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The Tempest is an intensely self-conscious play - it is, in many ways, theatre about
the theatre. Many of the actions and events in it are explicitly and implicitly referred
to as theatrical ones. Miranda's response to the shipwreck is a response to a
tragedy, full of pity and fear:
0, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel
Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her
Dashed all to pieces! 0, the cry did knock
Against my very heartpoor souls, they perished.[1]The shipwreck is described by
Prospero as a theatrical show staged by himself. "The direful spectacle of the wreck"
(1.2.26, my italics) where the predominant meaning of "spectacle", as defined by
Orgel, is "theatrical display or pageant". Similarly, Ariel is commanded to assume
the "shape", or role of a "nymph o'th sea". Prospero orchestrates the events in The
Tempest and much of the play is a play-within-a-play, directed by Prospero, with
Ariel as his assistant-director and stage manager.
The Tempest is also Prospero's attempt to undo the past by restaging it. In this
respect, Prospero is comparable to Hamlet, Richard II and Lear who also employ a
reenactment of the past as a means of exerting symbolic power over it. Hamlet
restages his father's assassination, and 'The Mousetrap', in a sense, is the
replacement of actual revenge. Richard II turns his dethronement into a theatrical
spectacle, and Lear calls his daughters to a mock trial. All resort to drama because
reality is out of their reach, beyond their control. Metadrama, in Shakespeare,
seems to function as a symbolic weapon, a substitute for reality, a staged repetition
of the past an assertion of control on the site of loss and defeat.
Prospero's theatrical art serves as his weapon of power, his instrument of control.
In The Tempest, theatre and political power are each other's doubles. Theatricality
and power converge most strongly, and reach their apotheosis, in the wedding
masque in Act 4, scene 1. A masque is a celebration of royal power and glory and,
in staging one, Prospero becomes a type of king, a royal mage whose ideals become
reality in a courtly entertainment. The wedding masque in The Tempest is an
allusion to the court masques performed at the Whitehall Banqueting House and
brings into the play a broad range of Renaissance thought about royalty, its
manifestations and the nature of royal power.
The Court MasqueThe court masque played a crucial role in the way Renaissance
monarchs chose to think about themselves. Masques served essentially as images
of the order, peace and harmony brought about by the monarch's mere presence,
and expressed didactic truths about the monarchy. Lavishly spectacular and visual,
designed to enchant the eye, they formed a genre fundamentally different from the
drama performed on the public stage. Much of the action was taken up by the
settings themselves, which did not merely form a passive backdrop to the action,
but were an integral part of it and symbolised the controlling power of the king. In
this sense, the masque is radically different from the plays that were performed in
the popular playhouses, which lacked scenic machinery. Inigo Jones's ingenious
settings, "his ability to do the impossible" were the prime manifestation of the royal
will.[2]
Under James 1, the form of the masque developed into two contrasting parts. The
first section, or antimasque, offered an image of vice and disorder, which, in the
second section, the masque proper, was superseded by the workings of royal
power, and an ordered, harmonious world, with the king at its centre, was
established. For example in The Masque of Blackness and its sequel, The Masque of
Beauty,twelve "Nymphs of Niger" were made white:
Brittania, whose new name makes all tongues sing,
Might be a diamond worthy to enchase it,
Rules by the sun that to this height doth grace it,
Whose beams shine day and night, and are of force
To blanch an Ethiop, and revive a corse. [3]
King James is associated with the sun, his rays break "the Night's black charms". In
Ben Jonson's Hymenaei, the "four humours and affection" are scared away by the
presence of Reason and make way for the eight "nuptial powers" of Juno: "These,
these are they / Whom humour and affection must obey".[4] In the same masque, a
debate between Truth and Opinion (Truth's false counterfeit) is resolved in favour of
the former. Truth, here, embodies the virtues of marriage, while Opinion glorifies the
benefits of spinsterhood. Eventually, Truth addresses the king:
This royal judge of our contention
Will prop, I know, what I have undergone;
To whose right sacred highness I resign
Low, at his feet, this starry crown of mine,
To show his rule and judgement is divine.[5]
In The Masque of Queens twelve hags, embodying Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity
and other vices, vanish at the dazzling appearance of Heroic Virtue, accompanied
by eleven mythical queens.
In other masques, the king is often represented as the controller and tamer of
nature. The royal will creates order and sophistication in "the wildness and
untutored innocence of nature".[6] At the climax of each masque, the masquers
descended from the stage and chose a dancing partner from the audience, merging
the worlds of the masque and the court into the ideal royal universe.
The court masque, then, manifested an important theatrical image of kingship;
royalty's prime mode of expression was fundamentally histrionic, as is also
confirmed by James I's personal treatise on royalty entitled Basilikon Doron (1599)
and Elizabeth's assertion that "We princes, I tell you are set on stages, in the sight
and view of all the world duly observed."[7] The theatre served as an extension of
the royal mind. Even watching a masque was a histrionic activity: the king's box was
placed at the centre of the hall, for all the other spectators to see. The king had to
be seen seeing. Inigo Jones' stage-effects were also designed in such a way as to
give the king the best view of the stage only from his seat could the action be
seen properly.
Prospero's MasqueThe wedding masque in The Tempest is a materialisation of
Prospero's will and power. Like the court masque, it is a visual spectacle: "No
tongue! All eyes! Be silent!" (4.1.59). Whereas in the second scene of The Tempest,
Prospero wanted his daughter to listen, and drink in his tale, this time he wants
visual attention. The masque celebrates Prospero's paternal magnanimity and his
ability to defy the laws of time and nature "Spring come to you at the farthest, /
In the very end of harvest!" (4.1.114-15): winter has been excluded from Prospero's
seasonal cycle. Abundance emanates spontaneously from Nature's inexhaustible
resources; the masque is a departure from the real world of The Tempest, in which
Ferdinand has to labour for his wedding, Ariel for his freedom, Caliban for the
liberation from bodily pain. These harsh, rigid transactions are replaced by a vision
of unconditional plenty. It is, however, worth noting that Venus and her "waspishheaded son" have been safely excluded from the party; unbridled erotic lust so
much feared by Prospero has been warded off.
In the court masque, when the masquers reveal their true identities (i.e. as persons
of nobility, people of the court), the audience was meant to look through the image,
at the ideals of kingship and courtly life it represented. "In such representations",
Orgel and Strong write, "the court saw not an imitation of itself, but its true
self." [8] Likewise, the wedding masque in The Tempest offers Miranda and
Ferdinand an image of their ideal, virtuous selves. It points to the ideals forged by
Prospero's royal mind and stands for his project in general:
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.
(5.1.208-13, my italics)
Prospero's noble, rational magic is contrasted to the black sorcery practised by
Sycorax, Caliban's mother, and this, again, links him to the images of royal power
we encounter in the court masque. In Jonson's Hymenaei, for example, "anti-royal"
forces are said to be concocted by "the black sorceress Night." Frank Kermode, in
his New Arden Edition of The Tempest, writes that Prospero's art is
the disciplined exercise of virtuous knowledge it is a technique for liberating the
soul from the passions, from nature; the practical application of a discipline of which
the primary requirements are learning and temperance, and of which the mode is
contemplation it is the ordination of civility, the control of appetite, the
transformations of nature by breeding and learning.[9]Just how strongly Prospero
fashions his world and his image of himself the way a king does in a court masque,
becomes clear if we connect Kermode's observations to a comment on the Caroline
masque but also applicable to masques in general by Kevin Sharpe, quoted in
Jerzy Limon's The Masque of Stuart Culture:
Neoplatonic philosophy postulates an ascent of cognition from the plane of senses
and material objects to a loftier stratum of knowledge of forms and ideas, of which
objects were but an imperfect material expression. The Caroline masque enacted
that philosophy in the transition from antimasque to masque. The world of sense
and appetite was represented in the masque by images of nature as an ungoverned
wilderness, threatening, violent, ignorant and anarchic; the sphere of soul was
depicted as nature ordered and governed by the patterns of the forms. So in the
All this has political implications beyond the play itself. As a structural allusion to
the genre of the court masque, it is an evocation of royal power and splendour. It
offers a series of antimasques, promises their undoing by Prospero's royal magic,
yet, at crucial moments, withholds it, frustrates the very expectations it first
creates. As such, it subverts the ideology of the court masque by resisting the easy
solutions this genre offers. Prospero / the king is powerful, but only up to a point.
Prospero's project is a royal desire whose realisation is ambivalent.
By staging the wedding masque as a piece of drama-within-drama, The
Tempest also highlights the theatricality of kingship, marks it out as a histrionic
construct. Royalty expresses itself by means of a theatrical fiction and in The
Tempest it is represented as such. The court masque, as an expression of royal
power, is appropriated for the stage, employed to create in the audience a
desire for resolution. At crucial moments, however, this resolution is not achieved.
Rather, it remains confined to Prospero's theatrical fantasy. What prevails, then, is
an image of political struggle. The 'counter-voices' in the play remain alive, are not
exorcised totally by the appearance of Prospero / the king, even if they do not
triumph either.
This is Prospero's tragedy. He learns that there are limits to his power. Crucially, his
brother, the usurper, remains unregenerate, never asks for forgiveness. In the great
reconciliation-scene, Prospero addresses Antonio in a disturbingly ambiguous
fashion, which indicates the unresolved emotional struggle within himself:
For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother
Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive
Thy rankest faultall of themand require
My dukedom of thee, which perforce I know
Thou must restore.
(5.1.130-34)
In one and the same breath, Prospero expresses both forgiveness and a deeply
rooted hatred. Antonio does not reply, and from his silence we may deduce his
unwillingness to repent.
Prospero also loses his daughter and, crucially, his dukedom to Ferdinand. The
two lovers are "discovered playing at chess." Their somewhat cynical exchange
seems to mirror the harsh Realpolitikcharacteristic of the world of Milan, and of
which Prospero became the ironic victim. Yet it may also be seen as an image of
erotic courtship, as a series of playful moves in which power-games are only
symbolically played out. As Leslie Fiedler brilliantly points out, the chess-game also
indicates Prospero's loss of power over his daughter: "the strongest piece is the
queen; and the combat always ends with the cry, 'Checkmate!', meaning 'The king
is dead!', the old man left without a move." [13]
Of his two servants Ariel, the creature of air and Caliban, the creature of earth
it is Ariel whom Prospero has to let go and give freedom, and Caliban with whom
in a famously enigmatic line he eventually expresses an ambiguous bond: "This
thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine" (5.1.275-76). Although these words firmly
claim Caliban as Prospero's colonised property, there is more at stake.
"Acknowledge" has a positive ring and may mean "to accept", or "to recognise".
Caliban, initially branded as the ultimate, evil Other, is acknowledged as a part of
Prospero's own identity. This is also suggested by the line "This thing of darkness I",
which, because of its ambiguous line ending, could be read as apposition "This
thing of darkness; I" and hence an equation, of Prospero and Caliban.
Commenting on these lines, Leslie Fiedler has observed that Prospero "speaks on a
psychological level, too, as indeed he must, since, in general the oppression of
minorities always implies the repression of certain elements in the psyche of the
oppressors with which those minorities are identified." [14] Prospero identifies
Caliban with impending death, and the infirmity of old age: "And with age his body
uglier grows, / So his mind cankers" (4.1.191-92). It refers back to Prospero's
realisation of his advancing age:
Sir, I am vexed
Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled
Be not disturbed with my infirmity.
(4.1.158-60)
At the close of the play, he announces his return to Milan "where / Every third
thought shall be [his] grave" (5.1.311). Caliban serves as a substitute for Prospero
himself. His fears concerning his age are transferred on to Caliban. Likewise, Caliban
may be said to embody Prospero's own repressed desires for Miranda. She is the
only woman on the island and Prospero imagines his relationship with her as a kind
of obsessive symbiosis:
I have done nothing but in care of thee,
Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who
Art ignorant of what thou art; naught knowing
Of whence I am, nor that I am more better
Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell,
And thy no greater father
.(1.2.16-21, my italics)
These desires are externalised and inscribed on Caliban, who is endowed by
Prospero with an unbridled, rapacious sexuality "thou didst seek to violate / The
honour of my child" (1.2.347-48). The Tempest, then, resists the ideology of a court
masque like The Masque of Blackness, in which the king reigns over and transforms
'blackness', and, instead, hints at the blackness within Prospero/the king himself.
This is an ironic reversal of the initial situation Caliban served as the embodiment
of otherness: low physicality, dangerous sexuality, unregenerate nature while Ariel
was safely sexless, bodiless, the materialisation-cum-enactment of Prospero's
language, the extension of his mind. Like his drunken fellow-conspirators, Caliban in
his "deformity" is a creature of the antimasque, to be evicted from Prospero's
courtly world, or at least 'whitewashed', deprived of his "nature" and inscribed with
"nurture". [15] Ironically, Prospero finds himself unable to 'educate' Caliban and it
even seems, once again, as if Prospero, in the last few scenes of the play, is thrown
back more and more upon his own physical vulnerability, is brought down to a level
of existence which he initially displaced on to Caliban.
In a sense, Prospero and Caliban come to occupy similar positions towards the end
of the play. Caliban gets his island back Prospero will return to Milan and he is,
once more, "his own king". As the sole inhabitant of the island, he is alone, like
Prospero after everyone has left the stage the other characters are all part of
a company (the lovers, the courtiers, the clowns), while Prospero is essentially
isolated and the Duke-magician pronounces his epilogue: