do after. It is clear that Sebastian and
Antonio outwit Gonzalo & Adrian both in wit and pedantry : and that they
can see and are exasperated by the latter pair’s useless grovelling.
We
noted in the previous scene the implausibility of Prospero asking Miranda three
times if she was listening. Here we have Alonso beg Gonzalo three times for
silence.
Prithee, peace….
I prithee, spare….
You
cram these words into mine ears against
The stomach of my sense.
His
grief and self-laceration finally break out. At which point his brother
Sebastian begins a chorus of chiding that had accompanied the marriage and the
necessary journey.
Sir, you may thank yourself for this great loss…
You were kneel'd to and importuned otherwise
By all of us…
As
Alonso, the raison d’etre of Gonzalo, further crumbles, the latter chides the
wide-mouthed brother.
My
lord Sebastian,
The truth you speak doth lack some gentleness
And time to speak it in: you rub the sore,
When you should bring the plaster.
This
is a perfect illustration of a psychological truth, a kind of two-way mirror,
that enables some people to see a fault in others but be wholly unaware of the
same fault in themselves. The truth of Gonzalo’s stylised empty obsequiousness
is proven
It is
foul weather in us all, good sir,
When you are cloudy.
Then
there is an interesting change of tone.
1b: The Philosopher’s Verbal Usurpation
Aristocrats,
unsurprisingly for the beneficiaries of a contingent hierarchical structure,
believe their superiority to be transferable beyond their geographical realm of
power. Even when there seems to be little hope of a return to
We
see the second instance of a psychological mechanism within Gonzalo –
fragmentation leading to attack. When he is bested by another, as with the
boatswain, he feels an unbearable sense of fragmentation, a little death: his
reflex defence is to imagine death coming to his tormentor. It is bad enough
when it is a low-class subordinate, but it is utterly humiliating, the most
painful little death, when the attack is from the top-dog, the King. After
Alonso gives him a tongue-slap, he imagines, within seconds, being King.
Had I plantation of this isle, my lord…
And were the king on't,…,
This
is nothing like the imagined and enacted reversal, suffused with goodwill and
parental & filial transference, in Henry IV Part One – when Hal says
to Falstaff:
Do thou stand
for my father and examine me on the particulars of my life.
Perhaps because they are appalled at the bad taste of
this, or as game for sport, the attendant lords pay great attention as Gonzalo
begins his extempore lecture on political philosophy:
I' the
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;--
In my interpretation, this is the key speech of the play. Of course it is not the
best poetry, nor remotely as well known as Prospero’s and Ariel’s lines. But it
is an absolute vindication of what I was saying earlier about presentism and
imagination: whatever religious political or moral codes one lives by, their
contraries are imaginable.
(‘Contrary’
is a broader concept including the concept ‘opposite’: a concept will have one
opposite, but may have one-plus contraries eg sink and rise/float. In Seinfeld
& Philosophy, a philosopher discusses the famous Opposites Episode
when George decides that having failed in life by all his preceding strategies
he may have a better chance of success by doing their opposites. He gets some
success but the strategy is not sustainable.)
There
is a sublime hope in his avowed project :
I would by
contraries
Execute all things.
It
is dramatically exciting to hear such ideas - the grown up version of once
upon a time - both for their intrinsic worth, and for the dramatic tension
they might generate. The strength of this speech, its viability, its persuasiveness
will define the moral and political hope the play is presenting. If the speech
is strong and viable, indicating a new way of social living, then everyone on
stage will be transformed utterly, their rank and relating, their rights and
duties will be changed forever: and the audience will leave the playhouse with
the idea of a possible revolution. Just as they had after having seen Richard
II with the centuries old idea of divinity of kingship shattered.
Shakespeare would know what might be done with this speech in the experimental
space of this island. The biographical, rather than dramatic, puzzle is why he
chose to subvert this possibility, having sketched it. Gonzalo’s speech is weak
and the response to it destroys it utterly.
Tragically,
his philosophico-socio-economic flight of imagination is confusedly piss-poor.
This results in a dramatic weakness and also a political evasion. It doesn’t even have intellectual reach of a
bright but ascetic school-boy. (Yes, like many other teenagers, I tried, and
better than this, to contain my adolescent anguish by sketching a utopia.) I
can’t bear to analyse it. The crucial thing is that within a few lines/minutes
it is pointed out to him that he has contradicted himself: King – sovereign. Credit should
be given to Sebastian & Antonio for their attention and analytic skill in
spotting the contradiction. The mark of the true philosopher is that though he
she is momentarily discomfited by a challenge, they are glad to be corrected,
and will proceed by a new argument. Whereas the mark of a sophist is that they
will ungraciously ignore comment and bluster on, sometimes with cunning
devices. So Gonzalo continues to describe his prelapsarian, non-Christian,
almost pantheistic, monastic domain, where Mother Nature (not God) benignly
serves all humans as usually only aristocrats are served.
Again,
Sebastian and Antonio instantly see a flaw in this conceptual
I would with such perfection govern, sir,
Twould excel the golden age.
This
almost completes his reflex attack on his ‘betters’. Even in the subjunctive
mood he doesn’t say modestly say ‘rival’ but ‘excel’ : implying boorishly “I’m
better than you Kings & Dukes”. In the previous scene we had heard Prospero
say to Miranda what an exemplary jewel he’d made of
Gonzalo
would have lived through that great era: but it is forgotten in an instant.
Perhaps all monarchs, real and imagined, brag in this way. Now utterly carried
away by vanity, he closes with a tongue-slap of his own, saying to his King – Do you mark me sir? The
structural tone of this recalls the servant Sampson’s taunt that opens Romeo
& Juliet. Abram must ask : Do you bite your thumb at us sir? This use of sir is a
heavy-handed insulting politeness from servants who of course weren’t allowed
to use the condescending term sirrah.
Alonso responds with a withering inditement of Gonzalo’s intellectual
prowess as well as of the companionate worth of his conversation:
Prithee, no more: thou dost talk nothing to me.
But because he is nine-parts veneer, he has nothing to say to support
his thesis, but merely shifts motive, arguing:
I do
well believe your highness; and did it to minister occasion to these gentlemen,
who are of such sensible and nimble lungs that they always use to laugh at
nothing.
This
is laughable, the suck-up revealed as failing even in sucking, now describing
it as fighting. Sebastian & Antonio laugh clearly:
'Twas you we laughed at.
He
then offers one of the lamest responses in Shakespeare, the equivalent of the
playground sponge-sword:
But (your) words can never hurt me.
Who in
this kind of merry fooling am nothing to you: so you may continue and laugh at
nothing still.
This is so far, a million fathoms, below its echo in
Mercutio’s astonishing jeu d’esprit on
Queen Mab in Romeo &
Juliet which
also ends on the evaluation of nothing. But here Romeo can sense that his brilliant friend’s magical
extemporising has brought him to a dark place in his psyche and that an
implosion is immanent. There is a great rescuing kindness in his entreaty:
Peace,
peace, Mercutio, peace!
Thou
talk’st of nothing.
Sebastian and Antonio
laugh even more, introducing the metaphor from swordplay:
What a blow was
there given!…
… An it had not fallen flat-long.
Gonzalo
still is too graceless to admit defeat. He lashes out at their physical power:
imputing to them a godlike vanity & power to pluck planets from the
heavens.
You
are gentlemen of brave metal; you would lift the moon out of her sphere, if she
would continue in it five weeks without changing.
Interestingly, Antonio can sense he is lashing out in
defeat, and with some grace says:
Nay, good my lord, be not angry.
But the pompous arse still won’t lie down:
No, I warrant you; I will not adventure my discretion
so weakly. Will you laugh me asleep, for I am very heavy?
Yahboosucks! His entire speechifying has been a catalogue of weakness
and indiscretion. Perhaps it is significant that these replies by Gonzalo are
in prose: usually a mark of class inferiority or mental breakdown.
1c : The Murderers’
Move
My
strong imagination sees a crown
Dropping upon thy head
This motion between ambitious men is a theme Shakespeare explored dozens
of times. One thinks of Jan Kott’s weariness as he analyses Shakespere’s ability
not to tire of describing the staircase of history and the
wardrobe. Here it is a successful
usurper, Antonio, who is stating the first fact of political life:
There
be that can rule
As well as he that sleeps.
…look
how well my garments sit upon me;
Much feater than before.
A king is no longer a personal pronoun but an impersonal that and a mere garment. He distinguishes between the truly daring act
of imagination and
lords
that can prate
As amply and unnecessarily…
As this Gonzalo; I myself could make
A chough of as deep chat.
But even the boldest, most ambitious imagination must feel
able to imagine defeating the power of conscience. Shakespeare gives one of his
many mighty and solid images of conscience-denied to mark human depravity:
Ay,
sir; where lies that? if 'twere a kibe,
'Twould put me to my slipper: but I feel not
This deity in my bosom:
1d: The Magician & His
Servant Triumph
Ariel, acting for Prospero, has put the King and his poodle to
sleep. He now wakes them, preventing the murder, and protecting the murderers
from moral progress. The ethics of this intervention I will return to below. It
just remains to note again the theme of not-hearing. Whereas Gonzalo hears
Ariel’s warning song as a humming, the King says: I heard nothing.
2 : GENDER
Interestingly,
to
Sir,
you may thank yourself for this great loss,
That would not bless our
But rather lose her to an African…
You were kneel'd to and importuned otherwise
By all of us, and the fair soul herself.
Then
follows one of the most astonishingly concise designations of many a court
woman’s destiny:
Weigh'd between loathness and obedience, at
Which end o' the beam should bow.
I
refer again to Maria Bellonci’s biography of Claribel’s antecedent, Lucrezia
Borgia.
We
have seen that Gonzalo’s attempts to describe utopia quickly end in
self-contradiction. Repetition is often a symptom of lying or at least
uncertainty. His quality of innocence is strained:
all
men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure…
…all
abundance
To
feed my innocent people
I
am aware that Elizabethan punctuation was fluid, and subsequent editors have
added interpretations. But a gender distinction is being made. Gonzalo is
trying to imagine a pre-lapsarian state: hardly an original genre – given a
lifetime of Sunday services. Work was part of the curse of the Fall, so the new
blessed state must be idle. But fearful of the new idle women, like Eve,
drifting towards temptation and causing disaster for all – again – he adds but
innocent and pure. This is the familiar theme of women as eternal
danger. At the end of his fantasy he repeats the crucial criterion: my
innocent people. Sebastian rightly reads these hints as a difficulty
with human sexuality.
That
would not bless our
But rather lose her to an African
This
element of the back-story is tremendously intriguing: making this marriage
symbolise the meeting or the clash of continents. What was Alonso/Naples’s
motive in arranging this marriage with a Tunisian prince. It implies sufficient
respect for the African civilization – perhaps because of the pride in the
ancient connection between
There
remains a sense of a realm uncertainly connected to Catholicism and northern
Protestantism.
================================================================================================================
1:
Caliban at his hard labour, cursing and fearful of punishment by Prospero’s
spirits.
2:
He sees an outsider, Trinculo. There is a moment of mutual puzzlement and fear.
3:
Another storm is feared. They, of necessity, share shelter.
4:
Stephano, another outsider, half-drunk, finds them. The Italians persuade
Caliban to drink for the first time.
5:
Drink emboldens Caliban to switch allegiance from Prospero to the Italians: and
to tell them all he knows of the island’s resources.
6:
Stephano feels that in the absence of the aristocratic party, he is de facto
king.
Shakespeare
uses two dramatic devices of which he is absolute master : abrupt change of mood and echoing sub-plot.
After the intensity of the thwarted murder scene, there is some low comedy
around dreams of usurpation among the lower orders. The reference point of this
switch is Macbeth : the stillness of the murder-night is shattered by
the knock on the gate & the drunken roaring porter. Here because it was
daytime, and the murder was prevented, the jolt is weaker. So the idea
of usurpation becomes fore-grounded. In the previous scene we had seen how six
aristocrats, stranded unimaginably far from home, in shock at their near-death
experience, and their implausible rescue, drift - within minutes - towards
murders of usurpation. They are rescued from themselves. In the immediately
following scene we see three creatures meet: at first they can barely place
each other as relatable species: but again within minutes, they are planning
flight and usurpation from their respective masters. How shallow mankind is!
The
emotions accompanying relief might be sadness and despair at universal human
depravity : but this depends on how broad and long the drunkenness is played.
Given Shakespeare’s weighting of the play, it is more likely that he is
laughing at rather than with the low-characters at their
aspirational imaginings. Cf Sly the tinker’s ‘dream’ in The Taming of the
Shrew. Though their moral depravity is the same, the aristocrats are not
laughed at, and they are morally rescued. This supports my fundamental
assertion that the play instantiates a failure of imagination, and a moral
hesitancy: contraries and parallels are introduced but then not developed, or
mocked : as if to force the conclusion – the status quo is eternal, by God, and
all the fairies. Let us look at some forms of power.
1a) KNOWLEDGE POWER
Most
readers and watchers of this play are not aristocrats but professionals and
labourers of sorts. It is difficult to get a fix on how to read and empathise
with the fundamental predicament of the non-aristocratic characters in this
scene: What am I seeing? How to name it? Is it dangerous? Shall I help it?
Three reference points come to mind, from mythical history, from the Bible and
from recent history.
i)
Proteus. In this episode from The Odyssey Proteus’s daughter
advises Menelaus, a mortal, that if he holds her divine father absolutely
firmly in the presence of his endless change-of-being, then he will be able to
ask him what he needs to know. This idea is given a sublime variation in the
similarly named episode in Ulysses: here the fundamental problems of
ontology and epistemology are held by those mighty phrases ineluctable
modality of the visible and ineluctable modality of the audible.
ii)
The Bible reveals various scenes of mortals, even righteous individuals,
far beyond the city, in the wilderness, the unknown. Things are seen – Jacob’s
ladder: and voices are heard in the wind – Job. How does the seer and hearer
know how to trust his senses?
iii)
The scene opens with Caliban working and cursing. It could be any Monday
morning anywhere.
All the infections that the sun sucks up
From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall and make him
By inch-meal a disease! His spirits hear me
And yet I needs must curse.
Though
he has previously expressed great bitterness at this modality of conversation,
soliloquising, perhaps it shows spirit that he still does, despite the fear of
the other kind of more tangible spirit.
Switching
modalities he sees a shape. It is Trinculo, an outsider, a servant of comedy,
to the royal party.
Lo,
now, lo!
Here comes a spirit of his, and to torment me.
This
is a reasonable inference – Prospero’s thunder-voice become flesh. He knows he lives
in a threatening world, so any stranger or strange creature, will be a danger.
Other creatures are of such stuff as punishments are made of! His best hope is
not not-to-be-seen or heard, but Perchance
he will not mind me.
Trinculo
has the mirror problem, seeing Caliban he wonders:
What
have we here? a man or a fish? dead or alive?
Let us soar as fast as
Ariel and Puck to a different moment of terror at seeing yet-unseen species.
Horatio in his epistemological awe at the Ghost’s conversation and gestures
remarks :
Oh day and night,
but this is wondrous strange!
To
which Hamlet gives one of the loveliest and most generous lines in the canon.
It is the line of absolute humanity and trust of the universe.
And therefore, as a stranger, give it welcome.
Like
Darwin, or Grissom of CSI, Trinculo runs through his knowledge of the species:
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!
His
limited categories move him towards the catch-all concept for the not-human
& not-known – monster. Feeling that he is not in immediate
danger, he instantly imagines mastering & selling the creature. Marx would
say this is the defining quality of capitalist relations : seeing others as
objects of capital.
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; any strange beast there makes a man: when they will not give a do it to
relieve a lame beggar, they will lazy out ten to see a dead Indian.
It
is many (Christian) emotions away from Hamlet’s welcome. But further
examination persuades him it is an islander, perhaps wounded. As the storm
gathers, he decides to shelter beside Caliban, remarking, Misery
acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows. In the previous scene we saw
how, among the aristocrats, shared misery does not bring the trust of shared
sleep, the innocent sleep Macbeth knows he has murdered forever,
rather sleep merely becomes the facilitating condition for attempted murder.
The
loveliest scene of strange bedfellows in world literature is in Moby Dick.
Though Ishmael and Queequeg have just met they must share a bed.
“So I kindled the
shavings: helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit
with X; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we
undressed and went to bed, at peace with our consciences and all the world. But
we did not go to sleep without some little chat. How it is I know not; but
there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man
and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other;
and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning.
Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg – a cosy loving pair.”
‘I’
is Ishmael, brought up to be an ‘infallible Presbytarian’ . He has known
Queequeg barely a dozen hours. He knows his old teachers & divines would
exhort him to identify him as a ‘wild idolator’: but he finds himself
reflecting ‘What is worship?’ Melville
describes the conversation of Ishamel & Queequeg as our hearts’
honeymoon. Beyond the literal level, the scene symbolises a loving
acceptance of any loving accord, sexual and emotional, between homosexuals, and
between races.
Stephano
has of course the same problem of newness and danger as the other two. His
faculties have been further heightened by wine? We’ll return to his song below.
Caliban, again plausibly, expects attack and begs:
Do not torment me: Oh!
Interestingly
it is Stephano who manifests the survivor’s fearlessness that I spoke of above,
using the comparison of the film Fearless.
I have not
scaped drowning to be afeard now of your four legs.
Even if it is Dutch courage, topped with swigs preceded by self-soothing
prediction, well, here's my
comfort, he has the drunk’s
generosity and gregariousness. Like
Trinculo he identifies a monster and a sickness but, unlike Trinculo, does not
infer from the latter fact that it is a sick islander. Perhaps this is drunken
misperception or mis-reasoning. Again he soon imagines enslaving and exploiting
the newly seen creature. But to be fair
to even the drunk’s complexity, there is concern also. To split the two
motives:
a)
Concern:
This
is some monster of the isle with four legs, who hath got, as I take it, an
ague. …I will give him some relief, if it be but for that… He's in his fit now
and does not talk after the wisest. He shall taste of my bottle: if he have
never drunk wine afore will go near to remove his fit…. Come on your ways; open
your mouth; here is that which will give language to you, cat: open your mouth;
this will shake your shaking, I can tell you, and that soundly: If all the wine
in my bottle will recover him, I will help his ague…..
b)
Enslaving
If I
can recover him and keep him tame and get to
Alcohol is not like MDMA (ecstasy) taming all takers and
getting them loved-up. As Macbeth’s
porter explains, it releases all sorts of emotions and desires, only some of
which it assists. Among these are lust, maudlin regret and protestations of new
affection. But still there is not to Stephano the bitter edge of anger as we
saw in the aristocrats. Perhaps his dreams of enslaving are half hearted
wine-dreams. One of his most generous remarks is you cannot tell who's your friend. This recalls both Hamlet’s humanist line above, and of
course it has an echo in
There’s no art
To find the mind’s construction in the face.
Like Falstaff speaking of
sack, Stephano knows that for some shy souls, drink is necessary to help them
dare to speak, and he is willing to be such a helper to the world:
here is that which
will give language to you. This
is the benignly offered logos to be contrasted with the earlier lessons.
This shared alcommunion
prompts Caliban to switch allegiance and also to offer the power of what he
knows.
I'll show thee the best springs; I'll pluck thee
berries;
I'll fish for thee and get thee wood enough.
A plague upon the tyrant that I serve!
I'll bear him no more sticks, but follow thee,
Thou wondrous man….
I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow;
And I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts;
Show thee a jay's nest and instruct thee how
To snare the nimble marmoset; I'll bring thee
To clustering filberts and sometimes I'll get thee
Young scamels from the rock. Wilt thou go with me?
It is important to allow Caliban his moment of wonder, even in his cups,
and not to quick and cheaply mock. It is many an innocent man’s and woman’s
experience to learn in sunlight that they mistook, through night-wine eyes,
earthen creatures for deities. Poor Caliban’s joyous question Hast thou
not dropp'd from heaven? recalls the trainee seducer’s lines Where
are your wings? Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?
Trinculo, as sober as the designated driver, can see the foolishness of
wine-talk. That’s his small pleasure, which if a little suspicious is not
deeply malicious.
By
this good light, this is a very shallow monster! I afeard of him! A very weak
monster! The man i' the moon! A most poor credulous monster! …A most ridiculous
monster, to make a wonder of a Poor drunkard!
1c: THE VERDANT
REVOLUTION
The revolution disclosed towards the end of this scene is neither bloody,
nor velvet, nor orange. It follows the contingent logic of inheritance and
perceived superiority. Stephano states, plausibly:
Trinculo, the king and all our company else being
drowned, we will inherit here.
It is left open whether or
not it will be a duel kingship ruling the one self-abasing subject Caliban:
what kind of ‘we’ Stephano is describing: and whether Trinculo will get a go at
attaining the sweet fruition of an earthly crown. They are too drunk and shocked to reason
about any other indigenous peoples on their new island kingdom.
Caliban, after singing
joyously of relinquishing the slave tasks commanded by Prospero, adds:
Has a new master: get a new man.
Freedom, hey-day! hey-day, freedom! freedom,
hey-day, freedom!
He infers
the new subjection will generate his re-nascence. Alas, it is a tragic error,
repeated endlessly in political history. Here is an example from my father’s
generation. As the Indian struggle for freedom entered the 1940s, some anti-Raj
strategists suggested supporting Hitler, persuaded by the simple oppositional
logic of the ancient proposition, my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Little
did they realise that had Hitler won at
Shakespeare failed to
imagine, or certainly failed to present on stage, an alternative to a
monarchist, hierarchical, degree-bound State. He also consistently mocked the
political plausibility and the moral worth of protest from below, from the
non-aristocratic orders, the peasantry and the budding burghers. The original
poll-tax rebel Cade, in Henry VI Part Two is shown to be oafish,
opportunist and hysterical. In the Roman plays the masses exists solely to
celebrate, or more often frustrate, the desires of the Caesarians. The saddest
disillusion with the commonality is in Richard II, where the king
despairs that even his horse will be proud to carry his usurper Bolingbroke,
rather than throw and kick him.
RICHARD
Rode he on
How went he under him?
GROOM
So proudly as if he disdained the ground.
RICHARD
So proud that Bolingbroke was on his back.
That jade hath eat bread from my royal hand;
This hand hath made him proud with clapping him.
Would he not stumble, would he not fall down—
Since pride
must have a fall—and break the neck
Of that proud man that did usurp his back
Forgiveness, horse! Why do I rail on thee,
Since thou, created to be awed by man,
Wast born to bear? I was not made a horse,
And yet I bear a burden like an ass,
Spur-galled and tired by jauncing Bolingbroke.
Here
the horse is the metaphor for the masses whose role is only ever to carry the
desires of the aristocracy. All of Shakespeare’s profoundly withering attacks
on aristocratic excess, especially in Hamlet and Lear, cannot
excuse this omission. The Tempest was his last attempt to write, like
Bob Dylan, from outside the gates of
STEPHANO:: Trinculo, the king and all our company else being
drowned, we will inherit here.
TRINCULO: A sorrow to see any man swallowed by such a meal of saltwater.
Even those for whom we sweated from the moment our brief schooldays ended. Are
we alone? Then might there be an end to kings and lords and all their company
of gradations. Which honest man wrote those immortal words:
When Adam delved and Eve span
Who then was the gentleman?
We must believe God brought us safely to this new
STEPHANO : But friend, we were born and remain in sin original . Our
bright designs will never contain our dark desires.
TRINCULO: But we shall not sin in failing to attempt. And the watching
heavens will send angels to aid our endeavours.
STEPHANO: And what of those we may find on the other side of the island,
men or monsters.
TRINCULO: Let us look for grace in all.
Etc etc
2 : GENDER
This is one of the few scenes in the canon where the lower orders
describe their ordinary lives and loves and gradations and preferences.
The
master, the swabber, the boatswain and I,
The gunner and his mate
Loved Mall, Meg and Marian and Margery,
This
is an almost Marxian communist state of sexual exchange : two groups rather
than two individuals loving each other. The time is of the pre-capitalist
social formation and no doubt is predicated upon cash rather than companiate
exchange, with women in the subordinate position – but it still resonates with
goodwill. As Alexandra Kollontai describes in her more realistic
post-revolution novel The Love of Worker Bees, actual attempts at such
communal sex & love foundered messily upon envy and opportunism.
But
none of us cared for Kate;
For she had a tongue with a tang,
Would cry to a sailor, Go hang!
She loved not the savour of tar nor of pitch,
Yet a tailor might scratch her where'er she did itch:
Then to sea, boys, and let her go hang!
Kate – yet another like Petruchio’s brief nemesis – is scorned for her
social pretensions. She won’t fuck sailors, but will even enjoy tailors.
Perhaps Shakespeare used a tailor for the rhyme. Or perhaps because – as Lisa
Jardine brilliantly describes in Still Harping on Daughters –
Shakespeare was profoundly alert to the power semiotics of cloth and dress. It
is worth remembering that the tailor, who facilitated these social distinctions
of cloth, was one of the rare non-aristocrats to be allowed frequent access to
court and such intimate access to the bodies of the rulers of the body politic.
3: RACE
We’ve addressed the perception and misperception of species above. This
is not complicated by race – even to the minor extent in Act 1.
4: RELIGION
Even the mariners glean this is an unusual realm, perhaps containing
transcendental creatures unseen in Christian realms. But, strangely, no one is
praying.
==========================================================================================================================
ACT 3 SCENE 1
PLOT
1: Ferdinand slaves for Prospero, doing one of Caliban’s tasks.
2: Prospero secretly follows Miranda as she secretly seeks out
Ferdinand.
3: They introduce themselves, sympathise, fall in love, and perform a
marriage ceremony.
4: Prospero is pleased but wishes to slow the process.
RECEIVED INTERPRETATION
1: There are two incorruptible essential forces that will not be
suffocated by contingent external factors, they will always shine through and
persuade or defeat those who attempt to frustrate them – aristocratic nobility
and love.
2: So Prince Ferdinand is not in any way diminished by wood-work.
3: Similarly Miranda’s innocence and grace and boldness make of the
rough island a court.
4: Innocent love is the most healing force in the universe. It even
begins to melt Prospero’s rage.
COMMENT
1: POWER
The stage direction at the
head of this scene is Enter FERDINAND, bearing a log. The more accurate
direction would be Enter Prince FERDINAND, bearing a log. Imagine the audience being shocked at seeing
an aristocrat doing manual, work.
This scene is of course about love: but it is equally about work:
the two modalities Freud used to define mental well-being. The love aspect, the
wooing compromised of modesty and boldness, is very familiar, completely
unaffected by the unusual setting, a barely civilized island unreachably far
from the Italian court.
Primo Levi once remarked that there are few descriptions of work in
world literature: an insufficiency he
tried to correct in his other writings. What is more astonishing about the
opening tableau, before Ferdinand begins his soliloquy, is that an aristocrat, a
prince no less, is doing the very labour that Caliban, the ‘untermensch’, has
been enslaved to perform. (Again let us ignore the massive inconsistency that
the man-magus who can raise tempests can’t get spirits to do a bit of logging.)
So Prospero has imposed an equality of humiliation on Ferdinand, or rather a
worse one, for he does not recognise that Caliban was Sycorax’s Prince and heir
to the island.
The task is well-defined :
I must
remove
Some thousands of these logs and pile them up,
Piece-work
is a particular additional degradation to some tasks. The employer does not say
‘we trust you to work as you can during the working day’ but ‘ you must do this number as a minimum,
and you might get a bonus for more’. One thinks of the opening of Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning, Sillitoe’s novel of working class life in
The
aristocratic and capitalist problem of work is how to get someone else, the
majority, to do the all the necessary work, as cheaply as possible, for the sustenance
and profit of the minority. The moral problem of work is what can possibly
justify not-working whether others are working. Prospero has captured and
enslaved Ferdinand and given him this manual task, not in a mutually agreed
contract, but Upon a sore injunction:
There
be some sports are painful, and their labour
Delight in them sets off: some kinds of baseness
Are nobly undergone and most poor matters
Point to rich ends. This my mean task
Would be as heavy to me as odious, but
The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead
And makes my labours pleasures:
This
is almost emptily courtly. Remember a similar but grimly ironic moment in Macbeth,
when the new-made Cawdor, directing
Macduff to the scene of butchery he’s just made, says: The labour we delight in
physics pain. Soon though Macbeth will be cursing Throw physic to
the dogs. Not even Miranda’s face would console Ferdinand some
months & millions of logs later. Behind all such tales of waiting is
Penelope and Rebecca: a kind of muted symbolic realism about the human capacity
to wait. Interestingly, the work & oppression here is as plain and symbolic
as Lucky’s misery in Waiting for Godot. One of the other rare
work-scenes in Shakespeare is the garden scene in Richard II: though
here the symbolism of climbing creepers is spelled out:
Go thou, and
like an executioner
Cut off the heads of too fast growing sprays…
2 : GENDER
Consider this scene.
First Man : Will you clear this patch of garden, trim the
bush and remove the weeds and litter?
Second Man: Yes. Of course.
First Man: There are shears in the shed, and a trowel and
bag.
Second Man : Okay. (He moves towards the shed)
First Man: I’ll get them for you. (He goes and gets them)
Second Man: Right I’ll get started.
(The Second Man begins clipping. Then he notices the First
Man has bent down and started removing twigs and rubbish. They quietly and
contentedly work together.)
First Man: That’s fine. Let’s eat.
How might one make a moral judgement on the two
actors/labourers. After requesting the Second Man to do a task, on his own, as
a favour perhaps, the First Man joins in the work. It seems a character trait
that he can’t see work being done, without joining in to help. The important
thing to note is that this is a willing and gracious sharing of a burden,
rather than intrusion, displacement or humiliation.
What if the First Man was 35 and the Second Man 15: and both
are fit? Then both have the physical capacity to do the work task. One can
imagine circumstances when either or both do the task. What if the First Man
was 83 and the Second Man 53? You’d expect the younger of the pair to be fitter
and to do the task, as a duty/gift/favour to the older. What if these two older men were father and
son?
Yes, it was me and my dad, some months after my mother’s death.
I knew how broken by grief he was. Given that he and my mother had worked so
hard for over 50 years, it would have been plausible, and even more so in the
year of grief, if he did nothing domestic or manual. The task would take one
person about forty minutes. I’m not a keen gardener, but I could do it and was
willing to do it. I’d have been happy to know my dad was inside enjoying the
Sunday papers. When he stayed to help me, I thought, and proudly, that he
shared a defining characteristic of my mother: she couldn’t see work, of
whatever kind, being done without offering to help. This is surely one of the
highest marks of humanity.
Now let us return to the play. Seeing Ferdinand working
Miranda’s first response is:
Alas, now, pray you,
Work not so hard: I would the lightning had
Burnt up those logs that you are enjoin'd to pile!
Pray, set it down and rest you: when this burns,
'Twill weep for having wearied you.
There is an instant distinction between her response to Caliban working and
this man working. The fancy points are all with Ferdinand. She offers the
courtly conceit of the pathetic fallacy. But then after Ferdinand has described
the enormity of his task, there is a remarkable shift:
If you'll sit down,
I'll bear your logs the while: pray, give me that;
I'll carry it to the pile.
Even if it is personal rather than universal Christian love that prompts
her to help with manual labour it is still a virtuous motion. Of course
Ferdinand must reply with manly courtly horror.
No, precious creature;
I had rather crack my sinews, break my back,
Than you should such dishonour undergo,
While I sit lazy by.
It takes both genders to maintain the patriarchal attitudes of their
time and place: even though they are – in the conceit of the play – outside
that time and place. For Ferdinand, more than for Miranda, women’s value or
preciousness is maintained by them not-working. To this Miranda replies with a
revolutionary statement: revolutionary at the level of politics as well as at
ethics.
It would become me
As well as it does you: and I should do it
With much more ease; for my good will is to it,
And yours it is against.
How does work become humankind? How does it destroy humanity? This is such a
remarkable thought. Imagine a society where goodwill, and not mere surplus
capital, gives value to work done? If that is fanciful, recall my father
above. Just as he could not see me do a
small task alone when he might help, so Miranda asserts an equality of potential
contribution to the task in hand.
The
physicality of this shared task distinguishes this play from the earlier ones
where women might help men. Usually brain-power is called for. Portia can help
Bassanio and Antonio with their legal intellectual burden because she has
(somehow) absorbed that mental skill. As I argue above, Shakespeare defuses the
revolutionary potential of this plot line even within this earlier play: which
of course is not a political tract but a test of the audience’s imagination and
delight. The State doesn’t find a place for Portia to maintain, develop and
exercise her legal precocity.
Miranda’s
speech asserts equality between herself, Ferdinand and, most importantly,
Caliban, with respect to the ability to perform the necessary task of
log-hauling. The implied questions are Can this work be shared? and
extrapolating from that Why aren’t more community tasks shared?
Given
my labours as a counsellor, I think of ‘love’ as paired with ‘work’. This
passage, asking so profoundly What is work? seems to correlate with Feste’s
sublime rhetoric and song in Twelfth Night:
What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter.
Prospero speaks aside, an
oblique soliloquising. He could directly enter the debate Miranda has opened,
without fear of protest from his prisoner nor from the daughter he was last
chiding as a foot-rebel. He could directly address the audience on Miranda’s
theme of work and rank. But Shakespeare has him side-step that theme entirely,
and focus exclusively on the love-theme.
Poor worm, thou art infected!
This visitation shows it.
The complex image of the worm as small and precious and also infectious,
redeems Miranda from her rebellion and allows the love-making to become
dominant.
Do men listen to women and to what? Proceeding in his wooing, Ferdinand
makes the Zeus seducer move: I’ve seen and had a lot of women, but you’re
simply the best! One of his phrases goes:
many a
time
The harmony of their tongues hath into bondage
Brought my too diligent ear
It is not what they said, but how they said it – aesthetic
harmony not the intellectual weight of the matter. Miranda, like Prospero,
loses her own question – why can’t I help your work? The scene then proceeds in
a familiar way: to offer virginity as a dowry jewel, declare love in courtly
phrases, enact marriage. Whereas Portia gets law by osmosis Miranda supposedly
gets one-to-one tuition from a magus and self-styled best-ever teacher: and yet
she is mostly presented as nice-but-dim, a proto-Diana Spencer.
I do
not know
One of my sex; no woman's face remember,
Save, from my glass, mine own; nor have I seen
More that I may call men than you, good friend,
And my dear father: how features are abroad,
I am skilless of
One wonders, like
I am
in my condition
A prince, Miranda; I do think, a king;
There
is filial respect and grief in his qualifier
I would, not so!
It is only now that he answers Miranda’s offer with its implied
question:
It would become me
As well as it does you
with
[I]
would no more endure
This wooden slavery than to suffer
The flesh-fly blow my mouth.
But it is not a proper answer to her point – here we are,
you and I, in this mini-universe of two, with this task: let us both work. He
insists that his present condition is virtual: his real condition being of
another kind foundationed in an elsewhere that he can institute by words here
and now. To establish an ego separation from his present condition he conjures
a filthy image of death to which his work-task must be compared. The irruption
into his thoughts of wooing of the death-mouth is worth examining.
Years ago, during adolescence, a friend reported a fantasy: “That Marie Osmond is so innocent looking.
She’s a virgin, as a Mormon must be. Whenever I see her face, I just imagine
putting my cock into her mouth.” The young man wasn’t imagining oral-rape, but nor was
he imagining a shared experience. He was disclosing a profound ambivalence
about innocence. His cock would answer
her mouth. That he believed his cock must be partly (or only) an agent of
spoiling reveals his pathology.
Ferdinand had just been speaking of Italian ladies &
princesses and the harmony of
their tongues
: and he is looking at the talking mouth of the girl he has fallen in love
with. So where does the idea of the maggot-mouth come from? Is it fanciful to
say that he is so puzzled by her question about work, that he imagines her
mouth as dead, as well as imagining it kissing or fucking him.
Hear
my soul speak:
The very instant that I saw you, did
My heart fly to your service; there resides,
To make me slave to it; and for your sake
Am I this patient log--man.
I am
your wife, if you will marry me;
If not, I'll die your maid: to be your fellow
You may deny me; but I'll be your servant,
Whether you will or no.
The most interesting ascription in this quartet of possible
identities – wife, maid, fellow and servant – is fellow. It’s hard to know what Shakespeare means here. Is
Miranda imagining a second-best connection as being a hunting and fishing and
drinking quasi-male but equal-ranked buddy to Ferdinand after he’s married one
of the harmony gels. Again the possibilities opened by this idea are ignored.
Ferdinand doesn’t say “What
do you mean by fellow?”
3 : RACE
Not a theme in this scene.
4 : RELIGION
As the characters assert and act as if their consciousness
was elsewhere, Catholic Italy and not this pagan
I do
beseech you--
Chiefly that I might set it in my prayers--
What is your name?…
…O heaven, O earth, bear witness to this sound
The
puzzle of the most powerful force in the universe is re-presented. Shakespeare
had first presented in The Dream the contest between the three powers -
of human love, (male) state/parental prohibition and pagan drug-cunning. In
mid-scene there is a very rare and almost unbelievable instance of Prospero speaking
with a kind human heart:
Fair
encounter
Of two most rare affections! Heavens rain grace
On that which breeds between 'em!
It is worth remembering that he is in fact snooping with that incestuous
lasciviousness and vanity that has its nadir in Polonius. Summing up the scene
he remarks:
So glad of this as they I cannot be,
Who are surprised withal; but my rejoicing
At nothing can be more.
This contradicts his first remark, and is more in character : he can
only enjoy what he can control. It is of course a non-human modality, and more
like a sad-God.
============================================================================================================================
ACT 3 SCENE 2
PLOT
1: The low-characters get more drunk, plan rape & murder and quarrel
among themselves.
RECEIVED INTERPRETATION
1: The scene provides dramatic balance: after the near solemnity of
slaving, wooing and the adhoc marriage ceremony, the return of brawling drunks
allows the audience time to relax.
2: It also affirms the position, established in the earlier scene, of
the incompetence to rule, and even to think, among the lower orders.
3: Some critics tire of the extent of the low comedy. In some
productions – Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero at The Globe,
COMMENT
1: POWER
There is little to say. This scene is rare in Shakespeare in that it is
mostly repetition, and not development. Of course there has to be a
filler-scene between the trio meeting and attempting their coup d’etat. But as
Shakespeare has decided not to allow any thinking or political debate here,
there can only be this horse-play. There is some minor word play in the mutual
mockeries, and some more menacing teasing faciliated by Ariel in panto-mode.
Trinculo remains sober enough to observe the car crash:
Servant-monster! the folly of this island! They say there's but five
upon this isle: we are three of them; if th' other two be brained like us, the
state totters.
The Oedipus complex is the primal puzzle of sharing:
if only two can share the thing most wanted – whatever the thing is -
what must the third do? Protest? Fight? Murder? Christ set against this the
idea of the immanent benign third – the Holy Ghost “For where two or three
are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” The low trinity are planning to usurp the
remaining couple. But within minutes, within the three, a new internal couple is
attempted and murderousness breaks out.
Trinculo
is appalled at Stephano’s neologism Servant-monster! No doubt he is also a bit miffed that his
old friend Stephano is preoccupied with his new friend. Caliban is desperate
for the refuge of a new subjection.
How does thy honour? Let me lick thy shoe.
I'll not serve him; he's not
valiant…
Bite him to death, I prithee……
Beat him enough: after a little time
I'll beat him too.
At
one level we have here the problem of three sharing. Chaucer offers the template
of this plot in the three low-character friends who find money, plan to but
can’t share it, form treacherous couples, and all die mutually murdered It is
echoed in the 90s film Shallow Grave. These are
Stephano
is minutes into his kingship but has already identified rebellion and the required
redress.
Trinculo,
keep a good tongue in your head: if you prove a mutineer,--the next tree! The
poor monster's my subject and he shall not suffer indignity.
Perhaps fairness requires us to compare the speed &
moral depravity of these shifting alliances with those seen in the first
tetrology Henry VI Parts
1,2,3 & Richard III.
We mentioned above the fecund writer’s eagerness to keep in all his/her good lines, even if it
means distributing them to the ‘wrong’ character. A brilliant illustration of
this point and Shakespeare’s ambivalence about Caliban is anchored in the voice
he gives him. The boatmen and the servants predictably speak prose. But
Caliban, relentlessly scorned as sub-human, is given great inventive and
emotionally subtle poetry.
The murder speech has a Marlovian chaotic grandeur and
homely detail.
there
thou mayst brain him,
Having first seized his books, or with a log
Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,
Or cut his wezand with thy knife.
It is understandable that the log-slave would want to murder
his master with a log. There is an irony in the fact that his books, of
wood-paper, are magically more powerful than everything.
without them
He's but a sot, as I am.
What
poignancy there is in this praise of book-knowledge-power.
In
Macbeth the sound of the knock at the porter’s gate shatters the
psychological and external stillness created by the murder. Here we have an
interesting variation. After their almost murderous squabbles there is
reconciliation. Stephano offers a good apology to Trinculo.
Give me thy hand: I am sorry I beat thee; but, while
thou livest, keep a good tongue in thy head.
The
murder work-party is so content it breaks into a song, almost a football or
military chant, which has the most ironic line in the play: Thought is
free. Throughout the play, when genuine thought might begin, it is
prevented.
Then
Ariel invisibly joins in and they are terrified. Music is traditionally seen as
innocent and as a balm to the wounded innocent. Had they been in innocent
conversation and song, the interruption would have felt like a blessing. Now it
feels as if they have found out by invisible harmonious constables. Trinculo
panics, as he had but a few hours earlier on their tempest tossed boat.
Stephano has the drunk’s bravado. Caliban reassures them both with his finest
and most delicate speech.
Be not
afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
This is
music at its most mythical and Orphic: and this quality of the island gives it
a preciousness surpassing
There’s
not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in
his motion like an angel sings.
Here Caliban, like Lorenzo above, attains to the moral
grandeur of all those lovers in Shakespeare who are caught between dreaming and
waking. It is dramatically hard, you could say impossible, to reconcile this
Caliban with the other.
Here is a white man, like Prospero, descended from Europeans
but, unlike him, filled with humble wonder at a new music in the new world:
“It is
impossible to describe the music of their [Mohican] language, while thus
engaged in laughter and endearments, in such a way as to render it intelligible
to those whose ears have never listened to its melody…It is rare for a white
voice to pitch itself properly in the woods.” (Cooper ibid 227/229)
Stephano, as a new king with his new exchequer to worry
about, replies to Caliban’s tender confession:
This
will prove a brave kingdom to me, where I shall
have my music for nothing
There
is a wonderful modern parallel. In the video to the great Dire Straits hit Money
for Nothing we see blue-collar workers envying the rock star whose LA house
they are furnishing with heavy refridgerators, microwave ovens and colour tvs
& also mocking his skill.
I should’ve learned to play the guitar
I should’ve learned to play them drums.
Maybe get a blister on your little finger
Maybe get a blister on your thumb.
Which would have brought them also to this paradise of:
Money for nothing and your chicks for free.
Poor hedonists - but at least they don’t have dreams of state power!
2 : GENDER
Is rape worse than murder? Shakespeare examines this moral puzzle in Measure
for Measure…which also features a bookish Duke aspiring to be the Deus ex
machina in the city he has failed to rule responsibly. Germaine Greer would
say, from her experience, “No”:
and men must defer to women in this. But it also important to note it
would be an unimaginable torment to Miranda, just ‘married’ to Ferdinand, to
submit to Stephano’s drunken gropings.
If book-knowledge & its practical application in society isn’t a
modality of personal fulfillment and of social value allowed to women, then all
that is left to them is beauty and duty. In a play continually foregrounding
the theme of comparison within and across species, it is interesting that it is
Caliban who remarks:
And
that most deeply to consider is
The beauty of his daughter; he himself
Calls her a nonpareil: I never saw a woman,
But only Sycorax my dam and she;
But she as far surpasseth Sycorax
As great'st does least.
These courtly superlatives are familiar. But I am reminded
of an observation made by the great child analyst Melanie Klein. She overheard
on the bus a four-year old child describe his mother as beautiful but, looking up,
she saw that the mother was in fact quite ugly. Given that the child was too
young for irony and sarcasm, she concluded that some other psychic operation
was in place. The child has learned to connect a certain affect of satisfaction
and joy with this thing, the word-presentation beauty, but has not yet learned that its socially sanctioned
ascription is restricted to formal qualities of shape and balance. There is a
sadness to the fact that Caliban has come to internalise Prospero’s later
description and valuation of his mother.
3: RACE
This last remark about beauty also has a race-element. It is
possible that two cultures agree that beauty has a balance of elements, but
disagree whether a particular element must be absolutely of one kind, shape
,size. Orwell recalls that Burmese women didn’t like him fondling their
breasts, as they considered flat-chestedness to be the line of beauty. Fanon
writes movingly of the distress of the black man at the cinema. In the dark
auditorium he can identify with the white hero seducing the white beauty: but
the moment the black servant enters grinning and gormless, the poor black
movie-goer sees the mirror of his unloved and mocked otherness and hates
himself.
As I say above, Shakespeare validates African beauty and
worth, in the teeth of the racist Sebastian. But the fact is left
hanging. Then back on the island, the
old prejudice is resurrected: the African Sycorax and Caliban become the usual
suspects. Though it is said she is banished for some unspeakable depravity,
that supposedly any human community would
shun, shame, exile, it is never named, nor allowed to be a point in a
discussion about the line of civilisation, let alone beauty!
4: RELIGION
The adhoc marriage is to be seen as the best version of a
Christian ceremony possible for secret lovers on a distant island far from
O,
forgive me my sins!
=========================================================================================================================
ACT 3 SCENE 3
PLOT
1:
The aristocratic sextet is exhausted from shock, grief and searching for food.
2: But two of them are still planning murder.
3: Out of thin air come strange non-human beings that bring tables & a
banquet.
4: Overcoming their fear, the mortals are about to eat, when once again they
hear tempestuous thunder. A harpy appears & removes the food. A voice
speaks judgement on the previous actions, betrayals and sins of the Italians.
They are terrified.
5: The strange beings return and remove the tables.
6: The murderous lords are still resolved.
7: Prospero, the director observes all this and thanks his servant stage
manager/actor Ariel.
RECEIVED INTERPRETATION
1: A
brilliant use of the dramatic device of spectacle. This is the second major
spectacle, after the storm. It establishes more firmly than the storm itself,
that the play is presenting two realities: ordinary and supernatural, and so
two genres with different moral modalities.
2:
Because spontaneous human contrition for past acts is rare, and because human
plans for more betrayal and murder are not easily deflected by time and reason,
then coercion through terrifying supernatural agency must be used. There is a
little success. Gonzalo sees most clearly.
3:
Prospero is a good man in initiating this moral reformation, rather than merely
murdering those who hurt him.
COMMENT
1: POWER
Unlike the first scene where we are shown three levels of power - Nature,
aristocrats, lower order - here we see four, even without the mariners: Magus
Prospero, Ariel & the quaint shapes, Nature, the aristocrats. It is
important to keep stressing level and degree. The idea of the Great Chain of
Being and fixed-degrees was part of the Elizabethan world picture. It was part
of the structure of feeling of the time and did not need to be spelled
out very often. Only in Troilus & Cressida is it hammered home. Our
contemporary version of degree is by celebrity-grading, the ABCD lists. But as
the great director Richard Eyre wrote, only two generations ago one had to
carry a tremendous burden of anxious watchfulness about the gradations of
middle-class: a perfect exemplar of Freud’s mightily affective phrase - the
narcissism of minor differences
PHYSICAL & PSYCHOLOGICAL POWERLESSNESS
Gonzalo
opens the scene declaring this:
By'r lakin, I can go no further, sir;
My old bones ache:
King Alonso echoes this, adding grief:
[I] am myself attach'd with weariness,
To the dulling of my spirits: sit down, and rest.
Even here I will put off my hope
Contrasting
with this are the younger men - who have the power of youth and the almost
irrepressible power of murderous ambition:
Let it be to-night;
For, now they are oppress'd with travel, they
Will not, nor cannot, use such vigilance
As when they are fresh.
A central part of my thesis against the inadequacies of the Received Interpretation
of the play has its crux in how the three trials of the aristocrats are
described and situated. I use ‘trial’ as the most innocuous word. Others might
go so far as to say ‘test’, or ‘chiding’ or ‘bollocking’. I have never read the
word ‘torture’ in the Received Interpretation. So it behoves me to give an
account of torture that would justify my designation of these scenes as
torture and also to comment on the varieties of reception of the torture scene.
VARIETIES OF TORTURE
In my
generation, most people’s sense of torture comes from the Spanish Inquisition,
the Gestapo and the Japanese. But the affects attaching to the first phrase are
very different from the other two. The great American satirist Lenny Bruce once
remarked that “satire is tragedy-plus-time”. Most daring comedians have
experienced the frustration of silence greeting a joke made too-soon. Mel
Brooks’s original film The Producers, which was partly an examination of
bad taste, got a very muted distribution in 68: but come the millennium, it was
the hot ticket on stage, and then remade on screen. Yet he was not troubled at
all by the Busby Berkley routine The Inquisition he devised for
History of the World: Part One. Later comedians, such as The Pythons,
mocked the mere reference to the Spanish Inquisition as a feeble hyperbole of
modern life. The lamest reference to Nazi brutality, which was allowed as
comedy within a few years of the war, was to shine a desk lamp in someone’s
face and say in a feeble German accent: Ve haff vaze of maykin yoo tok.
Some people have the modern reference point of Sartre’s concept of hell, as the
presence and look of those one has hurt, which attains to such a torment that a
person aches for the tortures of medieval hells.
We
are looking at Shakespearean torments from a long, long way away. But even if
we have become ‘cultured’ enough to laugh at the Inquisition and the Gestapo,
it is not hard to imagine torture. In fact it seems to be an ordinary stage
in adolescence to imagine torture. The horror-joke in my boys’ school was: “What’s
the definition of pain? Sliding down a razor sharp banister using your balls
brakes! Arrggghhh!!!!” . This is a wonderful illustration of the
sublimation into riddling humour of pubescent anxieties about castration and
rage. It also shows that it is not hard to imagine and identify torture,
whatever country or historical period one is born into. Anyone can soon judge
that there are two basic types of torture:
a) Physical : an attack and invasion
of the integrity of the body, surface and insides, up to unconsciousness and
near-death. This includes non-contact noise, rape and starvation.
b)
Mental/emotional : This form can exist without any kind of physical
attack/threat. It is a manipulation and attack on one’s ability to sustain a
sense of Self through thinking & believing and their attendant feelings.
This ability, in relation to fearing for one’s self and for those one
cherishes, is manipulated until one breaks down. Sometimes the breakdown is
irreversible: the old-self no longer exists.
One
of the most cunning and cruel forms of mental & emotional torture is to
trick the victim into hope of release. There is a short story called A
Torture by Hope by Villiers
de L’Isle-Aadam. A man is physically tortured by the Inquisition until he
blacks out. When he comes to consciousness, he notices the cell door is open
and there is no one about, even the block-door is open. He feels he must try.
Each step away from his cells, feels both liberating & terrifying. The next
long corridor is clear: and he sees ahead a side gate to the outside world. At
some point he begins to believe he is free: and at this point someone, seeing
his free-face, leaps out and shackles him. He collapses in despair.
The
only variation on the schema above is when the jobbing torturer is under threat
of being tortured. Milgram described the mildest version of this. Even when his
experimental torturers knew they had freedom to choose, or cease, without
consequence, they ignored the victim’s cries, preferring to use their energy to
get close to by not disappointing the teacher, to whom they feel primary
loyalty. The worst version is where the torturer says to his co-opted
friend/servant/prisoner “Torture that person X - or I’ll torture you.
This was the sonder-commando’s dilemma in
Isn’t
that strange to see the word ‘
Here it might be valuable
to interpolate a biographical detail about the playwright. In 1583, when
Shakespeare was still a ‘teenager’, he would have heard of his kinsmen, on his
mother’s side, Edward Arden & John Somerville being arrested, tortured on
the rack and executed for their Catholicism and for supporting plots to usurp the
Protestant Elizabeth. It is important not to let such details just fade into
mere historical background. Compare Ted Hughes’s deep indignation in his poem
about the Rememberance Day poppy – because he’d seen how his kinsmen suffered
from gas sickness for years after World War 1. The terror in such family
stories & histories, their minute details, would have remained in
Shakespeare’s world-wide mind. Later he would know of fellow playwrights, Kydd
and Marlowe, experiencing the varieties of absolute menace of the State.
The
method Prospero chooses for Ariel to discharge has the same structure as that
in the story Torture by Hope. When his enemies, the Italian sextet, or
basically trio, are exhausted and despairing from the first torture, the
near-death experience of the tempest, followed by hysterical relief of escape,
followed by mortal hunger and exhaustion, he will offer them food and rest, and
with great cordial ceremony. This will lull them into a belief that they are on
a benign island, that it has a benign, though as-yet-unmet, ruler and so
in Eliot’s words:
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well.
And then he will terrify them until they shit themselves.
THE POWER TO MANAGE STRANGENESS
In a typically brilliant echo,
Shakespeare has island music appear here also. By now the audience can only see
a tragic irony in Alonso’s remark:
What harmony is
this? My good friends, hark!
It is one of Shakespeare’s
favourite tropes to use the music metaphor of harmony to comment on human
connectivity. Do leaders have friends, let alone good friends? Soon after
Blair’s election, one of his old friends wrote a fine piece in The Guardian
on how he felt that high power had placed Blair beyond a familiar connectivity.
The audience knows that two out of the sextet of aristocrats are planning
double murder. Unlike in the previous scenes, the advent and appearance of
strangers, strange beings and forces, is met with due wonder, comparison with
the limits of imagination, and the thought experiment of imagining one’s
earlier self present here now.
Gonzalo says : Marvellous sweet music!
Sebastian
says :
Now I
will believe
That there are unicorns, that in
There is one tree, the phoenix' throne, one phoenix
At this hour reigning there.
Gonzalao adds : If in
I should report this now, would they believe me?…
When we were boys,
Who would believe that there were mountaineers
Dew-lapp'd like bulls, whose throats had hanging at 'em
Wallets of flesh?
We should discuss why here the aristocrats are more open-minded about
other beings. Odysseus famously curses his belly. Because man must find food
regularly, the food-giver becomes the nicest person you’ll ever meet. Oscar
Wilde put it best: After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s
own relatives.
THE SECOND TORTURE
The best thing to do is to
repeat the first terror: for this sets up an unconscious primary process
extrapolation – that terror will be periodic but unpredictable and yet eternal.
(Recall the new & heightened horror when new bombs were attempted in
Ariel lies about who or
what he is, and in what capacity he acts. This adds to the mental torture of
the aristocrats: because they don’t know how many more gradations of power
besides him there are, nor their intention to attack. They can but think they
have, like Dante, entered a post-mortem tribunal while yet alive. Earlier Ariel had reported to Prospero the
terror on the ship:
the
king's son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring,--then like reeds, not hair,--
Was the first man that leap'd; cried, 'Hell is empty
And all the devils are here.'
Now they feel they are
imprisoned where the devils live and rule. The crucial thing is they feel
judged, punished and uncertain of future punishment. They know, or at least
guess, that what is required from them is confession and abasement before the
punishing power. I will look at the ideological structure of the judgement and
punishment below. Alonso breaks down completely, and even contemplates suicide:
my son
i' the ooze is bedded, and
I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded
And with him there lie mudded.
Sebastian & Antonio have not felt remorse at the judgement heard.
So their response is one of pure defense, indignation and hysterical bravado
given that it has already been proved that their weapons are useless against
these supernatural beings.
You
fools! I and my fellows
Are ministers of Fate: the elements,
Of whom your swords are temper'd, may as well
Wound the loud winds, or with bemock'd-at stabs
Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish
One dowle that's in my plume: my fellow-ministers
Are like invulnerable. If you could hurt,
Your swords are now too massy for your strengths
And will not be uplifted.
Despite which, Sebastian can still say:
But one fiend at a time,
I'll fight their legions o'er.
This irrationality fits : for their earlier murderous plans for the
coming evening are given an immediate object. As Macbeth complains, murderous
thoughts are usually attended by profound impatience – deathly thoughts are to
evacuated as soon as possible, and hopefully for ever:
If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well
It were done quickly.
MORAL POWER
As expected, Adrian and Francisco remain in innocuous
spear-carrier mode: but Gonzalo is now morally abstracted from the aristocrats,
first by Prospero, then by himself.. The Golden Age sage-braggart observes of
the supernatural beings, the strange Shapes [who] dance about… with gentle actions of
salutation… and inviting that :
these
are people of the island--
Who, though they are of monstrous shape, yet, note,
Their manners are more gentle-kind than of
Our human generation you shall find
Many, nay, almost any.
I believe that Shakespeare’s revisionist project in this
play was partly to revive Polonius. Like the monkey at the typewriter, the
person who won’t shut up will eventually say something true if not interesting.
The logical, or at least humble, conclusion to this observation would be that
the islanders have established a Golden Age without him! It is hardly original
to remark on the depravity of humankind, the Judaeo-Christian patriarchs
lamented and raged about this every generation for five millennia. So it is
strange that Prospero overvalues Gonzalo’s trite observation.
Honest
lord,
Thou hast said well; for some of you there present
Are worse than devils.
Shakespeare has Prospero overvalue this fairly banal
comparison coming out of the mouth of a deeply morally compromised character.
If one assumes that Prospero has some proto-CCTV footage of the aristocrats,
then he will know that not long before Gonzalo was imagining virtual
usurpation.
I would with such perfection govern, sir,
To excel the golden age.
It is plain that Gonzalo is not without ambition: at least
to be always on the winning side.
Perhaps this is Prospero merely remembering and extrapolating from
Gonzalo’s one (best) action in helping him all those years ago.
Gonzalo’s final speech completes the separation.
All
three of them are desperate: their great guilt,
Like poison given to work a great time after,
Now 'gins to bite the spirits. I do beseech you
That are of suppler joints, follow them swiftly
And hinder them from what this ecstasy
May now provoke them to.
He has obsequiously attended all three for a dozen years,
but had – exactly like them – chosen to be unaware of their great guilt at
great crimes. Now he steps away from them and by implication proclaims his
innocence. How to think of attendant lords like Gonzalo? Is it easier with
Rosenstern & Polonius? I am reminded of those Frenchmen who after four
years of cowardly compromise & profitable collaboration with the Nazis,
when they heard the guns of the advancing Anglo-American forces switched to the
Resistance. Life has taught them – make sure you are on the winning side
always. It looks like concern, and perhaps it is partly concern, but it is too
undifferentiated.
2: GENDER
Prospero’s compliment to Ariel contains one of the most
amazing adjectives given to qualify ‘grace’ – ‘devouring’:
Bravely
the figure of this harpy hast thou
Perform'd, my Ariel; a grace it had, devouring:
It is worth looking at why Prospero chose a harpy for his
spectacle of terror. Any
non-human
shape would do – lion, elephant, even a talking snake – with its echo of
a) There
is a psycho-logical experiential
sequence: fault, understanding culpability, guilt, contrition/remorse,
(unconditional) apology, beg-forgiveness, reparation, reconciliation.
b) Each term
is logically necessary for the one following. Those who refuse to
understand/accept culpability, feel & show contrition, make unconditional
apology and beg forgiveness are NOT to be forgiven.
c)
It is the totality of the experiences (and concepts) that psychologically binds
the suffering of the victim (and also of the perpetrator) and places it in the
bound-memory without fear of irruption and
abreaction.
d) Any omission, disruption or stage-jumping of
the sequence will create an imperfect binding. People can agree to do anything
– formulae of words and gestures - and, out of fear or desire,
describe
it as reconciliation. But there will be residues of suffering and resentment
prompting futile repetition.
THE
IDEAL SEQUENCE
(KEY: T =
THOUGHT F = FEELING S = STATEMENT A = ACTION : TWO AGENTS Mal
& Efi
|
PRECONDITION
1 |
Mal |
T&F |
I intend to hurt Efi and |
|
The Action and |
|
T |
I intend to do X, to hurt Efi. |
|
The Hurt Happen |
Mal |
A |
He does X. |
|
|
Efi |
T&F |
I feel hurt by Mal doing X. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
PRECONDITION
2 |
Efi |
S |
I feel hurt by your doing X. |
|
The Hurt Declared |
Efi |
A |
She looks shocked & is
weeping |
|
|
Efi |
T&F |
I feel hurt Mal wanted to hurt
me: |
|
|
|
|
So I feel there is now a breach
between us. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
PRECONDITION
3 |
Mal |
A |
I see Efi is hurt by my doing
X. |
|
The Declaration |
|
T&F |
There is now a breach between
us. |
|
Received |
|
T |
What do I want to do? |
|
|
|
|
|
|
PRECONDITION
4 |
Mal |
T |
Perhaps I was unfair |
|
The Reparative |
|
T |
Perhaps I didn't want to hurt
her so bad. |
|
Impulse Observed |
|
T |
Do I desire to heal her hurt
and |
|
|
|
T |
repair the breach? |
|
|
|
T |
Yes! But what do I do? |
|
|
|
|
|
|
APOLOGY 1 |
Mal |
S |
I see and understand that you
are hurt by my doing X. |
|
Understanding & |
Efi |
T&F |
At least he understands that
much. |
|
Explanation |
Efi |
S |
But why did you do X to me? |
|
|
Mal |
S |
I did X for Reason-R (& was partly right to do so.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
APOLOGY 2 |
Mal |
A |
I see Efi (was) is shocked
& weeping. (He looks upset) |
|
Contrition |
|
T |
I did that. How could I be so bad? |
|
|
|
T |
I can't believe I'm such a
brute. |
|
|
|
F |
I feel awful. |
|
|
Efi |
T&F |
He seems to understand how
hurt I am. |
|
|
|
T |
He looks quite shocked. |
|
|
|
T |
I believe he does understand. |
|
|
|
F |
I can feel he is shocked. |
|
|
|
F |
I can feel he is upset. |
|
|
|
F |
Oh this feels too much to me. |
|
|
|
T&F |
I feel I must help him |
|
|
|
|
|
|
APOLOGY 3 |
Mal |
S |
I apologise. |
|
Apology |
|
T |
I can't do any more. |
|
|
|
T |
I hope she will forgive me. |
|
|
|
T |
I hope both of us will feel
better then. |
|
|
Efi |
T |
He's apologised. |
|
|
|
T&F |
It feels like a genuine
apology |
|
|
|
T |
I can't expect him to say/do
more. |
|
|
|
T |
So, it’s up to me now. |
|
|
|
S |
I forgive you. |
|
|
Mal |
S |
Thankyou. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
APOLOGY 4 |
Mal |
T |
That's a relief. What a time! |
|
Resolution and |
|
T |
Will it happen again'. |
|
Purgation |
|
T |
Will Efi believe me next time. |
|
|
|
T |
I need time to think. |
|
|
Mal |
S |
I (promise) I won't do X again |
|
|
|
S |
I will do Y for time T and
think about this episode |
|
|
Efi |
T |
He sounds genuine. |
|
|
|
S |
Thankyou |
|
|
|
|
|
|
POSTCONDITION
1 |
Efi |
S |
Thankyou |
|
|
|
|
Let’s close that episode now,
and lets go forward. |
|
|
Mal |
S |
Thankyou |
The
above schema makes no mention of religion, showing a secular morality is
possible. It is important this secular account is kept in mind,
even if one believes in a ‘broader’ religious context. What religion adds are
entities who also might suffer from human fault and from whom humans might feel
both a suffering separation, and the possibility of redemption. To reiterate,
the play moves between two religious contexts or structures of feeling –
Christian and pagan, without ever arriving at a secular position. Christianity
is the religion of the eternally suffering & eternally redeeming God. It
supposedly accepts the eternal truths of Judaism but revises them! Of the
inviolate commandments, two are most necessary to foreground here: not to
worship/consort with other Gods: and not to bear false witness. It challenges
the old law of talon - which was already
in contradiction with God’s rights: Vengeance is mine, I will repay - by advocating turn the other cheek and love/forgive
your enemies. The scriptures emphasise ‘love’ with an implication of
‘forgiveness’.
I believe that these
counsels of perfection, with their implausible and almost impossible
psychological demands, have caused incalculable misery for two millennia. There
is a bizarre contradiction in the fact that God will not forgive any human
without contrition but humans are commanded to forgive other humans who are
incontrite, or who even refuse culpability. It is almost as if ‘faster’ divine
forgiveness is being offered (by the church) to those who attempt the illogical
forgiveness of the obdurate. In a brilliant essay For Grace Received,
Umberto Eco shows how the thaumaturgical pamphlets pouring through contemporary
Italian letter-boxes each week, soliciting donations through the promise of
faster recovery from physical or spiritual sickness, are as theologically and
morally corrupt as the medieval indulgences.
We have tried to show the
weakness of the Received Interpretation of Ariel as a fundamentally good/light
and loyal, if playful, spirit. This scene confirms my thesis that he has no
moral sense, only opportunism mediated by contractual obligations. In this
opportunism he is kin with those masters of opportunism Polonius & Gonzalo:
he does not share the innocence of Puck, with whom he is sometimes compared. In
this section, I will discuss Ariel-as-actor, of whom his master says:
Bravely the figure
of this harpy hast thou
Perform'd, my Ariel
Shakespeare knew
intimately what his society thought of acting and actors: that pretending to be
another person was fundamentally a morally compromised project that needed to
be restricted. However valuable the theatre as biblium pauperum was to keeping
the illiterate in line, or however diverting to the university wits, it could
easily become dangerously uncontrollable. In a patriarchal society that had
just passed through five decades of burning the ‘other’ Christian denomination,
it is not surprising that the two basic restrictions were:
a) Women can’t act on stage.
b) Biblical figures or their words can’t
be shown on stage.
Many low-wits have
remarked: if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be writing tv soaps. I’ve often
wondered what the history of Christian belief would have been had Shakespeare
been allowed to use Biblical characters and quote the Bible as he did
Holinshed. Imagine the writer of Hamlet and Lear writing the
Passion. Nearer our time, X, after seeing Salome, remarked “Were Mr
Wilde allowed to write the rest of the New Testament, the churches would not be
half-empty of a Sunday”. Of course
preventing women from acting was a show of power, masking a deep anxiety about
what women might come to think and do in the real world after speaking powerful
words in the virtual world of the theatre.
Ariel’s hectoring speech
begins with a clear Christian ascription:
You are three men of sin.
Everyone in the audience for the next three centuries, but not late 20C
or early 21C generations, would have instantly recognised this trope from
countless sermons preaching hellfire and damnation. To that first audience it
would have appeared even worse coming out of the air, and the mouths of
creatures not yet painted on church walls. It is intended to unsettle that part
of the adult mind that is still susceptible to absolute terror.
This
phrase would seem to (re-)situate the ethical realm of the play within the
Christian paradigm. But both the legal restrictions and Shakespeare’s
(artistic) ambivalence instantly prompt a paradigm shift, which is affirmed a
few lines later:
whom
Destiny,
That hath to instrument…
… I
and my fellows
Are ministers of Fate…
The powers, delaying, not forgetting,
We
are back with Destiny & Fate & powers. Ariel proceeds to name fault,
culpability, punishment and last-chance extenuation.
The
powers…
… Thee of thy son, Alonso,
They have bereft; and do pronounce by me:
Lingering perdition…
Here
is the moral crux. Ariel is acting as a minister of Fate and he
pronounces a falsehood of the nadir of wickedness: to lie to a parent that
their child is dead, and for their fault. This surely defines one limit of
psychological torture. I guess the reader is wincing again at these ‘modern
instances’. Let me give both a modern example and one closer to
Shakespeare himself.
Some
years ago, I read a groundbreaking paper in the 1970 Volume of The Law Review
of The University of Pennsylvania (another brave new world!) by Welsh White
called Police Trickery in Inducing Confessions. At Precinct X, some cunning cops had worked
out that if an officer went into the cell dressed as a priest, sympathetic or
chiding, there was a better chance of a confession and case clearing. This led
to the law being changed. (By a strange
coincidence, one section is called The Current Status of Miranda :
referring to an earlier legal line of interrogation).
Shakespeare
had thought of that means of revenge and humiliation centuries earlier viz
Feste who, as Sir Topas the
curate, torments Malvolio, while
seeming to help him, and doubly enjoys his revenge. It is important to note that Olivia judges
that her steward, despite his manifold faults, has been most notoriously
abused.
Do not these two examples, separated by centuries, support my
anti-anti-presentist thesis and refute the common position, most recently
asserted this very year by high Catholic authority, as the
"You
cannot project backwards our modern morality to a society which did not know
toleration, in politics as well as religion. Even one death for heresy is a
problem."
Last
year, this society, in which we live, affirmed both the moral and the
instrumental worthlessness of torture: some using the latter consequentialist
argument to support the former deontological argument. Torture is wrong: and it
is useless because the tortured will lie. Anyone from the Pharoahs long gone to
now could have worked this out. It is a shameful disavowal of this ordinary
knowledge and a special pleading for one’s ideological community to pretend
otherwise.
Ariel
closes his menacing tirade with any priest’s familiar life-line:
whose
wraths to guard you from--
Which here, in this most desolate isle, else falls
Upon your heads--is nothing but heart-sorrow
And a clear life ensuing.
Heart-sorrow, like agenbite of inwit, is a beautiful & powerful
phrase for contrition, which like the word ‘contrition’ is lost to modern consciousness.
The tragedy of the internalised legal restriction is best seen in the odd
phrase uttered by Gonzalo as he sees Alonso paralysed by fear and guilt:
I' the
name of something holy, sir, why stand you
In this strange stare?
The vagueness of something
holy coming from Shakespeare’s pen is saddening.
In Twelfth Night Shakespeare moves the audience from identifying
with Feste’s justified vengeance at Malvolio’s condescension and vanity to
identifying with Olivia’s disgust at the disproportion of the revenge. Here the
audience is presented with Prospero in similar unChristian exultation:
My
high charms work
And these mine enemies are all knit up
In their distractions; they now are in my power;
And in these fits I leave them,
But here there is no Olivia to rescue the audience from its
seductive identification with the pompous powerful aggressor.
4: RACE
On this island, where according to the lying Ariel man doth not inhabit, there are various other
non-man beings. The stage directions give strange Shapes whom Prospero describes as my meaner ministers. Even among the
spirit-world there are gradations.
I think
of Cora’s moral challenge to her Miranda-like sister Alice, frightened by the
Indian runner in The Last of
the Mohicans “Should we distrust the man because his manners are not our
manners, and that his skin is dark?”. What makes
her rhetorical question so powerful is that it unusually elides a
characteristic that can’t be chosen – skin, with one that can – manners: and
thereby demands a greater effort at moral understanding and negotiation.
============================================================================================================================
ACT IV SCENE 1
PLOT
1:
Prospero explains that his ill manners were to test Ferdinand's love. He
accepts him as a son-in-law, with the proviso of chastity.
2:
He offers, as goodwill and reparation, to put on a spirit-show for them.
3:
The spirit-show affirms marriage.
4:
It is interrupted by Prospero's recollection of Caliban' s murderous plans.
5:
Caliban and the aspirant mariners are punished by spirits.
1:
The pageant in this Act, unbroken by scene division, is what, in dramatic
terms, defines The Tempest.
Shakespeare
innovatively integrates three genres -
a)
Realistic drama: a father solemnly advises his prospective son-in-law.
b)
Masque : pagan, pre-Christian, entities affirm the Christian sacrament of
marriage and the symbolism of harmonious fecundity
c)
Pantomime : as relief from the solemnity and from the symbolism, the vain low
characters are shown being chased and mocked.
2:
Prospero discloses an inchoate melancholy about levels of reality.
COMMENT
The
scenes in this Act are enchanting, in the theatre and even more so on film.
They are not only aesthetically delightful, but also emotionally seductive,
lingering long in the memory and giving the play an afterglow.
Its
principle themes are parental power and metaphysical power: political power
hardly registers. Perhaps here are our two methodological categories, power and
gender, can be treated together.
1a: DADDY’S GIRL
This
Act, in this play famed for its graceful demonstration of forgiveness and
reconciliation, begins with the most dishonest & disgusting manoeuvre in
the dialogue of reconciliation – the disingenuous/false conditional.
Prospero
begins:
If I have too austerely punish'd you.
He
knows, and the audience has seen, that he has barked at the young stranded
prince, imprisoned him, and humiliated him by forcing him to do hard (demeaning)
labour. I would argue from philosophy, and theology would support me, that when
the perpetrator of fault-F begins If I did F, then one can only doubt
their honesty, and wonder at such transparent ambivalence in understanding and
accepting culpability. They seem to be trying to create a parallel world in
which they didn’t do the fault, and then by passing between the two worlds
bamboozle the victim. (Perhaps there is an echo here of the two worlds of the
play: the Christian world, and the pagan world – in which the hero may cheat,
for winning is all.) The crucial point
is that the disingenuous conditional of culpability means the contrition is
qualified, conditional or even non-existent: and, in fact all the subsequent
stages of reconciliation are vitiated. People who have done F do say “If I
did F, then I am sorry” : believing that this constitutes an apology. It
doesn’t : it fails!
1b: THE LAME REPOST
The
reader may feel this is an extraordinary amount of energy to spend on this
little word. He/she may reply: People say this kind of If all the time,
we all know what is meant. It’s a bit like lahdedah people saying Shall we
see if we can’t get a cup of tea?” when they are spitting feathers. (The
example is from the film Witnail and I ).
The
frequency of an error does not establish truth and understanding. Both artists
and psychoanalysts are interested in the way ordinary, even tiny, words carry
over-determined
unconscious meanings. The reader who protests and defends such ambivalent
apologies has probably forgotten how much they hurt and resentment they still
carry about people who offered such imperfect gestures of reconciliation: they
rub along, but are still a bit miffed that the other person was holding back in
some way.
In
fact the strongest support for my argument comes from Shakespeare himself, who
also wrote one of the greatest If scenes in world literature. In
Richard III the young dramatist imagines the trapping of Lord Hastings. At
the hastily convened Privy Council meeting the King presents a bizarre and
lavish counterfactual threat to his person.
If they have done this deed, my noble lord -
“If”? Thou protector of this damnèd strumpet,
Talk’st thou to me of “ifs”? Thou art a traitor.—
Off with his head
His
moral outrage at this word allows him to instantly judge and punish/murder his
enemy. Imagine a world in which all adults, and you among them, who on hearing
from the adult who hurt them “If I have hurt you”, immediately reply “Fuck off, and don’t come back until
you’re sure you did hurt me!”.
In
As You Like It Touchstone is in the pastoral realm, beyond the court,
when he remarks:
Your “if” is
the only peacemaker; much virtue in “if”. In an
inter-textual fantasy, such sophistry would not have saved him from a mighty
Machiavel like
1c: MAD DAD
For
all his reading, Prospero is a poor philosopher and harsh counsellor, though he
might have made a good Inquisitor. Ferdinand should be very afraid to have him
as a father-in-law. The defining quality of mutually respectful (adult)
conversation is that there is space between the statements: the speaker gives
the listener time and space to think of what has been said. This requirement
becomes imperative at declarations of apology and of love. (Isn’t this what
distinguishes a polemic from a work of art?) One person is not telling or
jostling the other person what to think and feel.
One
must concede that Prospero is attempting reconciliation. He knows he has been
unfair, and cruel. But he vainly jumps stages:
beginning with the crucial understanding of culpability. He shows no
contrition, nor does he beg forgiveness: but merely asserts that he is to be
forgiven and reconciled because of the reparative gift of his daughter.
If I
have too austerely punish'd you,
Your compensation makes amends, for I
Have given you here a third of mine own life,
Surely
any offer of reparation ought to be framed as a question not a statement:
I have hurt you. I am sorry. May I make amends? Would my daughter be
enough amendment? Ferdinand is not really allowed to think about his
suffering, nor about the explanation and new marriage contract that Prospero
near imposes, just as forcefully as he had earlier imposed punishment.
It
is not worth labouring the point that Elizabethan/Shakespearean fathers often
treated their daughters as badges and bargaining chips of honour and
advancement: meeting any filial protest with an assertion of the right to
murder or to close in holy orders. The great sadness is that Shakespeare
couldn’t more daringly imagine otherwise in this final attempt to imagine an
island where other human possibilities are explored. Interestingly in this
first speech he doesn’t refer to her by name or bloodline.
a third of
mine own life,
Or that for which I live…
my rich gift…
her…she….
To weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain,
And therewithal to win me if you please,
Without the which I am not to be won,
You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day
Visit the speechless sick and still converse
With groaning wretches, and your task shall be
With all the fierce endeavour of your wit
To enforce the painèd impotent to smile.
Of course the year-long
test is a fairy-tale trope: but at least one with more psychological
plausibility than three hours of log-work!
The
nearest Ferdinand gets to spontaneous comment is the gesture which is implied
by Prospero’s plea/command:
O Ferdinand,
Do not smile at me that I boast her off,
We
do not know Ferdinand was smiling, or what kind of smile it was. But the
exchange this opens is profoundly acute, for it marks at least Ferdinand’s
consciousness, if not Prospero’s, that they are united in their sexual desire
for Miranda. Obviously boundaries are more problematic for Prospero. There is a
stridency to his advice with its implied curse.
but barren hate,
Sour-eyed disdain and discord shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both
Shakespeare has shown us many men obsessing about someone’s bed. It is
bad enough across one’s peers, but it is clearly a sign of madness across
generations: Hamlet chiding his mother:
…to
live
In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed,
Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty—
He
is at his most hysterical here. In the real world, Kafka was this madly
concerned with his parent’s bed, which he had to endlessly pass to get to his
own cubicle. It is almost as if Prospero is cautioning himself for some
internal mental transgressions.
A
gentler way to have made the same point would have been to refer to his own
good example when he was Ferdinand’s age: to say how his deep love for
Miranda’s mother had made him willingly chaste, and the result was a wonderful
marriage and a wondrous daughter. But of course it is not really about
Ferdinand. In both the punishment and the curse, there is something of the
tragic envy and malice of the incarcerated Nun of Monza in The Betrothed
– who knowing that her pupils will soon be brides of a kind she can never be,
makes them suffer now.
Ferdinand’s
reply is mostly stylised drivel. Its only interest is that he catches
Prospero’s unconscious tone and echoes it – the locker-room banter. It is the
mark of preachers and lay-hypocrites to name at length that which is to be
not-done. Ferdinand runs through a few possibilities:
the murkiest
den,
The most opportune place, the strong'st suggestion.
Our worser genius can, shall never melt
Mine honour into lust,
If
this is honestly and respectfully said to reassure an anxious father-in-law,
then what is said next is rather coarse. It only takes its energy from the
Prospero’s hint - let’s imagine Miranda in bed :
to take away
The edge of that day's celebration
When I shall think: or Phoebus' steeds are founder'd,
Or Night kept chain'd below.
The
reference to ‘edge’ echoes the scene with Shakespeare’s most powerful euphemism
for sex. Settling down for the play Hamlet wilfully misunderstands Ophelia
nervous courtesies Do you think I meant country matters? Later, she, perhaps innocently, alludes to
sexual prowess.
You are keen,
my lord, you are keen.
To
which, he feeling challenged and aroused by sex-talk, boasts – like Malcolm –
It would cost you a groaning to take off mine edge.
To
this uncouth remark about sexual prowess restrained by astronomy, Prospero
says:
Fairly spoke.
Sit then and talk with her; she is thine own.
Go
bring the rabble, [thy meaner fellows]
O'er whom I give thee power, here to this place
The nature of aristocracy is to establish a (false) belief
in an unattainably intrinsic, inheritable power, which then may, for whim or
realpolitik, be divided or delegated. The nature of religion relies on a
theological version of the same dynamic. Christ gives to the cowardly Peter and
the other disciples authority
to forgive sins in my name’. Here Ariel and some
lower-order spirits (echoing the human hierarchy of classes) will, through
Prospero’s power, perform the masque. There is scorn in the choice of the word
‘rabble’. Just as there is a feeble and
unbelievable paradox in a brain-box like Dr Frankenstein having such dumb lab
assistants, one wonders why a great magus like Prospero has such trouble
getting good staff from the spirit world.
In the seventies there was much work in philosophical ethics
done on illocutionary acts: and long discussions and papers on the different
status of performative utterances like threats and promises. One criterion was
reception. After a bit more of his usual barking of orders, Prospero reveals an
unusual project:
I must
Bestow upon the eyes of this young couple
Some vanity of mine art: it is my promise,
And they expect it from me.
A
threat was distinguished from a promise by the fact that the person threatened
need not receive it for it to exist between them. Here there is a report of
promise and reception & expectation but no such experience. I argue this is typical of Prospero’s
aggrandisement: a belief that what he thinks and desires happens and has
happened: other people’s thoughts and desires
are not really relevant to his projects. There was no promise!
The
next exchange between Prospero and Ariel has them both regress to a kind of
baby talk, or at best a Puck & Oberon playful nonsense. The genius of
Shakespeare is that his words seem to allow almost opposing interpretations.
What is Ariel doing here? Is it whorish wheedling? Is he being sycophantic
towards a narcissistic power-mad master? Ariel closes with :
Do you love me,
master? no?
There is an anxiety in the repeated question. Prospero replies:
Dearly my
delicate Ariel.
How can a master love? Is Prospero’s love important
to Ariel? His ascription has changed, within a few lines, from industrious servant to delicate – from earth to
air. This will be clarified later in the Act.
1g: SERMASQUE
The masque, which had been flagged as a promised wedding
gift, turns out to be a benign lecture on the worth of marriage and husbandry.
One is left wondering about the timing of Prospero’s two lessons. A kind and
good teacher trusts his/her pupils to take the gentle lesson, thereby obviating
the need for a harsh lesson. Prospero might have shown his promised masque
after accepting Ferdinand as his son-in-law: viz after
afore Heaven,
I ratify this my rich gift.
Then if Ferdinand was too gormless to get the point from
this sermon in spirits (not stones) about pre or post marital chastity,
Prospero could enviously attack his penis with dire warnings of literal and
metaphorical shrivelling. (Parents do do
such spiteful things. Was there not a barely unconscious attack on her own
daughter’s sexuality in
1h: OUTSIDE THE GATES OF
People, especially artists from post-lapsarian
faiths, have remained fascinated by the pre-lapsarian state, and especially the
moment before paradise is regained. Even though the New Testament states clearly
the conditions of redemption, it is in human nature to imagine other routes.
Dante gives the greatest description in (Christian) world literature of this
moment before rising to the stars. His masque/pageant at the end of Purgatorio
presents the mortals and animals that literally and metaphorically enact the
progress from Fall to heaven. Being forbidden to use the holy book, Shakespeare
had to present a scene that was morally and theologically as affective, albeit
from a different religion. The poetry is so great that even were a minor
character to have spoken the words as a set piece, the scene would be deeply
moving for its profound celebration of nature’s fecundity and the hope in
mortal marriage. But, as a coup of spectacular theatre, Shakespeare has
symbolic costumes and engine appearing from and vanishing into the upper, not
merely up, stage. Today’s audiences first encounter such spectacles on tv and
at the movies. Perhaps the nearest
equivalent of this dramatic moment, with all its crucial conceptual
implications, is the scene of the Jupiter mission in the film 2001.
There is, for my purposes, the interesting dynamic of
power & subordination here also. Iris entreats Ceres to appear. Ceres asks
why she is summoned by her sister, Queen Juno. When told of the reason, the
mortal marriage, she wonders
If Venus or
her son, as thou dost know,
Do now attend
the queen.
Shakespeare brilliantly introduces drama and anxiety
into the masque. There is a disruption of a stellar voyage to parallel
Prospero’s tempest disrupting the journey of the Neapolitans. Apparently Venus
and Cupid were on their way to facilitate/seduce the betrothed into pre-marital
sex, but other gods, somehow, deflected them for Hymen’s honour.
There is a benign fantasy
offered to the audience that each marriage might draw a personal visit from the
gods of marriage, even pennies from heaven:
A contract of true love
to celebrate,
And some donation freely
to estate
On the blessed lovers.
Ferdinand, like the
audience is dazzled by this majestic vision. Then he courteously
asks the crucial question of identification.
May I be bold
To think these spirits?
And Prospero replies:
Spirits, which by mine art
I have from their confines call'd to enact
My present fancies.
Isn’t this every child’s dream – to get instantly what one fancies. This
is Freud’s pleasure principle. It is fitting that Shakespeare locates it so far
from civilisation and its discontents – winter, summer, all year long!
Ferdinand is now instantly seduced by Prospero. There is no time for Scottish
scepticism of supernatural soliciting. A moment’s reflection on his Sunday school
lessons would have convinced him that such consorting with the non-human was
heretical. The audience may have remembered the trick played on Faustus, that
the Helen of Troy he begs for a kiss to make him immortal is a demon. One
senses Ferdinand imagining being taught his father-in-law’s art. This is why he says :
Let me live
here ever;
So rare a wonder'd father and a wife
Makes this place
He
has refound his
You sunburnt
sicklemen, of August weary,
Come hither from the furrow and be merry:
Make holiday; your rye-straw hats put on
And these fresh nymphs encounter every one
In country footing.
It
is a profoundly generous, almost Biblical tribute to those who work that others
may eat. There is the reward of the invitation to dance and perhaps licence to
engage in what Hamlet called country matters! This image, among
others, is referred to in Eliot’s East Coker, even by the spelling! :
..see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie
Then there is a strange stage direction : graceful dance ; towards
the end whereof PROSPERO starts suddenly, and speaks; after which, to a
strange, hollow, and confused noise, they heavily vanish.
In a play about levels of being, perception and reality, it is a potent
tableau. Prospero has seen or experienced something that, for all his power,
makes him start: he speaks voicelessly and then from somewhere an unowned
noise. Grace becomes heaviness and the masque falls apart. I can’t remember
that precisely described noise in any productions. But I am reminded of the
similarly bizarre stage direction in The Cherry Orchard calling for the
sound of a breaking string in the distance. Most interpreters see
this as marking the beginning of the end of Russian feudalism.
It is poignant, but typical of his vain solitude, that his great distress
must be disclosed as an aside, not even to Ariel.
[Aside] I had
forgot that foul conspiracy
Of the beast Caliban and his confederates
Against my life: the minute of their plot
Is almost come.
There is great tenderness when he notices that his
betrothed children look shocked.
You do look,
my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
This
is the first time he has referred to Ferdinand as his son. But the final ‘sir’
seems cool again. Then follows one of the mightiest speeches in the canon:
Our revels now are ended….
It needs no gloss. What must be noted for our
purposes is that this marks the beginning of Prospero’s literal and
metaphorical disrobing. The possibility of doing things with one human life and
with books which give access to eternal spirits, still founders on human
mortality. There is a curious humility in Prospero’s unnecessarily lengthy
explanation, including as it does an admission of mental and physical frailty.
Sir, I am
vex'd;
Bear with my weakness; my, brain is troubled:
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity:
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
To still my beating mind.
This must be even more unsettling to Ferdinand. Prospero has moved from being the strong man
who was brutalising him, to the kind man who gives his daughter, to the magical
man who commands spirits, to the man with a terrifying headache that breaks up
the engagement party, all in one afternoon!
1j: THE FORGETFUL GOD
All writers struggle with fundamental puzzle of matching plausibility of
plot with plausibility of character. Perhaps it fits with an irascible loner to
have him agree to an engagement with a warning speech and then to put on a nice
show. But there remains the puzzle of his forgetting: I had forgot that
foul conspiracy. The most beautiful scene in the play is interrupted by
a thought in one man and because of a fear in a spirit. Man proposes but God
disposes. But what about when man is proposing as-God, ordering or at least
directing spirits? What is the epistemological status of forgetting by God or
by a magus? Obviously and logically an omniscient God can’t forget.
Perhaps the proof that a magus is not quite a God is that he/she can
forget – hubris makes it so!
Freud explored the psycho-pathological mechanism behind ordinary
forgetting: locating it in a conflict of desires or in anxiety suffocating
desire. Related to this is the ordinary index of mental well-being that a
person knows how to own and protect his/her desires & pleasures: there is
not a repeated imperfect planning for the satisfaction of a desire such that it
is probable it will be spoiled. This is bad enough when the only person who
will be disappointed is oneself. It takes on the colour of envy and malice when
one’s plans for shared pleasure always end in the other person being
disappointed too. One of the finest contributions to this debate about
foregrounding joy is the couplet from
All this to love and rapture’s due
Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?
[Some of the energy to write this essay came from an experience with
such a man – a scholar & lecturer, married and in his fifties - who
suggested enthusiastically we see The Tempest and then by his typically
wilful mis-planning ruined the evening – again. It persuaded me to end the
friendship.]
At the least, I’d like to say it is implausible that Prospero would
forget.
1k: TELLING TRUTH TO POWER
Ariel hadn’t forgotten. What is magnificent about his report of this is
that it clarifies the power relation between them.
Ay, my commander: when I presented Ceres,
I thought to have told thee of it, but I fear'd
Lest I might anger thee.
There is much sentimental drivel written about the nice, special
relationship between Prospero and Ariel. It is clear that Ariel has worked out
that Prospero is a vain and irascible old man who doesn’t keep his promises: so
might be managed but can’t really be engaged with. Earlier he had
addressed him as my potent master : now he calls him my
commander. Finally, we get the criterion of human connectivity that
marks absolute trust and equality: to tell the truth – of bad news & of
even failure – without fear. Surely that is what one would expect from a loved
relative, a friend and a lover – that they would receive your difficult truth
with grace and gratitude, and with no hint of menace. This is of course why the
line of courage in journalism is to tell truth to power. It is of course
also the line of courage at court – whether monarchical or democratic or
fascist. Clare Short spoke too late and has been in the moral wilderness ever
since. The great satirist Lenny Bruce died unemployed yet still believing in
the worth of stating difficult truths. In one of his jewel-like micro-sketches
he imagines the last days of Hitler.
Hitler: How am I doing?
Aide1: Great!
Hitler : How am I doing?
Aide 2: Fantastic! The Russians are retreating.
Hitler : How am I doing?
Aide 3 : You’re finished.
Hitler: Kill that man!
I thought to have told thee of it, but I fear'd
Lest I might anger thee.
What kind of human connection, trust, affection, respect, love can
possibly exist between two people when one of them can say this to the
other? To make oneself so fearsome and
unapproachable that another person can’t tell you something for your own good
is to have fallen to the nadir of human wisdom and character.
1l: BEAST-MAKING POWER
I left them
I' the filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell,
There dancing up to the chins, that the foul
O God, that
men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we
should with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause transform ourselves into
beasts!
So it is not surprising that Ariel describes the trio – whom we are
already disposed to see as less human than the aristocrats - using animal imagery – horse, cow bear…
Then I beat my tabour;
At which, like unback'd colts, they prick'd
their ears,
Advanced their eyelids, lifted up their noses
As they smelt music: so I charm'd their ears
That calf-like they my lowing follow'd through
Tooth'd briers, sharp furzes, pricking goss and thorns,
Which entered their frail shins: at last I left them
I' the filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell,
There dancing up to the chins,
In this middle of this constabulatory report of bringing drunken
riff-raff to the drunk-tank is that
beautiful description of synaesthesia, they smelt music. What
Christianity never found an equivalent for were the sublime pagan ideas of the
music of the spheres, which, as we noted above, are most beautifully described
at the close of The Merchant of Venice:
and of the humanising power of music, Orpheus almost making men of
beasts. We saw above the unresolved tension between Shakespeare’s presentation
of Caliban as utterly and irredeemably subhuman: and his presentation of the
same character as exquisitely attuned to the intrinsic, pre-Prosperoan music of
the island.
1m: THE CLOTHS OF
HEAVEN
In a brief exchange between the low-class conspirators we have a
bathetic reference to the high tragedy of Macbeth. At the first plotting
of the coup Stephano had assumed Kingship-elect status, Trinculo was First
Minister/ Queen and Caliban had chosen to be, in street-talk, their bitch.
Nearing Duncan/Prospero’s chamber Stephano says portentously:
Give me thy hand. I do begin to have bloody thoughts.
Now
is the moment for Trinculo to also to draw and check daggers, but he is
instantly distracted by what Prospero calls trumpery and the
stage directions call glistering apparel. Whereas the Thane of
Cawdor had protested Why do you dress me in borrowed robes,
Trinculo squeals as excitedly as the Sex in the City quartet,
O king Stephano! O peer! O worthy Stephano! look
what a wardrobe here is for thee!
Even the supposedly dumb and dead drunk Caliban is appalled at this
shallow diversion.
Let it alone, thou fool; it is but trash.
The word ‘trash’ in the context of a criminal plan echoes one of the
great ironic speeches by Shakespeare’s greatest monster, Iago
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something,
nothing;
Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.
And according to Christ, to call one’s brother Thou fool was among the very worst actions. But the
new-Royals have become two girls on prom-night or Patsy & Edina in Harvey
Nicks. They are now seconds away from their comeuppance. Is Shakespeare mocking
the possibility of revolution from below for being the indisciplined project of
the born-weaker mind, easily distracted from higher even altruistic,
utilitarian actions: or is he observing a great truth about human greed?. One
thinks of the too many left-wing trade-union leaders who take the ermine and
never so much as squeak ever again! At this point the stylised dignity of the
masque is displaced by the stylised indignity of the pantomime. The stage direction calls for
A noise of hunters heard. Enter divers Spirits, in shape of dogs and
hounds, and hunt them about, PROSPERO and ARIEL setting them on
This makes for a great stage spectacle, a catharsis of low emotions. Two
of the spirit-dog’s names are particularly interesting Fury and Tyrant.
Just as at the beginning of the Act, Prospero had name one type of
Pleasure Principle power:
Spirits, which by mine art
I have from their confines call'd to enact
My present fancies.
it closes with him naming the other:
At this hour
Lie at my mercy all mine enemies.
This is a far deeper satisfaction than the one
Chinese sages offered: If you sit on the riverbank for long enough, you will see
the corpses of your enemies come floating by.
3: RACE
In this Act Prospero passes from the profound, if not-unmixed, fatherly
joy of giving away his only daughter to a Prince, and the director’s thrill of a
great performance, to mental and physical anguish at his slave Caliban. He
finally gives up an old project declaring:
A devil, a
born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost;
And as with age his body uglier grows,
So his mind cankers.
In the flow of the play it is easy to be persuaded by Prospero version
of events and to misperceive his inadequacies as an adoptive-parent &
teacher and also his delight in cruelty. Recall that he is introduced as a
source of the low comedy of swearing:
We'll visit Caliban
my slave, who never
Yields us kind answer.
But this final ascription
is important for the political & moral hierarchy the play is advancing,
because it presents the puzzle: at what point, after how long and after what
kind of effort, my pains, Humanely taken, does one re-write one’s
topology of beings? It isn’t after the
threat of rape, but the threat of usurpation that Prospero declares that
Caliban is:
A devil, a born
devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick
Interestingly Caliban has
enough reason to construct a topology and fears transformation into a lower
species:
… we shall
lose our time,
And all be turn'd to barnacles, or to apes
With foreheads villanous low.
I remember that after the
trial of the perpetrators of rape and assault at the Ealing Vicarage, 1986, a
journalist observed that the tariff seemed to be higher for robbery than
rape: a perfect expression of capitalist
values undeflected by theology.
It is an absolutely and
ineluctably political act to say that a creature who looks & seems
sufficiently similar to a human being isn’t a human being and need not be
treated as a human being. Alas the sublime ancient Greeks did this and the
ancient Hindus devised a mighty piece of sophistry in a supposedly divinely
given caste system. Against such assertions there might be other assertions,
based on the same experience differently interpreted, leading to different
human relations. In as great a danger of brutal death in a new world, a
different white European man could say:
There is reason in an
Indian though nature has made him with a red skin. (Fennimore
Cooper ib)
To be fair to Prospero
(and to Shakespeare, a lover of dark women), there is little colour racism. It
is the more subtle neo-capitalist problem of equality and labour. Whereas erring aristocratic human beings are
judged with dignity and their punishment is to effect spoken remorse, apology
and reconciliation, the lower-orders & ‘sub-humans’ are to be poisoned and
beaten until they wail like animals and retake the collar and shackle, literal
and metaphorical.
I will plague them all,
Even to roaring.
I would argue that Prospero partly knows that he has failed miserably as
a great teacher & noble fellow human that he has long imagined and boasted
that he is: and sometimes he punishes Caliban for being a living proof of this
failure. Isn’t it common, in all cultures, for failed parents to hammer their
errant teenagers in this way?
The play’s basic
intertwining of pre-Christian and Christian ideas permeates this Act, as shown
above.
=========================================================================================================================
ACT V : SCENE 1
PLOT
1:
Prospero prepares to rejoin his civilization, as he first knew it:
a) By renouncing his magical powers, so as to be equal to his countrymen.
b) By forgiving & being reconciled with those of his countrymen who hurt
him.
2:
He allows himself a final rant of anger and then introduces himself to them in
his former robes of earthly power.
3: There are profound speeches of reconciliation with the aristocrats and larky
acceptance of the inept coup-plotting mariners.
4: He frees Ariels, re-adopts Caliban & resolves to drown his books
& think of death.
5: The actor playing Prospero steps forward and delivers an epilogue direct to
the audience.
RECEIVED INTERPRETATION
!: The play
presents one of the sublime scenes of Christian forgiveness and reconciliation.
2:
Ariel presents humankind's angelic possibilities and Caliban their brutish
earthbound proclivities: the latter being harder to disown. (It is easier to
say that Caliban is Id, and Prospero is Ego, than that Ariel is superego.)
3:
From 20C: the problem of Caliban (the colonised) is left unresolved - will he
finally inherit the island: or be taken to
4:
Prospero finally sees the limitations of books.
4:
After almost three decades of work and almost two-score masterpieces, this is
Shakespeare's farewell to the
COMMENT
1: POWER
1a) THE VANITY OF HUMILITY
Not
unsurprisingly for a dissenter, my strongest protest against the received interpretation
is with respect to the climactic final Act. I propose that this there is both a
dramatic and psychological lacuna that vitiates the denouement. Let me
reiterate that I am not suggesting that the myriad-minded man didn’t
know what he was doing. All I am doing is identifying what he – for sure,
intentionally - did not do and then wondering more about its dramatic
consequences, than conjecturing biographical explanations.
As
I argued above any narrative presenting a progress or process from fault to
reconciliation will only attain psychological truth if it foregrounds
contrition. The wisdom of a parent, the acuity of a psychoanalyst or priest,
and the integrity of a writer, all depend upon an ability to distinguish
between varieties of contrition: genuinely-true, well-acted-true, ambivalent,
conflicted, disingenuous, dishonest and rubbish-pretence. Even the young
Shakespeare knew this. Although the scene of contrition in The Two Gentlemen
of Verona is as brief and as instantaneous as twists in folktales, it is
sufficiently believable.
PROTEUS
My shame and guilt confounds me.
Forgive me, Valentine. If hearty sorrow
Be a sufficient ransom for offence,
I tender ’t here. I do as truly suffer
As e’er I did commit.
VALENTINE
Then I am paid,
And once again
I do receive thee honest.
Who by repentance is not satisfied
Is nor of heaven nor earth. For these are pleased;
By penitence th’ Eternal’s wrath’s appeased.
And that my love may appear plain and free,
All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.
This
exchange meets all the philosophical and theological criiteria. Lear’s contrition
is the most powerfully true in the canon. At the opposite end of the moral
spectrum, Iago gives the perfect illustration of the incontrite man. In between
there are so many on-stage speaking demonstrations of imperfect and failed
contrition. To mention a few:
a) Bolingbroke/Henry IV in Richard 11 and
Henry IV Part One.
b) Claudius’s ambivalent prayers in Hamlet
c)
Macbeth is initially contrite for the very thought
of the murder. Afterwards he
is
tormented by his unconscious guilt: but on the surface he has mere paranoia and
vain vexation that his fame and regal line will be brief.
Here,
in his final play, Shakespeare does not show the treacherous aristocrats
in state of contrition: speaking their understanding of culpability, breaking
in their agony of remorse, aching to beg for forgiveness and to offer
reparation. One wonders why. Perhaps Shakespeare, the dramatist, understood he
had painted himself into a corner. Having shown extensively Prospero’s desire
and ability to torment and torture his enemies, there might not be sufficient
temporal psychological and crucially dramatic space for them to arrive at
believable contrition.
To
reprise, Prospero has subjected his enemies to extraordinary rendition, and
then tortured them, by near-death danger & menace, twice. He now holds them
physically and metaphysically bound. There is no space – of any kind – for them
to think, reflect and act: they can only react – liked traumatised humans,
caged animals perhaps. Were they shown there, it ought to be a scene of bedlam
– catatonia and violent despair. I propose that one could not trust the
viability of the emotions expressed in that state. And that because Shakespeare
knew this, he has Ariel report the scene.
The king,
His brother and yours, abide all three distracted
And the remainder mourning over them,
Brimful of sorrow and dismay; but chiefly
Him that you term'd, sir, 'The good old lord Gonzalo;'
His tears run down his beard, like winter's drops
From eaves of reeds.
The
crucial word is distracted. I know that whereas for moderns
‘ecstasy’ means a below-the-waist intensity, for Elizabethan’s it meant an
above-the-neck intensity, derangement. Perhaps ‘distraction’ carries layers of
intensity of meaning not easily grasped by us moderns. It is certainly much
more than Eliot’s wordplay in:
…the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction.
Perhaps even then it was as vague as our modern term
‘depressed’. Both the 1960s child-torturers, Hindley and Brady, were said to be
depressed at different times: but in significantly different ways. Brady’s
depression was akin to the unrepentant Iago’s and Macbeth’s, and the tiredness
of the vain madman briefly weary of the noise of his own vaunting voice.
Hindley’s contrition was so transparently opportunistic, imperfect and false,
it is shocking how many people were seduced into believing her. Her depression
was of the failed trickster.
I
would argue that the King has broken down. Though grief is not an illness, at a
certain intensity, a person can break down and become ill. In fact he is
suicidal: so he can’t gather sufficient reason to locate culpability and locate
rational contrition as distinguished from suicidal self-punishment or despair.
Most importantly, the attendant, aspirants lords, Antonio and Sebastian, are
neither broken nor contrite, they are barely reflective. They are plausibly
puzzled and annoyed by the ‘unnatural’ events on the island that keep interrupting
their plans to murder.
What
is differently astonishing is that Gonzalo, the vain, unconsciously ambitious,
pompous arse of Act 2 has suddenly been transformed into the good old
lord Gonzalo, almost the mater dolorosa to this unholy family. I
don’t think Ariel is being ironic when he says that you term'd, sir. Again
the only explanation might be that Prospero is so eternally grateful for the
books and provisions that Gonzalo risked his life to give a dozen years ago, he
can’t see him as a rounded person with the flaws the audience, & Ariel have
seen and that presumably even he, the mighty Magus, could see.
1b) PROMETHEUS UNFROWNED : FORCING FORGIVENESS
We
can, by imitation, honour Feste’s sublime rhetoric,
What is love? ’Tis not hereafter,
by
suggesting
What is forgiveness? ‘Tis here - but after!
Reconciliation
is principally about now binding the pain that happened in the past so
that in the future it does not keep bleeding into the present consciousness of
both the victim and the perpetrator. But it has its various necessary
pre-conditions. At line 25 Prospero declares Though with their high
wrongs I am struck to the quick.
(I
will look at the comparison between mortal and air-beings below.)
Despite
the avowed noble intention that follows, it is important to pause a moment
here. Note the present tense, albeit mock-subjunctive. His hurt is still raw
and deep because even he knows, somewhere in his mighty library-full head, that
his enemies, and particularly his fratricidal brother, are not contrite. Just
as Claudius tries and fails to will contrition against a deeper desire to cling
to the fruits of fault, so Prospero will fail to attain genuine forgiveness.
The typically Shakespearean speech that follows sounds great:
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the
quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further. Go release them, Ariel
But
the lesson that one part of his Self is giving to another is not truly taken by
either. The truth of this is what gives a melancholy colouring to everything he
says to the end of the play. There is a strange logical and psychological
riddle in the final two lines of his speech:
My charms I'll
break, their senses I'll restore,
And they shall be themselves.
In this play about ordinary and supernatural
mutability, such a declaration of essentialism sits uneasily. No ordinary
person who has been traumatised can return to their pre-traumatised state: that
is what distinguishes a trauma. At best one might be left with a new terrible
beauty: more often one faces the rest of one’s life as cracked as Scott-Fitzgerald’s plate.
Here a bit of magical dry-cleaning and magical therapy and they are as before,
for what else can restore…themselves mean? But that was the whole
point of the tempest and the rendition - to make them what they were not,
contrite! The greatest tragedy in this romance-comedy is that they have not
been allowed to be themselves. Prospero has not dared to enter a dialogue
with them-as-they-were-themselves, trusting his mighty learning and
dignity to bring each of them to a different nobler self. It is hard to see
what he is offering them.
Prospero
puts on his Island-Self, magus-in-residence, robes for the last time and
delivers one of the famous melancholy speeches of the canon. At the moment of
renunciation it feels deeply necessary to him to recall his so potent art.
Everyone remembers the charms of the
graves at my
command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth.
Among
many other boasts this makes the slavery of Caliban redundant: why not get the
dead to fetch wood and water, they’ve had a life! Perhaps the desperate final
pride in these unchristian powers comes from an awareness of the futility of
powers that couldn’t save him from usurpation in
But this rough
magic
I here abjure,
There
is the not-small matter of the recipient of this speech. It is a soliloquy, so
none of the stage characters are chosen to receive it. But it is with them that
he must be reconciled, and live as an equal. Human illocutionary or
performative acts necessarily require another human to witness them. One can’t
logically promise to oneself. Nor can one abjure alone, or to mere elves and
mushrooms. Finally it must be added abjuration is neither contrition nor
forgiveness. It might of course contain wanton destruction.
I'll break my
staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book
Like
many powerful lines in Shakespeare, this has gathered all sorts of pretty,
neutering accretions. Read it again and you will see that it, especially the
famous second clause, is as profoundly despairing as the sign over
i )
One
of the indices of Macbeth’s collapse and unworthiness for kingship is given by
his literal unfitness for the regal clothing:
Now does he
feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.
In
the female inflection, typically of the poor beauty at court, there is the
dream that there is a dress that will win the King’s desire and power. In
Kapur’s magnificent film Elizabeth the poor girl tries a dress
meant for the young heiress, not imagining it is laced with poisonous acids
that wither her beauty in hellish pain. We are to understand that Prospero
finally sees the danger in his cape.
ii)
STAFF
It
is implied throughout the play that Prospero is not a wizard or a witch, but a
white good magician. So his staff is as innocent as St Christopher’s or even David’s
in Psalm 23. It is not as dangerously secular as Stephen Dedaelus’s ashplant.
But it must be symbolically broken – like cutting Samson’s hair.
iii)
LIBRARY
What
is a book worth? This question is foregrounded in Act 1 & now answered in
Act V. No commentator on the play has answered this as brilliantly as Peter
Greenaway in his film Prospero’s Books. Like him, I conjecture that the
reader/audience cannot understand Prospero’s gesture of what might be called
secular sacrilege, without an act of historical imagination. The best way in is
to recall the triptych on a new postage stamp issued in 1975? The first panel
featured a papyrus, the second the Gutenburg press and the last a PC. Even
though I wasn’t going to get my PC for another twenty years, I experienced an
epiphany when I saw this stamp. I understood I was living in a moment of
absolute transformation equal to the experiences of the Egyptians and the
medieval Germans. As MacLuhan remarked, people can’t grasp the magnitude of the
meaning of new technology because they can only understand it through the old:
or, rather, people of a certain age. Just as we, unlike our great-grandparents,
understood the idea of a telephone, without shouting down it: so there are
millions of nine-year old girls who can use the Google without the thought of
teams of Bob Cratchits sifting through billions of index cards. But even a
modern Professor of literature must pause to imagine how Elizabethans, and then
only a minority, might have been in awe of books coming into their hands, what
was a book for and what it might do. Just remember that sublime plaint from The
Merry Wives of Windsor:
I had rather
than forty shillings I had my book of songs and sonnets here.
(At this time you could probably buy
a small house or horse for forty shillings)
At
the climax of his film, Greenaway presents a catalogue of cunning, beautiful
and bizarre objects in book-form, all fitting the Platonic idea of a book.
(Imagine the young game-writers & webmasters of our time.) All the books
are cast into the water and all drown except a three volume set of
Shakespeare’s works which, as they hit the water, burst into light as if they
were made of magnesium and float away beyond destruction. It is a sublime
tribute to the book that, centuries later, is allowed on every desert island!
We
know Prospero had the wonder of books that Greenaway beautifully illustrated.
But now he feels they are too dangerous and can’t be taken back to
Prospero
is the bibliophile in the canon. And yet he is the only character who
destroys books. In the flow of the magnificent poetry, one forgets the moral
depravity of this act, however it is extenuated by Christian ideology or his
private melancholia. He must be compared to the barbarians who destroyed the
library at
There
is the famous and bitter aphorism of the 20C: “Those who begin by burning
books, will soon be burning people” .
It is a high mark of the Renaissance that the Florentines eventually
came to their senses and burned Savanorola! Prospero begins by almost drowning
his kinsmen and ends by drowning his books, Here’s a thought experiment.
Imagine Prospero arriving back in
(I read chemical physics, also known as material science, at university
for a year. Minus 39 is the temperature of the ocean beyond the Elizabethan
plummet. Here the salt and cold will dissolve ink and paper.)
Before leaving the theme of libraries, I wish to give three examples:
literary-historical and personal.
1e: Absolute Milanese
Marx spoke of the spectre
of communism stalking the daytime of his
Yes, he is also a church-man, but life is full of contradictions, and
perhaps this civic ministry was his own (unconscious) being-against
the Catholic ministry – which was most famous for eighteen hundred years for discouraging
the laity from reading!. For surely the first idea that the idea of a free
library teaches is that of the absolute equality of all readers: which sits
uneasily with the supposedly eternal hierarchies of Church and the supposedly
necessary hierarchies of State! He also seems to carry a certain melancholy,
more like Shakespeare’s Merchant Antonio than the gobby Jacques. By a pleasing
coincidence, the historian of the Inquisition Prof Borromeo, mentioned above,
is a scion of this original Cardinal Borromeo.
1f: AN INDIAN’s LIBRARY
Prospero couldn’t imagine
Sycorax and Caliban being enchanted and ennobled by books. Nor any island
Indian. I am the son of a poor Indian man who founded a public library, the
first public Indian Library in the
1g: FORWARD CHILD & RUNNING HORSE
“Anchos was quickly
scribbling a note. His mother came over, smiled and said softly “I wish I could
write like that, so quickly: your hand running over the page.” He stopped
writing but didn’t know what to do. Then he smiled, but as she moved away
quietly, he felt something inside him tearing and aching in a way he had never
imagined possible.”
(The Slipped Suture
: Celia Maddenware)
Anchos is fifteen. His
mother was illiterate. Later, when he becomes a great writer, the misery
intensifies with each book he writes, that he know his mother won’t be able to
read. Psychoanalysts rightly talk about the suffering of the Oedipus complex.
In a recent letter to Woman’s Own, a woman in her fifties spoke of her
distress when her son of 36 announced that this is what he had and he wanted
her to satisfy him now or he would never see her again. But the episode above
discloses another profound anguish, not about not-being-able to give one’s
penis to one’s mother but one’s pen. In our time, the most perfect expression
of this anguish is in Camus’s The First Man and his Nobel Prize speech.
His mother was illiterate.
Consider this famous
speech by Touchstone to his fiancee:
When a man's verses
cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child
Understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little
room. Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical.
Can this be any more or
less autobiographical than Prospero’s final speeches? Did Shakespeare feel the
misery and anguish of the young Anchos? His mother, Mary Arden, for all her
family-links to William the Conquerer, was illiterate and used a running horse
– what strange echoes of the Mohicans - as her signature. She died in 1608,
when he was 44. By then Shakespeare was rich enough to have endowed a library
at
1h: A FINAL TORMENT: LAST HIT
Prospero bring his enemies
– for they are as-yet still his enemies to him – into his magic circle. Once
again he delivers a speech, and makes a gesture, to an unspecified audience. He
allows himself a final tormenting rant. Perhaps Shakespeare used this structure
for dramatic purposes – to summarise for the groundlings the denouement. A
theme in my psycho-philosophical research is what are the conditions of
conversation and how do they relate to the conditions of creation. I
hope it is uncontroversial to assert that a magic circle, like hypnosis, or
imprisonment of any kind, is a condition that instantly vitiates the
possibility of fair and open human conversation. From the psychoanalytic paradigm,
one would say that Prospero has internalised/introjected his hated enemies as a
psychic device to manage his almost unbearable agony at betrayal and
separation. So this speech is from one part of his damaged ego to the
fragmentary object of the dangerous Other. Similar thoughts may have prompted
Greenaway to present the play/film as entirely the
daydream/fantasy/thought-experiment of Prospero. Back in the macro-external
world, one can at least observe that Prospero, the soon to be re-established absolute
He proceeds to repeat his
hyperbolic praise for Gonzalo.
Holy Gonzalo,
honourable man,
Mine eyes, even sociable to the show of thine,
Fall fellowly drops. …
O good
Gonzalo,
My true preserver, and a loyal sir
To him you follow'st! I will pay thy graces
Home both in word and deed.
The
trouble is that the him that Gonzalo follow’st as a
loyal sir is himself! In
that regard of absolute vanity and egoism he is like Prospero: so little wonder
that the latter produces fellowly drops. Surely this is the moral crux for all
courtiers and senior ministers – should one be loyal to a weak or corrupt
ruler? Let me offer a reference point of superogatory, and in truth unnecessary
self-lacerating guilt, shame and remorse. My philosophy teacher, is a
half-German Jew who got out Spring 39, when he was twelve. A few of his family
perished in the camps. Fifty years later he was asked to writer a memoir for a
collection Childhood & War. I was shocked when he called his piece Not
a Colonel von Stauffenberg, Unfortunately! I was even more shocked when he, an ethicist,
couldn’t understand why I felt he was being unfair to his pre-teen Self. It is
honourable that von Stauffenberg planted the bomb in 1944, and was tortured to
death for it: but the point is he didn’t move in the preceding 11 years: he was
yet another loyal follower! History repeatedly proves that tyrants and
torturers are kept in power by men like Polonius and Gonzalo. What is shocking
and puzzling in this play is that Gonzalo escapes just comment.
In his secret mind,
Prospero enjoys some snarling and schadenfreude at his prisoners’ abiding
distress and confusion. There are two references to an unusual form of
suffering, but his brother isn’t named in either.
Thou art pinch'd fort now, Sebastian….
…..Sebastian,
Whose inward pinches therefore are most strong…
I do forgive
thee,
Unnatural though thou art.
This is so wretchedly wrong and confused, that I
almost weep. Here theology clashes with psychology and philosophy.
a)
PHILOSOPHY
Two humans must be present to establish forgiveness
as a human communication.
“I forgive you” like “I promise” like “With this ring
I thee wed” are not descriptions of an action: they are the action, they are
illocutionary, they are performative. One can’t forgive in the absence of the
person to be forgiven. In the teeth of theology, I would argue, from
cross-cultural ethics, that one can’t forgive the person who has not yet
expressed contrition and begged for forgiveness.
b)
PSYCHOLOGY
I know that poetic rhythm often necessitates the
transposition of clauses against common usage, even common sense! But surely at this climactic moment the order
must be right. If forgiveness is an unqualified grace, sacred or secular, then
it is unqualified: One is not taught to say “I forgive you, you fucking
bitch/wanker/bastard” The nomenclature of fault/sin is to be
performatively placed in the past: “You were a bastard/bitch to me. I accept your
contrition and apology. I forgive you”. I would argue
that unless these conditions are met there will be a residue of resentment and
puzzlement, even malice, even hatred. I don’t doubt that people can develop all
sorts of scenarios and gestures and
rituals to manage the
double hurt of the incontrite perpetrator, first the cruel fault and then the
lack of concern. These might produce an effect of total – or more than likely
only partial – disconnection from the wound and from the perpetrator, which
helps one get on with life, but I’d like to say this is not real forgiveness:
and that it muddies ethics.
c)
THEOLOGY
What theology, certainly ordinary pulpit
Christianity, insists is possible, even mandatory, is the logical and
psychological nonsense of forgiving the incontrite person. A whole drama
of theology is advanced to support this. What it is really about is that
religion abhors a vacuum of control. At the point where a person might feel the
agony of ambivalence and the agony of waiting in anger and despair, religion
says - We’ll take care of it. Don’t think, do this, you’ll feel better: and, if
you do, remember we said it: and keep supporting us – at least with money!
The most tragic proof of this is from the Ealing Vicarage
rape. Ruth Saward, the poor girl whose body and mind were smashed the most
viciously, said how deeply upset she was that her father, the Vicar, had within
a fortnight of the attack, publicly said that he forgave the still incontrite
raping robbers.
1i: FORM & FORMICAH : POWER DRESSING
Ariel,
Fetch me the hat and rapier in my cell:
I will discase me, and myself present
As I was sometime Milan:
Prospero intends to present to his enemies – for the
forgiveness is still a morally untenable charade – a tableau of shock and awe as
they gradually arrive at supposedly their own consciousness. This will be
himself as he was at his coronation twenty years ago. Unlike Micah, he has not
bent his rapier into a plough-share. In a brilliant gloss on Richard III, Jan
Kott, who knew the same experience from the communist authorities, applauds
Shakespeare’s psychological acuity at having
The charm
dissolves apace,
And as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason.
Prospero knows what he is doing. For of course he
could have taken the ancient line of hospitality, courtesy, decency. If a
person is not your prisoner, then he/she is your guest: and they must not be
questioned until they have bathed, been dressed in clean linen, eaten and drank
to their content, a feel a sense of safety and openness.
Ariel’s song continues his strange regression: the
rebellious justly indignant spirit of Act 1 and even the compassionate
adult-mortal-like being of a few lines earlier in this Act, seems to have
become a choirboy ninny.
1j : STRANGE MEETING
Prospero has ensured he meets his kinsmenemies on his
terms. They are still terrified, or at least as afraid enough for Gonzalo to
implore:
some heavenly
power guide us
Out of this fearful country!
Of
course this is dramatically brilliant. But what it means is that the
conversation that follows is not normal and ordinary and fair. It is rather
intrinsically hysterical: charged with that mixture of abiding terror, relief,
intermittent disbelief and panic, and reflex obsequious gratitude to one’s
former tormentors and torturers that are the symptoms of what we know as
Stockholm Syndrome. Of course an anti-presentist will bulk at this term from
hostage taking in the 1970s being applied to a play from the early 17C. Let
that pass, and let us examine the gesture and conversation of reconciliation. A
person’s relation with another person has, despite all plausible similarities
with other relationships, a specificity that must be honoured. I’ve often heard
counselling clients in their late 20s and 30s talk and act as if there was a
siamese being, mom’n’dad, and not two separate relationships to be engaged
with.
Prospero
doesn’t answer Gonzalo, for rank demands that he first address the senior of
the party, Alonso. He offers an embrace. Despite the former’s reassurance of
ordinariness and species kinship, the latter is plausibly hesitant:
Whether thou
best he or no,
Or some enchanted trifle to abuse me,
As late I have been, I not know: thy pulse
Beats as of flesh and blood;
This echoes a charming trope-joke that appears
several times in The Divine Comedy, Dante embracing a being made of
post-mortem special-air. But here what is crucial is that there is no
psychological space of even that kind to meet. This is shown by Alonso’s next
remark: which is too hurried, and only fits a person who is still afraid and
thinking how best to placate the unpredictable Power.
since I saw thee,
The affliction of my mind amends, with which,
I fear, a madness held me: this must crave,
An if this be at all, a most strange story.
Thy dukedom I resign and do entreat
Thou pardon me my wrongs.
This presumably means since the torment that Ariel had
devised, when Alonso is told by Prospero, through Ariel, his son is dead and
becomes suicidal. The final two lines give the play’s only genuine sequence of
remorse and apology and plea for forgiveness. besides Stephano’s. Even then it is somewhat psychologically
dubious: that madness produces sufficient reason for genuine contrition.
PROSPERO & GONZALO
There is an emotional exchange between the mirroring egos , but Gonzalo
too is still wide-eyed.
PROSPERO & ANTONIO &
SEBASTIAN
Just like old King Hamlet, Prospero can’t find a way to speak directly
to his treacherous brother. He is still obviously choked with justified rage.
He begins with a joint address to the brace of lords that inevitably brings in the Rosenstein &
Guildencrantz theme.
But you, my
brace of lords, were I so minded,
I here could pluck his highness' frown upon you
And justify you traitors: at this time
I will tell no tales.
From the received interpretation’s Duke of clear and
clean-minded exemplary Christian forgiveness, it is odd to get this bit of
playground menace.
a) SEBASTIAN
If proof were needed that the two lords were never
any near attaining the state of contrition, despite the reports of being distracted, this is it.
Prospero’s threat reveals he never thought so. Sebastian aside confirms he is
still managing a strange world of perpetually new wonders and dangers.
[Aside] The devil speaks in him.
A genuinely contrite person aches deeply for the opportunity to show
contrition and apology to the person they have hurt, and to beg forgiveness,
and to offer reparation in the hope of reconciliation. This is not remotely the
dialogue of reconciliation. In fact there is no dialogue: it is all Sebastian
says until a few minutes later he says one more line about the betrothed, and
then has a tiny piece of horseplay with the low character Stephano.
b) ANTONIO
Here is the play’s worst dramatic & psychological dereliction and
moral cowardice. For twelve years Prospero has been convulsed in agony of rage
at his brother Antonio’s almost fratricidal usurpation. The received
interpretation asks us to believe that he has, after two sessions of torture,
transcended this feeling and attained Christian magnanimity. Again one must
refer back to Hamlet. Old Hamlet’s injunction to his son regarding
Gertrude, his wife, and his son’s mother, Leave her to heaven is often
said to an example of decency: but it can be argued that even Shakespeare’s
powers failed here. In Lear of course he gives a wife, Goneril, a line that
even perfect husbands fear My fool usurps my body! But what of brothers? Perhaps Old Hamlet knows
all is lost, what could he say to Claudius now: all he wants is that he dies
horribly.
Prospero’s relationship with his brother Antonio is not complicated by
sexual betrayal – the perfect Duchess is just lost to the story – but he
still can’t or rather daren’t speak to him. He merely speaks at him, with
barely restrained rage! For again, though it is not spoken or shown, logic and
psychology persuade him that Antonio has not arrived at contrition,
For you, most
wicked sir, whom to call brother
Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive
Thy rankest fault; all of them; and require
My dukedom of thee, which perforce, I know,
Thou must restore.
Not
naming, by rank nor by baptismal appellation, was a powerful way of drawing
power distinctions and of insulting in those times. In this context Sir
become a term of abuse. Compare the vain Gonzalo’s use of Sir
above. The insult is heightened by saying that the sound would be leprous! This
is hardly a charitable preamble to forgiveness. The following gesture thereby
becomes more deranged than the examples of mad forgiveness given above. “I
forgive you, you fucking bitch/bastard”. Such is Prospero’s terror of his
brother’s imagined power he doesn’t let him speak. The reader might
baulk at the suggestion that Prospero is afraid. But any counter-argument must
explain why this Claudian brother isn’t allowed to speak. As I have argued,
forgiveness requires the precondition of contrition: and reparation requires
the precondition of the desire for and acceptance of forgiveness : or else what
is then taken, is morally stolen. Prospero merely requires and
threatens with perforce and must.
Antonio does not answer.
In this first section of this act-long scene, dealing with the
mighty reconciliation, Antonio doesn’t speak. In fact in the entire Act he has
two lines: and they only sharing in the horseplay with the failed usurping
servants. This is staggering when
one becomes aware of it. Surely one of the dramatic, as distinguishable from
sermonic, purposes of Shakespeare’s final play was how to integrate the
dialogue of rage, contrition and reconciliation between two brothers within a
spiritual romance-comedy. The play is unconsciously anchored in Genesis:
is it possible to get the murderous proto-brothers Cain & Abel back to the
prelapsarian world? How to write that conversation and process. For some reason, Shakespeare’s
dramatic bark gets thrown off this course: by an unnameable tempest in his
mind?!
Joyce, and then Burgess, inferred from the canon – especially Hamlet
- that Shakespeare’s own brother(s) had
cuckolded him while was working hard in
We
have noted above how brilliantly Shakespeare makes the transition between
scenes and between emotional states : the finest being the knock at the gate
after the
Antonio doesn’t speak but Alonso does, perhaps accepting the duty of
power speaking to power.
If thou be'st
Prospero,
Give us particulars of thy preservation;
How thou hast met us here.
He does not protest that
Antonio has not a chance to speak his contrition and apology, and accept the
terms of reparation and reconciliation. But soon collapses into fatherly grief
again.
1k: AFTER SUCH JUDGEMENT
This effectively ends the
episode of judgement. We now move onto other matters and emotions. There
follows a little subterfuge, a Jesuitical white magician’s white lie that acts
a prologue to a brilliant coup de theatre. Prospero also claims to have a lost
a child. (I will refer to the figure of patience below) Alonso responds with a
sublime gesture of sympathy and grace:
O heavens, that they
were living both in Naples,
The king and queen there! that they were, I wish
Myself were mudded in that oozy bed
Where my son lies.
But then Prospero returns
to the idiom of real-politik – which is hardly compatible with Christian
reconciliation that must include a commitment to future truth. Interestingly,
he refers to truth through his remark about the attendant lords, who
scarce think
Their eyes do offices of truth,
He now answers Alonso’s
first question about identity and the seemingly chance meeting.
know for certain
That I am Prospero and that very duke
Which was thrust forth of
Upon this shore, where you were wreck'd, was landed,
To be the lord on't.
As Hamlet says, that
would be scanned. There is an
unconscious guilty use of anacolouthon. There was no strangeness in Prospero
landing on this shore. It is ordinary in a tempest for some boats & ships
to go down and for other vessels, or at least some survivors, to get beached
safely. The real strangeness, as Prospero knows, is for someone to control the
tempest and arrange the coincidence of two Italian parties, twelve years apart,
being beached on the same tiny island. He doesn’t say the absolutely crucial
fact that he arranged their near-death experience at sea and also the
recent torture where the disembodied Ariel does reveal this possibility.
No more yet of this;
For 'tis a chronicle of day by day,
Not a relation for a breakfast nor
Befitting this first meeting.
This is a lovely deferred,
rain-check, tempest-checked, invitation. But it is a guilty man hurrying along
the story of those he hurt. It must be said again, that the integrity and
viability of human reconciliation depends on everyone involved declaring
truthfully all the emotions and responses related to the fault and its
aftermath to date. For the Neopolitans not to have to keep producing, in the
hours and months ahead, contrition and further reparation, it was necessary
that Prospero declared his sense of deep hurt, which produced deep anger, and
then vengeful torturing. They should have been allowed to comment on whether
his torments were disproportional revenge/justice for the initial faults of
usurpation and near-death abandonment to the seas.
Prospero side-steps this
moral failure by a gift. This is to, once again, disrupt the moral order, the
reparation should only arrive after there has been complete acceptance of
respective culpabilities, contrition and apology and forgiveness. There is
nothing like a gift, especially a big one, to allow guilty or fearful people to
think they can fudge or omit the necessary stages. The biggest gift of course
is one’s child. There follows the most graceful screen-scene in Shakespeare’s
work
My dukedom since you
have given me again,
I will requite you with as good a thing;
At least bring forth a wonder, to content ye
As much as me my dukedom
There is a poignancy to
the repetition of the phrase my dukedom in once sentence. For all
his declarations of monastic indifference to the world, a deeper desire remains
for mortal fame and power.
We will look in more
detail at the courtly chess scene & exchange of fathers in the Gender
section below. In the midst of all this wedding joy there is a strange return
to the theme of reconciliation. Alonso suddenly says
But, O, how oddly
will it sound that I
Must ask my child forgiveness!
This is one of the
profoundest and yet least written about experiences in life: when a parent, who knows they have hurt their
adult child, or even their young child at the age of reason, decides that
he/she will not pull familial rank, but rather will meet the child in a morally
equal universe and therefore will show contrition and apology, beg forgiveness
and offer reparation to establish a genuine reconciliation.
(It was a shattering and
exhilarating experience when my mother showed absolute contrition, spoke
apology and begged forgiveness from me. I was 33, but it changed so much. I am
now in my fifties but I have yet to come across another person, of any culture who
has experienced this.)
What is deeply poignant
about Alonso’s misery is that he is confusing shame with guilt: for he has not,
as far as we know, actually intended to do Ferdinand a harm: but he has been,
as now revealed, a treacherous conspirator against Ferdinand’s prospective
father-in-law. It is to the credit of his new-born humanity that he feels even
this confused emotion. It seems new-brotherly kindness when Prospero says:
There, sir, stop:
Let us not burthen our remembrance with
A heaviness that's gone
But he says sir and
not ‘brother’. We might also conjecture that he says this also because he feels
things moving into new realms that he might not be able to control. It is clear
through this scene that Prospero can’t follow his own counsels: he is clearly
burdened of many rages: it’s only been a few seconds since he was unnecessarily
dark and pedantically spoiling his daughter’s joy.
The summing of this stage
of experience, and this section of the Act, is left to Gonzalo, Prospero’s
alter ego. The latter gets a second chance to come clean about his
intentionality and responsibility. But he still keeps unusually silent when the
former says:
Look down, you
god,
And on this couple drop a blessed crown!
For it is you that have chalk'd forth the way
Which brought us hither.
The reference to chalk brilliantly, albeit
unconsciously, alludes to the magic circle Prospero had drawn. Finally Gonzalo
gives the binding speech, uniting all -
well all the court-folk – in a group-soothing narrative of almost pilgrim-like
transcendence.
In one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost, Prospero his dukedom
In a poor isle and all of us ourselves
When no man was his own.
This trope of the journey of unknowingly lost souls who lose all
familiar anchors and yet find themselves, is so seductive. The jaded souls in
the audiences, down the centuries and across the globe’s islands, long for the
possibility of such a voyage. Eliot graciously offered it to his war-exhausted
old islanders of
And where you are is where you are not.
In a counter-factual universe of greater truth and boldness, it would be
Miranda who would now say: “Time will tell, and very soon I fear!” It should be conceded that this speech is far
more disingenuous than Miranda’s brave new world speech. She can
actually plead innocence to explain her boundless hope. Gonzalo, the perfect
First Courtier is, as usual, talking up the King’s arse. The game is given way
by the fact that no moral or political revolution or even spiritual awakening
is imagined as informing life back home, and by the sycophant’s hyperbole of :
O, rejoice
Beyond a common joy, and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars:
Alas poor Ozymandis. I knew him Horatio…..
As if unconsciously admitting that the recently
declaimed dreams and intentions of
aristocrats would die without the labour of others to bring them to
life, and of course with Shakespeare’s intended dramatic symmetry, the final
section reintroduces the mariners who opened the play. Like a rubbish comedian
who, years later, still can’t believe the audience finds him unfunny, Gonzalo
immediately returns to the weak and malicious joke he told in mid-tempest:
I prophesied,
if a gallows were on land,
This fellow could not drown. Now, blasphemy,
That swear'st grace o'erboard, not an oath on shore?
Hast thou no mouth by land?
In their absence, Gonzalo didn’t even think to
include the mariners – who sweated to steer their ship to safety as best they
could - in the binding grace of the pronoun ourselves. The opportunity to amend this
provided by their presence is ignored. Historians and psychologists say that
some people just before death and others just after escaping death, tell sick
jokes about death. But this is so lame and, by lying, also carries vengeful
spite.
The boatswain’s tale further unsettles the King.
there is in
this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of: some oracle
Must rectify our knowledge.
This is Prospero’s final chance to own up to his intentional direction
in a day-long experience that was both terrifying and exhilarating for all of
them. He can’t imagine an equal conversation:
Sir, my liege,
Do not infest your mind with beating on
The strangeness of this business; at pick'd leisure
Which shall be shortly, single I'll resolve you,
Which to you shall seem probable, of every
These happen'd accidents;
Here,
for the first time, Prospero shows diplomatic deference to a higher political
power. The metaphor of puzzling-thought as infestation is strange. Accidents
seemed to be being used in some Aristotelean sense: and which seems to
allow Prospero to maintain a fiction about his culpability.
1l:
MASTERING RIFFRAFF
In the final section of the Act, Prospero tidies up.
He has given his judgement and his daughter and re-established his homeland
power. Ariel is instructed to bring in the servant-slave rebels. The stage
instruction is:
Re-enter ARIEL, driving in CALIBAN, STEPHANO and TRINCULO,
in their stolen apparel.
The word ‘driving’ is of course a metaphor from animal
husbandry. Here it glosses a subhuman ascription to the trio. This implicit
exclusion from the human pale has already been effected by the fact that
Prospero makes sure they are separated from the royal party until now. It is
only in diurnal servitude or in extremis, as during the tempest, that they can
cross the Civil Lines. This prevents any dialogue about the respective values
of hierarchy of birth and of knowledge, the latter being crucial to knowing how
best to build shelter and to recognise what plants and animals are edible in
this new country.
There is a generous and typically Shakespearean parallelism
in that there are two plots about usurping: one initiated by two aristocrats
and the other by Prospero’s slave, aided by two royal servants. Both are foiled
before the plotters have committed an unforgiveable sin. The prevention also
includes a certain amount of menace, even terror: but only the lower orders are
physically humiliated and degraded by being thrown in the cesspool, and also
politically mocked. Prospero introduces
them thus:
Mark but the badges of these men, my lords,
Then say if they be true. This mis-shapen knave,
His mother was a witch, and one so strong
That could control the moon, make flows and ebbs,
And deal in her command without her power.
These three have robb'd me; and this demi-devil--
For he's a bastard one--had plotted with them
To take my life. Two of these fellows you
Must know and own; this thing of darkness!
Acknowledge mine.
The implicit synonym of mark and badge,
remind me of Falstaff’s cowardly but still brilliant deconstruction of
hierarchical patronage: Honour is a mere scutcheon. Caliban is
described three times – by his lineage, by the term of abuse for the fatherless
and by ownership. This mis-shapen knave recalls Shakespeare’s
most famous malformed malcontent, Richard III: perhaps a fitting father for
Caliban! By a typical piece of hypocrisy and a lie of omission, Prospero gives
a castigatory description of the unnamed Sycorax’s powers: with the bizarre
addition And deal in her command without her power.
I will return below to the most famous ascription thing
of darkness.
Prospero’s political mockery is captured in the scornful
question to the Pretender, Stephano: You'ld be king o' the isle, sirrah?
All of the Elizabethan centuries of condescension is in this question with its
end points of the political spectrum,
king – sirrah. Caliban has already been dazzled by the glamour of
Prospero’s ducal robes, in a speech with a strange echo of Miranda’s wonder
words:
O Setebos, these be brave spirits indeed!
How fine my master is!
In fact he has been awed into fear and submission:
I am afraid
He will chastise me….
I shall be pinch'd to death.
He is not yet contrite, nor hopeful that contrition would be
accepted. It is the ideology of the time
that allows Prospero to explain to Alonso, who has been troubled by Caliban’s
unusual appearance:
He is as disproportion'd in his manners
As in his shape
He then states his conditions of reconciliation:
Go, sirrah, to my cell;
Take with you your companions; as you look
To have my pardon, trim it handsomely.
To which
Caliban replies
Ay, that I will; and I'll be wise hereafter
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god
And worship this dull fool!
This shows an understanding of culpability and guilt, a
level of contrition, a willingness to accept the promise of forgiveness and a
desire for reconciliation – all expressed graciously, in poetry Cassio might
have spoken ! – that utterly belies Prospero’s insulting description:
as disproportion'd in his manners
As in his shape.
Of course Alonso doesn’t correct Prospero and say: “That was fairer expressed than many
of our intemperate lords.” In typical
kicked-so-kick-down fashion the recently chided royal plotters, Sebastian &
Antonio, indulge in a bit of loose mockery at the other plotters. And to
reiterate a powerful absence, this is the only line, in the climactic Act, of
Antonio, the villain of the entire piece.
The tone of these exchanges between the low-sinners and
their judge has been very different from the implicit deference and care when
Prospero judged the royal party. If capitalist market-economics offers the
hidden-hand, trickle-down theory of how help and hope come to the dispossessed,
what of the aristocratic hand? Well, it is confident enough of power not to
hide, and even to slum: Good King Wenceslas….! It does seem as if all Prospero’s
emotions with regard to the low plotters are trickle. They are sent away: and
it is only then he assumes the mantle of the ancient Greek kings: and offers
hospitality and benign conversation. By now we know that Prospero will give
only a Stalinist, an air-brushed - if not quite an Ariel washed &
conditioned - version of history, with
intentionality and culpability fudged.
1m: ET IN ARCADIO
EGO
Then, utterly unpredictably from the plot, but perhaps
signalled by his desperate need to control, he says:
And thence retire me to my
Every third thought shall be my grave.
It is difficult to imagine what his first two thoughts are:
given that he has abandoned reading and thinking, and that he was so solitary
and so poor a conversationalist. Perhaps this tedium vitae is just a vain style
of the age, like the sentitious Priest in Twelfth Night who, when asked
the time, just after the joy of a high love-marriage, says:
And all the ceremony of this compact
Sealed in my function, by my testimony;
Since when, my watch hath told me, toward my grave
I have travelled but two hours.
Again, it is strange that Alonso doesn’t reply to this
remark, the most emotionally powerful one in the courtly speech of dining
invitation. He doesn’t say, ruler to ruler, happy father to happy father,
brother to brother,
Brother, shall we not take our daughter to see her sister in
His last words in the play include another broken promise.
My Ariel, chick,
That is thy charge: then to the elements
Be free, and fare thou well!
Ariel is not freed now, as repeatedly mentioned throughout
the play, but tomorrow : which had been his complaint in Act 1!
EPILOGUE
This is a familiar speech in a familiar idiom, whereby the
principal actor closes the theatrical experience for the audience, and returns
them to reality by foregrounding a real relationship between paid actor and
audience, paying for entry and ‘paying’ complimentary applause and shouts. It
makes reference to the play just seen – so in As You Like It Rosalind
talks of kissing. Here Prospero alludes to the play’s themes:
Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell
Shakespeare is such a master of the thorn in the bouquet,
the crack in the golden bowl, the ineluctable presence of horror-head at the
maypole. So it is not surprising that the mannered entreaties of the final
couplet runs:
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
We dream, rather than hope, for a life of indulged indulgence,
and we fall like water into faults. How hard to hear them called crimes!
2: GENDER
ANOTHER GAME AT CHESS
The King of playwrights
for thirty years would have been aware of every dramatic innovation of his time,
even the few he didn’t devise or use. No mere play since his own Richard II
caused as much controversy as the later 1624 A Game at Chess, by his
former co-writer Middleton. The latter is structurally as well thematically
daring – looking forward to Genet & Lorca in dazzling conceit.
Here is a delightful but
very tame & literal use of the chess metaphor. It begins with
Miranda protesting Sweet
lord, you play me false. They’ve only been engaged half an hour and she
is already accusing him of cheating – How Hollywood! But knowing she has caused
him sufficient discomfiture,
No, my dear'st love,
I would not for the world.
she relents and in fact prompts him to ambition and
reassures him of her passivity and support:
Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle,
And I would call it, fair play.
This is ironic, given what she has recently learned of
her father’s fate at the hands of cunning wranglers. But there is nothing like
starting your Lady Macbeth apprenticeship before the law gives your husband a mountain
of conjugal rights.
The play begins with her almost commanding her father
and ends with her spurring on her husband-to-be. In between she is nice enough,
but fairly dull: not remotely the star pupil of the Scholar of Milan and the
Magus of the island. She has one line left in the play, containing one of the
most quoted phrases in an age of accelerating technology:
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
Because he is a mad spoiler, still oozing bitter bile,
Prospero punctures her wonder and shits on her innocent & gracious hope.
'Tis new to thee.
It may be true but what’s the point of saying this: what
moral, didactic, parental, human value does this have? She is too much of her
time to protest at his crassness. There is a much, much warmer exchange between
Ferdinand and his father. It brings Ferdinand to his knees in filial love. The
magnitude of his relief must be understood by recalling his distress at Ariel’s
song
Full fathom five
Thy father lies.
In this play of
Renaissance Fathers IV Justice, the absolute value of fathers is asserted,
without any reference to the worth of life-giving or life-nurturing mothers or
the tragedy of their absence:
this famous Duke of Milan,
Of whom so often I have heard renown,
But never saw before; of whom I have
Received a second life; and second father
This lady makes him to me.
This is surely perverse and implicitly misogynistic.
3: RACE
There are two passages
that support the indignation that is implicit in the anti-colonialist readings
of the play. The first is less often remarked on than the second.
a) Thrust forth of
b)
This thing of darkness I own…
This is the fundamental discussion
the play doesn’t engage – the nature of ownership. Caliban is a slave. That is
easy enough. It is left unclear what
will become of him. Prospero doesn’t echo Hamlet - who gives his dying word of
succession to a man he has been fighting -
and confer the island on Caliban. Will he really imitate Trinculo and
Stepahano and make him a cashcow in a freak show in
NAMING THE SPECIES
Caliban is also referred
to as demi-devil. We know what this means: though it does call
forth the joke about being a ‘little’ pregnant: how holy and saved by Christ is
a half-devil?
The nomenclature of
regression that Prospero imposes on Ariel as we move through the play is
fitting completed with My Ariel, chick.
The perennial, and here
pervasive, moral puzzle about whether one could or should assert and accept
another being’s equality with oneself based on sufficient similarity, or
exclude them by sufficient difference, is only once addressed by Prospero.
ARIEL
Him that you term'd, sir, 'The good old lord Gonzalo;'
His tears run down his beard, like winter's drops
From eaves of reeds. Your charm so strongly works 'em
That if you now beheld them, your affections
Would become tender.
PROSPERO
Dost thou think so, spirit?
ARIEL
Mine would, sir, were I human.
PROSPERO
And mine shall.
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?
It is pretty and poetic, but it is specious species fluff. The idea of
comparing many forms of being and the kinds of moral obligations to them is not
developed and discussed. All that has been set forth is a paradoxical idea of
Ariel - mere air but capable of soulful
& bodyful feelings - that allows any meaning. There is not the
theological puzzle glorifying human love which is at the heart of Wim Wender’s
beautiful film Wings of Desire : where an angel sent to attend to human anguish
slowly becomes intrigued by the possibility of joy, surpassing divine joy, in
human love.
4: RELIGION
Implicit in Prospero’s
abandonment of magic is a return to Christianity. The dual ideology, dual
world-view – Christian and pagan - that
informed most of the play is slowly cast aside. But astonishingly Christianity
is still held at bay. (pun intended!)
Apart from Larrkins, Mary doesn’t get name-checked at all.
But even Gonzalo who had made that earlier entreaty now says:
some heavenly
power guide us
Out of this fearful country!
In fact the Mother Mary of sixteen centuries, and of
McCartney’s Let
It Be, four centuries later, is displaced by an almost pagan
abstraction, Patience:
ALONSO
Irreparable is the loss, and patience
Says it is past her cure.
PROSPERO
I rather think
You have not sought her help, of whose soft grace
For the like loss I have her sovereign aid
And rest myself content.
But note the ambivalence expressed by using the lower case. This
‘goddess’ had last put in an appearance as a comparator for light mockery in Twelfth
Night.
She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.
Is this sacreligious, or idolatrous? And what of Gonzalo’s hyperbole:
set it down
With gold on lasting pillars
Why not thank God by building a hospital for widows
of seamen etc. Compare this the intention of Henry IV to go a penitential
crusade. Even Alonso feels he cannot trust to Christian powers to bring
knowledge:
And there is
in this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of: some oracle
Must rectify our knowledge.
In fact it is the arrival of the mariners that brings
back the Christian concept of blasphemy:
Now,
blasphemy,
That swear'st grace o'erboard, not an oath on shore?
Hast thou no mouth by land?
As I said in the
introduction there is an instant paradox created by narratives featuring
characters with supernatural powers. With more than one character of
omnipotence, or near omnipotence, there will, or ought to be, stalemate. And
even with one alone there will be glaring inconsistencies. We’ve looked at a
few of Prospero’s. Unsurprisingly, the play ends with another.
[I] promise
you calm seas, auspicious gales
And sail so expeditious that shall catch
Your royal fleet far off.
Though he has renounced magic today, his powers and
influence will still hold sway tomorrow. Why didn’t he catch that wind twelve
years earlier, if only to be in exile on mainland
Is my journey
through the play over………………?
I
hope something of my argument is clear from the previous pages. The reader may
have both questions of clarification and questions of exasperation. By way of
an inviting interim conclusion, here is the continuation of my argument, by
other means…..
*********************************************************************
Orlana, 35,
French: Kev, 42, Geordie.
O: Well! That’s quite clever and very …ermmm…
very, very…but what remains?
K: The play.
O: But what have you added to genius, o little
man?
K: I was talking about what wasn’t there.
O: A different play! Your play?
K: Not quite. But every play contains its
shadow.
O: Perhaps, but a genius integrates the shadow.
K: Shadow-play indeed!.
O: But not a shadow-sermon, or even worse a
treatise.
K: That’s not what I was thinking about.
O: Ahhh! Thinking! What you don’t understand is
that whereas a philosopher must know exactly what she or he is thinking, an
artist must exactly not-know what he or she is thinking.
K: Oooohh! Rhetorical patterning - to hypnotise
me! The thing is that, unlike Shakespeare, I’ve had to read Kant.
O: Ooooh! The fearsome Germans! Do you realise
that Shakespeare set no play in
K: But Shakespeare’s readers are not
Shakespeare and do! Not the modality of compulsion, but the modality of
ineluctable attribute. Not must by the speaker’s coercion, but must
by the listener’s indifference and fear.
O: Only the few get it? Only the over-clever?
K:
Anyone may know – who can be arsed to consider the distinctions, the very ones
you think I don’t know.
O: So tell me what you know.
K: I know that a part of art, a part of a work
of art, is the aesthetic idea.
O: Back to lahdedah philosophy!
K: I know what an aesthetic idea is. It is not
a lab report, a prayer, a police caution, a sermon or any thing such: and it’s
never reducible to these.
O: So what is it?
K: Kant argues that the faculties of
Imagination, Understanding and Reason which process (sense) data from the
external physical world and the internal mental world can, and in fact must, be
used not only to gain conceptual knowledge and to inform practical action but
also in what he calls “harmonious free play”. The aesthetic delight in
say a tulip is disinterested and purposeless, and so is distinguishable from
any interested pursuit of agreeable sensations or of the tulip as Good - worthy
or perfect. “Delight in the beautiful must depend upon the reflection on an
object precursory to some (not definitely determined) concept.” This notion of being able to live with and
enjoy a preconceptual or conceptually uncertain state of course looks back to
Keats’s brilliant idea of negative capability as an aspirational moral
aswell as aesthetic developmental marker: and forward to Bion’s recommendation
that the therapist enters the therapeutic space “without memory and
desire...and with a capacity for reverie”.
The
perception of form and limitation that characterises experiences of the
beautiful, whether of the tulip or the abstract painting, induce in the mind a
sense of being “in restful contemplation”.
On the other hand the Sublime experience is of the mind “set in motion”
beginning as “a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction produced by one
and the same Object” of seemingly limitless (mathematical) magnitude or seemingly formless
(dynamic) might eg the starry Cosmos or
the volcanic storm or high tragedy: and moving from humiliating terror to an
invigorating awareness of the power of Reason, the faculty of ideas which can
explain, contain and help transcend that initial emotional disarray. He
introduces the concept of ‘subreption’ for this “substitution of a respect
for the Object in place of one for the idea of humanity in our own self - the
Subject” .
Though
he further highlights the difference from the beautiful, by calling the sublime
“a negative pleasure” it is
through the latter concept, and its grounding in ideas, that he delineates the worth of human-made art. “We say of a man who
remains unaffected in the presence of what we consider sublime that he has no
(moral) feeling”. The task of the
artist, and here Kant means original artist not merely imitiator or hack, is to
generate aesthetic ideas. These products of the free play of her imagination
and understanding are what he calls exponible: though there is an intuitive
sense of a fit between the ideas and the work made, the concepts of
understanding cannot explain it. From the spectator’s side, the inadequacy of
concepts to aesthetic pleasure is familiar: one runs out of worthwhile things
to say about the final meaning of Virgil or Mozart.
O: Can I lie down for a while?
K: Yes but keep listening!
O: Why does everything have to be so
complicated?
K: Life eh?! An aesthetic idea is not another
kind of idea, well-defined in another realm like theology, politics, ethics,
which is then dipped in Art - in poetry or dance or stone or music – like
Ronseal varnish. Similarly the task of criticism is not like lab-work at CSI:
it is not to strip and analyse the varnish, and then write an essay on the
ideas.
O: Alright, alright! So you know the
difference, but where do correct aesthetic ideas come from: as Mao nearly said!
K: Sit up!
This is not complicated but it is an unusual way of putting things.
Under the pressure of an unconscious affect, an artist feels moved to make a
shape. (It could be a poem, or song or dance or building, but let’s keep a
dramatist in mind.) This first motion – which might involve a mark on paper or
the movement of a foot upon the floor or some pressure on a string, or might
still be a shape in the mind – having bound some of the original affect,
reconfigures that original affect with two consequences: firstly, affect from
deeper in the unconsciousness is drawn up; and secondly, conscious delight in
the apperception of the shape gives a spur to continue. Both of these guide the artist’s mind (and
hand/foot) to change the first shape and/or to add another shape that is positioned
as an opposite, a contrary or corollary rather than a mere repetition. The
possibility of either or a unity or a tension between the two shapes also seems
to bind and release affect. At this point the artist becomes partly an audience
to him/herself, wondering what the shapes will do next. This is I believe what
you meant by an artist must exactly not-know what she is thinking. To take a
metaphor from biology, this repeated sequence of affect-binding shape-making is the DNA of
creation. If you think this fanciful, read Harold Pinter on his own process.
O: So it’s all emotionality.
K: No!
‘Affect’ isn’t an exact synonym for ‘emotion’: it’s instinct imperfectly
bound by imperfect thought.
O: Did you plan to write that explanation in
that way?
K: Of course not!
O: So you’re an artist?!
K: After a migraine and a cappuccino, anything
seems possible but artistry unlikely.
O: How modest.
K: No it’s not that. I suppose it’s a mixture
of awe and sadness – not envy – about an insufficiency of daring or, rather,
the wrong kind of daring.
O: How can daring be wrong? Do you mean reckless?
K: Not just oafish blundering or
braggadaccio. I mean an awareness of a blocked inner openness, that one of the
doors of perception is wedged by some primal terror.
O: Surely that’s what Class A drugs are for!
K: If only it were so easy we’d all be on the
flight to the
O: I still don’t get it.
K: The difference between a political or
theological treatise and a work of high drama is that the former presents both
a closed account of a possible situation and a promise of happiness, whereas the
latter presents an open account and the admission of inevitable unhappiness.
O: Misery-lit.
K: I’m talking of high tragedy not David
Pelzer.
O: Meeeaaaoowww!
K: Take ancient Greek tragedy: still the
bench-mark for tragedy in any culture. Two reasonably good human beings
know they must act in a world that is so complex and flawed that they must, by
whatever act chosen, cause and receive great pain: and supernatural powers will
be of little help. Consider Antigone. The writer is not proposing any
rules of behaviour: or only – Remember your own moral compass, act well and
hope.
O: Isn’t that the lesson of the Gita?
K: Yes, and some scholars see an overlap and
influence between the two ancient mythologies. Back at the new Globe in
1610, Shakespeare was trying to end his career with a play that was as far
ahead of his all of his works, as Hamlet been ahead of A Spanish
Tragedy.
O: Is it biographical playtime now? The play as
Shakespeare’s farewell to the tiring-house before retiring to his un-mock-Tudor
pile in little
K: You sound sceptical: I thought that much was
universally accepted. In the final great speeches of The Tempest,
Shakespeare is speaking through Prospero about leaving his art and books
on the South Bank and going home.
O: It’s a nice story for the groundlings and
it might be true. But who are you then?
K: Star Critics in their Eyes. This week
Matthew, I’d like to be the greatgreatgrandson of Oscar as The Critic as
Artist. That’s why we are in this room: so pretentious that Yoko might walk in
at any time!
O: Vanity or fear – for pity’s sake choose
one.
K: I’ll try vanity. Let’s go back to the
pretty story. We know Shakespeare had a brilliant career for three decades, and
then threw it all in to go back to
O: His mother had died recently?
K: Well remembered. And? Yes,
there is a fact little made much of? Wouldn’t mothers have been even more
present to him in the last few plays?
O: You’d flogged that horse in your other
essay. Let it lie.
K:
Alright. But here’s a new brand-new surprise. I was reading the paper and came
across a passage that was shattering in its passion, and disclosed a new
sublime affiance. Nine years after her niece Billy-Jo was brutally murdered,
her step-father Jenkins was tried for the third time and acquitted. The
newspaper reported:
Maggie Coster, the
13-year-old's aunt, punched Mr Jenkins repeatedly in the face, drawing blood,
before she was pulled away by police. Earlier she had shouted from the public
gallery: "It's not over yet, Jenkins, you fucking child killer, everyone
knows it. She was a 13-year-old kid, you fucking bible bashing prat, it ain't
over."
I
thought of the maenads falling on Pentheus and tearing him apart.
O: Ecchh! All very tabloid. Enough to
persuade one that the man is innocent. A nine-minute wonder!
K: You don’t see – this was life, not a drama.
I thought of Old Hamlet being unable to focus on his post-mortem purgation –
and Shakespeare’s theology here is an utter mess - because he wanted the living
to know of his suffering: and then I
imagined the ghost of Billy-Jo, feeling comforted by the astonishing courage
and rage of her aunt. Finally I thought where are the aunts in Shakespeare?
O: Oh grow up: absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence.
K: Isn’t all theology based on a corollary of
that?
O: How droll! It’s a play not a sermon!
K: But surely that relationship, like all
possible human connectivities, would get fore-grounded once in a while or
mentioned in support. Wodehouse & Greene thought to make much of them.
There’s an aunt in The Dream who is not used. Imagine Prospero’s sister
or Miranda’s maternal aunt leaping on Antonio, and saying “Where’s my niece you fucking
child-killer?”
O: How did the mighty Reed put it? (sings)
“Those were different times…
And the ladies, they broke their eyes.
K: You gormless sod, that’s my point – they
weren’t different times. Do you need to see Billy Jo in a lahdedah play to
understand that aunt’s sublime gesture?
O: The caravan has passed: and certainly the
canon has. Read the play. Stop fucking trying to rewrite it!
K: I’ve just reread the play.
O: You’ve misread it.
K: I have not knowingly misquoted it or
wilfully refused the obvious interpretation.
O: Crikey! The John Lewis school of criticism.
The play is not for sale! So what if you can say you’ve quoted the words
exactly: you might still have failed to understand them.
K: Why can’t I say others have misread it? If
Eliot, after four centuries of unqualified admiration, can argue that Hamlet
was an artistic failure, why I can’t I dissent from the received
interpretation?
O: Okay give me your best
shot.
K: The hardest things to write are
self-transcendence and social transcendence.
O: Oh give me a break! Let’s have some
plain-talk once in a while.
K: I was coming to that. The first scenario is
where a person imagines being a person unlike themselves. To tell that
brilliant example again: one charming version of this is the Seinfeld
episode when the craven, sneaky and miserable character George decides that
perhaps being bold, true and optimistic might bring him happiness.
Unsurprisingly, the strategy leads to different complications. The harder
scenario is to imagine one’s own society transformed into one in which there
are different morals and obligations to humankind and the Gods and different
opportunities for self-realisation.
O: Alas the doomed project of the
perfectibility of humankind.
K: Alas the aristocratic cynicism to dissuade
amelioration as well as revolution. Because enyfulekno the last thing those in
power want the powerless to do is to imagine and discuss a different
distribution of power, they know how daring an artist, let alone politician,
must be to tell such stories. Recently, poor bus-drivers in
O: It’s easy enough to imagine nice scenarios
that don’t exist and probably can’t exist. That’s what the Lib Dems are for!
K: How droll! It is said that what Marlow, the
over-reacher, tried to do in his play
Dr. Faustus was imagine a new paradigm for living – knowledge
and pleasure and mocking political authority - outside the Christian medieval
certainties. That he fails and the old paradigm closes him in its jaws doesn’t
matter: for he tried. One loose biographical conjecture is that Shakespeare was
in awe of this political and professional daring in one so young, well his own
age. He felt it an inspiration and an affront to his prowess. All his life he
knew he’d have to write a better drama. Macbeth is a far superior play
to Tamburlaine but the Utopian theme is missing. The latter is present
in As You Like It, but then like the first Male Arcadia, in Love’s
Labours Lost it is without women.
O: Women can’t live with them, can’t keep them
out of
K: And of course in The Tempest women
are absolutely compromised – a dead witch, a pure wife, some whores, and a
sappy daughter to represent half of humankind.
O: What was he to do - re-write Lysistrata?
K: No: a genius doesn’t rewrite.
O:
K: You know what I mean. Yes make a better Lysistrata
and then a new wonder.
O: I’ll quiz you on the new wonder in a
moment, but why didn’t he try.
K : (sings)
I can’t think for you.
You’ll have to decide.
If William Shakespeare
Had God on his side.
O: Yes isn’t that a mighty sketch – by which
artist ? – of ‘Nature revealing
herself to Shakespeare’.
K: Nature not God. Hesitancy again!
O: Well nobody wants to be beheaded for the
blasphemous wrong line.
K: I think of Graham Greene’s essay on
Shakespeare called The Virtue of Disrespect. He quotes Shakespeare
against himself.
O: As all weaker pensters must.
K: Perhaps. The line in question is a friend
chiding the Venetian merchant, another Antonio:
You have too much
respect upon the world.
They lose it that do
buy it with much care.
O: Meaning what: that greybeards should scoff
and swear like teenagers?
K: Oh Dear! Who’s regressing now! No, its
meaning is to scorn the person who has let his eye and heart rest too longingly
on State honours of the world, forgetting that most of them are the ash of
corrupt, manipulating minds. The smaller world community of the virtuous, who
did tell truth to power, and fought for justice and equality, will see their
baubles and gold chains and cross the road.
O: I suppose so. Great writers and great
psychoanalysts develop dazzling powers of insight, which they are able to
express in delightful and memorable language: and yet they still might be utter
shit-bags to their partners, children, friends, and fellow citizens.
K: That doesn’t mean that the work of art or the
conceptual clarification is worth nothing.
O: Nothing is worth nothing!
K: Cordelia’s voice was soft, not her jokes.
O: A momentary lapse Do go on.
K: I can’t understand why Shakespeare wrote
this play as his farewell, his coda. By now he was the most celebrated playwright
of his generation, with a dramatic & linguistic facility far surpassing all
his co-writers, who were in awe of him. He was also wealthy, able to retire in
the best new house in his birthplace. It is almost maddening in its tantalising
promise – an island, an elsewhere, not-like-here - it is science fiction avant
la lettre, even before the idea of science.
O: Forbidden Planet.
K: Exactly!
O: But can you understand the play he wrote.
K: Well-enough. It’s not among his hard,
difficult, problematic plays. It’s a romping cash-cow, like The Dream or
Much
O: What’s wrong with that? He had a family
and an elderly mother to support for decades.
K: The George Foreman school of art. He had money and, as Edward Bond argues, some
of it dirty money from enclosures. Anyway, hacks repeat, geniuses
innovate.
O: He’d had enough of scratching ink.
K: But he began the play, he didn’t not-begin
it. He began with the most daring idea and gradually weakened it until it was
just another splendid hit.
O: Loss of nerve. All this to fame &
the bank-manager due,
But is there
not a debt to Apollo too.
K: Nice alluding!
O: So let’s see if your nerve holds.
K: Shakespeare sets up a staggeringly original
premise. After twenty years of the comfortable device of removing the court and
courtiers to the forest just-outside the city walls, he decides to take them
beyond all cities, to beyond civilization as the city folk knew it. This is one
degree of carnival. Then he introduces beings who, though they had lived in an
African city equal to an Italian state, were wilfully uncivilized. This is a
second degree of carnival. It should be noted that mere moral disagreement, or
bad behaviour by the received morality, is not a state of carnival.
Finally he introduces the
element of supernatural power. This generates a tension between the power of
nature and the power of human and other, superhuman or subhuman, creatures to
harness supposedly unharnessable forces.
Of course all magic is nature accelerated or decelerated: it contributes
only speed, it is a catalyst.
O: Yes he takes these three elements and makes
a brilliant play.
K: No he makes only a brilliant play. A
piece of piss to a genius like him. What he doesn’t do is write the play the
premises hold. Given free play they would have led him into questioning so
much. He doesn’t let the carnival take its course. He stops the carnival.
O: Anarchy! Farce! The proto-advert for Soviet
realism?.
K: Surely only neocons would show so cramped
& crabbed an imagination.
O: And you’re imagination is greater than all
in all the centuries?!
K: Straw-man argument! Almost wicker man! And
certainly like Sir Thomas More, a man for torturing Protestants in all seasons
in his garden shed in
O: You’re not even Shaw.
K: I’m happily sure of that. Oh pray forgive
that perfectly lame Shakespearean pun!
O: Well what might he have done?
K: Consider again the three premises, preconditions:
a) An island beyond known civilization.
b) The possibility of unknown creatures,
but like us, living in ways yet unknown.
c) Humans, European and African, with
supernatural unchristian powers.
So much could have been
imagined. So much that would have sent the audience home reeling from
possibility, rather than just soothed by a familiar bit of fighting & love,
fairy-tale happenstance, all jazzed up by spectacular stage trickeries.
O: Yes what a pity Shakespeare wasn’t as good
as Brecht!
K: Even Brecht didn’t say that!
O: Consider, the audience had just lived
through three religious transformations,
the possibility of an invasion from the Spanish Armada, and the
Gunpowder Plot. Revolutionary theatre was the last thing on anyone’s mind.
K: Yet it wasn’t lost to
imagination. That’s why Richard II was written, by the young
Shakespeare, and even commissioned by aristocrats to be performed as an
intended prompt to sedition. Anyway the artist lives in the time-frame of
composing newness!
O: Precisely he’d had his revolutionary phase
and grown up, as would Southey & Wordsworth. No don’t scowl. I’m teasing
you!
K: Instead of the Duke of Milan, or even the
Duke of Vienna, Shakespeare should have transported the Venetienne Portia.
Here’s a story.
O: Oh goody, a hanging. Have you got enough
rope?
K: Only silken twine. Imagine The Daniella
of Venice & Beyond, a sequel to The Merchant. If Henry VI can
have two sequels why not one here? And of course Shakespeare was forever
tweaking old stories. So…
Bassanio and Portia, the
leading couple married at the end of the original play, decide to go to
Meanwhile Bassanio returns
to
O: Not bad, a bit laboured. But then there are
24 resolutions at the end of Cymbeline.
K: It’s a start. I’d watch it if some young Turkess playwright
wrote it now. It at least has scope for all sorts of discussions of new ways of
human being and human sharing – as well as a dollop of love and fighting.
O: And what of Caliban and Sycorax?
K: It’s one play – it can’t cover everything.
In this play it is understood the indigenous people of the island were
respected and a modus vivendi established. Perhaps there could be a prequel
about how Sapienza/Sycorax’s arrival and engagement with the natives.
O: Isn’t didactic art always dull, however
worthy?
K: Perhaps – the degree speech in Troilus
& Cressida and the legal
justification for war in Henry V are quite tedious. But have you never
read The Divine Comedy ?
O: Not as bad as the naming of the ships in The
Iliad.
K: Wouldn’t it be great to have an essay by
Shakespeare, even a school exercise?
O: Why?
K: To refute forever the rubbish argument
about didacticism. The refutation is plain in the work of Dante, who wrote both
essays and poems: so clearly knew the ways they were similar and different. A
poem or a play bursting with new aesthetic ideas, that shake one to the both
the heart’s core and the mind’s core, is possible.
O: Don’t you wish you could write a play,
little man?
K: Must I always be your straw man?
O: Sorry. Well you’ve got me thinking.
K: A first!
O: Steady! To take your most controversial
anti-anti- presentist connection, about extraordinary rendition, then one
obvious place to set the play, even as it is written, would be
K: So who would be Prospero?
O: I think the simple life of Miranda would
suit Paris Hilton.
K: She’s no Daisy Buchanan. All
money and no class!.
O: Yes, she’d never have got
the call from Rose to Hyannisport.
K: Oh no – not another woman dreaming of the
Kennedys. Fifty years, let it go!
O: Ah to have been young in
that Camelot! What wouldn’t I have done!
K: How strangely pertinent to
our theme. Is history then just biography writ large?
And not even true biography or true history but a beautiful fiction.
O: Even enchantment has its
uses.
K: That’s the puzzle: how
indelible are those stories of newness and hope tha capture the heart’s
imagination. Once they are shaped and hover like
O: Indeed little man! All your
precise arguments against Prospero and Gonzalo won’t ever dim the dazzle of
enchantment that protects the play.
K: Have I reasoned wrongly?
O: You were wrong to reason,
Alas!
K: Can I have the last word, or
at least let the song, from which I take my title, have it?
O: Sing on!
K: I tell you friends it's a part of
history
Carnival time is a big necessity…….
.
After
a delightful and encouraging conversation with the 17C scholar Dr Burlinson, (
The Tempest. In a different and better world, I too would have
transported myself to a library and proceeded to digest shelves of books by
proper scholars. My small labours were as follows:
1:The
Tempest : Arden III (1999/2005) edited & essay by Vaughan
& Vaughan.
This is a
development of Arden II : (1954/61) edited by Kermode
2:
The Tempest :
3:
The Tempest : Sources & Contexts : Criticism, Rewritings &
Appropriations
Norton (2004)
edited by Hulme, P & Sherman, W
4:
The Tempest : Advanced Notes : York-Notes : (1998/2003) ed
Todd,L.
I
assume that all these four books, from the last decade, are written for the
smart, keen, student 16-22 . My target audience too.
SOME FIRST RESPONSES
a) I enjoyed them. I was most intrigued by
Lamming, Strachey, Hulme & and Orgel.
b) The York Advanced Notes, for A-level students,
were better than I imagined they would be. They were perfectly suited to
contemporary youth with their PC ease: making reference
to a variety of free web-material.
(Perhaps the York GCSE Notes are still doltish.)
c) I was pleasantly surprised and encouraged
that my own (2000) closet-drama, “Who Might Be Your Mother?!” – loosely
developing from The Tempest – and different from the
new
counter-factual plot-lines I suggest in the Appendix above – overlapped
with imaginative explorations in earlier centuries.
d) As Dr Burlinson observed, a new
interpretation often carries an implied criticism of earlier critical practice
– “Why couldn’t you see this!”. The corollary of this is the old critics’
reply “You’ve made an illegitimate
connection!”. This theme will recur.
e) I felt a confirmation of my original
preference to not-write a meta-critical piece on other interpretations :
looking at the sociology and psychoanalysis of such positions: eg
(i)
“Why did my university tutor in 1973 fail to foreground same-sex
eroticised companionship, viz ‘gay gangbangs’ in Edward II & Richard
II ?
Was it because Wolfenden was a mere six years in the past & hadn’t
filtered into university critical practice?
(ii) Why did my next tutor, in
1977,foreground the eroticised class struggle in Miss Julie? Was it
because he was a confident gay?
f) When I gloss ‘Received Interpretation’ in
my essay (without reference to texts) perhaps I should use the term ‘Common
Reading”: then offer my ideas: and leave it to the
reader to do the meta-work.
g) Prompted by my discussion with Dr
Burlinson on anachronistic terms (and his Spenser Group Mss) I will introduce some remarks by some of the
writers in the books above.
THE QUOTATIONS – in italics but all emphases are
mine unless stated
a) LAMMING
“The rock
imprisonment [of Caliban by Prospero] is, in our time, a form of the emergency regulation which
can forbid a son of the soil to travel outside a certain orbit: marked out and even made legal by a foreign visitor.”
[Lamming
A Monster, A Child, A Slave : 1960
in Hulme p.154]
b) FUCHS
“The English often perceived the
Trousers’, and Martin Pring saw natives with ‘a Beare’s skin like
an Irish mantle over one shoulder’….
Writing
his ‘General Historie of the Turkes’ in 1603, Richard Knolles
calls them ‘the greatest terrour of the world’
[
c) HULME
“Prospero mortgages his inheritance for a chance to repress a history
of failure’…[He] takes pleasure in their suffering…The last move in [his]
psychological
manoeuvring of Alonso – ‘the like loss… for I have lost my daughter in
this last tempest’ is especially acute
or to put it another way little short of psychopathic, showing
Prospero’s obsessive observance of the patterns of repetition.”
Rappoport
very usefully reminded writers on the modern-named sickness OCD,
obsessive-compulsive disorder, that ancient Jews had rituals to heal the mind
(psychological) sickness of scrupolosity. Prospero has its sadistic version.
“Prospero speaks and behaves with an excessive vehemence, threatening
punishments out of all
keeping with the supposed crimes. Miranda’s virginity is an important
political card for Prospero. He goes through a ludicrous charade in order to gain what David
Sundelson calls a ‘symbolic
victory over [Ferdinand’s] confident sexuality.”
“This is probably as far as the warrant of the play’s words
themselves permits. Recent psychoanalytic criticism has gone further. These can only be speculations,
‘reasonable inferences’
“The earliest, most trenchant, example [of using such
psychoanalytic terms] is probably Clifford Leech who [in 1950] called
Prospero’s behaviour ‘pathological’.”
[Hulme
238/239/242]
d) LEAH MARCUS
“[The Blue eyed witch. This does not necessarily mean, of course, that
people in early modern
the blue-gray that we call blue as gray” [Hulme p.294]
e) ORGEL
“The interpretative issue here is not really why Prospero is
incapable of being fully reconciled with his brother. On a much more basic
level, it is why Shakespeare, having set up such clear
expectations about the matter, was unwilling to have Antonio
repent. There may, of course, be a biographical explanation that we may never
know; but the play’s genre itself points to one kind of answer.” [p.55]
My
entire thesis of the carnival-stopped chimes exactly with this basic level
point about clear expectations set up and then implausibly blocked.
COMMENT
These
phrases - from different centuries,
“in our time”, “like to”, “to put it another way”, “what we call” , “[optimistically]
reasonable inferences” all disclose
both a desire to make a comparison and an anxiety about the legitimacy of it.
The legal metaphor is spelt out in Hulme’s assertion: “This is probably as
far as the warrant of the play’s words themselves permits.” Anti-presentism asserts that some forms
of comparison and all conveying of modern meanings into the past are
unwarranted.
In
the world of literal warrants ( as shown in the fictional version CSI :
Crime Scene Investigation) there is often a tension between the
scientist-criminalists and the police-department judge. A search-warrant is
applied for when the criminalists have an intuition that the present evidence
they have gathered persuades them there is more evidence to be had at place-X
or from person-Y. Sometimes this extends only to property and a new one must be
applied for to take a suspect’s blood/skin sample for DNA testing. Eventually
sufficient evidence persuades them to apply for an arrest warrant.
Bolingbroke : Go, some of you, convey him to the
Tower.'
Richard. II.
: O, good!
“Convey.” Conveyers are ye all,
That rise thus nimbly by a true
king's fall.'
His
descendant Richard III makes some jokey-play over baptism after he has
cunningly got a false warrant to convey his brother to judicial murder. The
vanity of each critic ( including me) justifies the line of permission self-given/warranted.
Rhetorical grand-standing is not far behind: thus Hulme’s mocking of Prospero’s
strategy as ‘excessive vehemence’ ‘a ludicrous charade’. Actually I like
such gusto in critics.
THE PSYCHO-LOGICAL WARRANT
In
Arden III the Vaughan’s offer the following footnote to Sebastian’s lines.
Whiles we stood here securing your repose,
Even now we heard a hollow burst of bellowing,
Like bulls, or rather lions”
“burst…bellowing..bulls Sebastian’s mendacity may be indicated by
the forced alliteration” (p.206:n]
The
crucial intellectual scholarly question is :
“What
level of insight is this: inferring a psychological state and a moral choice
from the use of a literary device? On what evidence, (intellectual paradigm) is
it based : why is it fitting here: and what kind of generalisation is implied?
I
smiled when I saw it for I immediately thought of Stoppard’s jokey remark in Travesties.
“Tristan Tzara : You British and your propaganda “brave little
Consulate
Carr : You are gravely mistaken Sir. It was “brave little
And
from the tragic realm, I thought of poor Blanche Du Bois when
[both quotes from memory]
Unsurprisingly,
I feel psychoanalytic ideas can illuminate a narrative, while avoiding
reductionism: as do lots of writers, who aren’t seeing patients. By now it is
not uncommon to see references to unconscious uncontained sexual energies,
incest and barely repressed rage. More
subtle tracking – especially of mutations in energies - is harder: that is my
quarry: eg:
a)
Gonzalo : Being bested in wit, leading to fantasies of death/power & sexist
jokes
b)
Prospero : his anxiety about Miranda’s sublime remarks and implied questions on
work: How does it become the virtuous? After a dozen years
sublimation in magic-books, does book-drowning also include an unacknowledged
hope for desublimated sexual release.
Underneath
all this are the yet unworked-out significances for literary criticism of the
work of Matte Blanco. I’d say it is equal in originality to Klein and Bion, and
far surpassing Adam Phillips etc. It is relevant to The Tempest precisely
because of the invocations of similarity & difference and of magical
thinking/acting.
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